Susan Harris's blog about eco-friendly and urban gardening, plus the adventures of a DC-based garden writer, coach and occasional rabble-rowser.

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Organics and more

GreenScaping brought to you by the government

January 14, 2009 · 4 comments

From that headline you’re expecting something snarky, I bet, because the government couldn’t do anything right by us. But this isn’t GardenRant and this post is snark-free, just reporting some gems I heard from the person who runs EPA’s program that teaches "The Easy Way to a Greener, Healthier Yard". Or try their terrific brochure, in pdf. They also have this info for larger landscapes.

What I like about the program is how it breaks down sustainable ("environmentally beneficial") gardening into 5 simple parts, and makes the changes easy to understand and fairly easy to do.

Build and maintain healthy soil
Plant right for your site
Practice smart watering
Adopt a holistic approach to pest management
Practice natural lawn care

Looks right to me, this holistic approach to our land. The director of the whole shebang, Jean Schwab, explained to a local Sierra Club group over the weekend that sustainable gardening mimics natural cycles, and went on to wow us with her amazing landfill photos – seriously!

NOTES I TOOK

As alternatives to our tall fescue turfgrass, she suggested buffalo grass, clover, ground covers, or one of the "no-mow" grasses. I’ve gotta research this stuff some more.
Most post-construction "soil" has about 1% organic matter, while turf needs 5-6% and larger plants more like 10. They don’t have a chance.
She’s really big on "plastic lumber," which lasts 50 or more years, unlike treated wood at 10 years, maybe, and the critters won’t gnaw on it, either.
Also loves the permeable rubberized asphalt. Gonna Google that one, too.
Say what you will about modern farming techniques and products, they don’t dump anything on their land that doesn’t produce a result, unlike homeowners who just buy crap and spread it, more often than not without reading the instructions. (I’m embellishing here; Jean was much nicer about homeowners than I am.)
The number uno mistake of homeowners is the failure to prepare the soil.
85 to 95 percent of bugs are "good bugs."
Save money with "blown-in" compost. Yep, something else to look into.

Btw, Jean is also on the steering committee of the Sustainable Sites Initiative, and overall, she’s way cooler than our stereotypes of federal officials.

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Worms on the loose!

January 4, 2009 · 21 comments

Who’d have imagined the challenges inherent in getting to know the newest additions to my household - the red wigglers busily chomping on my kitchen scraps. Experts offer advice about helping them adjust to their new home in your compost bin, advice I’m researching with all the earnestness of expectant parents reading "What to Expect". But it’s the advice about runaways that’s gotten my attention this past week as I’ve watched my worms scrambling to escape their new home. By that I mean every time I opened the lid, the underside of the lid was covered with the little guys, and a few even escaped, much to the delight of the cats.

My reaction has been along these lines: They hate me! I’m a terrible worm-mother! Typical pangs of parental rejection, I suppose, but new to ME.

Then it occurred to me that most of this runaway action had been in the past week and it had been pretty cold out and I wondered if the compost bin resting on an unheated tile floor was such a good idea. And sure enough, after moving the worm bin to the living room the worms totally stopped trying to escape.

Wow, they’re such sensitive beings! They prefer the same temperature range that humans do, these red wigglers do. And who knows – maybe they like being with the rest of the household critters, humans included, and near the TV.

More vermicomposting reports coming soon.

Top photo by Wendy via Flickr. Bottom photo – would YOU want to live on that cold, cold floor?

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To hasten a stump’s demise

December 10, 2008 · 6 comments

A Yoshino cherry tree growing happily for 10 years in my curbside garden up and died this year – due to the double whammy of beetle infestation and tent caterpillars, I’m told. But wedged as it is into a narrow strip of land between sidewalk and road, with close neighbors including a beautyberry shrub, ornamental grasses and lots of sedum, using a stump-grinder was NOT an option. Even if I weren’t a tightwad.

So I thought in the spirit of research I’d try using the bottle of Bonide Stump-Out that has been sitting in my basement for longer than I remember (from waaay back when I bought products pretty much on faith).

