Dung, Doo Doo, and Dirtier Part 2!

soferdig, did you get your rotting log placed where you want it. Send along a picture.

Donna

It will be something wild when I leave my Parent's property (my Garden!). The hops will no doubt eat the place. I may take my palms with me.

Donna, well done. I like the form and foliage colors. I'm dreaming of Cedrus atlantica now...

Sue, just think the possibilities! Woodland garden! Yee-haw! And you must take the compost- all of that invisible but irreplacable collection of microbes that have accumulated... The only way to take the success of you last garden.

Yes, Steve, how did that log go? Still in GF, old chap?
Kenton

Steve
did you google rotting log benifits? i wonder if it gives imfo? LOL
well i do hope to take my compost with me , I told DH last night ," if the compost doesn't go , i don't go!!", :) he hasn't given me an answer:) LOLOLOL
I do have a list of plants
my peonies are a must
and my two blue hostas 8 yrs old and they are huge!!
Kenton have a quest if i get a huge pile of Llama poop and put it in my compost bin will it decompose with just the Poop or add the usual stuff and make the Poop layers ever other layer, can you compost just poop, I hate to sound dumb:) but i was wondering for the this up comming winter, fill up my bin and let it decompose over the winter ?How long does it take to decompese just poop alone? yr?
sue

Manuire really doesn't decompose completely on it's own. It goes all the way when mixed into soil, but I would mix in into you other compost ingredients. Llama is not horribly hot, so I would personally throw it directly into the ground. I wish I had some... My weekend burning and gardening projects yielded three times as much garden space as last year.
Down with thee, weed! Chop! Hack! Though art villain!

the neighbor informs me that my dreams (when I look at his giant, vulgar globe willow with the sweet word "compost" whispering in my mind...) may come true and that he knows someone who will lend him a chipper-shredder.
K

Sorry Guys I have been hard at work 8am to 6pm as a Veterinarian and 6pm to 1am as a contractor on my rental house getting it finished for a resale for retirement. I am finally home and planning on a lots of garden projects. When I loaded up my truck and trailor to bring things back from my house in GF I placed the most valuable items first. The compost pile is in the trailor. 5 years worth of grass composted with a few leaves! Then the truck is layered with a bunch of the last sandstone pieces that I will have from GF. The tools were next and I left behind dishes, TV, Microwave, and Bath and Kitchen towells. After all it makes the house looked lived in.
Sue you need to get tough with your DH and start sitting on your compost pile when it comes time to start packing. Tell him you are not moving until he loads up the pile on the first trip to the new house. After all its no big deal with his loader! He needs to buy you a new house with a soil test as good as the one you are leaving. Please note that Kenton is wrong with the PH being ok. You were sitting on a lime pit and need to get closer to the Ohio R and get more acidic soil. There is lots in Ohio. Also tell him that you need a $3,000 transfer from the sale of the house for your personal plant purchase list transfered into an account with your name only. Then and only then can you consider a move. Cross your arms and put on a Roseanne rerun to make the point.
My Compost pile is in the new/old bed making my plants sing old Cole Porter songs in joy. I heard "Zippity Doo Dah" last night when I drove in the drive way from working at Great Falls. The bed has become the best soil now in my garden (Best acidic soil). Last night I was between sleep and dreaming and I came up with a great Idea with my new bed. It is completely different than I origionally had wait till you see this one! I unload my truck and head up the mountains behind my house for the rocks. Oh boy! My soil will be spectacular. 4+ yards mushroom compost: 3 yards mix of peatmoss/perlite/potting soil/bagged topsoil from Home Depot torn bags: 2 yards sandy loam: 2 yards grass compost from the 3 year old soil like pile I had in GF. Just watch the annuals and perenials take off this summer.
Donna I love your garden shot you had above. Your garden even looks beautiful on a cloudy day. Though you have done the sin of all tree-a-holics. You have planted so many trees you have no more room when they grow up. You have 4 trees planted where only 2 can survive. Unless they are dwarfs. You are like me let someone else choose which ones to cut down after I die. LOL
My rotting log will be at the forefront of my new bed. It faces my sun room/living room area of my house so it will have 4' monster rocks at the back with a taper to the sides in a curving C shaped back. Then it will be terraced to the facing sun room and broaden to a flattened front about 8" high. The long rotting log will be in the front set back about 2 ft with a low group of the new clover varieties around it. Have you guys seen all the new clover species that are out this year! There are red leafed with yellow flowers and heart shaped dark red centers, green leaved with red centers, etc. I will probably place a lot of mums, Asters, and various wave petunias all over the terracing. I plan a grouping of Cimicifuga simplex to be placed at the sholders of the mountains in the back. I can't wait.
Kenton you must curb your thoughts of composting that Globe Willow. Some people just like to have ugly gardens. It makes our gardens more spectacular. Hey Kenton are the hops on the hops plant seeds or what? You can easily take cuttings from your hops and put it in your new garden.
Googling rotting log benefits is something I don't need to do. They are unlimited. A rotting log is a home to everything in a garden that has a halo over its crawling, buzzing, chewing head. I think of a rotting log as a Reuben like portrait of a group of Cherubs acending into heaven. Ahhhhh.
Glad to be back. Now out to the garden to plant all the hundred plants my wife and I bought at my favorite nursery in Great Falls.

Soferdig, looks like you had a pretty good load there, glad you got safely home. I planted the trees and shrubs closer than I know they really should be because it is a windbreak and I can't wait years for them to gtow close enough to be an effective windbreak. Okay

Donna

Thanks for hte update, Steve!

(Here I would just like to publically announce and say thanks that Donna saved me from certain insanity yesterday.)

Steve, I have made a few layers of the Hops and have given away many. The rest are going to Donna on Monday. I only need one vine that can get up to 10' tall by this time of the year... (No joke, kids, it's more than halfay to the roof as a herbaceous perennial!)

The new local arboretum (planting it now) is intentionalyl overplanting trees- the intent being to cut down some of them in favor of more desirable neighbor trees. Experimental trees, you know.

Here is the East end of what used to be my Veg garden last summer.

West end. it is all cleaned and torn up to expand my veg garden greatly this year.

Discovering a huge pile of leaf mold on Easter is a real blessing, you know...

Compost King for a day. Sometimes the heat gets to the brain...

Who doesn't like rocks?
Tulipa clusiana chrysantha

Steve, you must mean the 'Iron Cross' Oxalis (Clover/Sorrel). I think I ordered some this spring... They are supposed to rebloom continuously.

Last one. Just a garden Picture I like.
Kenton

Kenton great set of photos. Explain to me the tall posts with what looks like hog wire around them. Are they for the hops vines. In the first picture looks like what we have along the river (PUD puts them up to keep the osprey from building on power poles) but no wire. Really like your last picture of the decorated fence area and garden below.

Donna

Nice kenton! A man on a compost pile stands taller than any man on a money pile cause he has dreams that never come to an end. "Anyone who wants to be happy for an hour drink a beer, anyone who wants to be happy for a day roast a pig, anyone who wants to be happy for a weekend go to a beach, anyone who wants to be happy for a week get married, anyone who wants to be happy for a lifetime plant a garden."
Love the repeated rock shape idea I'm going to copy that. Love the sticks with wire shaping the wheel effect. I am doing something similar with the hops post, I'm using the stump I got a month ago and plant it on end and grow clematis on it. That tulip has its own microclimate with that rock. Beautiful color. Hey is that stock tank a compost tea cooker? Or just a place for poor students to hot-tub?
Donna thanks for saving Kenton. He is too nice to go insane.
Hey you guys I found this plant in the nursery last week and love it. It is a Abutilon 'Voodoo'

Aha! Steve falls to dark plants! Come to the dark side, Steve...
That spiral bit is an unfinished part of what will be a trellis for an evergrewen Clematis.

The post (now taken down, it was falling apart) was what I called my "totem pole" last year; it was covered top to bottom with Morning Glory 'Star of Yalta.' The hops has a giant triangle wire that it uses to go the the roof.

Ah, the Horse tank (six foot wide) is what I call a pond. In the nasty summer heat here, Waater lilies are the only plant that thrives and blooms like mad in the 105 degrees. I'm cleaning it out tomorrow- fun!

Let me look for Totem and Dark plant pictures...
Kenton

Good gosh. the good vine pictures were not taken by me, but worse yet, taken with me in them.
Jack and the bean stalk. And Morning glory.

Last summer's hops. There is more wire for them now. Two strands twisted together too- there were two times last summer that the wind tore it off of the facia board on the house, leaving this great, limp snake of a hop vine lounging heavily across the garden...

In the Horse tro-- er, Pond.
The best Water lily, named after the best state in the union:

Nymphaea x 'Colorado'

Viola 'Halloween II'

Kenton, more great pictures, I think it is very good for you to be in some of your photos, we need to see you too. I especially like the one with the tiny little Castor beans and the MG and You.

The one with the long strands of hops vines is intriguing. Wish I could figure out a way to get a support for my hops to drape over my path up the slope. Very pretty waterlilies.

soferdig, now if I could just lean over far enough to get that abutilon in focus !!!!! It is a very pretty color.

Donna

Here is the Abutilon turned up. It is spectacular. Actually the Maple leaf Abutilon hangs down and it is at the top of my "hill" so when it grows to its 30" height I will look up into them when I go out to visit my Moose kitty.
Kenton what is that biggie. Castor bean? I want to plant it but I'm afraid of toxicity to my critters. What do you think? Hey I noticed that one of your dogs is a female. the grass burn gives it away.

Two female dogs. Both of whom seem to have chewed on a Castor bean or two and lived to tell the tale.
Dang, I didn't like abutilon until today...

You should see our Moose bed tonight. It is dropping to below freezing and we mulched and covered all the plants with clear plastic until the cold front passes. The Abutilon is a spectacular new plant in our garden. I cant wait until it gets 18 to 24" tall. I'm going to plant the castor. I want a big leafed plant for foilage. Does it need all the sun you gave yours or would it work in a woodland garden? Filtered sun all day. Oh I had a guy in my garden from CO and he told me where you are hanging out in Clinton. I thought it was eastern CO but its western. Off I 70 huh?

I would like to thank all of you for this thread. I built my first raised bed, and I really wanted to do it right. Clay soil here..I picked out many ideas from you guys as a bit of a lurker- and I wanted to show you just how helpful these threads are!

AS I went from this......

To this...
Jan 5th thru May 9th
80% planted by seeds
Ya never know who's learning!
Rj

This message was edited May 9, 2006 12:30 PM

Well done! The arrangement is impeccable. Nice colors, too. It doesn't look ata ll like a raised bed- too buried in thriving plants. What are the gold spherical guys? I like the garden art, will any vines grow up it? I see a banana to the far right. Yours or the neighbors? What kind?
Those castor beans (I'm assuming R. communis 'Carmencita') are goingto be great monsters, being so big already.
Well done, I'd say. A tremendous acheivement, what do visitors say?
Would you join in on the new thread with your experiences?:
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/597804/

Kenton, who feels the need to go plant some Ricinus now...

Thanks..
flowers are zinnias, the ladder is a coconut ladder from Thailand, I cut it in two, have morning glories, baby hawaiin wood rose and chalice vines climbing.
I collected the castor bean seeds from a local restaurant (seed snatchin).

Rj

rjudd - from one lurker to another.....your garden gives me great hope. It's beautiful. HM

Thanks..my next door neighbor saw me working on the beds..she said "boy! you must have really made that fertile, it seemed like it popped up over night!) I spent about 3 weeks - snatching everyones leaves that was bagged and put to the curb..then just followed the advice from the threads for the rest of it.!

Response continued here:
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/597804/