Save the peonies, and don't disturb them if at all possible. Moving them will cause them to not bloom for a year or two. If you liked the iris, keep it, but the rest of that stuff is really easily replaceable. The seed exchange forum always has seeds for the black eyed susans (rudbeckia) and the coneflower. If you don't want to grow from seed, both are usually available in your local "box" store. Do you have a place for a "holding" bed for anything you really want to keep? That might be an option too. I second (or third!) the suggestions to use thick newspapers and/or cardboard underneath the mulch. This year that was the only way to save my sanity in a few beds that I just couldn't devote the time that was necessary to keeping them weed free. I have also used this method to start new beds (but a lot more additional material was used.) Lisa

In the 70s, I was one of those young "Naturalists" "Environmentalists" who worked on the initiatives to try to get the government, business, and the public aware that we cannot continue to trash the earth. That it would lead to Global Warming. Because it was a rainy, cooler time period, some people laughed it off. The prediction was for the far future - the polar caps wold melt, the glaciers disappear and the earth's temperatures would rise without the ice to reflect off the radiatio of the sun. The salinity of the oceans would be diluted by the melted ice, which in turn would start to cause horrific storms, massive flooding in certain regions with severe droughts in other areas. The ocean's currents would shut down due to the dilution of the salt. The Gulf Stream affects all the Northern Hemisphere. It is what warms Great Britain and Europe and the northern Hemisphere. It is the rising and falling of the high salinity-to-fresh water-temps which creates these currents. Not enough salt would cause this to fail. No movement would bring on a more rapid occurence of an Ice Age than normal. This naturally happens in cycles, anyway, but it was begining to happen at an alarming rate, much, much faster than normal. Scientists had been studying this at that time since the 1950s, but during the 60s and 70s, they saw that it was really speeding up. CO2 and Methane gasses were also increasing in the upper atmosphere due to the industrialization of mankind. (this is just a brief, but you can see where I am taking it). Thus, warnings were given that unless man found solutions, it was going to increase more and more rapidly with each decade. There was no window at that time for knowing when it could happen, only that it most definitely would. At the same time, plants, animals and organisms were disappearing at an alarming rate. New algaes were forming in the oceans and seas that were destroying ecosystems. I remember the great Lakes dying, choked with pollutants and solvents and all manner of garbage and sewage. Disgusting. There was only six inches of water on top of the yuck in may areas. Fish were dying. Groups like ours were instrumental in reversing most of this, but not all. Tons and tons of garbage and raw sewage and chemicals from factories and refineries still continue to pour into the rivers in America. The rivers flow into the Mississippi river and all that flows to New Orleans and out into the Gulf. We took water samples in the lower Miss. Valley and at New Orleans which showed high toxicity - toxic water. This was correlated with the stats showing there was (is?) alarmingly high rates of cancers, heart diseases, miscarriages and birth defects in the lower Mississippi Valley. Since the 70s, the rate of increase in polar ice melting, thawing tundra, melting glaciers, and the thawing of the Perma Frost regions in Canada alone, has increased at an alarming rate - even much faster than we predicted in the 70s! I don't see this as an "en vogue" thing, but if public awareness gets people to try to end our self-destruction, I am glad for the help! Knowledge and Awareness - those are good things. So, "Global Warming" is only one aspect of the whole problem. We just can't keep poisoning and raping our planet for corporate greed and common indifference! We are like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. The boil is on and we sit idly bye unawares of the dangers, insisting that the rising temperature in the pot is just a cycle and it too shall pass. Sadly, the frog dies in the boiling pot. By the time he figured it out, it was too late. The "tipping point" may have come and gone for us now. Not enough has been done to stop it. In fact, we have been deceived and artificially soothed into believing there is any effort to reverse the affects. It's all window dressing. Now we'll just have to wait and see and live it...or die from it. Hope this helps explain, albeit in brevity, what the situation is and has been since the 70s. It isn't a fad to be part of the in-crowd, it's an attempt to bring awareness and changes for sustaining all life on Earth. Off my soap box now.

here are some more news why we should be gardening (organic as much as possible)and produce own vegetable at least! Recently, one of my colleague who has been diagnosed with colon cancer. He not have any bad habits, no smoking, no alcohol, very health cautious...but stuck by dread evil. By god grace he is out of danger now due to right time detection and diagnosis. While resting in hospital beds, he looked back his life style, food habits, family history, etc... he concluded that food was one of the main culprit. He wrote me five page long story about the his cancer and aftermaths...to cut the story short, I just copy/pasting some of his points on Why does one get cancer: Causes of cancer; -Environment we live in (e.g., breathing polluted air); -Genetically modified food (e.g., nearly 80% of all food sold in US super markets are genetically modified like your tomatoes, apples); -Food processing and storage (e.g., injecting chicken with antibiotics to "preserve" them; preservatives in all those tin\can food; manicured apples!!); -Polluted water (e.g., dissolved carcinogens in water from heavy industries that may never be filtered out) ...and one can go on... Another story is Parkinson's vs. Pesticides: I just come to know from Dorothy, Rotenone, a pesticide used in home gardens/farms seems to be causative factor for Parkinson's diseases... He is our own family story...My mother-in-law, but call her a mother, she is nice lady, is also suffering with Parkinson's disease.. she used to consume lot of raw vegetables/salads (of course from market) to keep in good health... but that tuned out be bad. I too guess her PD was due to lot of harsh chemical in the vegetables. The use of pesticides in food production becoming one of the biggest threat to health, mankind and nature. My mother has been diagnosed with PD in 2007, she has been treated with many Allopathy, Homeopathic, Ayurveda, and Acupressure systems. but none of these practice/medicines has freed her from PD. Now she is doing yoga, meditation, drinking wheat grass juice in the morning, and also started using stationary bike. I read some time ago in science magazine that cycling/biking will help in brain cell stimulation and blood circulation to brain which may help patients to recover faster... mother tells she feeling little better... We should encourage more and more people to start gardening, growing their own food also bring awareness about the chemical in food. Encourage (pressurize) commercial growers to producing organic food.

If you have the room and the time I'd say go for it. Some definite pros I personally see is that some vegetables, like lettuce, onions and cabbage we like to harvest before they bolt. After they do so, we tend to use them only for their seeds. By having separate gardens you can harvest all the vegetables from your main garden to use as food and not have to leave any for collecting seeds. Also, you can definitely maintain purity better with space and buffers. Some plants you will probably have to do a little bit more preventative measures even with the distance (such as corn whose pollen can blow for miles and miles and miles and.....), but I think for the most part it will make it easier if saving 100% genetically pure seed is a concern. That being said, I would not take up space in your seed garden with crops that do not tend to cross anyways. Beans (P. vulgaris cultivars especially) and peas being the most glaring example. But if you are growing different cultivars of corn or squash for example, a seed garden would help immensely IMO.