Oooh, this is a topic that is one my personal bugbears! They get so much wrong in films and even more so in TV series. Stuff blooming at the wrong time of year, snow sprayed over clearly deciduous trees in full leaf, blatantly artificial flowers stuck onto the wrong foliage, supposed rows of vegetables which are just plunked into the ground and are already beginning to wilt. Random bits of artificial ivy which are clearly covering modern bits of street furniture. (I live in an area where many of the buildings and surrounding villages have been used for filming and I've seen them sticking this stuff over modern doorbells and things) Recent classics from my collection include a blatant large flowered garden scabious being passed off as a wild scabious and growing in a wood, where it would never be found. In the film 'Bright Star' about John Keats they are seen picking bunches of cherries(plastic) from apple trees. Then there are all the anachronistic plants where you sit there saying 'the Elizabethans did not have Lilium regale' you fools! And don't get me started on the animals... Starting with the skunks in Disneys 101 Dalmations which is supposed to be set on the outskirts of London right up to the cicadas which are clearly heard in the night scenes of Shakespeare in Love. Only today I saw an episode of a TV costume drama supposedly taking place near Oxford where the nighttime cacophany would have done credit to the South of France in mid-Summer. Phew - good to get that off my chest.

Jandey, I live west of Sugar Land and we bought our land about 30 years ago so it was a little more affordable back then!!! We have access to cotton mulch so we built our beds with it. I planted all our plumerias in pots then put the pots in the beds of cotton mulch and topped it with hardwood mulch. We've planted some directly in the mulch and they did as good as the ones in the pots planted in the mulch. But it was easier to put in the greenhouse for the winter if they were in pots. We have many this year that have infos on them that were cuttings just a year or two ago. And ones that bloomed for us last year and split, are going to bloom for us again this year on the new shoots. We are so excited since we are so new at this. It is like watching a baby take their first steps when you see the new flowers unfold. I'll try to post a picture of our beds so you can see what we did. Yes, I am going to the sale in June. Will probably be working it. So Jandey, you will have to let me know what you are wearing so I can tell you who the good sellers are!!! Also, if you are looking for something in particular I can ask around if someone may have it and make sure they bring it to the sale. Joanr

There are other methods of weed suppression that might be as useful or even more useful for raising crops on as large of a scale as you intend to do. 1. LIVING MULCH: Using a living mulch is one of them, but it isn't the only one. Growing clover as a living mulch in corn fields is one example of how a living mulch can be multipurpose. The clover suppresses weeds, it keeps the soil beneath it shaded and cooler, it shades or crowds out weeds that attempt to germinate and grow, and it fixes nitrogen that returns to the soil helping to replace the nitrogen that was used by the corn plants. When you use living mulch interplanted with crops, the drawback is that it can compete with the main crop for moisture, but you can work around that with spacing and careful selection of specific living mulch crops. Buckwheat is a great living mulch that goes from seed to flower in as little as 6 weeks. It sometimes is used by organic farmers as a living mulch in between rows of sweet potatoes. By the time the buckwheat is done, the sweet potato plants are running rampantly and can shade out their own weeds for the most part. 2. INTERCROPPING: Intercropping is another common technique. It is explained best in the wonderful book by John Jeavons "How To Grow More Vegetables...." (the title is long, I'll link it below). It is amazing how well some crops grow mixed together in an intercropping system and Mr. Jeavons and Ecology Action have worked out the best spacing over the decades. I use a lot of intercropping techniques in order to cram as many plants as possible into my garden beds, and the way it tends to work out is that I have very few weed issues. When you intercrop, you not only grow multiple crops in one space, but you also have the shorter crops serving, in essence, as a living mulch for the taller crops. One way that I have found works exceptionally well for me is to plant cool season crops (lettuce, radishes, beets, carrots, etc.) first and then to come back a month or two later after they are up and growing vigorously and plug-in larger warm-season crops from transplants---like tomato, squash, melon or pepper plants, for example. The warm-season crops benefit from the shorter, cool-season plants being well-established and shading the ground, preventing weeds from sprouting and growing. The cool-season crops benefit from the shading provided for them by the taller, fast-growing warm-season crops. This often allows the cool-season crops to continue producing a harvest later than they do when they aren't shaded. You use very careful spacing, and planting in specific (sort of hexagonal) patterns so that each of the plants, when it matures, is close enough to the next plant that their leaves barely touch. When they are grown that close to one another, they shade the ground beneath themselves pretty thoroughly which helps prevent weeds from thriving by shading them out. The first time I intercropped using one of John Jeavons' recommended planting combinations in the specific pattern he advocates, I was shocked at how well the plants grew in combination with one another and I was pleased with how well they outcompeted weeds or shaded out weeds. I'm not saying you won't have any weeds (that is just a dream) but they are greatly reduced and easy to hoe out or pull out. In my garden, I sometimes use the exact plant combinations advocated in the book by John Jeavons, but I also have experimented and found combinations that work better for me here in the soil