I have also found if you use your lawn trimmings as ground cover as soon as you plant your seedlings, it provides many useful uses: protects soil from drying out, keeps weeds from growing, and in the fall you just turn your garden over with a pitchfork , lawn trimmings, leaves, wood chips and all ! You will soon never need a tiller again ! Honest ! and it's the most rewarding physical workout there is ! Fresh air sunshine and mother nature :)... and year after year your soil becomes better and better and better ! Can hardly wait for spring !

Hello Gardeners, I find that gardening is a addiction for which I hope that there is no cure, to me its a personal satisfaction to grow something yourself and see it flower or bare fruit. Thanks to the out of control economy I have doubled my garden this year, which I a lot of you have done also.  I have found that if you compost religiously you will use less fertilizer and have better drainage, if you start with better soil you will have a better plant. I started out with one compost bin and now I have four, also I collect rain water in recycled plastic barrels. Funny how working in the yard / garden has replaced working out in a gym, without a membership fee.  

Just a comment about the soil solarization recommendation in one of these frames... I've studied it a bit and have used clear plastic/tarp, not black plastic.  With clear plastic the sun's shortwaves are able to radiate through the plastic and strike the soil.  The radiation is re-emitted from the soil as long waves, which cannot escape through the plastic.  This causes the heat to rise in the trapped air pocket.  This is basically a modified greenhouse.  I've worked with an experiment where a bucket of soil was refrigerated to 60 degrees and place into a pvc cube frame covered with clear plastic.  The outside temperature was 95 degrees.  Within 5-6 hours the soil temperature was at around 140 degrees.  The sun's rays will reflect off of the black plastic (although I am not sure if ALL of the rays are reflected). And since they do not transfer through the plastic, the temperature does not rise through solar radiation (although there may be a slight temperature increase due to biological activity in the soil).  Black plastic will work to kill plants/weeds, but only by restricting photosynthesis and starving the plants.  Soil solarization, with clear plastic, will kill the weeds by heat and also sterilize the soil.