Sustainable Gardening Blog

With spring fast approaching, let’s look at  two popular plant-related spring events, especially at what one prominent authority on sustainable gardening has to say about them.   She’s horticulturist Linda Chalker-Scott with Washington State University and her website features "Horticultural Myths."  There happens to be one of those on point, from 2001:

The Myth of Arbor Day/Earth Day Planting in the West: "Arbor Day/Earth Day is an ideal time to install trees."

According to the good professor, Arbor Day began in Nebraska back in 1872 as a way to encourage the planting of trees on what was basically grassland, and the official date was set for the first Friday of April.  She applauds the moves taken here in the East to move the date up in the hotter regions and back for the colder, for obvious reasons.

Earth Day, officially April 22, is more recent but still, notice, in the spring, and has been used as an event for "revegetating human-altered landscapes," including the planting of trees, which she thinks that’s a bad idea - in the West.  In the West they average from 2 to 10 inches of rain per month through the summer, with Seattle at the 2-inch level.  Besides the problem that plants need more water during the heat of summer, late spring and summer are when they’re devoting all their resources to new above-ground growth and can’t develop the kind of root structure necessary to survive in the long run. 

What Will Survive?

According to Chalker-Scott, the only plants that can survive dry summers are: well established native or Mediterranean climate plants grown under optimal conditions.  Notice the plants not ONLY have to be naturally drought-tolerant but they have to be grown under their ideal conditions and have already survived a year or two.  And how many of our suburban and urban gardens offer optimal conditions?  Thanks to the nature of development itself, very few.  So what chance does a sapling stuck in the ground in April have, especially in the hell strip between the street and the sidewalk -  a less than tree-friendly place if there ever was one.

Back East    

So what’s the situation here in the supposedly wet East?  Not so different, as it turns out.  Our average rainfall (in DC) is only about 4 inches per month for the summer months but man, those wet days may be over.  In 2007 we averaged about half that per month, but it’s even worse than that sounds.  Because so so much of that rainfall occurred during downpours, droughts were longer than the 2-inch number would indicate.  With our less-than-normal rainwater coming in more extreme amounts - either none or too much at once - it was a terrible situation for not just plants but also runoff into our waterways.  Hello, Global Weirding.

All this explains why the city garden manager in my town spends Earth Day and Arbor Day FUMING about the utter waste of saplings.  Move it to fall, he says to anyone who will listen.  It’s happening in enlightened communities across the country and sounds like a change whose time has come.

But What About Those Fun Spring Events?

But-but-but spring is when HUMANS are ready to start planting.  People are in the MOOD.  That is, if they ever are, and let’s face it - most people never are.  But in my town anybody who gives a damn about trees and the environment in general turns out in droves for both events.  They’re So happy about the new trees the city gives away on Arbor Day.  But I’ve seen the results by late summer and I don’t know who I feel sorrier for - the trees or the discouraged treehuggers, who see their efforts come to nothing, year after year.  Some succeed, I’m sure, but they’gardeners, not your average homeowner, tree-lovers though they may be.

Ann Whitted - Fotolia.com

For comment:

Much to my surprise, digital photography has taken my enjoyment of garden to a new level.  And because now I’m designing the garden with great photos in mind, the result looks better than ever.  

If you’ve come to digital photography recently, lucky you. I went digital in 2001 and ranted endlessly about the frustrations of getting it all to work.  Turns out I’d really never learned Windows and ya know, if you’re on a PC you live or die by Windows.  I finally got on board and have been having a blast ever since. Well, mostly.

The Camera

My first (which I remember far better than my first roll in the hay on the top bunk of a college dorm room) was an Olympus C-2020Z, which set me back over $700 for a mere 2.1 megapixels. Meager resolution, and clunky, too. But those days are long gone.

Then, following recommendations of some wonderful garden photographers, I moved up to the amazing Canon Powershot SD550.  This time I paid about $350 for 7.1 megs!! And it’s small enough to fit into my pocket, any pocket. It even survived being badly abused at the beach about a month after I bought it, so I LOVE THIS CAMERA. 

I’m no technie (no kidding) so I’ll leave to others the exacting job of reviewing it.  I’ll just recommend it.  Reviews are here,and here, Canon’s info is here.  (In you’re in the buying mood I hope you’ll buy it here. and support this site, though.)  I notice on that link that Amazon sells 7.1-megapixel Canon Powershots for $127, which I find amazing.

