I was hoping one of our southerners would pipe up. In the deep south, Pampas Grass should be evergreen, so pruning the whole thing down shouldn't be needed. I expect you could get away with cutting out dead leaves and spent plume stalks.

James, The Pat Lanza lasagna gardening books are good. I have two of them right here on my bookshelf: the original one called simply "Lasagna Gardening" which was published in 1998 and then Pat Lanza's follow-up book "Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces", which was published in 2002. I haven't read the third one, which is about "Lasagna Gardening with Herbs". One thing to remember when you read about the lovely layering method of building beds, which closely resembles sheet composting except you're layering purchased 'finished' ingredients instead of raw compost ingredients, is that you have to remove or otherwise deal with the bermuda grass first because you can't just build a bed on top of bermuda grass. So, even though the book is very good and quite inspriring, you have to know it doesn't work equally well in every geographic region of the country and building a lasagna bed in our part of the country requires you to remove drought-tolerant, aggressive grasses like bermuda which makes the method more difficult and more time-consuming than it sounds when you read the book. In the book, the author suggests you just lay several thicknesses of newspaper on top of the sod and build a lasagna bed right there on top of it, and you know that will never work with bermuda grass. Another thing to remember is that lasagna gardening is just a new name given to an old method. Ruth Stout was using a method that she called the no-work mulch gardening method decades before Pat Lanza wrote the lasagna gardening books, and I'm not saying that to dispect Pat Lanza, but merely to point out that there really isn't anything new under the sun. I consider lasagna gardening just a fancier, more modern form of no-till, mulch gardening and probably found Ruth Stout's book "The No-Work Garden Book" just as helpful in its own way as Pat Lanza's books. I think you'd enjoy Pay Lanza's "Lasagna Gardening" book as long as you remember that her easy method just isn't as easy for those of us with bermuda grass, but think you'd find Ruth Stout's book just as helpful. The best two gardening books of this century, in my opinion, are relatively new ones. "Edible Landscaping" by Rosalind Creasy, which was published in Nov. 2011, is simply amazing. I've read many of Ms. Creasy's other books, and have been waiting years for her to write this one. She covers everything you'd ever want to know about creating a landscape that blends edibles with ornamentals and she knows what she's talking about because she's been doing this kind of gardening for several decades. The book is big, full of photos and is very detailed. It also is very inspiring. The second book I'd recommend to anyone and everyone who wants edible gardening to be a part of their life was written by Barbara Pleasant and is, hands down, the best book on getting started in vegetable gardening I've ever seen, even if you've never gardened before. It is called "Starter Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Vegetable Gardens". It has specific plans and designs for specific gardens, and shows how garden designs progress from the first year to the second and so on. It is wonderful and is great not only for new gardeners but for experienced ones as well as the author provides so much info that is so helpful. An older book that is highly revered by many gardeners is Dick Raymond's "Joy of Gardening". Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the newer books that we forget the older ones. Another book that's been around a decade or so is Ed Smith's "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible". Although he is more of a traditional row gardener, the book is outstanding. If you want to grow as much of your own food as you possibly can on the amount of space you have available, I highly recommend John Jeavon's book "How To Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine". This is a very complex book, full of charts with all kinds of data and statistics, but it does a great job of teaching people how to use biointensive techniques to grow huge yields. It is not, however, about no-till style gardening. It is sort of the opposite as one of its basic tenets is that you use double digging and adding lots of amendments to build each bed. I use his plant spacing techniques, but don't do the double digging, choosing instead to build raised beds above ground and leave the big task of double-digging to people who are younger and more ambitious than I. A more simplified form of biointensive gardening is Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening". This book and technique have been around for a long time now....long enough that there has been a revised edition of the book published in the last few years. If you want to use a greenhouse, cold frame, high tunnel or low tunnel to raise cool-season crops in the winter, you can't go wrong with "Four Season Harvest" by Eliot Coleman or by his newer book, "Winter Harvest Handbook". Those are some of my ideas about books that you might find helpful. The style of gardening I engage in now is a blend of several different techniques and the books I listed above all contributed a lot to the way that I do things. As with all gardening techniques, you have to experiment to find what works best for you in your soil and your climate. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Four Season Harvest

I was told recently that burning when the stilt grass is beginning to emerge in the late spring works and usually does not kill the natives. I plan on trying this at the lake's edge because I cannot use any chemicals that are not aquatic approved...and I don't want to use anything that is a general herbicide;I have many plants that I want near the water. One of my friends has used the corn-based pre-emergent, and it works some, according to her, but it needs to be used many years in a row to have any impact...and it is not cheap.

What kind of Lycoris? In what area/zone? My experience with L. radiata is the same as Purslanegarden's. Currently, the foliage is up, and flopped. That's how I found mine too - the "lawn" was FULL of them, had been mowed for years. When drought turned the lawn brown, I wondered, "what are those green striped leaves?" There's patches of floppy L. radiata leaves in this pic: