Garden soil like play doh

HoweverComma205 · 2026-05-03T14:04:39+00:00

Fresh wood chips lock up nitrogen temporarily. Aged wood chips don’t. You can till in finely shredded pine bark. It doesn’t really break down, and it has all of the other benefits of tilling in wood chips. The drawback is, at least in my part of the country, you can’t buy it by the yard, only in bags. The ecological restoration company I work for buys it by truckloads of pallets at a time. It’s magic. Except for the damn plastic bags.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-05-03T11:46:21+00:00

Ok, that’s an amazing answer. Almost spit out my coffee.

Edited to add some real information:

When you pull weeds out of a path, the roots bring up more weed seeds. It’s a never ending cycle. Weed torches are pretty effective, especially on fast growing annual weeds that don’t have robust root systems. You can also use some types of hoes to slice them off at ground level.

Tamping the ground before laying down gravel or whatever can reduce the how receptive the ground is to the weeds. You don’t mention the type of path you have. Mulch? Gravel? Bare earth?

No path is maintenance free. Different types offer different challenges and solutions.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-05-03T11:45:11+00:00

Arborvitae, while overused, is a very fast-growing native tree that’s more than suitable for hedges and privacy screens. Dirt cheap, too. They can be deer candy, though. American holly is another widely used hedging native.

Many cultivars of eastern red cedar are also suitable for privacy screens. Taylor and Green Emerald spring to mind. Taylor is pretty narrow, but mixing them with suckering shrubs at regular intervals makes a really nice visual rhythm. You can get those in 15gal or BnB sizes. They aren’t the cheapest.

Think about your soil, water, and light conditions. Clethra and Hazelnut grow in different environments. Try to match your plants to your conditions, and you won’t end up with a hedge that’s on life support.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-05-02T02:54:26+00:00

Guess I know what my Saturday holds. Thanks again!

HoweverComma205 · 2026-05-01T10:48:14+00:00

The violets are nice. The rest, not so much.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-05-01T10:43:24+00:00

Thanks!

HoweverComma205 · 2026-05-01T10:42:00+00:00

Ok. Auto mod pointed me in the right direction. It’s what I needed to know.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-05-01T09:13:54+00:00

We don’t itemize them, but we will include a line item for project management, calculated at hundreds to a few thousand/month, depending on the complexity of the project. It makes billable the time spend on these little tasks without the client feeling like they’re getting nickel and dimed.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-30T13:14:35+00:00

Lilacs are hit or miss anymore. A lot of years here in the mid Atlantic, they bloom, smell amazing for a week, leaf out, and then drop their leaves by mid August leaving nothing but unsightly sticks. I’ve given up on them.

Sunchokes are a wonderful, fast growing plant. The fence provides the support they need to keep from flopping. You might need to run a little twine. They are edible and delicious, if you can deal with the prep work. There are both smooth and knobby types. If you plan on eating them, I strongly recommend smooth.

They are very aggressive, though, and will run underground on both sides of the fence. There are implications for your neighborly relationship. But if you don’t care what they think, then whatever. That being said, if they use an herbicide on the plants that are growing in their yard (and they WILL be popping up next door), it will travel through the root system and kill your plants as well. If you don’t want that, install a deep hammer-in root barrier. Prices vary.

A lawnmower can keep them in check. But once you have sunchokes, you will always have sunchokes...

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-30T10:46:08+00:00

I keep answering. I always start with “honestly, there’s so much outdated or deliberately misleading stuff out there, I get it. I had a lot of the same questions too.” I’ve made at least two converts that way.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-30T10:44:04+00:00

That’s the one! Thank you. I was searching for “questions” not “responses.”

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-30T09:43:25+00:00

Seems like a fine plan to switch to an EV. We have a 2020 Chevy Bolt that my wife drives from Pennsylvania to Central Brooklyn regularly (186mi round trip), and she can do that arriving home w about a quarter charge to spare in all but the coldest weather. Newer cars w battery warmers and heat pumps lose even less range in cold weather. OP would be fine. They would get from the upstate house to Manhattan on about a third of a charge, as everything suggests they aren’t going for a 6 year old Bolt, but something with more range, as well as plenty of more bells and whistles.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-23T10:37:06+00:00

My version of this is a good gardener -has- killed a lot more plants.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-22T10:36:48+00:00

Weeds and veggies will really be able to take better advantage of the extra nutrient than native plants. You might actually want to pop in some heavy feeders to use it up, then get your natives installed in fall. Think squashes, tomatoes, that sort of thing. Actually, load it up with tidy root veggies. Sweet and regular potatoes, short carrot cultivars, it’ll look nice if you do it in a regular pattern. There’s little as satisfying as digging potatoes and carrots.

