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Has Achieved Nirvana |
Also, I’m wondering if there is some landscape cloth under those pebbles - we had rocks like that in our beds in Billings. Landscape cloth with holes cut in it for the bushes and perennials. Not the healthiest way to keep good soil, but it did work for weeds.
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JodiHas Achieved Nirvana |
Jodi speaks sooth (her previous post). While I do compost as fertilizer and hand weeding in my postage stamp yard, it would be impossible to maintain almost an acre in that manner.
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| czarina Has Achieved Nirvana  |
we aerated and composted our acre-sized lawn (front and back together). we had a landscape company do the aeration (IIRR it was $70, and doesn't need to be done every year). We borrowed a manure spreader, hitched it to our riding lawnmower, and spread our home-grown compost (we have a mountain of it--seven years of horse manure--back in the woods) over the entire acre. didn't take but an hour. our lawn doesn't look like a pristine suburban lawn because we have dogs (in the back) and I use the front yard as my riding arena. but without those insults, it would be a nice enough looking lawn. "nice enough" is an option. We aren't going to play golf on it, or even croquet (though there is an annual golf tournament played in a hay field filled with cow pies around here--lots of fun.) it's true that for sk to keep the lawn looking the way it does now, she'll have to continue what the previous owners did. but there is a trade off for doing that. the choice is yours; i'm just suggesting you make it an informed choice.
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| (self-titled) semi-posting lurker Minor Deity  |
I don’t want to use roundup if we can avoid it. Mr. SK used it at our old house when there was poison ivy in bad locations. Anyway, I looked at those links, one thing that’s not explained is what they count as “exposure” In any case, in the short run we going to keep our lawn as it is, and probably use the same person to do the treatment that the seller used. In the long run,I don’t know, we’ll have to see. Maybe we’ll put an ADU in the back yard and make it a rental, which would give us some income and greatly reduce the actual yard.  But it is a lot of yard, and very visible. If the yard was in bad shape, it would definitely bring the value down when it came time to sell or refinance. Re the beds, Steve, ok so we’ll think of pebbles as mulch. I think there might be fabric under them, although I’ll look again of course. The pebbles completely cover the beds, so you can’t see what’s under them. I wish I had taken a photo.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
Yup, the pebbles are basically mulch and there is usually landscape fabric underneath. If you do get any weeds they're likely to be on top of the mulch and fabric and can easily be yanked out. The "system" can work pretty well in areas that you don't need to dig in, but is kind of a pain when you want to plant something new or take out something out. pique, I envy you your vast supply of composted manure along with a way to distribute it around your yard. Even with all the trees around us, I get maybe a cubic yard of finished leaf compost to use in my yard. It's precious stuff and I treasure every bucket of it.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
The beauty (or disaster) of not very well composted manure from horses spread on your grass and/or gardens is that the herbicides they use to keep the weeds out of hay now are usually still very active when they pass through the horse. So if your manure is not extremely well aged, it will do a great job of keeping the weeds from growing as well as stunting and disfiguring any perennials you have that are not grass. I’ve had this happen to me in my flower beds at least three times, including once from a store bought bag of composted manure. So activated charcoal now gets mixed in with all the compost I buy and bring home from the barn.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
I have never bought a bag of composted manure. Until yesterday.  I'm going to try a few climbing roses on my various arbors, and the instructions from Heirloom Roses said you should mix composted manure and bone meal at the bottom of the hole you dig. jodi, where do you get the activated charcoal? And how much do you put in? Do you think I'm better off skipping the composted manure and just use my own leaf compost?
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
You will probably be fine. I buy bags of composted manure every year, and have only had issues once. You can find it in powdered and small chunk form, I buy it in powdered form and add it to a watering can. On Amazon. Just google activated charcoal for gardening.
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
I only used manure once - when I was in high school. I was working for a bank, taking care of yards where the owners had defaulted. One house had a really nice yard and when the lawn lost some its green I decided to fertilize with the free manure the local dairy was giving away. In retrospect it was a terrible idea. It was plenty green but that beautiful lawn turned in to a cow pasture practically overnight. Everything those cows ever ate came up and smothered the wimpy landscape grass. I lost that job.
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| czarina Has Achieved Nirvana |
great tip! i have used our manure in our flower and tomato beds with nothing but great results. so our hay suppliers must not spray for weeds. jodi, you are more than welcome to come up and collect as much of it as you want.
