I visited a local reader and when he mentioned that he used worm castings on his lawn I asked for more info, please. So he wrote to tell me exactly what he puts on his good-looking lawn:
- "WOW pre-emergence weed control" – this is basically 100% corn gluten with a slow nitrogen release, and I apply it with a hand-cranked hand-held spreader when the forsythia bloom each spring.
- "100% Pure Earthworm castings" – again, I apply it with a hand-crank, hand-held spreader about a month after I’ve put down the corn gluten.
- "Gardener’s Gold Premium compost" – goes down at the same time as the worm castings. (About every three years or so I’ll pick up a small 10-lb. bag of fish emulsion and I’ll mix that into the compost before I spread it onto the lawn).
Then he concluded: "And that’s it; that’s all I do for lawn care – I don’t apply anything else during the year. As I think I told you, I use no chemicals in this garden at all. I do mulch the fall leaves into the lawn with a mulching mower. I hand-weed throughout the growing season when/if necessary (and that’s pretty rare – the corn gluten really does suppress the weeds). I also keep my lawn high – I let it grow to 5 inches or so and then cut it down to three and a half inches – that keeps the sun off of the soil and helps discourage weed germination as well. In the hottest part of summer, if we’ve had no rain for 10 days I’ll give it a half inch of water via a sprinkler.
"I’m continuously mystified by the far more complex and expensive lawns regimens that I read and hear about."
And can I just say, his garden looks maaarvelous, and in no small part because he avoids a huge swath of lawn like the one you see here. His garden is mostly borders, and they’re filled primarily with conifers. The model of the sustainable garden looks good every day of the year, and costs the gardener very little in time or money.
Photo credit.
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.
[This is my October column for the Takoma and Silver.jpg)
Spring Voice newspaper. I'd love your feedback!]
Gardeners want to know: Do I really have to remove leaves from my lawn? And the answer is that a few are fine but a thick coating of leaves will smother turfgrass over the winter.
Next question: Can I leave them in my flower beds and borders? On that one opinions vary, and some sources even recommend raking leaves into the beds for the winter. But like most gardening advice, it depends – in this case on their size and shape, and how many you have. An impenetrable mat of leaves, especially from oaks, can smother groundcovers and keep rainwater from penetrating into the soil, so my own practice is to wait til all the leaves are down in late fall, then lightly rake the easy-to-get majority of them, being careful not to yank the groundcovers out of the soil. I hand-remove the remaining leaves during spring clean-up.
[click to continue…]
Not that I’d ever recommend this, of course. But sometimes our creative urges just can’t wait til the temperatures cool down enough to move plants safely, so measures must be taken.
- Watering twice a day at first, then daily through the first week or so.
- Providing shade til the roots get established. My neighbors assume I’ve become a radical front-yard laundry-dryer but lucky for me, they’re mostly hippies (at least in spirit) and couldn’t care less.
In this case I moved the decidedly shade-loving pulmonaria to a spot that gets direct sun from 3 to 6 in the afternoon. Wish it luck. For more about this front-yard garden, now an anti-lawn, catch my story about it and GREAT comments over at GardenRant.
Sometimes it’s damn hard to keep up with the current best thinking on gardening practices, and the question of whether wood chip mulch is good or bad for our plants is a case in point. After what thought was 
a lot of research, I came down against it in my page about mulch and mulching, recommending instead the use of shredded pine or leafmold mulch. (Around plants, that is. Wood chips on paths are indisputably okay.)
Now here comes Master Gardener Magazine with an article about wood chip mulch by Linda Chalker-Scott (Ph.D., Extension Urban Horticulturist and Associate Professor, Washington State University) to contradict conventional wisdom. (Those durn scientists can be SO annoying, with their namby-pamby reliance on the scientific method and peer review and all that stuff for sticklers.)
Here’s what she has to say: In tests (something that apparently scientists are still doing) wood chips perform with the best of all possible mulch materials for moisture retention, temperature moderation, weed control,sustainability and enhanced plant productivity. And what’s more, in urban areas they’re often FREE.
Drawbacks? What drawbacks?
Referring to the reported drawbacks of wood chip mulch, she calls them "much ado about nothing". The concern that wood chip mulches can tie up introgen and cause deficiencies in plants, it turns out that studies show that it actually increases nutrient levels in soils and the foliage of plants. "My hypothesis is that a zone of nitrogen deficiency exists at the mulch/soil interface, inhibiting weed seed germination while having no influence upon established plant roots below the soil surface." For that reason, she recommends against wood chip mulch around plants with shallow roots – annuals and vegetables.
Even if you remain unconvinced by the research, you can still use wood chips on top of a more nutrient-rich underlayer (say, of compost). This "mulch sandwich" approach mimics what you’d see in the mulch layer of a forest.
How deep?
Here’s what surprised me – her recommendation that 4-6 inches of the stuff be used. That’s because "A review of the research on coarse organic mulches and weed control reveals that shallow mulch layers will promote weed growth and/or require additional weed control measures." Again, a divergence from lots of other writers recommending 2-4 inches, or even a maximum of 2 inches.
But what about soil structure?
Now here’s something the article didn’t addres – the impact of mulch on ability of the soil to hold moisture and other benefits of what we call good soil structure. Do wood chips decompose fast enough to improve soil within, say, a year? I’ll shoot the link to this post to the good folks at Master Gardener Magazine and see if we can get a response.
Photo credit.