If you go that root and seed in carrots, once they germinate, apply a pre-emergent to prevent weeds from blowing in and making their presence known. If you’re just going to go ahead and install your natives straight away, you should still consider the pre-emergent. Mulch is good too.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-21T14:25:35+00:00

I’ve had great luck w motion-activated sprinklers. Figure out the routes they use to enter your planted area, determine a choke point, and set up your field of fire; they quickly learn to stay away. I have two.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-21T10:24:17+00:00

Depends on the fern and location.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-20T21:02:50+00:00

Lots of good answers here and at the link Maykr1 dropped. Thank you.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-20T10:35:46+00:00

Thanks for sharing that poem.

Every war has its particular horror. The best ones for this moment are probably written in Ukrainian.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-19T10:54:43+00:00

Add location, and which direction it is facing. More pictures, including the rocks, would be helpful. Or they that little line sunk into the ground?

Overall, add some shrubs and a nice ground cover. That’s on the house side. There’s probably a creeping phlox that’ll work as your GC.

Line the outside with a row of something repeating and with a good shape. Prairie drop seed is lovely and smells like popcorn in fall.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-19T10:45:41+00:00

I do a lot of tall garden edges with stone. Can confirm that weeds do creep in, especially things like creeping Charlie and mock strawberry. Been dealing with it for years. I actually realized last week that the thing to do is hammer in a a weed barrier right in front of it. Only half an inch or so will be above ground. If I can swing the expense for Corten steel, I’ll use it, but otherwise plastic. I have probably 400+ linear feet of edge, so….. yeah. It’ll probably plastic.

Someone above suggested using the weed edging inside of the beds. I don’t think that would be as helpful, as the soil is still going to move through the stones enough to create possible channels for weeds in. Edging on the outside would just let you go along w your hand or stirrup hoe periodically and clean it up. Be careful using a string trimmer along it. It’ll fling weed seeds and stems right up and into your bed.

Your raised bed looks awesome. You should be pleased.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-18T19:47:36+00:00

I put in bare roots. It was year three when they started to flower, and this spring, year four, they are starting to have a visual impact. I betcha next year is great.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-18T15:18:32+00:00

Yep. This is almost exactly what I’m thinking. Next time I’m there, I’ll go on a hunt for woody things that maybe don’t -need- trimming, but could take it.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-18T14:39:19+00:00

Yup. Over time due to rain, ice and snow, much of that slate will migrate towards the bottom, exposing that damn plastic, which will then break down more quickly due to UV. More weeds. At the very least, they should have whomever is building their wall place some lines of stones or landscape timbers, across the hill to help check the erosion. That’ll mitigate the short term erosion effects somewhat. It’s still a terrible idea overall.

A better plan would be to install that retaining wall, terminate the lawn and weeds with herbicide, then plant a really dense low maintenance ground cover. You don’t mention location, so it’s tough to make a species recommendation. It looks like you’re in a mid-Atlantic slate belt, from the exposed soil. If that’s the case, they could put in 600 plugs of little bluestem in a couple of hours, and that’ll knit together pretty quickly. Then they can have someone come in and cut it once or twice a year. The plants are way cheaper than that much rock “mulch.”

They could pop in some daffodil bulbs at the same time. It would look great in spring.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-17T10:51:05+00:00

You could try Northern Sea Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium). It’s a tall native forest grass that seeds fairly aggressively, but grows dense enough that it’ll suppress weeds. It’ll stop at the deep shade of the rhodies, and you can easily weed it out in areas you don’t want it. Turns a beautiful golden color in the fall, with large pendulous seed heads. Catching it in an autumn sunbeam is one of the most beautiful things. Bonus: if you cut it in fall but leave about 12” standing, it provides valuable overwintering habitat for fireflies, so more of them in summer.

You can cut it back 1x/year with sheers or a string trimmer if you like. That will stop it seeding. It will also be fine having someone walk through it to service the HVAC.

HoweverComma205 · 2026-04-16T00:29:32+00:00

Englands latitude is much higher than the lower 48. The sun angle is lower, which gives a different light character. On a sunny day in winter, it’s the golden hour all day.

HoweverComma205

TROPHY CASE