For the most part I agree with previous comments. I would only say trees do have roots in the top few inches of soil,lots of them. ALL the plants we grow require air in root zone to survive and there isn't much deeper down. Not only will plastic and cardboard cut off light to soil,it prevents moisture getting to soil. Sufficating grass will sufficate tree roots as well. Depending on how long the cover is in place it might not to kill trees but will undeniably harm their overall health starting day one. Short of digging an olympic pool size hole and backfillihg with improved soil,composting has little effect on a tree over it's life,EXCEPT the first years. Because of shock from transplanting,it is wise to afford every advantage possible to new plantings. For future planting sites I suggest tilling an area aproximating drip line of mature tree in question. If such large area seems to conterdict what I said above regarding lack of benifit to mature trees,I'm allways concurned about compactation during construction. It also alows puting turf in so roots arn't desturbed latter. If one has the equipment,chisel plowing intire yard should be considered in cases where mixer trucks and/or other heavy equipment has packed soil, You should already have soil test results in hand. Incorperate admendments as deep as tiller will reach. Set up bed retainer for at least 25% size of tiiled area. Plant annuals in bed and desired lawn and/or ground cover in remainder. Bed should be mulched minium of 3 years following placment of tree. Any time after 3+ years,retainer can be pulled allowing turf or ground cover reaching trunk if desired. If one uses a lawn service,leaving retainers will minimize weedeater damage to trunk. See if your city offers compost. That allows getting it fresh and from a likly professionally supervised operation. Since your trees are in place,do the above EXCEPT the following difference. Till only outside area where roots have grown to (3' dia circle).

You may be getting to a point where people aren't coming to look at your place because it's been on the market for too many days. I know when we've been looking, our first thought on seeing a high days-on-market figure has been, what is wrong with that house? and then often as not we passed it over without going to look at it. ...I'm not saying anything is wrong with your house specifically, just that people turn down houses with high DOMs. If you haven't got a contract by mid-June, if you can, you might want to take it off the market for a bit, at least til fall when it'll pick up again. Summer is the absolute worst time to try to sell a house. We are putting our house up on the market next January (I totally get the conflicted feelings about gardening when you know you're going to leave it all behind!) I agree completely that curb appeal is everything. I bought my first house despite its truly ghastly condition because I irrationally fell in love with a magnificent garden. So definitely get out there and attack those dandelions! It is totally a heart-wrenching drag to invest time and money in a yard you know you're leaving, but financially, it's worth it: http://www.asla.org/nonmembers/publicrelations/homeowners_guide.htm Presumably you've already invested a lot of what you're going to from your previous years of gardening - but this is the BEST time to fill in the holes and tidy up. If you do want to keep it on the market, here's ALL the advice about landscaping that our realtor and his landscape designer friend suggested to us, emphatically, and over a good deal of beer: - Gardens in general really do help sell the house - but only if they're in good condition. Unkempt yards and ESPECIALLY weeds make people think that the house has been poorly kept up, too. (We do all organic, and our realtor has been BEGGING us to ChemLawn the place or something so the lawn looks all nice.) Prospective buyers routinely do a drive-by to look at the outside of houses before even scheduling an appointment. When I was looking - LOL I'm not proud - if I could, I went down the alley and peeked over the back fence too. If your yard looks ratty they may never come to look inside. - Both our realtor and a landscaper friend said that most people just cannot for the life of them envision a garden from drawings or a list of plants. (I don't understand that personally, but I have the perfect example of this in the blank stares of my husband when I moon over plant catalogs, LOL.) Most folks need to SEE it in its full glory to understand just how great your garden is. It's not enough to know there are some perennials back there someplace that you haven't gotten around to tending to. - In keeping with that, they both urged us to take photos of the garden at its peak throughout the season - all the way from crocuses in the snow to the last of the fall Misicanthus plumes. Then when you have showings or open