I grow blueberries here in Madison, Wisconsin, and we have hard water, that is, our tap water contains dissolved limestone. There is a layer of limestone underground here, I think it covers all of southern Wisconsin. Blueberries require soil with a pH between 5 and 6, so our tap water is a problem when the shrubs need to be irrigated. I have had success by adding white vinegar (5%) that was bought at our local food market. This is standard white vinegar, nothing exotic. Using a pH meter, I determined that 6 fluid ounces of vinegar added to 4 gallons of tap water was about right. The blueberries seem to agree, they have dark green leaves, like they should, when the soil pH is correct.

It is nice to still see green hostas! This is zone 5a. A week ago I took pictures of green hostas, today it is all yellow, a nice color when the sun shines on it. Today I collected the first spent leaves of hostas, nothing more to show of a hosta than a marker. We here have 6 months of hosta, snow from middle of December to April 1. See you in spring!

Hi Emily, Before I tell you how large our place is, I want you to promise me that you will stay calm and NOT hyperventilate. OK? It is going to sound like a 'gardener's dream' but most of the time it is a 'gardener's nightmare'! We are in a very, very rural area on a piece of land that was part of a farm until about the mid-70s. After that, the land was left fallow although it was leased out for cattle grazing. During that time, no one was keeping the land cleared out, so most of it reverted to cedar trees and obnoxious brush like greenbrier and poison ivy and 'trash trees' like hackberry, ash, elms, etc. I love all trees but the trash trees are weak and short-lived and are continually sick, sickly looking, rotting, dying and crashing down. Since purchasing this property we have spent thousands of hours and lots of $$$ on relatively inexpensive hand-held equipment like chain saws and multipurpose weedeaters that have steel cutting blades, trying to clear away the trash trees and brush. The greenbrier and poison ivy are still with us and always will be, although we work hard to keep it away from our cultivated areas and the pathways cut through the wild areas. If I had it to do over again, I would have bought a smaller piece of property. Actually, we were looking for a 3- to 5-acre plot of land, figuring that would give me more than enough room to play in the dirt. What we ended up with was 14.4 acres, which is enough to keep me constantly exhausted, and I don't even venture onto the 10 wooded acres that much. The land is beautiful. Our woods are gorgeous and remind my husband of Pennsylvania, where he grew up. We have ponds, springs, creeks and a swamp. The wildlife is amazingly abundant, which is good and bad. Our land is creek bottom land, so parts of it are lower lying than the land on two sides of us, which causes water to drain UNDERGROUND for weeks after a heavy rain and keeps us pretty wet and soggy for quite some time. Our house is on the highest part of the land, and we are not in an area prone to flooding, but my raised bed veggie garden some distance away from the house and on lower-lying land does have drainage issues. With this year's rain, those drainage issues have been quite apparent. Don't get me wrong. I love this place. I love every inch of the woods and all the beautiful native understory plants. I love the open pastures which, since they aren't used for cattle any more, aren't really pastures anymore. I guess I should call them meadows. I love the wildflowers and the wildlife. It is a maintenance nightmare though. Just mowing and weeedeating the approximate 4.4 acres that aren't wooded takes me a couple of days if the weather is dry and on my side. If it is continually wet, I often have to mow waist high grass with a wheeled weedeater (similar to a DR Field and Brush Mower) and then come back and redo it with the lawn tractor or a push mower. Weedeating takes forever. The bermuda grass we have was probably planted for haying many years before we bought the place. I know that I NEVER would have planted it. I spend untold hours trying to get rid of that bermuda grass because it is invasive and creeps into every cultivated bed we have. It is my dream to one day get rid of all the bermuda. Little by little, I am succeeding, but it will take me another decade at the rate I am going. We try to be good stewards of the land, removing overgrown invasive species and encouraging the good native ones. So far we have removed ALL the cedar from the 4.4 acres of open land, and now must start removing it from the wooded areas. We only work in the wooded areas in the winter when the copperheads, water moccasins and rattlesnakes are hibernating. I have learned so much about the soil, the plants and the wildlife since we moved here. I don't regret that we bought this place and I do, in fact, want for us to spend the rest of our lives here. However, I have had to accept that most of it will NEVER look the way I want it to, and instead focus on the land closest to the house and just try to keep it under control. Because it takes so long and is so hard to improve the soil on ever a very small piece of land, I have had to accept that most of what I grow will be plants that have to grow in red clay soil that is low in organic matter, holds tons of water when it does rain, and dries concrete-hard and cracks wide open when it doesn't rain. THAT is the reason I have had to learn so much about what does, does not, will or will not grow in clay soil. So, when looking for land, it is important to think about your life many years down the road. Do you still want to be mowing and maintaining several acres when you are 50, 60, 70 or 80 years old? Do you have to have everything look 'just so' or can you live with the overgrown woodland and wildflower-filled meadows that don't get mowed very often? Are you OK with tons of wildlife, including poisonous snakes and lots of predators like bobcats, foxes, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, panthers and cougars? If not, rural to semi-rural acreage might not be your best choice. I know I have sounded pretty negative, but I just want to give a realistic picture of what it is like to try to tame wild, relatively untamed land WITHOUT hiring someone with a bulldozer to come in and knock everything down, detroying decades-old trees and all the lovely wildlife habitat in the process. And, if hiring a bulldozer guy sounds easy and relatively cheap, think again. We have neighbors who hired a guy to clear and regrade their land and he spent most of TWO YEARS working on that, especially with regard to drainage issues. I know that I have made this whole thing much harder on myself than I had to because I have insisted on doing everything as organically as possible, so we don't use herbicides like Round-up or broadleaved weedkillers containing chemicals like atrazine or 2, 4 D. I simply refuse to poison the land. I work hard to save native plants, and work even harder to remove invasive ones, especially invasive grasses like Johnson Grass. It is worth it all to live here though. We have a beautiful place filled with all kinds of desirable wildlife like birds, butterflies, dragonflies, turtles, toads, frogs, skinks, lizards, salamanders, bunnies, etc., etc., etc. We have gorgeous sunrises and sunsets. We have a nice little 2-story Victorian house with wrap-around porches and a huge barn-style garage complete with a weather vane and cupola. We have the absolute best neighbors in the world on all sides of us and the people in our part of Love County are the nicest, kindest, most loving and giving people you will ever meet. I love it here. I suspect I would love it a lot more if we had only 4 acres, though, instead of 14. The moral of this story....be careful what you wish for! I truly love living here, but it ain't easy!!! Happy Growing!! Dawn

Thanks for that info. I probably should have mentioned my odd vent arrangement. Laundry is on the second floor. Our vent goes straight up the wall about 18" then through a secondary lint filter. After that, straight up into the attic, about another 5'. Makes a 90-degree turn and runs 3' laterally into a Fantech booster in the attic. Exiting that, a lateral run of 3' another 90-turn, and runs about 6' up and out the attic roof. Yes, complicated -- thus the booster. I kind of though the booster would hold back the damp like that damper. It just seems like a lot of vent for damp to travel down.