Sustainable Gardening Blog

In the News

• A ban on many lawn and garden pesticides will go into effect next spring in Ontario, Canada. The new law would prohibit 80 chemicals and 300 products that experts say pose a potential health

• Even big business loves bees, especially if the business if Ben & Jerry’s.  Blogger Michele’s family are seriously into bees. Then over on Dry Ideas learn how to build your own solitary bee house.

• Thanks to Craig Cramer and Jane Berger for posting about this great hort student project.

• Slate tackles the debate over fake turf.

• Treehugger reports that condoms can save the rain forest.  Another great reason to use ‘em, I suppose.

• Great report in the Washington Post about trees, global warming, and our gardens.

• It had to come to this - treebhuggers battling it out in court with solar-panel-huggers.

On the Blogs

• I give Jeff Gillman’s proclamations about herbicides and fertilizers, organic or otherwise, a thorough look on my blog and in my local paper.

• Boy, the Germinatarix got into the thick of the lawn/anti-lawn debate when she supported SYNLawn for areas without enough rainfall for the real stuff.  Commenters spoke their minds.

• Andrea (at Heavy Petal) posted about amending your soil organically.

• Just say no to water-saving hydrogels is Idaho Gardener’s recap of a meaty discussion on the garden writers email group, and I thank Mary Ann for the great summary.

• Carol reviews cultivators, so we don’t have to.

• Great post by Saxon Holt at Gardening Gone Wild about marketing of new plants taking a bizarre turn of late.

• One blogger steps up to defend a lovely weed - violets - and finds out she’s not alone in admiring them. I’m in the pro-weed camp myself.

• Check out this great post about pesticides, organic and otherwise, comparing a news story with The Truth about Organic Gardening.

• I report on a movie about truly sustainable agriculture in Cuba, post-peak-oil.

• Read about invasive plants being removed from shelves.

• I reported on how advice about dandelions is changing - but not fast enough here in D.C. where it’s still "Nuke ‘em!"

• It’s a hard life in the city for a tree. This reports on the pro-tree message, and some anti-tree pushback.

• Wanna see how the more toxic elements in the petro-hort industry promote their smelly products?  Every way they can think of, including lobbying the garden writers.  Lots of juicy comments.

• Oh, yeah, We Heart the Zero-Impact Man.

In the Garden

•  With Organic Gardening and DC’s Channel 9 News both visiting this month, readers may have seen enough of my garden for a while.  In case you haven’t, here’s a nice woodland scene.

• Reports of my lawn-to-groundcover and lawn-to-veggies makeovers are coming soon.

My So-Called Second Career

• It’s peak season for gardening coaches, and I wrote about one client who received my services as an early Father’s Day gift.  I’m meeting some very, very cool people this way, I’ll tell ya. 

• I finally gave my first talk to a large group, using actual photos, on the subject of Creating and Maintaining a Sustainble Gardening - what else?  The crowd was not shy with their questions and a lively time was had by all.  But best of all, it’s over.

What I’m Reading

A wildly enthusiastic review of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver is coming soon.  

 Follow up, as promised:

Of course it WAS actually on TV but you probably missed it and my cable service is screwed up so thank god for the Internet, huh?  Here’s the link to the article - where you can leave a comment if you’d like - and click on the right to watch the video.

My reaction?  Coming Saturday on GardenRant. 

Tomorrow is Gardenblogger Bloom Day and this month there’s plenty to show, but let’s examine what these plants require to keep on blooming like this.

SALVIA X SUPERBA ‘MAY NIGHT’
On the left is a perennial that’s popular because it’s a DOER, blooming like crazy all summer with little or no help from the gardener.  So yes, I’d call it pretty near sustainable, as perennials go.  Its neighbors are lamb’s ears, creeping sedum groundcover, and on the right, the foliage of an ‘Oron’ spirea.

TRADESCANTIA VIRGINIANA (SPIDERWORT)
Next, on the right, is a wildflower around these parts, and recently the subject of much Yahoo group discussion - what’s this weed?  And it appeared here as a weed, too, or to be kinder, a volunteer.  Its foliage looks notoriously crapping after blooming, however, so I hack it back, which results in much better looking new growth and a bit of reblooming.  So I’ve made my peace with spiderwort and it can stay where it is in my garden.  Others are using the "I" word - invasive - and complaining that’s hard to get rid of, especially in gardens farther south than here.

RHODODENDRONS AND AZALEAS - WITH HEMLOCK 
Okay, I live in the heart of Azalea Belt so I’ve gotta have a few, and I do.  Just a few.  NOT a whole garden of them, but that’s another post.  And I can’t even tell you which one this is but I do know the name of the rhodie in the foreground - the English Roseum type.  That’s all I know, plus the discouraging information that it’s sold as one that does especially well in this area and STILL they’re dying off in my garden, one by one. My guess is that, like mountain laurels, they’re happier at higher elevations.  But whatever the reason, I routinely advice against them.

What I like most in this woodland tableau is the new foliage on my Canadian hemlock - one of my favorite trees.  Yes, it’s under siege by a deadly invading insect but to me, hemlocks are worth a little coddling, if required, to keep them alive.  I keep an eye out for the telltale tiny cotton ball signs of wooly adelgid and am ready to buy a product!

‘RAINBOW‘ KNOCKOUT ROSES
Now I know that Knockout roses are proliferating in gardens at such a rate that I may eventually be just as sick of them as I am of azaleas, but for now I’m promoting ‘em - big-time.  That’s because unlike azaleas, they contribute to the garden for months.  In this area from May through November - seriously. With perfect foliage, and no fertilizer required. 

Shown here on the right are three Knockouts of the ‘Rainbow’ variety that I planted last June.  I’ve never fed them and they bloomed very happily right up until the first hard frost.  They’re on their way to becoming 4 or 5 feet tall and wide and making a nice big contribution to the garden.  I say God love ‘em.

Also blooming are the snowball viburnum, Mexican evening primrose, all the weigelas, a glorious Renaissance spirea, and some Johnson’s geraniums.

Though my deep lot is awfully narrow it still takes two shots with my Canon PowerShot to capture the whole thing, left to right.  So when professional garden photographer Rob Cardillo was visiting last week to shoot my garden I pumped him for information about cheap wide angle cameras and - because he’s one of the world’s nicest, most generous people - he offered his camera for me to grab a few quickies, which he promised to send to me.  Done! 

So what you see is my back garden at its most colorful, and also the progress being made by various groundcovers in replacing the former lawn.  It’s mostly a creeping sedum that pops up in this neighborhood as a weed and spreads like crazy.  Those full, billowy areas look maaavalous in the detail below, doncha think? Planted just last fall, that area filled in SO fast, I’m psyched that the bare soil around the more recent plantings will be gone soon.  Better be.

The sedums are accompanied by some mazus and an assortment of thymes, which I’m trying out on this mostly sunny hillside.  The mission of any plant on this site is to prevent erosion and eventually get thick enough to prevent weeds.  More will be revealed later this season.