houses, you can have large printouts of your pics in a little binder for people to flip through. My realtor has done this trick before and had fantastic results - it's the gardening equivalent of making cookies in the oven before open houses. For one thing, it allows prospective buyers to see your hydrangeas or iris or whatever in full glory even though they're just dead sticks at the time of the open house. Possibly more importantly, it keeps them hanging around in the house for longer while they look. The more time they spend in the house, the more likely they are to buy. ...If you're missing photos you wish you'd gotten earlier, you can always go online and find close-up pics of plants you have, and supplement with those. But it sounds like if you can muster it, you've got perfect timing to make your garden kick a** all summer. (LOL hopefully it won't be all summer!) - Write a little mini-guide in *excruciating* detail (but not in a way that makes it sound hard or scary)of what's in your garden, how easy it is to take care of, and any other tips you can think of. Your realtor should be able to put that on a web page or you should be able to make it into a brochure with pictures of your house and garden. ...People really seem to like this and it reassures them that they won't kill everything anyway. - Is your garden mentioned prominently in your ad? And are you putting descriptive enough ads out there? We just rented our apartment unit, and we'd had absolutely NO luck until I added a huge description of exactly what our garden was. We went from no calls to almost 100 in a week. ...Our realtor really liked the detail we could provide, because he said that even if a non-gardener bought the house, it reflected on the general standard of care we had for the whole property and made it seem again like a carefully managed place. - Do you have any online presence for your listing? That's another place some well-done garden pics can really make a place look great. If your realtor is affiliated with a large franchise then you should be able to get this and it's worth it. - I don't know where in Michigan you are, but think about advertising heavily on Craigslist. It's free and it really worked great for us, and it's spreading fast across the country. ...It can't hurt. - If you can get it together, you may want to have your realtor do some kind of "garden walk" event/open house for you to draw people in. - Another thing that you might want to consider is actually investing a little bit MORE in your garden by putting in stuff that's specifically geared to sell a place: plants and shrubs with year-round interest, and/or that are drought/neglect tolerant. This idea was presented to me as a kind of balance thing - on the one hand, most people won't know how to garden as much as you do, so a connoiseur's garden might be daunting, but on the other hand, you don't want to have McLandscaping as that turns a lot of people off. (There are enough Stella D'Oro daylilies in this world, thank you very much.) You want demonstrably carefree plants that escape total banality but also provide multi-season interest. Cranberry viburnum, hardy plumed grasses, some of the less common colors of evergreen barberries, red twig or yellow twig dogwood, Harry Lauder's Walking Stick, coneflowers, variegated shrubs like Daphne Carol Mackie, a Japanese maple that is relatively not so much of a PITA, etc. are all great. (My personal faves for this purpose are rugosa roses. Just try killing one. It's impossible! plus, they rebloom all summer, are fragrant, the foliage is nice and bushy and not modern rose-like at all, they turn brilliant purple or scarlet in fall, and they have bright orange or red hips that stick around through fall and right to the end of winter. You can't beat that!) - Think too about things that put on a tremendous show and then don't ask for anything for the rest of the year. There's an 80 year old peony bush in my backyard that would uncomplainingly pump out 100+ huge showy fragrant blooms a year, whether I fed and watered it or not. Tough hardy rambler roses, less ubiquitous daylilies (like Black-eyed Stella or Strawberry Candy), drifts of naturalizing daffodils, and crabapples are great for the same reason. - Paradoxically, while I would have thought that the ONLY place to spend money was on perennials, my realtor insisted that we fill in every single remaining gap with colorful annuals. The point was to make the house look as bright and cheery as possible because people would respond emotionally to that instead of saying, Hey, those are marigolds, I'd have to plant those again next year. - This last bit may be specific only to city folk because it's such a novelty here in Chicago - but think about planting a fruit tree. When people here found out that there was an apple tree in the back yard, and that it did in fact actually make real apples, they