People/Media

Sustainable-Gardening.com is about 18 months old now and has evolved in ways that made the old design all wrong.  Like my name and "coach" in the header, when the site’s now a compilation of writing by 20 of us.  All my original gurus - Ann Lovejoy, Lee Reich and Linda Chalker-Scott - plus lots of writers I’ve more recently come to admire - Andrew Bunting, Don Engebretson, Joe Lamp’l and many others.  So here’s what’s new: 

• The tagline in the header is "Practical answers from native-loving garden gurus."   That’s supposed to make the point that the authors are people who know how to grow plants in the challenging world of landscapes.  And because they’re actual gardeners, they level with readers about what really works.
• Better organization, with plants and how-to in the navigation, and Other Resources (videos, garden gurus, coaches) compiled elsewhere.

The parts I’m still dithering over are the header photo and what should be on the home page (which isn’t how most readers approach the site, having reached it by Googling to a specific page).  This boxed lay-out could be switched to a column approach, like the one we’re using for the newsletters.

Just for comparison, here’s the old design.  New design by Lucas Sanders.

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I have my own post about early-spring pruning on the way but in the meantime, Adrian Higgins covers the subject in the Washington Post.  Text and photos cover pruning/hacking back for:

• Ornamental grasses
• Hellebores
• Vines
• Nandina
• Roses

Just yesterday I cut back all my ornamental grasses, including some ratty-looking carex, and now the garden looks, um, pretty damn naked.  In fact, at its absolute ugliest!  But ready for March, baby.

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Many thanks to Ken Druse and Vicki Johnson for inviting me to chat with them in today’s episode of Real Dirt Radio.  They said lots of nice things!

Of particular interest here is our discussion of sustainable gardening - what does it mean?  All agreed that it’s a holistic approach, and Ken added an important point - that it’s a realistic, factoring in real-world limitations like labor and cost.  I chimed in about all the interest now in lawn replacement - but with what?  Compared to the cost of grass seed, masses of perennials are expensive!

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I’m excited to announce that garden designer, television host and speaker Shirley Bovshow of Los Angeles has contributed 3 terrific lawn removal stories to the website, and oodles of photos.  Check out:

• "Front Garden Replaces Lawn and Lone Palm Tree"
• "Create a Neat Edible Front Knot Garden"
• And "Extreme Lawn Makeover…Low-Water Plants Take Over!"

I’d known Shirley a bit online but got to spend real-time with her in Portland last month.  Now if I can just finagle an invite to visit her in LA, maybe next February.  I’ll work on it.

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A terrific bunch of contributors to the website have been jumping on board over the last month and it’s high time I make a fuss over them!  Here’s a little bit about them and their contributions so far.

• Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott is the hort guru who recently helped out over on GardenRant with clarifications about using wood chips as mulch - check it out.   But who is she?  An extension urban horticulturist and associate professor at Puyallup Research and Extension Center, Washington State University.  She is the Washington State editor of MasterGardener magazine and for six years she authored an online column, ‘Horticultural Myths.’ She’s also author of The Informed Gardener.  And because I asked for a photo, heeere’s Linda!
  • The Myth of the Wandering Weedkiller: "Do does Glyphosate (Roundup) really migrate to other plants?.
  • The Myth of Staking - Do we really need to stake trees and if so, for how long?
  • The Myth of Drainage Material in Container Plantings - Do we really need those chards at the bottom of our pots?

• Renegade Gardener Don Engebretson, is a Minnesota landscape professional and multiply award-winning author.
  • 10 Landscaping Blunders and How to Avoid Them - the PowerPoint version is a huge hit on the garden-speaking circuit.
  • Myth-Busting: When planting a new tree DO NOT amend the soil is a hot topic, so Don can’t resist.
  • Myth-Busting: Moss growing on lawn is a sign of acidic soil -  more proof that Don loves a good myth.
  • Dividing Shrubs?  Don’t DO That! because people need to know.

•  Rainy Side Gardener Debra Teachout-Teashon is the online gardening guru for the Pacific Northwest.
  • "My Gardening Practices aren’t so ‘out there’ after all," about her lifelong commitment to organic gardening.

• Landscape architect Billy Goodnick, the Garden Wise Guy in Santa Barbara, California writes newspaper columns and locally on television.
  • The Pro’s and Cons of Faux Turf" is a fair and balanced accounting from an arid-climate perspective.

• Denver Master Gardener and garden designer Lise Mahnke of Dry Ideas has a clear regional focus.
  • 7 Principles of Xeriscaping from a specialist on the subject
  • How to Make your own Solitary Beehouse, which she Lise actually did herself.

• Transplanted Gardener Ginny Stibolt, author of the upcoming Sustainable Gardening for Florida, has been vetted by academia, so her writing is certified authoritative.
  • Just say no to poisons, which doesn’t pussy-foot around the issue.

• C.Garden Lady C. L. Fornariis a garden consultant on Cape Cod, and a garden writer and speaker nationally.
  • Carefree Perennials about her favorites for sustainable gardeners.

• Climate change expert Michael Johnsen contributed "The Carbon Footprint in your Garden."

