Perennials: Dormancy?, 1 by hcmcdole

hcmcdole wrote:
I think you meant 4 stroke which uses just gas whereas a 2 stroke uses a gas/oil mix. Most tillers, mowers, small engines are just one cylinder.

My dad has the Troy Bilt Horse tiller which I think was the biggest model made. I went in with my daughter and bought the Troy Bilt pony tiller which is a bit smaller but still plenty of power to churn up a plot. A small lightweight tiller would be the Mantis and a lot of manufacturers have copied that design. Looks like they've added quite a few different models since we bought ours about ten years ago.

http://www.troybilt.com/equipment/troybilt/tillers

I had a big Troy Bilt chipper/shredder. It does a good job of reducing giant piles of brush and leaves to manageable piles of mulch. The downside is it is heavy, loud, and lots of work running material through it. Also be very careful on safety with the chipper chute itself. I about lost my mouse finger in my chipper because I rammed a limb too far down in the chute with my hand and the chipping blade grabbed my glove. $1400 chipper was cheap compared to medical bills totaling over $5,000 for the ER visit and a few days later surgery by a hand specialist. It took weeks of rehab to feel halfway useable again.

Getting back to stone mulch - you can put weed cloth as an underlayment if you don't want any weeds to come up or you could just spray with a weed killer as you see weeds come up. You would still have weeds coming up in any kind of mulch - stone, leaves, bark, etc. Pine needle mulch/bark mulch should be replenished at least every other year - possibly 3 years. I bought 100 bales of pine needle mulch about 2 years ago from Home Depot and it looks like it needs replenishing now. Bark mulch is kind of low too. At least I don't need to add to the stone areas since they are permanent (stone is heavy and expensive so you may want to hire someone to lay it).

This is a dry stream bed we had put in years ago. I planted 3 gallon pots of variegated Asian Jasmine on one side and over the years it grew over to the other side which covered the middle. This year I took the weed whacker to the middle and sprayed with Round Up to keep it clear. In this case the stones not only act like a mulch but also slow down moving water across the property.