and climate that I have. One of my favorite combinations is to grow cool-season flowers, veggies and herbs like sweet alyssum, lettuce, carrots, borage, chamomile and snapdragons in beds where I'll eventually grow tomato plants. (I grow tons of tomatoes.) All of those grow and spread. Most are edible but others serve the purpose of attracting bees and pollinators while shading out cool-season weeds that tend to sprout all spring here. Chamomile is a great triple-use plant. It makes a terrific living mulch, but it is not so deep-rooted that it is difficult to yank out of the ground when it dies back in the heat of summer. I can clip off and gather its flowers and use them for chamomile tea (either to drink or to use when watering seedlings in flats to prevent damping off). It also attracts many beneficial insects and pollinators to the garden. By the time the chamomile is dying back, re-seeded Laura Bush petunias (bred from native petunias, so very heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant) are sprouting and covering the ground and taking over as the warm-season living mulch. I'm very fond of growing sweet peppers and hot peppers on the north side of indeterminate tomato plants in rows that run east-west. My farmer friends here in my neighborhood told me that my tomato plants would shade out my pepper plants or cause them to produce poorly, but I didn't have either of those issues. When the plants are younger, the pepper plants get all the sunlight they need. As the tomato plants grow rampantly in May and June, they get a lot larger and do shade the pepper plants, which helps prevent sunscald on the pepper fruit. I have found that both tomato and pepper plants produce very well when grown side by side in the same raised bed, so it is a combination I use every year and it has reduced pepper sunscald to a rarity in my garden. I like to grow cantaloupes and icebox watermelons on trellises as space-savers, but that leaves bare ground beneath them, and we know that weed seeds sprout in bare ground. To combat the weeds, I grow a dwarf okra (for many years it was Little Lucy, lately it has been Baby Bubba or something similar) on the south side of the trellis, which runs east-west. The shade from the okra prevents weeds from sprouting and growing and the shade from the trellis itself largely prevents weeds on the ground on the north side of the trellis, but I usually plant Laura Bush petunias there just to help shade the ground and keep it cool. In the back garden which has a diffferent form of soil and which will be only in its third year of use as a garden in 2015, I use a lot of hot-season crops, with various varieties of southern peas (not just pink eye purple hull but crowder, zipper, lady and cream peas too) intercropped with other heat-lovers like cucumbers, melons, Armenian cukes, and winter squash. I try to keep most of the winter squash growing on the garden fences and grow southern peas in the soil at the base of the winter squash vines. It works fairly well, although in 2014 the voles that venture out of our 10 acres of woods to eat in the garden did develop a real fondness for the roots of southern pea plants, although they mostly ate the roots of Mackey and Colossus and left the Knuckle Purplehulls and Red Ripper varieties alone. When I lost the southern peas as ground covers, I just sowed seed of Armenian cucumbers and let them run rampant on the ground. I didn't really need any more Armenian cukes, so I'd harvest their fruit and feed them to the deer once the Armenian cukes were about the size of a baseball bat. I've also experimented with living mulches in the summer heat. Sometimes the living mulch is an edible crop, but sometimes it is grown only to shade/cool the soil and to suppress weeds. One of my favorite combinations is to grow icebox watermelons (the vines are not as rampant and wide-ranging as those of full-sized watermelons) as a living mulch beneath widely-spaced okra plants or pepper plants. In 2014 I grew ornamental sweet potatoes as a living mulch beneath my pepper plants. Being very rampant growers, the ornamental sweet potatoes did have a tendency to try to climb the pepper plants every now and then, but I would just carry scissors with me while harvesting the peppers and would hack back the ornamental sweet potato vines at the same time I was picking peppers. I just dropped them into the pathways as I worked, and then I came back and raked up the vines and carried them out back to my compost pile. No, I wasn't silly enough to imagine they'd be allowed to compost. I knew the deer and bunnies would eat them (and they did) but at least the vines served yet another purpose---as feed for the wildlife. I often grow nasturtiums (cool-season but often lasting until June before the heat burns them up, and surviving all summer in the cooler, wetter summers) and rat-tail radishes with my summer squash plants. The nasturtiums attract beneficial insects, produce edible flowes and shade the ground, the rat-tail radishes attract beneficial insects, produce edible seed pods (great raw or stir-fried) and shade the ground. The beneficial insects they attract serve as pollinators for the squash flowers or help control squash pests. 3. FALLOW FIELDS W/COVER CROPS. One of the best ways to suppress weeds is to fallow a field for an entire year, growing a cool-season cover crop on it in the fall/winter months and mowing that down and then either rototilling it into the soil (if you aren't using no-till farming) or using a drill to plant a warm-season cover crop right into the remains of the cool-season cover crop. After a year of cover-cropping, your weeds have been shaded out or crowded out, and then you spend the next year growing edible crops in that bed. This method requires keeping up to half your growing area fallow each year, but the cover crops are replenishing the soil when they decompose right there in the field, so you aren't just suppressing weeds---you are enriching your soil as well. I know that the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture has done a lot of research in this area, and has a very specific cover crop/fallowing routine they follow both for