The Photo Editor

I started out using the Adobe Photo Deluxe Home Edition that came free with my first camera, and it was okay for a while.  But if you want to do much at all with your photos - and who doesn’t? - ya gotta move up to something better, and Photoshop itself seemed the way to go.  Or in my case the slightly less gargantuan and much cheaper Photoshop Elements. 

Again, reviews are here and here and you can buy it here and support this site.  It’ll only set you back 80 bucks or so, compared with over $1,000 for the full-blown Photoshop itself, which has professional-level capacities you’ll almost surely never need.  Believe me, the more consumer-friendly Elements version does plenty.

Speaking of which, it’s still no picnic to learn.  I took an all-day class and it barely scratched the surface of what I needed to know to do the handful of things I need to do with it (crop, adjust colors and light levels, and that’s about it.) The manual wasn’t much help and I’ve found the best source of information to be on line, simply by Googling "Elements crop" or whatever function I need help with.  Good old Google.

Photo Browser

Now you’d think I’d have everything I need after buying the camera and the editing program and I thought so, too.  But for reasons I can’t even remember now I found the photo brower in Photoshop not to my liking, and followed a professional’s recommendation to use iView instead.  It lets me assign little tags to each photo so that I can search for, say, all the images with tulips in them.  Well, that was the idea.  Do you think I’ve actually followed through and done all that tag-assigning? Well, no, but if I ever have time…..  In any event, you can buy it here.

Tweaking is still going on here at the new Sustainable Gardening Blog but domains are being forwarded and readers are finding me here, so welcome!  Here’s what’s going on.

This  blog’s been doing some moving lately, leaving its old home on Typepad and moving up to the world of Wordpress.  At least that’s how Wordpress is usually described.  Ultimate freedom, they tout.  Simple to use, some even claim.  And as much as I like (so far) posting here, setting this thing up was no job for amateurs. The GardenRanters discovered that two years ago and believe me, things haven’t gotten noticeably better.  Without the guidance of a web designer/graphic designer, my neighbor and new best friend AJ Campell, this wouldn’t be here at all.  She even managed to move everything - posts, categories, comments, the whole shebang - without the blog skipping a beat. 

What’s new for you, loyal readers?  (Okay, you slackers, too.)  The domain www.Takoma Gardener.com is still good, though if you’re using www.takomagardener.typepad.com you’ll need to remove the "Typepad".  The domain I’m passing around nowadays is www.SustainableGardeningBlog.com. 

If you happen to have used any permalinks to specific posts, they’ll soon be dead, baby.  Sorry about that.  I’ll try to make it up to you.

There’s just too much lawn-bashing going on nowadays.  While I’m among the throngs calling for less lawn and encouraging homeowners to lighten up, add some clover, grow it all organically and let it go dormant in the summer, I shop short of painting it as all bad, as though by definition it’s a monoculture kept alive by toxic products and mowed with super-polluting gas machines.  And it’s true that I’ve recently removed every last blade of turfgrass from my own garden, but I don’t want my stories about the transformation to contribute to the demonizing of this garden feature that isn’t going anywhere, ya know. So can we NOT just substitute the old conventional wisdom about lawns for a new and politically correct one? 

I’ll be linking to this article every time I mention removing my lawn so I can stop but-but-butting every time.  A standard disclaimer seems in order.

IN DEFENSE OF LAWNS

• They CAN be grown and maintained in a healthy, environmentally friendly way.  Just ask the folks at SafeLawns.
• Organically grown and maintained lawns are reasonably low-maintenance.  And after all, compared to what?  Ground has to be covered with something, and what else ya got?
• They CAN contain a variety of species, even some that provide a little for wildlife in your garden.  I’m thinking particularly of clover, which not only is loved by the bees but is self-fertilizing because it "fixes" nitrogen.  That link explains how.
• Functionally, they’re absolutely essential for a variety of reasons.  Where else can your kids play if you don’t have a lawn?
• Designwise, they offer a place for the eye to rest, sometimes called a negative space.  The borders surrounding lawn can be busy as all get out but the overall effect isn’t busy because of that nice calming lawn.
• On my hilly site, lawn has held rainwater like a trooper, though I understand that if it’s grown in highly compacted soil it doesn’t perform that function as well.  But then it’s the fault of the soil, isn’t it?

Glad that’s on the record.

WHAT’S NEW

• The Seattle Times reports on what’s HOT in 2008 and it’s all green - organic practices, low-maintenance plants, rain barrels - everything that’s here on the site!  And OUT are big lawns and hiring contractors to do everything for you, though to that last item I say "Oh, really?". 

