Liberated Gardener

Free Burlap Mulch

Keeping a garden mulched can cost a lot in terms of time and materials. 

Organic mulches--bark, woodchips, shredded leaves, etc.--all decompose into their basic constituents, which are carbon dioxide and water. 

That decomposition is good for the soil microbes--and the soil microbes are good for the plants--but for the gardener it means an unending chore of replacing mulch before you're left with bare soil exposed to the baking sun and opportunistic weed seeds. And for some, it means frequent dunning of the bank account if you buy mulch. 

For our organic vegetable garden and our community garden in Burch Ave. neighborhood we scavenge old burlap sacks that once held coffee beans and use them to mulch the paths between beds.

 

It only takes a few minutes to spread several dozen bags to cover an area. I put them down with about 4" of overlap. After two or three months (depending on the season) a few of the toughest weeds (think nutsedge or bermuda grass) poke their heads through the weave of the bags. And a few annual weed seeds might germinate on top--like crabgrass in summer or chickweed in winter. 

But here's the fun part. Before the weeds can get very big or numerous (I like to do this before there's more than a couple of weeds on each bag), I go back through the garden and flip every bag over. 

Again, this only takes a few minutes and one of two bad things happen to the weeds:

1) The weed clings to the bag and its roots are ripped out of the ground. When I flip the bag the roots are exposed to the sun and the weed dies. This is usually the case with annual weeds that germinated on top and sent their roots down through the fabric of the bag. 

2) If the weed slips through the bag and remains rooted in the ground, it still loses. When I lay the bag back down, it covers the weed and deprives it of light.  A plant without light for 6-8 weeks will starve to death, since sunlight is food for plants.  

(Ideally, any tough perennial weeds like bermuda grass have been eliminated before you start gardening, but their seeds can float in on the wind too.)

  

 Counter Culture Coffee gives these bags away once they've dumped the beans into their roasters. You don't want to get coffee bags from any roaster--make sure they only use organic beans. One acquaintance picked up bags from her local coffee roaster and got home to find out the bags smelled like petroleum products. They probably had been sprayed with some nasty pesticide before being shipped to this country. She ended up tossing the whole lot. 

As for the ink to make the lovely logos on some bags, I think they must be water-based. An artist who uses coffee bags for her work says the ink rarely survives a run through the washer. So I don't think they'll hurt soil life or contaminate any food plants. 

Finally, because the burlap is also organic matter, after another 2 or 3 months the bags are deteriorating badly and need to be covered with another layer. But since they're free and take little time to spread, it's a small thing to put down  a new layer twice a year. 

And I can occasionally time my visits to the coffee roaster so I'm there for a free coffee tasting--or what they call a "coffee cupping" at 10 am on Fridays.

Now that's liberating. 

Contain Your Mulch

I'm always looking for ways to save time in the garden. 

And watering and weeding are two of the biggest demands on a gardener's time. 

If you spent less time on those two chores, it would leave more time for real gardening: cutting flowers, harvesting groceries, dividing plants that you want more of and kicking back and just looking around at your wonderful garden. 

Some garden writers advocate using containers as a way to reduce garden chores, but by adding pots and window boxes, you could actually increase the amount of time spent watering. Why? Because plants' roots dry out faster in a container--there's just so much less space available for storing water than in a big ol' garden. 

You could be watering containers every day or two during a summer heat wave. 

And weed seeds can fly on the wind to land in containers where they find the expensive potting soil you bought to be a very attractive spot to germinate, grow, flower and set seed--unless you snag 'em  and kick 'em to the curb before they get too big. 

I've got nothing against pots, but I do have something against unnecessary work. That's why I use mulch in all our containers and window boxes. The idea of mulching a garden bed to hold moisture and keep down weeds has become more common (tho too many beds go wanting). No reason not to adopt the same practice when it comes to containers. 

We even use mulch in containers for house plants. No reason not to save time there too. 

