When I purchased my house, the yard had almost no landscaping. The original owners had obviously not been outdoor people. There was a bed of wood ferns on the east side of the house and a couple of elephant ears growing by the front door and that's it. I had to start from scratch.

I made a number of beds, filling them with a garden mix, which I had delivered from one of the local soil yards. I found however that this so called garden mix left a lot to be desired. Fortunately, I had an opportunity to get large quantities of horse manure from a local stable. The pile had been aging for at least a year and I was able to use it liberally in all the beds. I applied it about 3-4 inches thick around all the plants every year for about 4 years. I also applied a 13-13-13 chemical fertilizer every fall. The results were tremendous. I had scapes with such wonderful branching and bud counts that I won numerous awards at local daylily shows. The soil was full of earthworms and was so soft that water would not run off but instantly soak in.

Then I started applying Hooker formula (see separate web page) in the spring in addition to the 13-13-13 in the fall. I included the Cygon in the formula because I wanted the protection from unwanted insects. I should have realized that while I was protecting the plant from one problem, I was inadvertently causing another. When the toxic Cygon mix soaked into the soil, earthworms would practically come shooting out on top of the ground. I should have realized that I was poisoning all the earthworms in the soil.

I eventually lost that source of manure but managed to locate another one. Unfortunately, this one brought with it a huge number of weed seeds. There were so many weeds that I couldn't keep up with them. I eventually gave up and decided to put down a heavy mulch of wood chips and use only chemical fertilizers. While not the first mistake, this was probably the biggest.

At first the garden continued to look good. Then after about 3 years, I noticed that the plants were just not as large as they used to be and the number and size of the blooms had decreased. I thought that perhaps I had not used enough fertilizer so I increased the amount I was using. The following year there was an even more noticeable decline. This is when I finally took the first step toward turning things around. I had a soil analysis done and found out that the Phosphorus levels in my soil were excessive (from all the chemical fertilizer). I didn't realize that too much phosphorus had literally made my soil slightly toxic to the very plants I was trying to help.

I decided to go back to what had worked well for me before. I located a new source of composted horse manure and tilled about 5" in each of the beds. After replacing the daylilies, I then top dressed with another 3". After top dressing with manure for 2 more years, I noticed that the worms had returned. At the lowest point of the soil's health, I could turn over an entire bed and see only a few worms. Now there are so many I see them sometimes when I'm pulling weeds. And even better, the daylilies have improved dramatically.

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