• Then the San Diego Union-Tribune weighs in with their hot trends for the new year and guess what leads the list - sustainable gardening!  (I’m not making this up.)   

• Now the bad news - the Herald Tribune says that gardening (as in digging in actual dirt) is down as a national trend, though upgrading the garden as a living area is a hot trend. You know, those fancy outdoor kitchens.   

• The NWF released some Tip Sheets for Wildlife (in pdf) - about bird feeders, nesting boxes, attracting butterflies and more   good stuff.  And here’s more expert advice about feeding birds in the winter from HGTV’s ornithologist.   

• Slate.com poses the the question: What’s the best tree for soaking up carbon?     

• Can tree protection laws go too far?  You bet. 

• What’s next? Climate-certified greenhouses in Sweden, so now flowers can be grown   sustainably even in the frozen North.   
   

ON THE BLOGS  

• Sure, we all love outdoor fires but gasp, squint, cough - that stuff’s toxic, you know?  Smoke, that is. The American Right to Burn Stuff explores the issue and commenters weigh in.   

• 21 Essential Skills of Gardeners is loaded with good ideas and links to more.    Thanks to Stuart, who’s enjoying spring in Western Australia.   

• The question was asked: Do cultivars of native plants "count" as native?  And readers had opinions.   

• Firefly in Maine considers the question: What IS a native plant?   

• Paradise Lost? Thanks to global warming, there are more ticks and tick-borne diseases in our gardens.   

NEW PLANT PROFILES  More evergreens for "winter interest"

• Canadian hemlocks 

• Pieris japonica and floribunda are evergreen shrubs for shade.

MORE NEW STUFF ON SUSTAINABLE-GARDENING.COM  

• Next up in the Tools and Stuff section are my favorite Tools for Pruning and Making Divisions, with lots of photos and favorite types and brands.   

• After this post solicited "real-life experiences with rain barrels" it was all compiled here on the site. This article about it being illegal to collect rainwater and from the comments it looks like it’s not just in Bolivia. 
   

• New combos are up and I’d LOVE to include photos of your favorites (with attribution, links, my first-born cat, whatever it takes).   

• Check out this cool family project for attracting butterflies, found on The Mulch and added to my   Butterfly resources.  

• I’ve discovered Constance Casey, garden writer for Slate, and have added links to her most on-point for readers here.  This meaty guide to beginning gardening has been added to the Getting Started section.  How to Water has been added to the Water/No Water section.  And I love this one: How to not be intimidated by roses.   

"ON THE HOMEFRONT" are the stories here about transformation of my backyard from lawn to something else, yet to be determined.  Just scroll down to see them. 
 

 Click here to subscribe to the monthly Sustainable Gardening News. 

Think of those quote marks as a wink to the quaint notion that blooms MATTER.  In fact, I have a little
story about that.

When the Associated Press photo editor called me to set up a shoot of me in my garden earlier this month there was grave concern that this would even be possible.  Did I have ANYTHING blooming, even a HOUSEPLANT?  And that just got me started on my schtick about evergreens and rocks and ponds and garden furniture and all that good stuff and she fell for it!  No seriously, though a nongardener working and living in Manhattan, she could envision all that looking damned photogenic.

And the photographer herself immediately saw all the best shoot locations - standing under an arched doorway, against the backdrop of a waterfall, on a teak bench with evergreen foliage and red berries behind me and ON AND ON.  (Did I mention it was about 40 degrees and a bit windy, too?)

But back to blooms because that’s what gardenbloggers show off on the 15th of every month and I only have one really sad-looking and disappointing hellebore bloom (H. foetidus) that you don’t want to see.  That’s why I’m showing you my friend Pam’s rosemary as it looked just last week, which she assures me will be its happy state right through the winter.  Gotta get me some of that.

And here’s a favorite winter photo of mine, taken at the National Arboretum.  Don’t winterberry
hollies look awesome massed like that and paired with grasses?  For the Latin-inclined, that’s Ilex verticulata.

This is Part Umpteen in my series about Getting Rid of My Lawn in which I ponder the question of what plant(s) to grow instead.  As much as I enjoyed the book Covering Ground, it didn’t - and couldn’t - answer every question about every site, so experimentation is needed. 

Now there are lots of plants being tried (or "trialed," to use my new favorite hort term) as replacements for turfgrass and they have to meet these requirements:

• Short enough to drag a garden hose across them
• Drought-tolerant
• Less labor-intensive than the lawn was, or at least more enjoyable tasks than lawn care, so you see I’m setting a low bar.
• Happy in this sunny, sloping site with really nice soil.