Here's a photo of a container I threw together one day for a downtown thrift store. They're no longer in business, but I hope someone is still enjoying this container made from a tire from a racing car, with a mulch of brick chips. 

 

Here's a container with a dwarf citrus tree mulched with Mexican beach pebbles. This kind of mulch is not cheap, but you get your money's worth here, as the pebbles are highly visible and you don't need large quantities. 

 

Here's another potted dwarf citrus tree with pebbles of a different color, that I've turned on edge for a different look.  I used to water my four citrus trees about once a week. With the mulches I now water them about every two weeks. 

  

And you can save your money by using whatever materials are plentiful to make a mulch. Here, Chris used the cups from acorns to mulch a potted pansy. Next spring I may use the oak flowers that clog the rain gutters as a mulch in containers. 

 

Don't get the wrong idea here, (okay, maybe you're getting the right idea) but I've used corks from wine bottles to mulch this ficus tree in our house. Yes, many of the corks are generated in-house, but most of them come from a restaurant that saves corks for me.

 Originally I had just been tossing them into the pot, but the helter-skelter look left something to be desired. I started standing them up for a more attractive look. I used to water this ficus once a week, but now that the potting soil is completely covered with a wine cork mulch, it gets watered about once a month. 

Your favorite restaurant will probably save corks for you if you come by to pick them up every-so-often. It's a shame for good organic material like corks to end up in the landfill. 

 

In other pots we've used more conventional mulches--pine bark, shredded hardwood bark, gravel, shredded tree leaves, cocoa husks, etc. The pine bark tends to float away when you water--which even if you're watering less often, the clean up adds to the work load, so we don't use that anymore, but the others are stable. And they do reduce the amount of watering and weeding.

And if chosen well, the mulch adds something visually attractive and can be cost effective. 

So get your containers mulched before summer really sets in and use the time you save for whatever your favorite gardening tasks might be. Or use the saved time to generate more cork mulch! 

 

Mulch

If you want to spend less time weeding and more time picking flowers and veggies, size up your options for mulching your plant beds. Except for early spring crops that need sun to warm the soil, every plant benefits from a mulch.

            Trees and shrubs will live longer without the competition from grass or the bark damage from weed-wackers. Smother the surrounding grass with a foundation mulch of overlapping sections of newspapers or sheets of cardboard—if you deny a plant light for 2 months, it will die. Then cover with pine bark, pine straw, wood chips or leaves. Put down the mulch about 3" deep--the mulch should cover the length of your middle finger if you're touching the soil. 

Don't let the mulch pile up on the stem or trunk--moist mulch invites pest and disease problems, so leave a little space.

            In the perennial bed a mulch keeps sunlight from reaching the soil to germinate weed seeds. Smaller particles make a better-looking mulch, so use ground pine bark mulch, seasoned sawdust or triple shredded hardwood bark mulch or my favorite--shredded tree leaves. 

Too thick a layer can cause disgusting root rots on hairy-leaved and succulent plants that tolerate dry conditions, so don’t let mulch pile up around the crowns of these plants.

            In the annual vegetable garden an insulating layer of mulch keeps the sun from steaming the moisture out of the soil and toasting the roots. 

As the mulch decomposes it becomes an organic food supply for the earthworms and microbes that make a soil rich and able to best support garden plants. 

I think the best season to apply mulch is winter--especially around January and February. It's cool enough to work hard and not break a sweat. And the bulbs and perennials are dormant, so they are not in the way, making it much easier and faster to spread the mulch. 

A Salad Green for Winter and Summer

In NC we can grow greens easily from fall, through winter and spring. 

Summertime--not so much.

But there is one green that we grow year-round and use for salads, sandwiches, sauteeing and soups. 

 
 It's called chard or Swiss chard. Probably originates in Sicily so you know it can take the heat. Gardeners called it "Swiss" to differentiate it from French spinach varieties of the 19th cent.

It's a relative of beets, but doesn't have an edible root. The stems have been cultivated to grow in a variety of colors--red, yellow, orange, white. The young leaves are best for fresh eating and the larger leaves for cooking. 

