"Bob Terwilliger" > wrote in message
...
> Leonard wrote:
>
>>> I'm *extremely* interested! It's just that I recognize my complete
>>> inability
>>> to keep plants alive.
>>
>> It's not a complete inability. It's a lack of passion. I'm cursed with
>> it too. You ought to see my lawn. If I killed the dandelions, I'd have
>> to reseed and pay attention. Not likely.
>
> It's more than that; it's also a lack of knowledge. See below.
>
>
>> I put a tomato plant in my front flower bed this year but neglected to
>> support it. Well... I supported it with a piece of rock. I got a couple
>> of tomatoes out of it, but most were beaten to death against the rock
>> during wind events.
>
> I didn't know that tomato plants *needed* to be supported. That's what I
> mean by lack of knowledge.

Tomatoes do not need to be supported, commercial tomato farmers do not
support tomatoes... imagine the price of a bottle of ketchup if millions of
tomato plants needed to be supported, and then the support removed for
mechanical harvest. Commercial tomato varieties support themselves, with
some help from hilling. And commercially grown salad tomatoes are picked
before they ripen, they are so firm they need no support. Only home
gardeners support tomatoes because they typically grow varieties that are
not self supporting, and they don't want to accept the waste of like 10%
rotting from touching the ground.


>> Where I live, I could make a border of rosemary and thyme without
>> effort. They're perennial in my outside flower pots, so I assume they'd
>> be perennial otherwise. That'd be a border of rosemary and thyme between
>> one patch of dandelions sparsely grassed and another.
>> Say la vee or something like that.
>
> Rosemary seems to grow easily around here, so I'm thinking of trying to
> plant some as ground cover in a side yard. But I don't know how quickly it
> would spread. How many plants would I need to start off with? Does the
> soil
> need to be more or less acidic? How often does it need watering, and how
> much water should it get when I do water? Really, I know next to nothing
> about gardening, and that's why plants die under my care.
>
>

Rosemary is an evergreen shrub/bush that grows upright, it wouldn't be used
for ground cover, it's often used for a hedge... you're likely confusing
thyme for rosemary... there are many varieties of creeping thyme that makes
a nice ground cover. Thyme has nice flavor, rosemary smells and tastes like
retsina, blech.