flipped. It just charmed their socks off. Our realtor thought the tree added a surprisingly large amount to the value of our house. If you don't have room for a dwarf tree, consider putting in something even like ultra-dwarf blueberries, a strawberry bed or a few raspberry canes, or even a little potted herb garden. People get inordinately excited by the idea of having their own little herb garden - it could cost you less than $50, look nice, and help charm potential buyers. ...Okay. That is just WAY more suggestions than I suspect anyone could possibly want, so now I'll stop rambling. But not before telling you my current plan to not be heartbroken all the time about leaving my garden: When I have to buy perennials to round out what's there so it looks good for when we put it up on the market, I'm choosing vigorous stuff so I can divide tons of it and keep it when I go; I'm asking some friends to give "foster homes" to a few really choice plants; I'm taking cuttings of absolutely everything I can and nursing them (in multiples) now; and I'm splurging and potting up plants I can take with me so I don't feel like I'm just stuck gardening for somebody else this year. It's making me feel good about tending this garden I love and feel rather unmotivated about, and helping me look forward to wherever it is I'm going. :) I do hope some of this is slightly helpful SOMEHOW! ...I do commiserate deeply. It's so awful to leave a house and a garden, and the process of selling is so awful... to have to do them both is just unimaginably crazy! let us know how it's going! (and just think of all the new plants you can buy when you sell, LOL)

Lordjezo, Of all the points I saw in your response, two jumped out at me: "Then every couple of weeks I used a Miracle Gro thing that attaches to a hose and sprays on." What are the numbers on this fertilizer? There should be 3 hyphenated numbers (should look like 10-10-10, etc.)... Odds are, the first one is too high and your pumping your garden full of excess nitrogen. "Do the tests cost a lot of money?" No. Well, it's relative, but I think I paid $30 for my soil test from the Penn State extension office - I tend to think that's pretty cheap. From what I've read, you add manure and fertilizer, but there are other factors to your soil besides fertilizer; Soil PH, Organic matter, etc. If you get one, there are people here who can help you understand the results (probably better off in the soil forums than here though). As an aside, I'd like to point out, that, in my humble opinion, tomatoes are not heavy feeders. Compared to a lot of crops (corn, melons, pumpkins, etc.) tomatoes demand fairly little. If you add fertilizer before planting, that should have you set until you see the first fruit setting (tiny tomatoes showing up) and then you can add more. After that, you should resume some sort of feeding regime to give them just enough to keep them productive for the remainder of the season. I do organic and no-till, top dressing all of my amendments (homemade compost from kitchen scraps, leaves, grass clippings, etc.), and I cover all of that with 6-8" of hay from a friends farm. When I plant, I poke through the mulch and put a little organic fertilizer in the hole at planting time. I don't fertilize them again until fruit set, and I usually do that with an water soluble organic like fish emulsion. After that, I'll do some occasional foliar feedings to give a boost here and there as needed and a soil drench every 2-3 weeks until the season ends. Basically: 1.) Make sure you're using an appropriate (numbers appropriate) fertilizer. This is very important. 2.) Fertilize at the start of season / at planting time. 3.) Fertilize again at fruit set. 4.) Fertilize every 2-3 weeks to keep the plants productive.

Thanks for that info triciae. There were signs on the ship that contained some of the same information, but since we were pressed for time because I had to get back to my father-in-law's place to start prepping for the shrimp/mushroom risotto dinner I had planned, I only briefly read the first few signs, and after that just took pictures of the signs. I had heard that the vessel was based out of New London, but never heard the state mentioned. One of the signs attempted to answer why the Coast Guard keeps and maintains a sailing ship, and uses it for training when none of the other ships it uses are sailing ships. They had a longish explanation mentioning "learning the sea", "learning to work together", but I think the real reason is its beautiful and cool and it maintains a tie to the past. I had been sailing on a sunfish the previous day, and was imagining the Eagle trying to chase down smugglers and gaining until the ship had to tack or the smugglers turned into the wind and got away. "Dang it, they escaped again." :-) Edited to add picture of sign: This post was edited by bob_cville on Mon, Aug 11, 14 at 11:31