Can be cooked like spinach or any other green: simmer some onions and garlic in butter and/or olive oil, then add cut-up chard leaves till they just collapse, but still have a nice bright color. Serve. Or add to a quiche or use instead of spinach in a lasagna.

 

I've been planting more vegetables with longer lives that are biennials,  like chard,  or perennials to reduce the amount of time I spend planting and re-planting beds. 

Chard is a biennial, which means it'll live through one or two summers and one or two winters depending on what season it's planted. You'll know it has run its course when it gets leggy and sends up a shoot of modest flowers.

 

Chard seeds are a bit smaller than pea seeds, so easy handling for kids. I soak the seeds overnight in a bowl so they can soak up some water to help them germinate.  They'll germinate outdoors in spring, summer or fall unless it's very hot. Plant them as a group a few inches apart if you want to harvest them young as salad greens with scissors. Or put them a foot apart if you want to hand pick leaves for both cooking and fresh-eating.

Sometimes Chris puts an individual plant at the center of a bed of carrots or lettuce for visual impact like the dimple in Mona Lisa's smile. I also use chard in container plantings so its big leaves contrast with finer, fernier leaves. 

And there's no law against using chard in a perennial bed or a bed of annuals--it's pretty enough--and always there for healthy snacking. Goes well with wine or beer as you knock out a few one-handed garden tasks after work. 

Trellising Vines the Smart Way

That last post about laying out soaker hoses, showed a picture of Carolina jessamine being trellised. Which reminded me that there is a smart way to trellis vines and a...uh....standard way. The standard planting of vines that I've seen usually looks like the pic below. The poor vine is still trussed up the way it was in the nursery, looking like a Saturn V rocket at the gantry, with half-a-dozen zip ties holding it to a 2' length of bamboo. Standard practice is to leave the vine that way and expect that somehow the vine will know that it needs to spread out to the right and left to meet it's mates 4'-6' away, in order to fully cover the trellis. 

But the vine only knows it wants more light so it rockets straight up the trellis, leaving big ol' gaps on both sides. 

 

The Smart way to plant a vine on a trellis, would be to remove the zip ties and the bamboo, as those things are only valuable in the nursery. (the pot is only valuable in the nursery, but you don't leave it in place when you plant do you?) And then you lay the vine down parallel to the trellis as in the photo below. If the individual sprays of the vine will separate, I often lay some down to the left and some to the right, if I want to cover a wider swath. (Don't worry if you break a few sprays--there's more where they came from.)

By laying the vine down, you will get a lot of shoots running up to the sunlight in a sweep (as in the photo below), instead of all of them running up the same avenue. 

 

This is a different site, but it's a couple of years further along. 

(As I'm sure you've heard--in the first year vines sleep, the second year they creep and the third year they leap. Of course for the first year, they are interested in establishing deeper roots, as any plant can only grow as much top as the bottom can support, so being patient is also being realistic.)

With vines laid all along the base of the trellis from one end to the other, my client is getting pretty uniform coverage by the jessamine, rather than a stop-and-start effect that comes from vines planted with their bamboo intact. 

The photo below shows the site a year and a half later, with the jessamine in flower from one end to the other. Pretty smart huh?

 

 

Soaker Hose 101

I drove by a yard once where the gardener was opening up a brand new soaker hose and getting themselves all tangled up in it. Looked like a one-person game of Twister.  The coils had them in it's grip and they couldn't lay the thing down without snagging a leg or arm or both. 

I pulled over and offered to help them with a little advice about soaker hoses. If you look at a new soaker hose, you can see that it was tightly rolled up at the factory into a coil. So the easiest way to install it is to anchor one end with a brick or something and then unroll it onto the ground down the driveway or across the yard. Once it's unwound and laying down it looses some of its springiness and relaxes enough to be installed where you want it without it grabbing your leg like a boa constrictor.

