Be sure you put them somewhere you can control their spread. I planted mine in a raised bed between a bed I use now for vegetables and one with blueberries. I just put the raspberries in last spring, and I've already been cutting down raspberries in the paths between those beds. At one end of the bed, due to a total lack of understanding on my part, I have a patch of horseradish. It went in well before the raspberries, and at the time seemed like a good space. I am now waiting to see which of these invasive plants wins! The horseradish had a head start and has already come up between the blocks forming the raised bed for the raspberries, but I figure I'll see raspberries in the horseradish soon. I wonder what a raspberry/horseradish sauce would taste like! Chuck

Thanks for the help! Yeah normally we do have fairly dry summers but it's been crazy here... we had snow last week (no kidding). OK just a few snowflakes, but still! It's been really wet and kinda cold so far except it finally warmed up the last couple days and I hear it's now supposed to stay that way for the rest of the summer. I do plan on making sure the whole thing stays moist. Will definitely be watering in the layers as I build up the beds. I might even, for the beds I'm not using, cover them with black plastic to hasten the decomposition a bit (IE, making room for MORE stuff!). I'll be using one of the beds, mostly for garlic and maybe some radishes but I'm also 7 months pregnant and so I don't think I'm gonna want to do TOO much in the summer heat this year :) One bonus is that there's a drive-thru coffeeshop literally a block away and so I'm gonna see if I can get it set up where they would leave the day's grounds out for me to pick up on my way home from work. I think that would be awesome! I'm also trying to get the OK from the higher-ups to do a coffee ground collection bin here at work but no word yet. The company has had a major "go green" push this year and so I'm thinking as long as they feel they can trust me to keep it clean and not smelly (in other words, take the grounds home every day) I think it'll be ok. It's just a matter of convincing them :) The lawn also needs some work, nothing terrible but it's pretty sparsely growing. It's pretty nice because the whole place is like a blank canvas and the landlord has told us that we can do whatever we want and they will pay for materials on anything that will improve the place. Not sure if that means plants/landscaping or not, but I think it does. I definitely plan on stockpiling OPL as much as I can this fall. One of the neighbor kids does yardwork for a lot of the elderly neighbors and so I'm gonna see if he'll just bring over the yard waste after he's done, especially the leaves if he rakes in the fall. I do want to be careful about lawn clippings, I want to avoid chemicals so I'm gonna have to talk to him to see if he knows who uses chemicals on the lawns that he mows on a regular basis... but I'm willing to bet with all the huge old trees in the neighborhood that I'll have all the leaves I can handle. I know a lot of people put them in the trash but they can only do one bag per week, so I can't imagine it would be a problem for me to just take them.

Thanks Jewel - that is the School of hard Knocks at it's best. A better plan is to have first the plywood - then some 1/2" Wonderboard Lite and then cover that with something like Laticrete's Hydro Ban Sheet Membrane. That way the tub deck is prepped for tile and would be acceptable even in a commercial steam shower environment. This is my last shower with tub deck. The tub is Kohler and the olive green material is Laticrete's Hydro Ban Sheet membrane. Installing it tight to the plywood was not ideal but again better than doing nothing at all. The shower side saw a heated bench get build and I used the sheet membrane to vapour proof the bench. The membrane then was used to protect the rest of the plywood tub deck from ever seeing water. Later a slab from Ceasar Stone was installed and I tilted the entire bathroom with a 1'x2' marble looking porcelain tile from I Marmi. Turned out nice.

Oh no! I’d be so disappointed to see half of my roses eaten! Ugh, I’m sorry. It’s hard to not feel frustrated with the wildlife. We have a handful of cucumbers we planted on the side of our chicken coop that have been a nice treat for a groundhog. My barn cats had 5 kittens this summer and they have been terrorizing my gardens! Not eating anything obviously, but they think all of my plants and flowers are toys to play with. I’ll have to track down some good pictures of our orchard and farm. Our apple trees are getting old so we’ll need to replace them in the next 5 years or so. Sam, the goat, is pretty entertaining when he’s not eating my plants. My kids like to make a game of “Where is Sam today”. He’s almost never where he’s supposed to be! I plant to put most of my roses in an area around my house where deer usually won’t go. We’ve also been putting our hair (after haircuts) in my garden beds...we read that this keeps them away? I don’t know if it works but we have strawberries on one side of our house that never get bothered by animals so I’ve assumed the hair has helped.