The cat scat is the brown spike thing behind the green mushroom looking thing, LOL* That's a water bell that'll ring when it rains. Anything green that I didn't plant I was pulling for a weed and I got busy and this bloomed and I thought, oh man, you know how many I've already thrown away!! Bare dirt I have a lot of still, I'm trying to cover it with mulch though. I've got one more load to do yet. I deadhead, I just have some violas that are stubbornly still trying to live in the heat. However I am bad about the dead blooms, I tend to toss them in the direction of the grass knowing they'll be picked up in the next mowing:) Rose petals I like scattering in the garden, I think they're pretty. And it's got to give something back, infintestimal, but it'll have an overall cumulative effect. Be pretty cool if these violas as well as the alyssum will come back next year. If not, they're adding some nice color now. I had one annual in the mtns make a surprise appearance one spring on it's own. Could have been a pansy, I usually planted those. Scats work because buried the cats won't step on the spikes:) They were using the bed as a litter box because of the loose soil. The large garden was hard clay and they were used to loose soil from the forest. They had two litter boxes, one in the house and one in the garage with a kitty door. They preferred my mini bed and kept digging up the mini roses. When first planted they were only a couple inches big. They either kept uncovering or covered them over when doing their "thing". I went out there 3 times a day to correct the damage and still every morning would find a rose uprooted. These really work. Keeps the dog out of there now, He eyes the nice cool shade in there and wants his spot back now that the roses are gone:)

Hank, With a new lasagna bed, I tend to just pile stuff on the first couple of years and don't start using a cover crop until all the lasagna ingredients have broken down and mixed together over time. However, if you have any reason to think that your bed is nutrient-deficient or is deficient in organic material, you can plant the cover crop of your choice. It might be difficult, though, to have a cover crop and to add the manured hay.....and if I had to choose one over the other, I would choose the 6" of manured hay! You also can pile up leaves on top of the hay.....the more the better, and the leaves will help keep winter weeds from sprouting in the manured hay. Around here, winter grasses and broadleaf weeds begin sprouting in late September. They remain quite small, especially the broadleaf ones which tend to form small rosettes of leaves down close to the ground. Then, all of a sudden, one winter day you will discover they have suddenly skyrocketed in size and become monsters. Thus, anything you do in the fall to keep down the weeds in your garden beds will make life easier later on. I like to shred the leaves by running over them with the lawn mower and catching them in the grasscatcher bag. Then I pour them over the beds and wet them down with the water hose so they won't blow around. The leaves break down fairly fast over the course of the winter, if shredded, and add organic material to your beds too. I don't know where you get garlic in OKC to plant at this time of the year, but most likely you would find it at any of the full-service nurseries. Or, if you can find organically grown garlic in any grocery store, you can plant it. Organic garlic should NOT have been sprayed with a chemical to keep it from sprouting, so it ought to sprout just fine. I also have planted plain, old, non-organic, cheap garlic from the Wal-Mart grocery dept., and it has sprouted just fine. (If if sprouts if left in the pantry too long, why wouldn't it sprout in the ground?) You can plant any of the cool-season annuals you want for winter color: pansies, violas, dianthus, snapdragons, ornamental cabbage and kale, etc. I usually wait until it cools down enough so that they high temps are only in the 80s before planting them. Or, if you want autumn color like mums or asters, which are usually perennial here, you can plant them now. It also is a good time to scatter seeds of early spring bloomers like poppies or larkspur that sprout in the fall or winter and bloom in early spring. It is a great time to purchase tulip or daffodil bulbs as soon as you see them in the stores. By the way, tulips will need to be pre-chilled in your fridge before planting. Dawn

Thanks for this nice synopsis! I have only ordered from Well-Sweep once and had the opposite experience with the plants I received, but I should give them another try in case that was just a fluke. At the moment it seems that there are no sources for most of the pink odorata cultivars (and of course, pink Parmas haven't been in known cultivation for many years now and might only exist in Europe if they aren't extinct, which they may well be). If you mean 'Sulfurea' when you refer to a yellow one, then I've seen seed for the cultivar 'Irish Elegance' from time to time and strongly suspect the "orange" odorata sold by Well-Sweep could be 'Sulfurea' or perhaps even 'Crepuscule' or another such hybrid of 'Sulfurea'. There are no yellows aside from those, however, and none of them comes particularly close to approximating the actual color yellow. Stefan

Each state makes it's own laws on plants that are legal to dig and what makes it legal. Some states you had to have a license to collect certain wild plants. Other states there are no state laws just federal. There for if you live in NY but the plants were dug in NC the laws for NC should be the ones followed. Somewhere I read that some companies are getting around the laws for trading in wild dug plants by putting them in a nursery bed for a couple of weeks. They can then sell as nursery grown. Not. If your store has the plants I would recomend purchasing but try to get store to stop ordering. Some times the store only sells what is sent from their headquarters and can not stop the placement. Although it is wrong to sell wild dug plants in these tiny bags if someone does not purchase they will go into the trash. Rather than see them trashed I feel the lesser of the two evils is to try to give the plants life while trying to stop the sales.