On the other hand, I find the scent of society garlic to be unendurably offensive. It is widely planted here because nothing bothers it and it is drought tolerant. However I find myself holding my breath while passing as quickly as I can. True garlic does not exude any scent unless brushed, and even then is not as unpleasant as society garlic. Society garlic casts its odor far and wide. It may not bother everyone, but I personally make it a point to avoid any garden where it is planted. I'm having trouble thinking of a plant I dislike more. Poison oak would fit the bill. Some years back I experimented with using garlic chives in the rose garden. I changed my mind because it spread enthusiastically and started choking out plants I preferred. It has been ten years now since I removed it, and I am still pulling out plants each year. Be careful with this one. No offensive smell, but it is very tenacious. I would not plant tomatoes with roses. I've tried it, both on purpose and accidentally when seeded in the garden, probably by a passing bird. Tomatoes are far too robust to play nicely with roses and later in the season start shading them. Then when you pull them out in the fall you are left with a big empty space. Pumpkins and squashes are even more this way. Yes, I gave that a try a few years ago also. The squashes did quite well. The ornamental plants suffered greatly. Like you, I experimented with the whole edible landscaping concept, mixing food plants with ornamentals in the same beds. It simply did not work well for me and I have pretty much abandoned it. What does work reasonably well is to intermingle roses with some of the herbs. It's very traditional, too, since roses used to be planted in physic (medicinal) gardens. You could try parsley, sage, and thymes. (I almost feel as though I'm singing the old song). Lavender, too. All are pretty and do not spread other than some casual reseeding, easily controlled. Avoid mints and most artemesias, as they will travel underground aggressively. Be aware that roses prefer more water than some of these herbs do, so the herbs are likely to be short lived if the roses are getting enough water. If you are using drip irrigation you could work it so that the rose gets more water. Anyway, have fun! Rosefolly

Susan, I love your light stand and always will love it. I realize it was the best solution for you, but if I told Tim I wanted to buy one of those, he'd hand me a hammer and tell me to build my own....which is why I have the one that I have. : ) Mine is hidden away out of sight in a room where guests rarely venture, although anyone who knows me and who knows I raise my own seedlings always asks to go upstairs and see it in the spring. So much for putting it out of sight....I just should have set it up in the dining room or breakfast room or something.... I am sure you'll be deliriously happy with it and will have many wonder seed-starting adventures and I look forward to hearing all about them. I think you got a great deal considering it was Gardener's Supply. I never buy anything of theirs for full price. They have sales often enough (and especially in November when, I think, some of us gardeners are shopping for ourselves) that a person can be patient and get a good price during their periodic sales. I've noticed that prices often are not as good in December when gardeners' spouses or family members are doing what I call "panic Christmas buying" and cannot afford, time-wise, to wait for a sale. I don't think you were repetitive at all. The more we all share about what we do, how we do it and why we do it (as well as pointing out what didn't work for us!), the better for all of us to learn from one another's experiences! Carol, Our weather is just like yours. Our high was 70 degrees yesterday and it was so gorgeous outside I could hardly stand it. I wanted to jump up and down and scream "Spring Is Here!". That was exacerbated by the smell of the orange blossoms on my little orange tree. However, I controlled myself because I knew it was a false spring and that winter was returning today. It was 56 degrees around 7 a.m. here at our house and now it is 36 degrees and we have had very, very light rain but lots of thunder. Phooey on winter! I think you showed those folks at the co-op that one benefit of being a gardener is that it keeps your muscles and joints strong, healthy and fit. I'd rather "work out" in the garden any day, than walk on the treadmill or work out on the weight machine. Who wouldn't? Trees, Nope, sorry, I just haven't gotten to it. I am trying. Watch for it in a couple of hours or in the morning. I'm about to start typing mow after I close up the chicken coops, put out the deer corn for my favorite deer, refill the bird feeders (those little birdies are eating nonstop today trying to stay warm), etc. I'm kind of dreading going out into the cold wind but I need to do it now before it gets dark. I have to warn you that I don't use the same planting schemes every year because I don't want to get stuck in a rut, but I'll try to mention some of the planting schemes in my usual rotation. Dawn