So what IS the stuff? Not that the bottle tells you, or their website, but some sleuthing reveals it’s sodium pyrosulfite, which when mixed with water turns to sodium dioxide, a smelly gas that breaks down lingens in wood to create pockets. Instructions say to pour the stuff into the drilled holes, add water, then wait 4-6 weeks and THEN pour gasoline down the holes. That seeps into those pockets, see? Then wait another 4-6 weeks, pour more gasoline down the holes and then set the whole thing on fire. (I’m not making this up.) The instructions further swear that it doesn’t really create an open flame kind of hazard, though local laws still may prohibit it. Ya think? And only six inches from the sidewalk, it just wasn’t going to happen.

Now a fun thing to do on every known gardening subject is to see what those real gardeners on forums like GardenWeb and DavesGarden have to say, based on their own gardening experiences in various parts of the country. For products and plants both, I love their forums!

And guess what they had to say about Stump-out? No one reported that it worked as claimed, but several people said it definitely doesn’t. Instead, one gardener recommended putting high-nitrogen fertilizer down the holes, and another suggested fresh manure, with mulch on top of it.

So I’ll have to add those to my list of easy stump removal techniques on the website. Then I’ll try something and watch what happens, up-close in this very public spot I pass by every day. I’ll pretend I’m a scientist and report the findings right here.

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Sunday, October 5: Visit my Sustainable Garden

October 1, 2008 · 4 comments

It’s the Takoma Park, Maryland Green Homes Tour, showcasing 15 homes and gardens, and it’s FREE. Here’s how to request the details, or go to their website for local green building resources and more. On my own Woodland Avenue there’s not just my sustainable garden but architect Rick Vitullo’s ultra-green home, too. Washington Gardener editor Kathy Jentz is also on the tour. We’ll be open for business from 11 to 5.

Takoma’s 15 homes and gardens are just part of the larger DC Solar Homes Tour. It features 50 homes that are open both Saturday and Sunday - check their website for full details.

Below the jump is the hand-out that’ll be available for Green House&Garden Tour-goers.

Notes on the Sustainability of this Garden

I KILLED MY LAWN

Why? Because I hated mowing, and I wanted plants that offer more for wildlife and for my own enjoyment than turfgrass. (Btw, beautiful lawns CAN be grown organically – see www.SafeLawns.org.)

Front: In the fall of 2007 I ripped out the lawn in the center oval and attempted to grow food – but there wasn’t enough sun. Now I’m experimenting with assorted groundcovers, and may add a bird bath. (For growing food, I’ll try again next year on my sunny deck – in containers.)

Back: The much larger back lawn met its demise, too – composted with leaves. The design goal in this lawn replacement was to keep the space open and low – visually and functionally similar to a lawn. Plants needed to be able to take a bit of foot traffic – at least for weeding and removing litter – and withstand having the garden hose slung across it in the summer. Also, they needed to require no mowing and no watering – at all – and not cost a lot. I priced several low creeping perennials but they spread too slowly and would have cost from $1-2,000 to cover the area within one season. (Because it’s on a hillside, covering the ground quickly is essential to prevent erosion.)

The solution: First I enlarged the borders. Then for the remaining ex-lawn, the dominant plant here is Sedum acre, which arrived here as a weed. It was already thick around the dry streambed, so I removed several plugs, planted them in the bare space, and in 3 months the ground is almost completely covered. Other weeds I’ve allowed to stay are the edible purslane and the native smartweed (Polygonum pensylvanicum), now blooming in fuchsia. The only money spent was for a few dollars’ worth of white and red clover seeds. Clover is drought-tolerant and “fixes” nitrogen – captures it from the air and converts it to a form usable by plants. Later this month I’ll be planting rivers of crocus and chionodoxa (“Glory of the Snow”) across the space and expect to be thoroughly dazzled next spring.

PLANTS CHOSEN FOR SUSTAINABILITY

My garden (certified as a wildlife habitat by the NWF) is a mixture of sustainable plants, both native to this area and well-adapted plants from other regions. There are full pages about almost all the plants here at Sustainable-Gardening.com – under “Plants” in the navigation bar. [Shrubs are here and Perennials are here.] Unfortunately, English ivy covered much of my garden when I bought it in 1985 (and still covers most of our wooded valley – more on that below). So I’ve used the ivy to cover the chain-link fence around the front yard but will rip it out when I can afford a decent fence. Ivy continues to climb the sides of the house and the tool shed. It’s a total pain to keep in check and I’m researching alternative solutions that isn’t TOO costly. Meanwhile, I make sure there’s no ivy growing up the trees.

