This thread spiraled more into a drainage thread instead of landscape, which is alright with me. I really like the my latest design (listed below).. yeah it has pathways and may not be for everyone... but I like it. I have a few other completed beds with the same pathways and I really like the look. pls8 - The land all kind of slopes towards this "wet area" I have listed below. It rained 3" last week. Today just 3 days later and all the water has soaked in. The ground is still squishy in spots, but no standing water. I mowed yesterday... in the "Wet Area" I had marked below, the mower made a mess. In the other areas it didn't. You can stand in this wet area and see the land slightly slope towards it. After I mowed, you could actually see where this wet area was because of the mud streaks. I spent a few hours after I mowed yesterday studying the land and where everything sloped. I cut it short just so I can see exactly where this land slopes and now it looks more clear. Below is an image of what I found. You can see the two wet areas. The one at the top of the image is an empty field that always has standing water. Here are my thoughts after I evaluated it: 1. The bed I have that's almost flat on the left. After I raise & slope this entire bed, it'll not only prevent the neighbors runoff onto my land, but give them some of my run off. 2. When I raise the other beds, It'll just allow the runoff to accumulate faster in the two wet areas. Preferably that brush/field behind my lot that always has standing water and is more like a swamp. 3. I only have a few pathways in this design that water may accumulate, which I don't think it will. If for some reason it does, I don't see why I couldn't just create a few small swales like I mentioned above. Just a small indent maybe an inch deep x a foot wide or something to carry the water away into the wet/wooded area. After I get the 300 yards of dirt out here, I plan on getting prices to have it spread... perhaps I could also get a price on regrading. Just by looking at my current yard, I don't think regrading will solve the problem. It's to large and you would essentially need to create a pond or deep hole at one end to get enough slope. That would equal $$,$$$. By just adding soil and sloping it, I'm just recreating what's already in parts of my yard. My front yard, side yard, and half of my back yard is built up... you can see it slightly arch in the center and slope off to lower points where it gets a little soggy. My field is "Flat", it does slope some, but it doesn't have that arch if you know what I'm talking about. I do have a few places in my field that slightly arch and it's as dry as can be. I think building my beds higher than the surrounding soil, slope them away from my property, will solve my problem without the need to regrade. This post was...

Yes, we are Sunset 3B here.... The sunshine on most days and temps in summer is the reason so much agriculture grows successfully here. Of course, they irrigate. I am surprised Wenatchee is the same zone as us, but I guess it doesn't take into account the amount of snowfall they get (They are probably the -15f extreme.. we are more like -5f.) RE: the suitability of the trees I listed, The Thornless Honeylocust seems to thrive here, it does well in alkaline soil and is drought tolerant. As a prairie tree, it thrives in full sun. I have noticed many honeylocusts in yards that do not irrigate, growing just fine... The list of negatives of the tree is pretty short, and it seems very adaptable to our conditions. Linden -- RE: irrigating, I don't know. We will have some lawn on the property, so a tree/trees in that area would get more water. Linden tolerates alkaline soil and has small leaves... Thus, it seemed to be an *option.* ash -- I still have to go to our local extension office.. I will ask them about borers here. Ash also tolerates alkaline soil and was another option for my lawn area. If the borers are that bad here, I won't consider it.