Here’s the plant I have the most of, since it grows as a weed here.  I call it creeping sedum but if you know the Latin name, please tell me.  I did notice that that groundcover book cautioned about this group of plants doing a poor job of preventing erosion on hillsides because their roots are so short.  It’s always something, to quote the beloved Rosanne Rosannadanna.  But I ain’t giving it up without a fight.

Then there’s my own question/doubt about this plant:  Will it be evergreen enough to look decent all winter in the center of the whole backyard?  Here you see it photographed in January, so whadaya think?

I’ve confessed to having second thoughts about the whole lawn removal project, but maybe it’s just
impatience with the work in progress, construction site look of the garden at the moment.  Compared with my neighbors’ lovely green lawn, ya know.  But I’m over it (for now) and moving on.

When I last reported on this project I’d removed only the lower half of the lawn, which I was replacing with a variety of groundcovers, complaining all the while about it not looking good.  Well, I decided I wasn’t ever going to like it because it  looked exactly like half a lawn had been removed; the design just didn’t make sense.  So out came the rest of the lawn and the next step was to complete the fieldstone path across the whole space.  That meant a trip to the stoneyard.

Now here’s my beef about stoneyards: They’re NO PLACE for homeowners.  Even if you’re not run down by a frontloader, it’s really hard to find just a few of something, like the 13 fieldstones I needed.  The good ones are bundled up in pallet sizes and for small orders ya have to comb through what they call the "Loose Wall".  And some guy was already there doing the same thing, hunting for the largest and flattest from what would more appropriately be called the "Wall of Slim Pickings".  So rather than duke it out with him, I went in the office and asked if a new pallet could be opened up for us and it worked!  So I found 13 (barely) large enough fieldstones and completed the path.  And gardeners, you all agree that paths are fabulous, right?  Even when they’re much narrower than the two-person width that we’re always being told is the absolute minimum.

SLOW GARDENING
And this is a good opportunity to expound (again) on the topic of slowing down and getting it right, one of the advantages of DIY garden design.  Whether I’m creating a new border line or a path like this one, I always do it slowly and gradually, tweaking as I go, stepping back again and again to see if I like the look.  So what you see here is just one tweaking, with more adjustments to follow before they’re dug into place.

This is fascinating.  I recently heard Charlie Rose interview Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.  Here’s a snippet from the Village Voice about the book:

In The Shock Doctrine, journalist Klein trains her sharp
investigator’s eye upon the flaws of neoliberal economics. This
meticulously researched alternative history, ranging from economist
Milton Friedman’s "University of Chicago Boys" to George W. Bush,
brings Klein’s argument into the present. Using stirring reportage, she
shows the ways that disasters— unnatural ones like the war in Iraq, and
natural ones like the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina—allow
governments and multinationals to take advantage of citizen shock and
implement corporate-friendly policies: Where once was a Sri Lankan
fishing village now stands a luxury resort. The Shock Doctrine
aims its 10-foot-long
middle finger at the Bush administration and the
generations of neocons who’ve chosen profits over people in war and
disaster; the effect is to provide intellectual armor for the
now-mainstream anticorporatist crowd.

But what’s relevant to our discussion of rain barrels is her mention of what happened in Bolivia.  They privatized their water resources, with U.S. company Bechtel winning the contract, and subsequently outlawed collection of rainwater because it threatened Bechtel’s profits.  Here’s more on the story.  And here’s a little video about it.

Thanks to everyone who contributed their real-life stories to this Round-up about Rain Barrels.  Most of those comments can be found on this post at GardenRant.

Why all the interest in rain barrels?

• They reduce the load on our municipal water supplies.
• They save (a little) on our water bills, though not enough to justify using them on the basis of cost alone.  In one test a rain barrel saved about 1,300 gallons over the summer, and one user told me he’d saved $35 over the course of the summer.
• If your roof is slate or metal, the collected water will be naturally soft, chlorine-free rainwater and excellent for plants of all types.  Water falling from asphalt roofs is too polluted to use on foodstuffs or TO DRINK.  (There’s more below on the question of polluted water falling from our roofs.)
• They reduce or eliminate runoff of stormwater into our watershed, which means less downstream pollution and sedimentation.  Even here in the East where we’ve been having prolonged droughts, global weirding has also brought more severe downpours, so the runoff problem is just getting worse.

Read the rest of this entry »