In the pic below, you can see my right hand man Howard Dunegan unrolling a coil of new soaker hose along a trellis planted with Carolina jessamine (most people pronounce that as "jasmine", but you know we southerners have to add a few syllables).

 

The picture doesn't show it, but he is also looping the soaker hose once around each plant as he goes. Then the soaker hose and root zone are covered with 2"-3" layer of organic mulch; shredded leaves or shredded bark, etc. Don't put soaker hoses under the soil--the pores will plug up and render it useless.

Here are a few other tips for having success and saving time, water and aggravation with soaker hoses. 

1) Put a timer on the spigot--they usually cost about $14. On your way out to work, open up the spigot all the way and set the timer to an hour or two. It'll cut off on its own. You may still worry that you left the oven on (I can't help you there), but at least you can be assured that the irrigation water will turn off.  And then monitor conditions; if the soil gets soggy, dial back the time, if plants are wilting in the morning, dial the time up. Freezing weather will cause timers to crack, so bring the them in for the winter. And since they're plastic they might only last 2-3 years, but until someone makes them of metal it's the best way to save money on watering and not have to stand around waiting to turn the spigot off. 

2) Some of the soaker hoses come with a blue plastic disc with a tiny hole in it, instead of regular gasket. I throw the blue thing away and put in a regular gasket (they come in sets at a good garden center and every liberated gardener ought to keep a set handy--if you have hoses that leak, it's often an old gasket no longer doing it's job and needing to be replaced. 

3) As you're laying the hose down, use metal landscape staples to pin them in place if they want to wiggle around. The staples should be for sale near the landscape fabric. I hook a bunch of them through a belt loop on my pants at my side. That way they're handy and don't poke me if I bend over or squat down. If the soil is very loose, they hold better if they're pinned into the potting soil. 

4) To water perennials I just run the soaker hose next to the plant--over or just touching the potting soil. Water from a soaker hose is going to go straight down into the ground--it doesn't spread to the sides much at all, so you've got to get close. And since shrubs and trees need much more water, I loop the hose around them once and make sure it is placed over the root ball.

5) I try to avoid running the soaker hose uphill. I normally run the garden hose to the high part of the bed and start the soaker hose there. Since the soaker hose is leaking water as it goes, if it's running uphill too, more of the water will come out at the bottom end of the hose. If, on the other hand, the soaker hose is running downhill, then you will get more even water distribution. 

6) If the house has good water pressure, I've run as many as 6 soaker hoses in a row (or connected with one or more 'Y"s, with no loss of water pressure. If the household water pipes are old and corroded though, you might be better just running one or two hoses end to end. 

7) After about a year, a soaker hose's pores can get clogged, so they still deliver water just not as much. But if you've chosen plants well, you won't need to provide irrigation after that first year as the plants will be established and on their own. 

So good luck and don't play Twister with a soaker hose if you can help it.  :-)

Lawn Story

For most of my life I hated mowing the lawn. But about 20 years ago, I learned two things. First, I discovered that the noise of the mower drowned out more than other sounds; it dampened my sense of accomplishment and my ability to think.

            I came to this realization during my time at NCSU working as a landscaper’s apprentice in Raleigh for Bob Mulder--the first organic landscaper in the Triangle area. Bob offered me a set of red and black hearing protectors—they looked like earmuffs—that squelched 20 decibels of the mower’s staccato racket. The first time I wore them I felt like I’d passed through Alice’s looking glass into a calm, quiet world where the mower was humming like a refrigerator rather than roaring like a motorcycle with a busted muffler. At the end of each job, my sense of satisfaction was greater and I had had some “quiet time” to think about organizing my other tasks or, better yet, planning my weekend.

  
 

            The second thing I learned was that if I employed the same kind of annual maintenance to my mower that I gave to my truck I would have a machine that started quickly and reliably. No more starter-rope pulling marathons for me. When the weather’s nice and I feel like saving money, I pull out the mower, drain the oil, soak and clean the air filter, clean or replace the spark plug, and a cranky, crotchety mower becomes lively and eager once again. But on those uh, rare occasions when fair weather and penny-pinching don’t line up, I let folks at a local mower repair shop do a tune-up, plus the blade is sharpened and balanced (a blade that’s sharpened, but unbalanced will wear out the piston—a warning to you do-it-yourselfers.

