I was introduced to Suzanne Wainwright-Evans, an ornamental entomologist, on Joe Lamp’l's terrific podcast. She helps nurseries and garden centers with their bug problems, so she has to know what works and what doesn’t. 
Her approach to destructive insects:
- Grow pollen-producing plants to attract beneficial insects, the ones that feed on the destructive ones.
- And conserve the beneficials by avoiding pesticides, especially the synthetic ones like Pyrethrin.
What about buying ladybugs or praying mantis?
First, she calls ladybugs "ladybird beetles". Okay. But the take-away message is that the ones we buy often carry disease and parasites, so avoid them. And most will immediately fly away, anyway. So save your money.
And those praying mantis end up eating all sorts of critters we want, like butterflies, beneficial insects, and even hummingbirds!! They’re also not native anywhere in the U.S., and bottom line, are not effective.
What does work?
Nematodes. She says these microscopic worms are very effective at controlling soil-borne pests.
Suzanne, any advice about Japanese beetles?
- First, don’t use traps – they end up just attracting them to your garden.
- Plant resistant varieties of plants
- Use Neem Oil. She sprays it "every few days"
- Apply insecticidal soaps – repeatedly.
Uh, that repeated spraying sure doesn’t sound like sustainable gardening to me. I’m sticking with choosing the right plants.
Read much more of Suzanne’s wisdom at her website: Bug Lady Consulting.
FABULOUS article by Adrian Higgins about the need for sustainable gardening, and the great work going on to spur the movement. He starts by getting our attention:
There’s someone on my block pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing to summer smog and allowing polluted runoff to reach the Chesapeake Bay. It’s me. Oh, and you. And everyone else.
The ecological pendulum has swung somewhat since the postwar decades, when homeowners blithely burned autumn leaves and applied nasty pesticides and too many synthetic fertilizers to their garden plants. But we still have a long way to go before our gardens are ecologically sustainable. This may sound strange, given that the whole point of gardening is to venerate nature, secure in the knowledge that our plants trap carbon, provide shade and pump oxygen into the air.
But in existing properties, too many gardens are part of the problem, with plants needing chemical support because they are il-chosen or in poor soils, or both. Lawns, apart from required repeated fertilizer applications, rely on gas-powered mowers and blowers.
Even gardeners who are dutifully trying to be green by minimizing the lawn, turning to hand tools and planting low-maintenance vegetation see storm water gushing down the driveway into the street, losing water that otherwise could be used in the garden while reducing river pollution.
AMEN. He goes on to describe the nearly-complete guidelines for Sustainable Sites, a joint project of the U.S. Botanic Gardens, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the American Society of Landscape Architects. Like LEED standards for buildings, these guidelines will become the standard for environmentally responsible treatment of landscapes nationwide. Very exciting stuff. Here’s Higgins’ summary of the practices endorsed and given credit for:
Using recycled rain and household water for irrigation, improving soil health with compost, choosing plants suited to the site and its climate, avoiding chemicals that contribute to smog and using vegetation to reduce the heat island effect of cities.
The photo above and many more of landscapes using these practices are available on their website, which looks like it’ll become a terrific new resource for us all. Higgins relates the experiences at two test gardens in California. Side by side gardens were grown either conventionally or using native plants only, and the costs and amounts of water used yearly were recorded. Great information to have, and I look forward to some residential examples here in the East. (Heck, I’ll volunteer my own lawnless garden as a "case study".)
Higgins goes on to make the important point that it may take the right landscape firm to make this all happen – by teaching the homeowners how to maintain their new sutainable gardens, which is "not the business strategy of a lot of garden design firms". Looks like they need to team up with some garden coaches!
Photo: Cayuga Medical Center in Itaca, New York
For publication in the February 2009 Takoma Voice newspaper.
Composting of all types is finally catching on, and that includes vermicomposting – employing worms to turn your kitchen scraps into black gold. Seattle and other progressive jurisdictions are even distributing worm composters to their residents. But mention of these industrious recyclers increasingly leads to the question: But aren’t they invasive? Well, some are, in some situations, but confusion abounds and unearthing the 411 about which ones and where is easier said than done. Not that that stopped me from trying.
First, what’s not to love about a critter who returns organic waste to the earth? And not just kitchen scraps, either. Rachel Carson wrote about worms being used to remediate pollution by removing toxins from the soil. Municipal sewage systems are using worms to remove harmful bacteria in human waste and turn it into clean biosolids – a great substitute for synthetic fertilizers on farmland. Some ranchers are using worms to compost the tons of animal waste that would otherwise be polluting our waterways.
On organic farms, the castings of another type of worm – the earthworm – not only increase soil fertility but have been shown to reduce plant disease, without the use of chemicals. Studies show yields increasing by 20 percent after earthworms are added to growing fields. Even for the home organic gardener, worm castings provide essential nutrients and have fungicidal properties that can fight mildew and other diseases. Then there are the soil-aerating benefits from earthworms’ constant burrowing, which helps improve both water retention and drainage.
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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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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?
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.