Jerry Baker needed a fact checking. On page 94 of the Tips and Tonics Book: Q. Can I use maple leaves to mulch my rhododendrons? A. Yes, they make a great mulch because they are very alkaline. I know he must have meant acid. Rhododendrons only like acid soil. I don’t use leaves to mulch away because they would blow away, at least in San Francisco on the western exposure garden. I use homemade compost and then if I want more mulching I would use something like Black Forest Sheared wood on top of that to keep the compost from getting washed away. But, I usually did not even bother to mulch with soil as good as I had going there with my coffee ground composting. I would use Starbucks grounds to make the compost, but never used straight grounds. But, using a mulch of leaves I think that would foster fungal diseases. I always pick up the leaves right away, if you leave them on the ground that is supposed to cause fungal in the leaves to fester, and I need them for my compost. This book has been really fun to read but some of it is just weird, like run your sprinklers for four hours a day on page 97. In fact, it was for AT LEAST four hours a day, not just four hours a day maximum, but not to do it very often. Four hours a day would create thousands of dollars in a water bill and not only that most all of the water would just drain away. It would be insane, your neighbors would turn you into the water police. They are the people in California who enforce drought regulation. There even have an app here so people can go around and take photos of others wasting water and upload them to the app and click a button called report. I guess it works like that I never tried it. Consider what he said about deep watering vs. light watering. I think light watering is not so bad. It can create root system that are close to the surface right? But if you plan to be there and water it often does it matter that much? On page 96, “he says water deeply because if there is a prolonged drought the plants will be healthier with a deep root system.” There is always a prolonged drought, but if you water lightly instead of deep there won’t be. In sandy soil with compost, deep watering just runs down in the soil and is not saved for the plants. If you don’t have compost the water will actually not sink into the soil at all. I have to water just a little bit and wait for that to sink and then water just a little bit more and repeat again and again. It just runs off of sandy hard packed soil. He should of divided the book up into watering for sandy soils vs. clay soils. I don’t know about the clay soils, I am just getting started with those.

Hazel, Hmmm, I have rarely seen aphid molt. I guess the ladybugs eat them before they live long enough to molt. Honestly, we have almost too many ladybugs--they try to come into the house to overwinter. I let them stay in the mudroom but they cannot come any further into the house or I vacuum them up and dump them back outdoors, so instead they overinter in the insulated barn-style garage and in the greenhouse, which is great since I have some plants overwintering in the greenhouse every year. I feel like once you get a good ladybug population established (and it has begun...because you have ladybugs in the garden), the aphids are a very brief problem and then the ladybugs gobble them up and that is that. If the damage to the foliage is not too extensive, the tomato plants will put out new foliage within the next couple of weeks and should survive. If the the damage is too severe, they won't. It really is a case of just waiting and watching and seeing what happens. I'm sorry the homemade soap spray damaged your tomato plants. I see that all the time here in southern OK, even as early as March if we are having high temperatures in the 90s, which happens occasionally (we even hit the 90s on a day or two in February this year). Our sunlight and heat are just too intense for homemade soap sprays to be successfully used without a high risk of damage, especially on tomato foliage which is very tender and easily damaged by many things. If I have to use insecticidal soap at all, I use a commercially prepared one. They are made in a way that their droplets of soap are smaller and less likely to damage anything. Still, because soaps can cause damage, I rarely use a soap spray when we are hitting highs any higher than 80 degrees, and I rarely use one in the sunshine. If I have to use soap sprays, I use them in the evening after the garden is shaded by adjacent trees, and I don't use them often. I can, in fact, go years without using a soap spray. Really, with most insects, if I cannot handpick and drown them, snip them in half with scissors, or kill them with an organic bait (like SlugGo Plus for snails, slugs, pillbugs, sowbugs and cutworms or Semaspore for grasshopper nymphs), I just leave them alone and let them be about 99.9% of the time. If I am patient, the beneficial insects, toads, frogs, birds, lizards, turtles, etc. will eat a majority of the pest insects for me. Some things, like stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are hard to catch and kill and I don't like to spray broad-spectrum insecticides (not even organic ones), so I just do the best I can with those. Sometimes I can snip a stink bug or leaf-footed bug in half with my garden scissors, but a lot of the time they get away from me. With the similar squash bugs, I keep a lint roller in my garden tool bucket and roll it over them, picking them up with it. Then I quickly peel that part of the lint roller paper off the roller and wrap it around them, firmly entrapping them, and I put them in a trash can with a lid so they cannot escape if they somehow manage to get free of the lint roller paper. Rainy years are always more challenging. I haven't used Miracle Grow on any plants yet, but I wouldn't hesitate to use it if