Most of your cool-season crops (potatoes, carrots, onions, lettuce and other salad greens (including spinach) and edible podded peas can be planted (per OSU's Spring Garden Planning Guide) from February 15-March 10. For radishes, the recommended planting dates are March 1 - April 15 ,and the best way to plant them is to succession sow by planting a certain number of radishes every week during that week. That will spread the radish harvest out over a longer time frame since you can only eat so many radishes per week and don't need or want the whole harvest at once. Potatoes will be your tallest cool-season crop, unless you plant vining edible podded peas, so they should be planted in the northernmost part of your garden to keep them from shading out everything else. If you plant a vining form of edible podded peas, like Sugar Snap or Super Sugar Snap, then their trellis also should be on the northern side of your garden plot so they do not shade shorter plants. I'd have them north of the potatoes because they'll reach 5-7' in height, and potatoes won't get quite that tall. Carrots can be slow to sprout and often the soil crusts over and it can become hard for the tiny carrot plants to break through the crusty soil. One way to get around that is to sow a radish seed in the same rows as the carrots, placing a radish every couple of inches. The radishes will end to germinate more quickly and break through the soil's crusty layer, paving the way for carrots to follow them. Since some radishes mature in just 3 or 4 weeks, you pull them out once they are mature, and the smaller carrot plants gradually enlarge and fill the void left by the harvest of the radishes. Lettuce and spinach are strictly cool-season veggies that will bolt once the air and soil temperatures reach a certain point. Bolting is partly a function of dry soil as well as being temperature-driven, so keeping the ground they're growing in evenly moist can help prevent bolting to some extent. Some lettuce varieties withstand our heat better than others. You should mostly ignore those litle blurbs on seed packets or in seed catalogs that describe one variety after another as being "heat tolerant" or that say "produces all summer". That may be true of cooler climates where the folks think it is insanely hot when temperatures hit the 80s, but it is not really true here where hot weather means 90s-100s and beyond. Some of the lettuce varieties that have performed the best for me here include Anuenue, Australian Yellow Leaf, Jericho (a romaine lettuce from Israel), Red Sails and any of the oakleaf types. Batavia summer crisp lettuces probably are the most heat tolerant types I grow, and some examples of them are Cherokee, Cimarron, Crispino, Jester, Mottistone, and Red Ball Jets, With Spinach, I often grow Bloomsdale Longstanding and Teton. Sometimes hot weather makes them bolt pretty early, but then you can grow them again in the fall and winter. It is not too early to get your lettuce going. If there's anything I like to plant really early, it is lettuce because all too often we heat up way too early in the year, so I'm always in a race to grow as much lettuce as I can before the heat sets in and makes it bolt. My early lettuce plants are in tall containers (so that if rabbits sneak into the garden in winter, the plants are elevated higher than the rabbits can reach) and already are about 5-6" tall. I'm getting ready to sow the seeds of the summer crisp types into a cattle trough on legs this weekend, which is a method I use to grow them near the house (far from the fenced-in garden plot) and keep them planted high enough that rabbits cannot eat them. I have hoops over the top of the catle trough and generally drape bird netting over the hoops to keep the turkeys, chickens, rabbits and cats from getting into the cattle trough and eating the lettuce. I often have trouble with wild birds, which are very plentiful here, pecking away at the early lettuce because there's just not a lot of green platns available to them at this time of the year, so row covers or bird netting help protect them. With your edible podded peas, you can grow vining types or shorter bush types, depending on whether you want to erect a trellis or whether you have a fence they can climb or not. I generally plant Sugar Snap and Super Sugar Snap on a trellis (made of T-posts and woven wire fencing, so I can move it from one raised bed to another every year). For a shorter bush type, I really like Cascadia. Sugar Lace or Sugar Lace II, and these get about 30" tall, produce heavily and are disease-tolerant. They are, however, basically leafless (so they can put all their energy into producing peas, not leaves) so if you want to grow edible podded peas partially so you can use the young pea shoots in salads, then Sugar Lace isn't the one you'd use for that purpose. Because potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes and peppers all are in the nightshade family, they can be affected by similar pests. I like to plant the cool-season nightshades at the northwest end of my garden, where a pecan tree will partially shade them beginning in mid- to late-afternoon, and I plant the warm-season nightshade family plants as far away from the cool-season nightshade family plants as I can. This is because the pests get a head start on the cool-season plants and then can easily move to the warm-season nightshade plants. By putting some distance between them, I keep my warm-season nightshades a little safer from attacks by pests already on the cool-season nightshades. I usually grow my tomatoes and peppers together in the same raised bed, or in adjacent beds. When I grow eggplant (which I usually don't because we don't like it....but I did grow it back when I was trying to get us to eat enough of it to like it), I plant it as far away as possible from the rest of the nightshades because it tends to be a flea beetle magnet early in the season. I'd rather have the flea beetles to flock to it instead of having them all over the potatoes, tomatoes and peppers. When you use a plant like that to draw the pests away from other plants and towards it, that's called a trap crop. You're likely to have flea beetles on eggplants, so why not use them to try to keep the other plants flea beetle free? Keeping a distance between your potatoes and tomatoes also is good because that helps keep any Colorado Potato Beetles that might be on the potato plants from moving directly to the tomato plants later in the season. I'll come back later and talk about your warm-season plants. I need to go finish making dinner and this is long enough as it is. Dawn

I've decided to transform the leaf mould bin into a compost bin sooner rather than later. Instead of emptying out all of the leaves, I've started incorporating grass clippings and kitchen/garden scraps into the bin, making sure it gets a good green/brown ratio. Over time, by turning the existing brown materials in with the new green materials, it should make good compost. The negative about this is that I won't be able to use this stuff for about two years, when I could have actually collected leaf mould in one year. The positive is that compost is more nutrient rich but can also be used the same way, as a top dressing or mulch, for water retention and weed suppression, but giving those plants a boost that leaf mould may not do. I'll work green materials in for about a year (or unless we get it so full that it absolutely can't hold any more) then setup another swimming pool composter up. On appx April 2018, the plan is to collect compost from the first bin. On appx April 2019, I'll collect compost from the 2nd bin. Then, April 2020, from the first bin, and on and on. Meanwhile, I'm slowly building up a small farm, with rabbits, cows, chickens, and eventually, ducks, possibly turkeys, etc. Rabbit poop = instant garden fertilizer + worm food, for vermicomposting, to collect worm castings for the garden, and the worms themselves could feed some fish, for a future aquaponics setup. Cow, chicken, duck, and turkey poop will be composted. As of right now, it's all about slowly moving forward, to try to obtain a balance, where everything works together.