weed suppression and to put organic matter back into the soil. I do use hay, straw, chopped/shredded leaves and grass clippings in my garden as a mulch as well, particularly in the pathways between my raised beds, but find it challenging to gather/obtain enough mulch material to cover all the ground ever year. It also is labor-intensive to gather it and spread it, and you have to deal with the wind trying to blow it away. So, I find using intercropping and growing a living mulch help control weeds and improve soil and help suppress weeds in areas where I don't have enough hay mulch to go around. I haven't yet used fallowing a garden area very much, but did it last year with sorghum growing in my usual corn cage area and in one-quarter of my new back garden area. I don't really like fallowing a growing area. To me, even when the fallow field crops are meant to grow there, it looks messy and weedy. This year I am going to use amaranth in one area I am fallowing. I think it is prettier and it doesn't look as weedy to me as sorghum does. When you look at amaranth grown as a green manure or compost crop, it looks deliberate. To me, sorghum just looks like Johnson grass that has been allowed to invade and run wild. I hate Johnson grass. Even winter wheat can be grown in winter as your cover crop, and as a bonus you can cut it down in spring and use it as home-grown mulch. Because of the garden-killing problems associated with persistent herbicide residues often found in hay and straw, I am trying to use mulching materials only produced on our own land. That's the only way I can be 100% sure that I am not using any sort of wheat straw or hay that was grown with the class of broad-leaf herbicides that can persist for several years in hay, straw, animal manure and compost at levels high enough to kill plants. It also is sustainable and more ecologically sound to use mulching materials produced on our land, but it is a lot more labor intensive to collect them and place them where I want them in the garden. Intercropping, fallowing and using living mulches helps keep all the bare soil covered. If there is one lesson I have learned (and I've learned it very well, unfortunately) since moving here and gardening on a much larger scale than I once did it is that you cannot leave one square inch of bare ground uncovered because if you do, Mother Nature will plant weeds there. I do everything I can to avoid having any bare ground in my garden areas. I still get weeds that sprout in mulch or beneath living mulch or beneath intercropped plants, but it is a small percentage of what I used to see. If I'd go no-till, I'd likely have even fewer weeds but I am addicted to working organic matter into my clay every fall and winter and it is a hard addiction to break. My newest garden area, which sits just north of our barn, is a no-till area where I built hay bale beds filled with hugelkultur materials. I'm not sure how I am going to like no-till gardening and the hugelkultur beds are scary because snakes love, love, love them, but I'm doing my best to make it work in that area. Maybe someday I'll expand the no-till techniques to the three other fenced-in garden areas, but it won't happen for a while yet. It has taken me years of experimentation to find what works best for me but I have enjoyed every bit of it. All my friends and family are just in awe of how much food I produce in a relatively small garden. It isn't that my garden plots are small---any one of the 4 would be considered a large family garden, but rather just that I pack tons of plants into them and harvest a huge amount of food. This past year we ate all we could fresh, filled up two freezers, canned over 800 jars, and put a huge number of root crops and winter squash into storage. Intercropping plays a huge role in having such an abundant harvest because it lets me grow 2, 3 or 4 crops in the space formerly used for one. I am astonished at how well intercropping works. I admit I don't do everything John Jeavons advocates, particularly the double digging, but I use enough of his techniques to produce very large yields in relatively small spaces. I also didn't think I'd like living mulches because my dad and grandfather gardened differently---using hoes, rototillers or tractors to cultivate the soil between plant rows and keep it bare (so the fine soil dust from cultivation was their only mulch material). It took me a while to develop an affection for mulched beds and living mulch but now I consider them indispensible. I just kept trying one thing after another to figure out what worked here for me. From the time I bought my first edition of John Jeavons' book, to the time I bought the latest edition, about 20 years has gone by, and I garden completely differently now than I did then, and my garden now is so much better than it was when I grow single crops in long rows with bare soil in between the rows. I hope I always continue to experiment, to learn and find increasingly better ways to grow as organically and as sustainably as possible while still getting great yields. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: How To Grow More Vegetables.......

It seems to me that Hollywood only makes three movies these days: The movie about running real fast and engaging in physically impossible acrobatics while things blow up all around. The fart joke movie. The dysfunctional relationships movie, which has two variants: pseudo-inspirational and frankly depressing. Of course, these can be combined, as for instance, in the upcoming remake of Murder on the Orient Express which seems to combine Hercule Poirot, superhero, with the most dreary-looking trainload of miserable people you ever saw. So I just don't go. The suggestion to go to an art house is clearly made by people who live in very major metro areas. I live just north of a major metro area, but still about 90% of the movies I might possibly wish to see do not play within 150 miles of where I live. I see about one movie a year in the theater. Unfortunately, I do keep up with what's current when visiting my brother who has every known streaming service. I'm astounded at how fatiguing it is to try to be entertained.