Re: Fertilizing AND animals underground

Sounds like you have Gopher problems, they make tunnels underground and eat
the roots of plants and they can also "take" the entire plant if they want too.

I had to replant 200 starter Hosta this spring-some 10 times, because of the
squirrels.  They like to dig in any fresh soil to see what might be hidden.
The red squirrels make holes about 2 to 4 inches deep and 2 to 3 inches wide.
The gray squirrels make wider holes but not so deep-and love to dig in the yard.

The problems with mountain soils is that often they are mainly organic and
thin, and as such are not very nutrienal, fertilizing such soils helps in the
short term but since the soils cannot hold the nutrients it has to be done
often.  If you can add a more mineral based soil that holds nutrients-then you
should not have to fertilize so much. Right now you are risking salt toxicity in
your soils, unless you receive good rains every year.

 Some plants like rich soils and other like lien soils. You can have too much
nutrients and not enough at the same time in the same bed depending out what
you are growing.

My woodland plants love a rich soil and all do better when I can "take care"
of them, but my dry-sunny beds would hate me if I fertilized like I do for the
Trilliums and Lady slippers and Hosta and Astilbe.



Paul
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