Sustainable Gardening Blog

Yes, I attended my high school class’s big four-oh reunion this past weekend, and here are some preliminary observations:

• Where are all the fat people?  Or, for that matter, the bald guys?  Is the Class of ‘67 just super-fit, or are the not-so-fit just declining to show up for inspection?  I gotta say, people looked GOOD.
• The guys lined up along the dance floor to watch the women dancing solo. Some things never change.
• When a guy introduced me to his wife as "my second-grade girlfriend" I suddenly remembered how much I liked him.  We traded a few drug stories and bonded all over again.
• Lots of couples had met in high school, married, and are still together.  They even looked happy.  Go figure, and congrats to them!
• Others of us had traveled a bumpier road.  Lots of us.
• I loved hearing people scream that they’d seen me in the New York Times or on CBS.  Others screamed "OMIGOD, You wrote ‘Golden Girls’!!!!" and gee, I wish I could have just nodded and said yep, that’s me.  But no, I’m the humble garden writer, not the rich, famous TV writer.  But no matter - I love that they wanted me to be that successful and famous.  It’s great to know the old gang is cheering me on.
• To understand the context in which one classmate wore a bikini T-shirt to the event, remember we were at a fairly fancy country club and "party clothes" were specified on the invitation.  But she thought it would be a hoot to wear the tacky beach T-shirt and a hoot it certainly was.  Who says you have to act like  a grandmother just because you’re old enough to be one?
• Speaking of which, the guy I used to sneak out with at 2 a.m. to go sailing across country roads at 100 miles an hour, with no driver’s license in sight, now has 8 grandchildren.  But he’s still cute and a great dancer.  So there. 
• This being the Richmond, Virginia, left-wingers furtively huddled together and inquired in hushed voices about other lefties and with whom, on the other hand, we should avoid the subject of politics at all costs.
• A member of our 7th grade girl gang complained that we’d all been mean to her because her clothes didn’t have the right label and we confessed it was only because she was cuter than all of us, and that seemed to help.  Maybe some old wounds were healed.
• My old swimming teammate and I were bragging about our trophy-hogging performance (best relay teams in the state!) when others spoke up to remind me I was the fastest runner in our class.  Year after year, apparently.  Thanks for the memory, y’all! That’s one I hope I don’t forget.  (Though I must say it’s saddening to remember why I didn’t pursue whatever talents I might have had at running - no women’s track team existed.  This was pre-Title IX, ya know, and our "athletic" options were limited to cheerleading or twirling a baton.) 

We may all meet again 10 years from now or in just 2 years for a big 60th birthday blow-out.  I say: Why wait? 

I’ve encouraged people to take up garden coaching and - yay! - they’ve responded.  My Worldwide Directory of Gardening Coaches now lists 23 coaches.  But before you quit the day job, here’s a reality check.

It’s hard enough for anyone to make a living in the gardening field generally but at least landscape architects and really successful designers get hired for BIG jobs, usually for a cut of the whole project. (And someone correct me if they’re paid a flat fee.)  But coaches are hired on an hourly basis - and for very few hours, at that - so it’s not like a lifetime of Freudian analysis.  Most of my clients need one or two hours and I never hear from them again.  If I reminded them of my gardening brilliance regularly, as my friends suggest, it might result in more call-backs but really, most of them are on their way and don’t need regular visits.

So even at my recently increased fee of $75 an hour, how much money can there possibly be in it? Remember that the appointments have to be when the client is home on the weekends, and naturally during the gardening season.  And the kiss of death to career aspirations?  While the universe of people who need it is HUGE, the people who know such a service exists, seek it out and make it happen is tiny, tiny, tiny, even with all the recent publicity.

Despite the pitiful financial returns, here’s why it’s still a good idea for some people:

• The need is there and it’s really fun to help people in this way.   Plus, the folks who hire garden coaches are a damn nice bunch. 
• Gardenwriters can use coaching to learn a lot and beef up their resumes, while earning some extra cash. 
• Landscape architects and designers can add coaching as one of the services they offer.
• Retirees and Master Gardeners?  Go for it!

But if you were thinking that coaching would ever pay your mortgage, sorry about bursting that bubble.

IS IT TOO LATE TO COACH SOMETHING ELSE?
Just the other day a DVD arrived from CBS of the personal coaching segment on "Sunday Morning" and I was surprised to see that the wardrobe or "image" consultant featured in the segment is someone I actually know - cool! Then I listened and heard Rita Braver say that this other kind of coach charges $250 an hour.  Crikey!  Where does she find clients who can pay that kind of money?  I’m afraid the answer is that she’s rich and probably knows most of the rich people in D.C. (Her brother is Dan Glickman and their family seems to have made a fortune in scrap metal.)  So that $250 fee is another case of the rich getting richer, I’m afraid.

