It’s just a click away – on the new Homestead Gardens Blog. My new gig! It’s not quite ready for prime time yet but give it a look and we welcome your suggestions for it.
Photo by Runner Jenny.
All about gardening the eco-friendly way, by Susan Harris and 22 other garden writers and experts.
Real Gardening
I love this story in today’s NYTimes. It’s by the owner of a small townhouse garden in Manhattan, taking us through his consultations with friends and lots of professional designers about a much-needed transformation of his back yard. It’s especially interesting because like most people who hire me as a coach, he’s a nongardener. Really, he wants nothing to do with it, yet the story ends with "I had become a gardener". AND he compares garden designers to "life coaches", which pretty much describes what garden coaches can do – with clients who are as open to it as this writer turns out to be.
Also, lots of good design and plant ideas.
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.
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.
