Thank you twohuskies. You have to be a winner if you love animals. I'll vote for ya!!! I have painted several huskies...beautiful dogs (don't tell THEM they are dogs). I say "used to be a photographer" because my house burned several years ago and I lost all my camera equiptment. I did horse shows and weddings mostly. I have a few flower pix left that my Mom had at her house. I lost all of mine in the fire...sort of lost my heart for photography after loosing all that equiptment...BUT my love for flowers will never die and I will have all the roses I want some day. I'll get some pix together soon, but you rosey people are mighty good with your cameras too. I'm seeing some beauties here and enjoying every minute of it.

I have done the lasagna method, too. I suggest you check out the book at the library..by Patricia Lanza, I think. Texased is correct....you need significant newspaper, which is why a lot of people choose to use cardboard instead. You can use color print with no problem, as most papers use soy based inks these days. But you cannot use paper with a glossy finish. I just took large rolled up sections of paper and let them soak in a bucket of water for a few minutes before I layered them. I think I have six layers under the garden. In the raised bed, six layers was enough....under some pavers in the kids' playhouse it wasn't, so I think the layers on top might be key also. You can use "browns" in a bed (composted manure, compost, brown leaves, etc.), if you wish to plant it right away. I also have some thin layers of peat per the author's instruction. While the bed will cook down several inches, it will not be too hot to sustain plants. I had a nearly six foot tall cherry tomato and some healthy globe basil in there. I didn't use any dirt. The last layer (top layer) was about four inches of compost, and I planted directly into that. If you use "greens" or "hot" stuff....kitchen scraps, lots of green grass, fresh manure...the author recommends an entire season of cooking before you plant. I've heard that you can speed the process a little with black plastic over the top, but it seems like too much trouble to me. As far as I know, nothing short of chemical warfare will kill bermudagrass...and sometimes even that doesn't work. Fortunately, I don't have much in my St. Augustine. My mom has Bermuda lawn, and we have a terrible time keeping it out of the beds and the mulch in the walkways. Have fun!

You are absolutely correct that learning how to manipulate the shutter speed and aperture to maintain the desired depth of field is the finer points of photography, but with the advent of auto focus and auto exposure controls that is rapidly becoming a lost art. Back in the mid 60's when I learned photography we all we had at best was manual focus and stop down match needle metering. Try shooting action shots at a football game when you have to manually focus and compute the exposure for each shot and you will rapidly find out the action is long gone before you even get a shot off. Add to that, we were working with fixed focal length prime lenses. The solution was to go to the sidelines at mid field (50yd line) and select a lens focal length that would give you closeups at mid field or at either end of the field, typically a 200mm. on the lens barrel you will see a center line that indicates the distance from the camera to the subject. On either side of that index you will see small lines that have an f-stop index number, one on each side of the center focus index. That is the depth of field scale index lines. The smaller the aperture the wider the distance between the index lines, and the greater the depth of field. Rather than focus the lens on a set point, rotate the lens until the infinity mark is on a depth of field index on one side and look at the corresponding depth of field mark on the opposite side to see what the closest focal point is. By example, a 200mm lens at f-16 has a maximum depth of field of 24' to infinity. A 300mm lens at f-16 would give you a depth of field range of 90' to infinity. The ISO or film speed index is equal to the shutter speed at noon daylight at the equator. As we move north or south of the equator the light falls off. On average, at noon in the USA the ISO number is equal to the correct shutter speed with the aperture set at f-11. We need a minimum shutter speed of 250 and f-16 is one f-stop slower than f-11, so we would use ISO 400 film (slightly less than one f-stop faster). With the modern digital cameras offering shutter speeds up to 1600 or 3200 it is much easier. Set the aperture at f-16 and set the ISO at 800 and you could shoot the whole game without making another setting on the camera.

A repeat.