No, I’m not going anywhere.  Just the name.  Time to take this blog and DO something with it, namely, use it to supplement Sustainable-Gardening.com.  The "beyond" is my excuse to go off-topic occasionally, coz I just like to. 

No need for readers to change their link to this blog; I’ll keep the Takoma Gardener domain name.  Newcomers can use www.sustainablegardeningblog.com.

Oberlin grads must be happy to see this - Grist Magazine reporting that it’s the fifth greenest college or university anywhere.  I know they’ll all notice it’s listed just ahead of Harvard, a spot most Obies have always considered its due on any scale, small-school pride being what it is.  Anyhoo, here’s what Grist has to say about it:

Oberlin College
Hoping to get an ober-view of energy use, faculty and students at this small liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, collaborated in 2005 to create a web-based monitoring system in some of the dorms that shows how much energy and water is being used, giving students real-time feedback that can help change their consumption habits. Last year, students worked with Cleveland-based CityWheels to create a car-sharing program on campus. The college’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies is housed in a pioneering green building that opened in 2000. Oberlin also boasts Ohio’s largest solar array and is transitioning to 100 percent earth-friendly cleaning products.

Sounds great and good for them (with or without my measly alumni contributions) and it’s not really a surprise, given Oberlin’s ultra-left credentials.  But I have a little story about that.

Anybody read The Road from Courain by Australian-American writer Jill Kerr Conway?  Well, her next book was True North, which covered her life in the U.S., including her 10 years as president of Smith College.  What’s of interest here is the part of True North where Conway compared two schools that were established during the 1830s, one all-women and one coed, those schools being Smith and Oberlin.

Now because Oberlin was the first coed college in the U.S. (as well as the first racially integrated one), this is a pretty big part of its pride in the world of progressive thinking.  Damn right!  And if you spend four years there you hear this history recited repeatedly, and I used to brag on it myself.  But then I read what Conway found in her research.

I have no direct quotes and I won’t be rereading the book just to find them BUT Conway found out that  women were admitted (just a couple of years after the school opened for the purpose of educating male ministers) for three purposes:

• So that female students would be available to do the darning and other domestic duties for the male students.
• So the young ministers could find suitably educated wives.
• And one more reason just as obnoxious as these two that I can’t remember, but you get the point.

Man, history can be inconvenient, can’t it?  Coz Conway just blew that whole progressive origins thing right out of the water and even had me worried that that their underground railroad history might turn out to be tainted, too.  (So far, so good on that score.)  But Conway’s point is that entire educational program was then designed for men, with women as an afterthought.  I guess I shouldn’t have been all that surprised to find these conditions when I arrived there as a freshman:

• Women had curfews; men didn’t.
• Men and women paid the same for room and board, but men had maid service in their rooms and women didn’t. 

SHOCKED?  That’s probably because you’re young and sexism wasn’t nearly as blatant by the time you came along, right?  Do tell, readers.  But now you see why I’m an equal-opportunity cynic.

Photo credit: Oberlin College.

You know what mud wrestlers look like, right?  Well, we’ve got heat and drought here and the dirt is dry, so imagine, if you will, dust wrestlers.  Now you know what I look like every morning after an hour or so of sod removal in my back yard, the site of the excavation project.  Legs covered in dirt - because it’s hot as hell and I’m wearing ragged cut-offs.  Then there’s the huge amounts of sweat in which I’m drenched, and the damp frizzies that comprise my hairdo, and now you know why there’s no photo to document the gardener at work.  Though it would be fun to have one, maybe to show people in the media what gardeners really look like when they’re gardening.  Then they’d stop asking us to dress like we would for real gardening when we’re photographed, which is just never gonna happen anyway.  We’re happy to shower up, dress casually, wield our pruners and show off the garden, though, any time.

But back to the project, the removal of about 500 square feet of sod that I wrote about elsewhere.  I’m out there at 6 or 6:15 every morning, when there’s barely enough light, and it’s too hot to work already but the project must move forward so I can get a bunch of plants in the ground.  But gardeners know to pace themselves, and by 7:30 or so I’ve moved on to the essential job of keeping my plants from perishing in this drought.  I see dead and dying plants everywhere I look and it’s pretty scary.

THE METHOD OF DESODIFICATION
With a flat-blade spade I slice under the sod or step on it to cut through the roots, covering an area of maybe 2×5 feet before stopping the cutting phase.  Then, on my knees, I take my favorite pointy trowel and lift-and-pull the chunk of soil, then slap it smartly across the dirt side with the edge of the trowel to break off the chunks of dirt, then shake it and throw it in the bucket for a trip to the compost pile.  And man, there’s nothing like sod to make some damn good compost out of the huge pile of dead leaves down in the woods.