• Australian garden writer Stuart Robinson, author of Gardening Tips ‘n’ Ideas is also the mastermind behind Blotanical.com.
  • Using Rubber Mulch in your Garden
  • Vegetables that MUST be Organic
  • Foliar v. Slow-Release Fertiliser - notice the Aussie spelling there?

MORE CONTRIBUTORS?
Know anyone else who writes wisely about sustainable gardening topics, including yourself?  Let us know in a comment.

Top photo: Linda Chalker-Scott.  Next, clockwise from upper left: Don, C.L., Ginny, and Debbie.  Lower composite, same deal:  Stuart, Lise, and Billy.

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Doncha love garden guests, especially when they’re gardening addicts AND gardenwriters?  Robin Wedewer is  Examiner.com’s  national garden writer and has her own blog, too - BumblebeeBlog. Think we had much to talk about?

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Big news on the second-career front!  A promising new website called OrganicGardener.com has hired me to write short but meaty articles for them, and the operative word here is "hired".  We online writers get awfully frustrated by all the requests to republish our work FOR FREE, which is still lots better than all the crawlers that steal our work outright, so it’s a breath of fresh air to hear from business people willing and able to look for quality and then PAY FOR IT!  (I know, very old-school, but a formula that seems to still work.)

Organic Gardener’s plan is to post new articles by yours truly once or twice a week, and here are my first two:

• On the Virtues of Clover… and Hard-Weeding  
• The Truth about Organic Fertilizers 

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 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. 

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Wow, being taped for TV is fun!  That was my mantra, anyway.  Otherwise a body could get nervous about being on camera, especially if the body has a few decades on it.  And a garden coach could fret over how the whole thing’ll get edited because there’s always that chance of coming off as stupid.  Or smug, or any number of impressions you’d rather not make on the viewers of metro D.C.  Thank god I can blog about it, at least. That seems to be how we bloggers process life.  (Not sure what I think about that but it’s a lot cheaper than talking to therapists so I’m sticking with it.)

THE SHOW AND THE SEGMENT
It’s called News Now at 6 and it’s the lead-in to Katie herself on CBS affiliate WUSA9.com.  The subject?  Garden coaching, of course.  But that was just the starting point.  The idea was to coach the camera - the viewer - so man, what an opportunity!  (See, another positive-sounding mantra - something else that’s easier on the budget than therapists, by the way.)

THE TEAM
First to arrive were the cameraman and producer.  Alia, whose last name I didn’t catch because it was all I could do to remember his first one, created the story line and determined every single shot and clearly knew what he was doing.  After bossing me around for 2 hours of B roll he’s relaxing here on my porch, just waiting for the anchor to arrive. 

With him was "senior multimedia producer" Stephanie Wilson, with whom I had a chance to sip lemonade and shoot the breeze on my deck.  (A respite - no reason to be nervous!)  She set up the whole event and was in charge of the interview itself.  That’s the very cool Stephanie on the right.

And last to arrive was local anchorwoman Lesli Foster, beauty-queen beautiful in person or on the air.  (Hard not to stare.)  I’d seen Lesli do countless interviews with gardening experts in her last gig on Sunday mornings -  including regular appearances by my buddy Kathy Jentz. - and always manage to look like she understood the answers. (She tells me that’s a miracle.)

WHAT I SAID
Quick - think of 5 bullet points you’d like to make in your few seconds on air.  Given what my garden could demonstrate on this particular day, here’s what I hoped to get across and if even one out of five actually airs, I’m happy.

• The lawn-to-edibles conversion.  Edibles are the one segment of gardening that’s growing.  (And I slipped in a mention of the great coaching that GardenRant commenters gave me, since I don’t know what I’m doing.)
• The anti-lawn tide sentiment that’s sweeping the green world, and the reasons for it.
• Climate change = drought-tolerance in plants more important than ever.
• For low-maintenance, choosing shrubs and trees over annuals and even perennials.
• Urging people to buy plants that bloom some other time of the year.  We have plenty of azaleas around here already, thank you. 

And I couldn’t help but talk up the DC Urban Gardeners and hand over the business card.  None of that was on tape - that’s a different story - but we’re spreading the word  every chance we get. 

WHAT I DID
Alia worked me pretty hard.  Had me pruning (while the shrubs are blooming?  Say it isn’t so!)  Also watering, both the wrong way and the right way.  And even dividing a sedum. 

COVERING GARDENING
It’s no surprise that this particular local TV station is covering garden coaching.  They have gardening interviews almost every Sunday morning, after all, with good experts.  And one of their weathermen, Howard Bernstein, has a blog where I recently spotted a discussion of preemergent lawn herbicides.  Neither Ed Bruske nor I could resist jumping in to suggest something organic rather than the synthetic Scotts product mentioned by our local extension agent.  Heck, I’d just read Jeff Gillman’s praise of corn gluten meal as a preemergent weedkiller.  Like the "Weed & Feed" products we rant against, it fertilizers while it weeds BUT in an totally safe and healthy way.

So local Master Gardeners and wise practitioners of the gardening arts, let’s join Howard in his efforts to educate the homeowners of DC about gardening by sending him timely items for his blog.  Then check back with your comments because the more the merrier - and because all bloggers crave comment, right, Howard?

WHAT, NO VIDEO?
It’s coming - as soon as it airs and they send me the link.  Coz nowadays we’re all about the link. 

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