'Nuff on the tiller question, SRS... You've gotten good advice... I have a couple older tillers an' both are beaters but seems that I can usually get the blasted things to run for small jobs... There's a farmer 'round there who tills everyones gardens fir like $25 with a 5 foot tiller he pulls behind his Ford tractor... Those tillers run 'bout $3000 so everone lets him do it an' he till up some 20 'er so gardens here in the holler in one day... I plow my own in the fall an' put lots o' chicken manure in it first...

Ahhhhh, as fir the Bermuda grass??? Till it in... It spreads from the roots but if you till 'um in 6 inches 'er so them roots will just rot anyway and then all you'll have to be concerned 'bout is the Bermuda grass 'round the perimeter of the garden which will have it's eyes on yer newly tilled area... MM is correct, tho, in tellin' ya' to put black plastic down... It will kill off yer weed seeds... Burns 'um up right good... Also, it might not look too purdy but after you have yer area ready to plant you might wanta consider putting down black plastic and cut holes in it for planting either seeds 'er plants... You can take a razo an' put slits in for rain water to get into yer soil... This will keep yer plants wet and weedless...

As for clay??? Clay is some fine stuff... It's loaded with stuff that plants love but doesn't drain too good so ya' got to loosen it up, Baby!!! No, not you... The danged clay... Straw, leaves, shreaded newspaper work well... There's also a product called Permitil which will make yer clay real palntable and keep underground critters out as well that you can till in...

Zones??? Remember that a zone is ***worst case scenerio*** an' global warmin' may not have an effect on those extremes... We are in 6B and it dipped to 2 degrees last week which is just 2 degrees on the warm side of 6B so I wouldn't go out an buy a bunch of tropicals plants unless yer willin', like we are, to make cages fir them in the winter... We do that with camillas... We also wrap our sasanqua (fall bloomin' camillias) for the 1st couple of years in straw and burlap before lettin' 'um go it alone...

We're just in the process of figurin' out which seeds to order... There are so many new hybrids ity is mind bogglin'... But we have a much larger project and that is that now that the house is finished we need to creat beds all around it and put in landscape gardens which is a monster project... On our vacation we satyed with a relative who is a landscape archietect and had him look at my drawings and he put his 2 cents worth in and we thanked him but... Them folks ain't garderners so he didn't offer us anything that would work... Oh well???

What else??? Hmmmm??? That's 'bout it... For now...

Bobert