the constant rainfall starts keeping the plants from taking up nutrients with their roots. Sometimes a good foliar feeding will help struggling plants, whether you use MG, Liquid Kelp, Fish Emulsion, Compost Tea, Garrett Juice (more as a plant tonic than a fertilizer) or whatever. Once your soil is more well-established and has the right level of biological activity in the soil, your organic fertilizers will be adequate to support great plant health, growth and productivity most years. There's a terrific book by Jeff Gilman about what truly works in organic gardening. It is called "The Truth About Organic Gardning: Benefits, Drawbacks and The Bottom Line". I really like this book. It was published in 2008 but I didn't read it until a couple of years ago. I had gardened 99.9% organically since 1999 (and even before that I didn't use synthetic pesticides more than maybe once a year and didn't like them either) so felt I understood organic gardening pretty well already, but really enjoyed the book anyway as it helped me understand some of the science behind some common organic practices. I like his scientific approach to studying organic practices to see what actually does work and what doesn't work and I like his explanations about why some things work and others don't seem to. Before I got the book, I was concerned that maybe he was sort of anti-organic, as many other university horticulture professors seem to be, but he isn't. His explanations on every topic in the book just blow me away in their thoroughness and in the way he looks at all sides of an issue. I really love this book, and have been meaning to get his other book and read it too. One section early in this book really gave me a lot of food for thought. It was subtitled "How organic is organic enough?" and made me rethink some long-held beliefs. From the first day we broke ground here (and, lol, we broke ground for our first garden here a year before the builder broke ground to build the house), my primary focus always has been on building healthy soil. If you focus on building healthy soil that is rich in organic matter, all your other garden problems become minor issues. However, building healthy soil takes time, especially if you are doing it in drought years when there is very little moisture. It took me a good ten years to get our soil to the point that I really was happy with its improvement, and at least half those years were horrendous drought years when nothing I did seemed to keep the garden as happy and as productive as I wanted it to be. (Rain does make a huge difference, as does the absense of rain.) Conversely, without healthy soil teeming with microbes, it is hard to have a healthy organic garden. I have focused so long on feeding the soil and letting the soil feed the plants that it is hard for me to suggest to someone that maybe there are times when a synthetic fertilizer would be beneficial, but there are times when it is....and your situation is likely to be one of them. I used Miracle Grow liquid fertilizer without hesitation in our early years here when the soil wasn't yet in good shape and didn't feel bad about it. I still use the Miracle Grow Moisture Control soil-less mix for growing on seedlings (after starting them in a sterile, soil-less mix) and I use it in all my containers at times, though I still add all the rotted wood and leaf mold and compost that I can to the containers as well. (Growing in containers is an entirely different process from growing in the ground, so you have to adapt your practices accordingly,and I learned that slowly and the hard way over many years of growing in containers.) In 2007 we had so much rain that my plant roots stayed waterlogged, and it was foliar feeding with Miracle Grow that saved the tomato and pepper plants and gave us a harvest that summer. Otherwise, I think we would have gotten almost nothing from the constantly-waterlogged garden. At that point, our soil was not in the fine condition that the soil in the raised beds now is in. Last year, we had more than twice as much rain as we had in 2007 (78" versus 2007's 37" or 38"), and the soil is so much better now that I didn't have the same issues with plant roots being too clogged with water to function properly and I didn't have to foliar feed with anything. It is amazing what a difference a few more years of soil improvement has made. Oh, and I should clarify---it wasn't that the rainfall was so heavy overall in 2007 as our rainfall barely was average for the year overall, it is just that so much of it fell in late spring and early summer all at once that the heavy moisture overwhelmed the plant roots). If I learned anything at all from last year's flooding and constant moisture, it was that we finally, maybe, had the soil I'd been working so hard to achieve, in all ut the newest raised beds (and they still have a long way to go). Every year has its own challenges. In a drought year, as long as I water with soaker hoses or drip irrigation lines, I never have to use a fungicide at all---not a synthetic one and not an organic one. The challenge in that sort of year isn't foliar disease like it is in a very wet year, it is simply the lack of moisture, the often insane heat, and the traveling hordes of grasshoppers that fly in from adjacent fields and can strip a garden bare in just a day or two. You just deal with whatever happens in any given year, learn from that year, and use what you learned the next time we have a year with similar weather. One of the challenges of growing here is that one year we'll have hot weather and almost no rain and the next year it will be much milder and wetter and we almost forget what heat and drought can do to a garden. It seems we rarely have the same weather two years in a row, so often we're scrambling to deal with whatever Mother Nature throws at us. It keeps us on our toes. Dawn