            These habits have served me well in the past, but have become less important recently. Some years back, I bought a cordless electric mower. The only sound it makes is the quiet whirring of the cutting blade. There’s also no maintenance to be done: no oil, no gas, no filter, no spark plug, no pull rope. All you need is a place to plug it in overnight. I love this mower.

            I would only recommend one of these if you have a small lawn that can be mown in 30 or 40 minutes. The charges on the battery only lasts so long.

            Ok, enough about tools. Here are some mowing practices to help you keep a lawn worth walking barefoot on. Make a habit of mowing weekly. Waiting longer and cutting off more than a third of the grass blade shortens the life span of the grass. Change your mowing pattern to keep from ingraining a pattern on the grass: mow east and west one week, north and south another week, and on the diagonal the next week.

            Bag your grass clippings less often. Leaving the decomposing clippings on your lawn reduces the amount of fertilizer and water needed by about a third. If your mower leaves a few clumps, mowing them a second time is still less work than bagging. Mow fescue at about 3 inches high—when you touch your finger to the ground the grass should be high enough to cover your fingers. Longer shoots, mean deeper roots. With higher grass you’ll have fewer weeds and need less water. I put my mower on its highest setting and leave it there.

One last maintenance tip--I also keep a bag of grass seed available year round for our fescue lawn. September is the best time for reseeding as it gives the new grass all fall, winter and spring to grow roots before facing the summer heat. But anytime that I find I only have a few minutes to get something done, I can stroll the lawn and throw some seed on any bare spots so I can have grass coming up there rather than weeds.

            Two helpful books: “The Natural Lawn” by Brooklyn Botanic Garden and “The Chemical-Free Lawn” by Warren Schultz.

 

Fertilizing Dwarf Citrus in Pots

Our grove of potted dwarf citrus trees are a bit like pets with benefits (a phrase I borrowed from my wife Chris, who says that about chickens). I only have to take them for a walk twice a year (once around Thanksgiving to bring them in the house and again in March/April to take them out in the sun) and they give us fragrant flowers, delicious fruit in winter and evergreen foliage. 

 
 

I've had a sour orange tree for almost a dozen years, a Meyer lemon for about 7 years, a Clementine tangerine for 3 years and just bought a baby Meiwa sweet kumquat. 

Every few years I've done some root pruning and re-potted them. But this year I decided to figure out a way to simplify that job. So instead of spreading out a tarp and pulling these 2'-3' tall little trees from their 14"x14"x14" pots and messing around with the new and old potting soil and dealing with a lot of clean-up, I decided to figure out a way to root prune (to generate newer, more vigorous roots) and fertilize with less time and trouble. 

I pulled out the soil sample tube from my days of organic farming (you can get one on Amazon for $30-$60). It's a stainless steel tube of about 20" with a T handle and a sharp tip for cutting through roots and soil. It has an open side meant for examining the soil profile. Farmers and others use these tools to see the changes in soil type below the surface. For my purposes it allowed me to cut a channel in each of the four corners of the pots all the way to the bottom and extract the potting soil and roots of about a one inch wide well.

 

The soil probe pretty easily allowed me to dump the extracted potting soil through it's open side into another pot for re-use or composting later. Then I poured Espoma Citrus-Tone organic fertilizer (5-2-6) from the bag into the well until it was full. I poked the fertilizer down with my finger and added some more to top it off, replaced the mulch of attractive river rocks and watered them in. The probe worked about equally well in both wet and dry potting soil. The roots will have access to air in the channel and the organic fertilizer. 

And I didn't have to make a mess. Instead of a couple of hours of re-potting and clean up, it took me all of 30 minutes and one 4 lb. bag of Citrus Tone (here's the fact sheet) to put 4 wells in the potting soil of each of my four citrus trees and a few other potted tropicals that I knew would like the high nitrogen mix: two night-blooming cereus and a coffee tree.

