sciencegeek, thanks for posting about manure. The only droppings that can safely be used in the garden directly, without composting, is from rabbits. Everything else needs to compost.

Also, it is an old wives' tale about not adding the cat or dog droppings to the compost. It's all just poop. There needs to be a lot of plant material in the compost in with it to break things down properly, and in my yard I also give it a long time, the compost I'm using in any given year is from a pile I constructed two to three years earlier. There is no good science behind the warning that you shouldn't add pet droppings to compost, it's simply a cultural bias (folkway).

I have a small electric chipper that I use for branches trimmed around my very large yard. Those chips are used to mulch around plants in my garden, and they break down very quickly. I buy bagged baldcypress chips that I put down on paths in the garden to slow the weed growth. After a couple of years the path chips are broken down and every year the beds and paths shift a little (I bevel the edges of raised beds but I don't have any kind of firm planks to edge them, making it easier to reshape or reorient beds as I decide what to plant where.

Have any of you encountered those "rules of thumb" some places pronounce - don't plant tomatoes where you planted eggplants last year, etc? I've never found those to be true. I do practice companion planting, in particular making sure there are plenty of flowers in the vegetable garden in order to attract more pollinators.