CHANGE OF PLANS
If you read the story I linked to about this project you know I thought I could just cover the lawn with newspaper and mulch, wait two months and start planting in the newly improved soil.  Thank gawd, some smart commenters gave me the reality check that it takes a LOT longer than 2 months for all that sod to decompose, and other commenters suggested I NOT replace the whole 1,000-sq lawn all at once.   So I’m removing half the lawn - the half with really crappy, spotty grass - and doing it the old-fashioned way, working up a good sweat in the bargain.  And for all my complaining about the heat, I love doing it because it’s for the project and I’m just happy to have one.

Low maintenance gardening?  Not for this addict.

Hey, readers, I’m taking my site about sustainable gardening live and you’re practically the first to know!  Take a look at Sustainable-Gardening.com and send me your ideas, feedback, corrections (even typographical - especially typographical) using comments here or by email.  Here on About this Site I to explain the method to my madness.

YOU’RE INCLUDED

• If you’re not already listed on my Sites and Blogs page, send me your URL and tell me where you’re located (and even a little bit about you).  And naturally I’d appreciate your links back to the site so that Google will start to catch on and readers will find it.  (Are links becoming the currency of our era?  Hmm.)
• I’m looking for relevant blog posts on each subject to expand the conversation (there’s that Hillary word again).  I could take the time to surf all your blogs, but it’s not gonna happen, so please send them along.  If you’ve written about the topics I cover or any of the plants I’m writing about, I want to know.  Here’s an example of what I’d like to see - only using more great links from you guys. (No surprise, it’s the page about lawns.) Let’s show off the great gardenwriting going on in the blogosphere.
• Send your favorite links and books, too.

NEWSLETTER, BLOG, COMBINATION THEREOF?
Tell me what you think.  As a reader of a gardening site would you (or would beginning gardeners) sign up for a monthly newsletter by the webmaster?  All the experts are insisting that sites have newsletters but on the other hand, I could bring this blog into the site and people can subscribe to its feed.  I’d love your ideas.

SUSAN’S PROMOTING WEED&FEED!
Yes, that’s my darkest fear.  I’ll try to monitor those Google ads but let me know if one gets by me.

I learned a thing or two from this story in today’s Free Press:

• The original New York Times article on the subject reported on the "growing demand for people who work as garden coaches."  Hell, yeah!
• There’s such a thing as the Michigan School of Gardening, started in 1996, with 1,600 students and counting.  I noticed there’s a class called GardenWalk but it’s nothing like the Buffalo and Chicago Walks; it’s about walking your own garden and learning from it.  Yet another great definition of the term.
• The enterprising owners of that school also created the Practical Gardening Institute to dispense even more good gardening information.  Looks like they’re doing lots of things right in Michigan.
• My ambitiously named WorldWide Directory of Gardening Coaches might just be having an impact.  It got these fine Michigan gardeners a little publicity, after all.

Great story, Marty, and thanks for the link to GardenRant.

Welcome to my mid-summer front entry garden. Just tuck under the English ivy-covered archway and head toward those Otto Luyken laurels (ubiquitous, I know - because they’re do-ers) and take a left to reach the front porch.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES AT PLAY
Think this is going to get esoteric?  You know, form, repetition, blah-blah-blah?  Well, no; my plant choices were a lot more plebian - and practical:

• Do I love the ivy?  Hell, no.  Sick of it.  Sick of explaining to people that no, it’s not harming anything where it’s growing.  But it was there when I bought the house and was the easiest and cheapest way to hide the chain-link fence.  Twenty-two years later I just want to get rid of it and replace the fence, but paying for electric service and health insurance has to come first.
• I did splurge once here and I’m glad I did because the walkway  used to be concrete and it went right up to the foundation of the house, covering the area under the window where the laurels are now.  Ew! The teak archway wasn’t cheap, either, but I love how in passing under it you know you’re entering a garden.
• The ‘Gold Coast’ Juniper on the left of the walkway serves the special purpose of holding up to  the daily pounding that spot receives from the Washington Post deliveryman.(Someone once helpfully suggested I try something lighter - like USA Today.) Numerous perennials had failed in that vulnerable spot.
• About those Otto Luykens and their ubiquity. I don’t care.  They look good every single day and when they’re blooming people actually notice them.  No fussing required, just 5 minutes of pruning every year or so.  Not every plant can be a star, you know; something’s gotta hide the damn foundation.
• To the right of the walkway is a modest little shade garden with absolutely nothing blooming and I love it anyway.  It holds pulmonaria, hostas, bishop’s weed, heucheras, astilbes, bleeding hearts, hellebores, and some not-terrible-looking rhodos.  See what I mean?