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| czarina Has Achieved Nirvana |
the best possible thing you can put in the bottom of a hole a rose is going into is a product called "soil pep". i use it for everything. it's partially composted bark. Roses need a lot of water but they also need excellent drainage. They are also heavy feeders. Soil pep is the very ticket for meeting their needs. I have never used bone meal for roses. composted manure is likely too heavy for them, it will make the soil too compacted. But since that's their advice, here is what I would do... dig your hole deep and wide. you want to rose bud union to be below the ground level and you want lots of friable soil around the roots so they will spread out. Put all the soil from the hole onto a tarp. Mix the soil from the hole with your bone meal and bagged compost (NB: I wouldn't do the bone meal and compost, but if you want to, this is how I would do it). In the bottom of the hole, make a hill of soil pep as a base for the plant. In a 5 gallon pail, mix water and Alaska Fish Fertilizer at the ratio on the bottle's instructions. This is great for preventing transplant shock and getting the roots off to a good start. Fill the hole with the fish fertilizer water, and also water the rose or soak a bare root rose in the fish fertilizer water. Then put the rose in the hole (the water should have drained quickly. If it did not, you don't have enough/proper drainage for a rose. Mix sand/gravel with the soil). Fill in the dirt from the hole over the rose's root system, tamping down in layers gently with your hands. When the hole is nearly filled with dirt, pour more fish fertilizer water into it, letting it percolate around the plant. Top off the dirt, firmly pressing it around the plant. You should have more dirt to put in there than there is room, but put all of it back and use the excess to make a wide well around the plant. Compress the well with your hands. Pour in the rest of the fish water. TOP OFF the entire area with a thick layer of soil pep. drip irrigate to fill the well every few days until the rose is well established. when you are done, the rose's bud union or graft is below the surrounding soil line, but is above the soil in the well. when fall comes, just fill in the well to protect the graft from winter freezing and dessication. You can also pile soil even higher making a small hill with the plant emerging from the middle, but don't do this until the ground is frozen solid.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
Thanks for the info, pique. Good stuff! Have never used fish emulsion; this will be a good opportunity to check it out. These roses are own-root, not grafted. https://heirloomroses.com/blog...about-own-root-roses These are the instructions from the grower for this type of rose.
Bone meal and roses: https://rosehow.com/is-bone-meal-good-for-roses/ I should probably have my soil tested… One thing I have going for me is that my subdivision was a farm in its previous life, and the houses were built at a time before developers stripped all the good soil off. I can dig almost two feet down before I get to anything resembling clay. Drainage definitely not a problem! We'll see what happens. I picked varieties that were labeled as being able to grow in partial shade. Sometimes these experiments work out well, and other times not so much....
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Minor Deity |
Steve, My take from the study is that glyphosate is not, in itself, the culprit. That makes sense because from what I've read, it works by inhibiting the activity of EPSP synthase in the shikimate pathway (I know it sounds like I know what I'm talking about but I don't, I'm just linking up different things I've read) which is essential to plants. Insects, birds, fish, and mammals don't use this pathway so glyphosate doesn't affect them. (Some micro-organisms do and that's bothersome.) However, also from the study, it appears that the inert ingredients in Roundup are responsible for killing bees. The inert ingredients make up 99% of the product.
I wanted to use Weedol because in the study:
Contrast that with the 94% mortality rate of the Roundup product. It seems clear that Weedol's composition of inert ingredients is different from Roundup's. Even though they both contain glyphosate, their study results are shocking different. I am close to making up my mind to go ahead with a one-time treatment with Roundup IF I can't find something less hazardous. I will choose a dry day with no breeze in the morning, and I will do it soon before bee activity really picks up. I will then most likely screen the soil to remove all the dead Bishops Weed. I don't think it's a good idea to use Roundup indiscriminately or on a large scale until they alter their formula. It sounds like they are, and here's hoping the new formulas are closer to Weedol's or something similar.
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| czarina Has Achieved Nirvana |
a wonderful climber that does well in shade/north-facing wall is New Dawn. I had my fence in Missoula completely covered in it--it was glorious.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
It's a great rose and was on my list of candidates, but I was buying Heirloom Roses' plants via Costco and it wasn't one of the ones they were offering. It may need more space than I have to offer it; it's pretty generously sized.
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