MAINTENANCE

Besides minimal watering during periods of drought, the only maintenance these plants require are weeding (with a hand tool), a yearly application of Takoma Park’s free leafmold mulch in the borders, collection of leaves in the fall, and a bit of pruning.

PEST MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

I have a 2-part program for garden pests: 1) Tolerance for a bit of insect damage. 2) Intolerance for plants that are severely damaged by pests or diseases – I just get rid of them. The only exception are the Canadian hemlocks, which I will spray if they ever show signs of wooly adelgid infestation.

WATER MANAGEMENT

The garden is filled mainly with drought-tolerant plants and the little supplemental watering that’s needed is done by hand. (I also recommend drip irrigation.) Container plants on the deck are exclusively succulents, so they never need watering.

Water from the driveway side of the house is directed under a stone retaining wall to discharge into a dry streambed, which slows the water down and can handle the occasional flash flood. Then in the wooded area the streambed ends and the water is dispersed into the vegetation, which continues to slow it down.

Water from the other side of the house is fed under boulders and discharged into a 2-foot-deep trench of gravel, then into the wide, intensively planted mixed border of trees, shrubs, perennials and groundcovers that continues all the way to the bottom of the hill.

At the bottom of this wooded valley is a stormwater runoff “creek” that feeds into Sligo Creek. Unfortunately, there’s no natural solution to the erosion occurring along its banks – because of the unnaturally large quantity of water carried by it, caused by increased development and the piping of water to this creek from other neighborhoods. An expert from the Anacostia Watershed Society has advised us that vegetation won’t stabilize the stream banks, that only large boulders or other physical barriers will stop the erosion – the exact solution we see along Sligo Creek. But because this is privately owned land, we’ve been unable to find any source of funding for such a project.

HOW TO RESTORE OUR VALLEY?

The other obvious ecological problem in this valley is the plant mix at the ground level, where there’s a Battle of the Invasives going on. Some of us have removed patches of ivy, five-leaf akebia, mustard garlic and other nonnatives in order for native plants to revegetate, but they haven’t been able to out-compete the thugs. To remove all invasives and restore the valley to its indigenous vegetation is a big job requiring not just funding but also expertise in restoration and a lot of labor for both the removal and the upkeep.

MORE INFORMATION

There’s LOTS more on my website www.Sustainable-Gardening.com and my blog www.SustainableGardeningblog.com, including slide shows of my garden at other times of the year. For definitions of sustainable gardening – mine and others – click "Sustainable Gardening 101" under "Gardening" on the navigation bar. [Here it is.]

Or for information about my garden-coaching, see www.TheGardeningCoach.com. I specialize in naturalistic, low-maintenance gardening for the budget-conscious.

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What’s new on Organic Gardener.com

August 2, 2008

For some fun browsing, just follow this link to directories of organic farms all over the world and the internships they’re offering to frankly stronger folks than I. Also, more tolerant of hardship, but they’re an adventurous bunch of aspiring farmers and if I were just out of college I might just join them.

Then I simply HAD to write Find a Gardening Blog Near You.

And Organic Gardener hired their second feature writer, known in the blog world as Commonweeder but in real life as Massachusetts gardenwriter Pat Leuchtman. So far, Pat’s taught me about Growing Raspberries and Growing Organic Herbs.

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Master Composters are Needed

July 23, 2008 · 7 comments

I’m thoroughly convinced of the need for good composting instruction for homeowners because on all the green or gardening Yahoo groups I subscribe to there’s no END to the questions about it. That’s why I surveyed people’s experiences with composting and compiled it all in one place on the DC Urban Gardener website.

So I was browsing the podcasts on my MP3 player and stumbled upon Emma Cooper talking about getting her Master Composter training and certification over in Oxfordshire, England and I’m instantly SOLD on the program. Here’s my article about it on Organic Gardener.com.