* Watering technique is very under-rated in container culture and can easily make the difference between success and failure. To illustrate: When an apprentice goes to Japan to study under a bonsai master, he will often spend 6 months or more doing nothing but learning how to water, before he is entrusted with any work on the master's plants. Ask a greenhouse plantsman what he feels is the most important job in the successful rearing of a crop, and his answer will be "proper watering" or "irrigation management". * A generalization - With everything else equal, the more often your planting needs water, the healthier the roots will be, as long as you don't forget to water. The need to irrigate frequently indicates good aeration and drainage, which insures that air is returning to the soil before anaerobic conditions create conditions that cause the death of fine rootage or impair root function/metabolism. Watering also forces old, CO2-rich air from the soil and pulls O2 rich air in behind it. * Don't water on a schedule. Water when the rootzone is first dry to the touch. This can mean watering new plantings (shallow roots) when the lower parts of the container are still wet, but for most established plantings, water when the soil at the drain hole first feels dry - or use the sharpened dowel trick. Push the dowel deep into the pot - if it comes out damp, you probably don't need to water. Your sense of touch registers 'dry soil' when soils are still about 40% saturated. Plants, however, can still extract water from conifer bark and peat down to about 30% saturation - after that, water is held too tightly for plants to access. This gives you approximately a 15% margin of error in which plants can still extract water from soils, even after the soil feels dry. * Your soil should at least allow you to water at every watering so that water drains freely from the drain hole. The best way to water a container is: Wet the soil until you 'feel' the container is about to start draining from the bottom and stop. Wait 10 minutes and add additional water until about 10-15% of the total volume of water applied in both applications exits the drain hole. The first water allows precipitate solids ( accumulated salts) to dissolve into the soil solution, and the second watering flushes them from the soil. * If you cannot water copiously w/o risking root rot, you might want to consider a different soil with better aeration/drainage and durability. You may be able to partially correct soils that drain poorly by adding a wick through the drain hole of the container to remove excess water from the layer of saturated soil at the container bottom until the planting is mature enough to do it quickly enough on its own. More drainage tips: Nesting the pot inside another pot with the same soil in the bottom of the second pot can remove all the excess water in a pot. Water moves downward into the soil in the lower pot (it "thinks" the pot is deeper & moves to the "bottom"), leaving the primary container free of saturation and improving aeration in the main pot immediately after watering. Tilting the container after watering also causes additional water to drain. To confirm, water thoroughly & wait for the container to stop draining. Tip container at a 45* angle & you'll notice substantial additional drainage. Also, if you hold the container at chest level and lower it at medium speed to waist level, then lift the container quickly back to chest height, you can use the physics of inertia of motion to help drain the container, too. Repeat until no additional water drains. It is very important to return the entire soil mass soil to a well aerated state as quickly as possible after watering. It can make a huge difference in sustaining o/a energy levels and maintaining plants at maximum vitality within the limiting parameters of all the other cultural conditions plants must deal with. Al

Lizards will use any available shade to regulate their body temperatures including holes. Most will not ravage your plants. Chuckwallas are an exception. YouÂll know them when you see them thereÂre huge. You have a gopher problem. If you haven't already dealt with it, I would do it soon. They can wreak havoc with irrigation lines and it looks as though they're/it is calling yours home. I won't go into trapping, as you can get that from animal control. If you want it solved permanently, as in terminally, buy a large juicy carrot. Cut the stem end off and save it. Using a drill and a 3/8 inch bit or anything else you can think of to hollow out the core as far as you can reach. Fill the cavity with gopher pellets from HD or LOWES and cut a plug from the end you saved to plug the hole. Tie a 2foot piece of string or cord around the top end of the carrot. It looks as though they /it, are using your valve box for the dirt that they excavate. Use a spoon, shovel out the dirt in the tunnel and insert the carrot as far down as you can. Stake the end of the string out side the valve box, cover the whole back up with dirt and leave it alone. Check the carrot in 24 hours. If itÂs chewed (And it will most likely will be) your problem is solved. If not move it to another hole and repeat the procedure. A dead gopher in the tunnels will keep the others away for a long time. This has never failed to produce the expected results. IÂm a live and let live kind of guy, but when you add up the cost of the damage and time you spend repairing it, you sometimes have to draw a line and swat whatever crosses it. Hope this helps.

lack of light intensity ... and i wonder about lack of spring time levels of humidity in the house ... especially if you have a forced air furnace in z5 ... it will have to be hardened off to outside.. both to temps and light ... in my house.. i cant hear/read this enough: he is RIGHT ... lol ... i tried this house thing.. in the way back machine ... for all the immediate thrill ... it didnt end well .. as piet notes... it probably wont look good the rest of the year .. but it wont die.. for this anyway ... or.. you will figure out how to do it better than i did ... i was pre WWW .. so i was winging it ... actaully.. now that i think of it.. i would buy forced hosta at hosta college ... in march.. they couldnt go outside til near june.. and seemed to go to sleep early in fall ... i dont know if i was a novice.. the furnace.. the forcing.. i dont know.. but i just quit buying forced hosta early ... or in the alternative.. lowered my expectations .. of what it would do the rest of the year ... ken

Actually, the Pbase path in the lower right hand corner is the closest to what I have been imagining -- only with rock edging instead of wood, and fewer stones in the middle. And soil on the surface instead of gravel. So I guess it's not very similar at all, when you think about it. Here is the question then. Let's assume I trash the idea of stone edging, but I still fill in the trench with 5 inches of gravel (and tamp it down) and two inches of sand (and tamp it down). Let's say my stepping stones are laid in a row, usually one at a time, but maybe two at a time for smaller ones. Let's say the stones are 18-24 inches wide and 12-18 inches long, and 3-4 inches thick. Let's say there is a distance of at least one foot on either side of each stone that has a base of gravel and sand. Let's assume I put an inch of soil down around the stones to bring everything to grade, tamp that down and plant moss on it. Is it OK to just let the path abut the garden beds on either side, with nothing in between? Not just aesthetics, which are in the eyes of the be-boulder, but engineering -- I read a lot in my how-to guides about path base materials spilling out onto the garden beds, especially dry laid stone paths. (Sorry, I just can't do the mortar, even subterranean mortar -- maybe this is a prejudice, but I don't want cement in my yard (except the house foundation -- it's ugly, but it seems to work pretty well)). The comments about huge 200 pound stepping stones are fascinating, but I'm not about to attempt anything like that. I've walked on many stepping stone paths and seen many more in books and on web sites, and I would guess that very few of the stones in those paths weigh as much as the people walking on them. I will have to settle (pun?) for less weighty stones and hope that they will find comfortable resting spots. (Those adorably cute little round do-it-yourself stepping stones with amusing little sayings look to be about 12 inches in diameter, if that, yet some people seem to be able to make stepping stone paths with them.) (I didn't say good stepping stone paths.) Finally, if I decide to take your advice and get rid of the edging, what the heck should I do with all these thousands of rocks? Dozens of piles of them all over my tiny 1/8 acre yard just isn't working for me. (I haven't been able to move several of the larger ones out of the 9X8 area I've dug into the slope to make a small patio. It looks like a dinosaur nest.) Thanks for taking the time to ponder these practical and ethereal questions with me, -- wd