To save money on this  technique, I suppose you could make a soil probe (or call it a potting soil extractor) from pvc, or copper which might be too bendable for this task. Either way, it would benefit from a T handle for twisting and the bottom would need to be sharp enough to cut roots. And you want the tube open on one side to get the potting soil out easily. Let me know if you make one that works and I'll post it. 

Meanwhile I'm looking forward to next winter's harvest of lemons, tangerines and sweet kumquats. 

 

Trees that Survive Beavers

Beavers. What do you do when beavers move onto your property and decide they want your bottom land for a pond? Some landowners have tried catching them in live traps and releasing them in wildlife preserves (they usually don't survive being dropped into some other beavers' territory). Others have gotten referrals from the game warden and allowed trappers on their land. In any case, beavers are undergoing a population explosion and, short of renewal of the fur trade, they’re here to stay. For some people the solution may be to welcome the new neighbors as a given—and then turn the situation to their advantage by planting water-loving shrubs and trees.

            Generally, deciduous trees fare better on wet ground than do evergreens. Bald cypresses with their knobby knees and tupelo gums with their scarlet fall color survive equally well in shallow water or on dry land. Ashes, willows, willow oaks, sycamores, river birches, ironwoods and deciduous hollies bear fruit, nuts and shelter for wildlife while growing on wet ground above the pond’s edge. Beavers love willows as much as they dislike cypresses. Getting some soft, fast growers like willows and river birch started keeps beavers busy while other trees settle in. Large numbers of inexpensive seedlings can be bought from Soil and Water Conservation Districts and Forest Ranger offices (in the phone book under county government or just Google-up your local office).

            Deciduous trees aren’t the only ones that like to keep their feet wet. Many shrubs like wet ground and sport fragrant flowers. Sweetspire, buttonbush and sweet pepperbush perfume the air in spring, early summer and late summer respectively. Spicebush and redtwig dogwood are also aromatic in spring. Look for them in area nurseries.

            If you plant large numbers of cheap seedlings, expect to lose some to beavers and muskrats. On the other hand, if you’re planting small numbers of trees and shrubs from nurseries, protect your investment by setting plants out in several groupings on sloping land above the water line. Mulch with whatever is handy. Then enclose them with fencing for the first couple of years.

Bulb Land

According to Raleigh garden designer  Tracy Traer, bulbs in piedmont North Carolina gardens often lack good drainage. Many diminish in number and stature because of rot, despite a gardener’s attention.

            A former N.C. State horticulture professor, Traer installed and monitored campus bulb plantings during the 1980's that maintained a constant number of blooms over six years—without adding fertilizer. The difference is that these daffodils and other bulbs were planted on the ground and then covered with 6 inches of pine park much. Their roots can reach the fertile clay, but the bulbs themselves grew free from rot in the fine bark. Most ornamental bulbs originated in the deserts and mountains of central Asia—so a well-drained bark bed mimics the bulbs’ native soils.

 

            Tracy refrained from fertilizing in order to isolate the impact of growing in bark. She says that with annual fertilization the bulbs would have multiplied many times over. Because of their dry-land heritage, bulbs are also extremely drought-hardy. This makes them ideal for a low-maintenance landscape.

            Pine bark is a by-product of the lumber industry. At the lumber yards they use a powerful hose to blast the bark off before milling the tree.  You can buy pine bark in bulk or have area nurseries and landscapers deliver it. You can also buy it in a bag at most garden centers. A 2-cubic foot bag will cover a 2'x2' bulb bed 6 inches deep. You can also buy bulbs in bulk from Terra Ceia Farm in northeastern NC. Brent and Becky's Bulbs in southeastern VA is also a great source.

            What to do if you’re buying smaller quantities and want a long season of daffodil blooms? Plant a mix of February Gold, Peeping Tom and Ice Follies.