Hey colored thumb, sorry about you snorting your drink out. That happened once before that I know of, a distant relative we hadn't met yet was reading up on us on our web pages. He reported that he snorted coffee through his nose upon reading about my husband being hit by a guy with a 6 foot tall sign of Jesus. (The irony of it I guess.) Anyway, our lawn mower turned out not to have been reassembled just so, and is broken again. So guess we will save some more gas. Really wish it was working, because I want to start some more lasagna beds, and it is hard if you have 3 foot tall wildflowers and grass in the way. About the guy selling us the sheep, I think he was crooked because I am SURE those sheep (or that one sheep 3 times, couldn't really tell them apart) ran back home, yet he insisted we pay for all 3 sheep. He knew we were just going to have it just for making fertilizer out of grass. We sort of dabbled in farming. When I was little we had geese, then a pony, a few rabbits, later on chickens, etc. My mother must have worn a sign saying 'sucker' When she bought 6 Bantam chickens, 5 were roosters and 1 was a hen. (We wanted them for eggs, so . . .) Let me tell you, all the eggs were fertilized. We called her Mama Chicken for obvious reasons. She seemed very happy. I was only about 14 when I captured the sheep, it wasn't my idea. They didn't have the internet then to read up on such things. Marcia

It's one of the sallows (Salix sp.), commonly known as 'pussy willow'. I'll bet there's a pussy willow or pw stump nearby which is sending out suckers. The easiest way to control it would be to just keep mowing it off. Any kind of chemical would kill the grass too. You could try digging it out but you'd probably end up making holes in your lawn. Sallows like moist ground so a change in the drainage mught deter it. But again that would be a big job.

[set soapbox mode on] Okay now I'm taking it personally. You can check all the sources you want, but I can assure you it becomes baffling almost immediately, especially if you spend much time reading peer reviewed university journal articles. What we have here in this and other forums is hundreds if not thousands of peers reviewing what we do and reviewing it in much less baffling terms. The text that I copy and paste is my own, so I don't need to site sources. When I came to this forum I was doing almost everything wrong. I was convinced I was fairly correct because I attended a land grant university and took classes covering this stuff. After a few heated forum battles I tried some of the things these illiterates were writing. Lo and behold they worked for me. After that I looked back at other suggestions my "opponents" were making. Some seemed counterintuitive, so I looked into the science soil biology. From that and what I had learned of human physiology in grad school, I created the Organic Lawn Care FAQ, available on the GW Organic Gardening FAQ section. I posted that FAQ on several sites. Those sites with download counters registered well over 75,000 downloads each. Nobody in the forums seemed to be arguing against my work, so I guess you could call that peer reviewed. My lawn owner peers - perhaps not your ivory tower peers. As a result of that document I was asked to moderate three new organic lawn care forums at other e-locations. Again I am calling this a reasonable review of the concepts I set forth. I consider the Organic Lawn Care FAQ the first easy to read concept document on organics since J.I Rodale popularized it in the 1950s. His compost approach was nice until we got the technology to study DNA in the soil. With testing done in the 90s and 2000s we learned that compost wasn't a be-all, end-all magic bullet. Compost is little more than a collection of microbes and microbe carcasses. It works great as a mulch. But the benefit to organics comes from feeding real food to the soil microbes. Then you'll have to read Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Biology Primer to learn how that food gets processed into plant food. While that document is not trivial reading, it is readable to us unwashed. What I try to provide is best practices for low hassle lawn care. These practices have been reviewed in other lawn forums and tuned up over the years. Yes there are ways to make it harder and more expensive, but I don't want to work that hard myself. I even copy and paste some of the things I have written, because that has a lower hassle factor than recreating it again and again. Every now and then something new happens in home owner lawn care. Two examples that come to mind are leveling and sprigging. Several years ago Dave Proud brought us an illustrated and detailed account of how he leveled his bermuda grass lawn. Before that we never discussed leveling to get rid of a bumpy surface. It was an epiphany. The lights went on and we dug into that. I got him to join another forum for lawn nuts, and the process has been used a lot. That general topic fed into the question of why lawns get bumpy. Rototilling was discussed among homeowners and professionals. Rototilling seems to be the root cause, or at least one root cause. Another fairly recent homeowner discovers is sprigging a few dollars worth of very expensive bermuda stolons onto bare soil. This process came to us from R. Simon in Australia. It seems like he developed the process and made it work. On this topic I do not know if anyone else has sprigged successfully. I spend more time in this forum where there are more beginners than I do in the other forum, so they could be sprigging all the time over there. My point is that if and when someone has a better idea about lawn care, I'm going to bring it to the forums and discuss it. Generally those ideas do not come from peer reviewed journals out of the universities. But if, for example, you want peer reviewed evidence that shampoo will soften your soil, search the journals for "Cascade Plus, golf course, core aeration." Without the quotes of course. You'll find plenty of articles on the use of a concentrated surfactant called Cascade Plus being used to replace core aeration on golf courses. Shampoo is also a concentrated surfactant. I did not invent the use of shampoo, but when I tried it, and it worked like magic for me, I was all over it. Please go ahead and look at all the sources you want. Come back with your ideas and we can talk about them. I have reasons for not top dressing, not core aerating, not rototilling, and all the other oddball stuff I suggest. You don't have to believe them or agree. You are free to present your thoughts, but what irks me is when people refuse to spend $0.50 on shampoo but they will spend $75 to rent a back breaking machine that will not work nearly as well. ...all because they read a peer reviewed journal about core aerating. [set soapbox off]

I know---very well---the effects of maple tree roots on plants. My whole backyard is filled with roots of two VERY large maple trees. Needless to say, I struggle to grow anything there! What I understand is that the tree roots extend beyond the canopy of the tree. Also, the roots are not necessarily evenly dispersed around the tree. So I find areas that are better for planting and have less roots. But if you plant near a maple tree---and water that area very well---that's exactly where the maple tree will try to grow more roots because that is where the moisture is! It's hard to outsmart a maple tree! For me, I also need to consider water drainage on my property. When we get a lot of rain, where does the water flow to? That's where a lot of maple tree roots will be. So what grows well under a maple tree for me? Not much when you get to the size my trees are. There are only three plants that come to mind: Sweet Woodruff (considered invasive here, but not for me!); lancifolia (which grows, but not to its full size) and lamium. I was surprised to see heuchera mentioned, but I do have a spot where they are growing. I also have a European ginger in a pot to plant. But I thought they need more moisture. We'll see.