In my office, before I break for the Friday exit door, I looked over a few of this forum's pages and realized that there's a whole bunch of interesting gardeners out there.

People who love gardening and learned, as I did, from Trial and Error.

In trying to "develop" a garden on my interesting but extremely poor planting base(thin soil on granite) about 25 years ago, I've had many failures but some real successes. We now have over 100 Rhodies and azaelas, 25 or 30 Clematis, 50 rosebushes plus many many more perennials. All our annuals I start in my garage first week of March and the ones I sow are those that reward me with lush flowers and the ones that don't do well never see my seed flats and shop lights again. I do a lot better than buying plants in local nurseries. I fight the varmints, large and small. Spray my roses each week, save all my Dahlia bulbs each year and continue to experiment with certain lovely, unusual groundcovers.

There are areas that I will always need help in...and I'll ask. There are a few valuable things I've learned that I would be delighted to pass on. For example, It took me three years to finally build (cut out of granite)a terrific small pond and waterful that,s clean, has 20 goldfish and a perfect sound....but the "good advice from experts simply didn't work. Water is not complicated, experts are and they slowed me down.

I'll send some pic down and a few will surprise you. Maybe, over time, somebody can tell me how to grow radishes?

Simon