Fantasy Forest by Allen Bush

 

Every neighborhood needs a microforest. The ingredients require a passionate, knowledgeable conductor, committed volunteers and a patch of land.

Curious children, nurtured by good teachers and mentors, will come running.

Connie May is the Fantasy Forest conductor. Connie was the wildflower propagator at the beloved (former) Shooting Star Nursery for many years before she brought Fantasy Forest to life in 2012.

She had been inspired after reading how Doug Tallamy sustained wildlife with native plants. And then Connie had a brainstorm. A community garden had begun on one end of Dolly Graham Park, and there was adjacent land waiting for a good idea.

Why not a forest!

Connie received a small grant to get the ball rolling. “Nature is food for kids. If kids are not getting outdoors, they’re not being fed,” she said.

Two weeks ago in Frankfort, while I was standing on the corner of 2^nd and Logan Streets, eight kids came running past me and down the hill toward the enchanted, woodland beds, as fast as their little feet would carry them. Buckeye leaves were unfurling. Shooting stars, Virginia blue bells, blue phacelias, redbuds and serviceberries were in bloom.

Jeri Howell led the kids in a chant. “Birds in flight” she said. Birds unite,” they responded. The kids pretended to be birds.

“Breathe in and wings go up. Breathe out and wings go down.”

Jeri proceeded with a few true or false questions. “Do all birds fly?” she asked. The trick question didn’t fool the kids. They knew penguins didn’t fly. Then she asked what birds ate. The answers included berries, bugs and pizzas. Two out of three isn’t so bad.

One of the boys reminded his playmates: “The forest is not just for climbing trees. Close your eyes and listen to the birds,” he told them.

Jeri sent the kids out to find birds and bugs.

They obeyed the forest’s simple rule: “Do NOT stay on the paths. Wander through the forest and enjoy the plants and insects you may see.”

The kids scampered over stumps and poked sticks in the dirt.

Volunteers arrived to weed and plant medicinal plants, including blue cohosh, blood root and Solomon’s seal. Brenda Bushwald, one of the regulars, has been volunteering at the forest from the start.

Fantasy Forest sparkled in late April.

My mind grew quiet, and worldly distractions disappeared.

Little footsteps became a joyful noise.

Fantasy Forest originally appeared on Garden Rant on May 9, 2018.

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Austin: ten years later and even better by Elizabeth Licata

Cecropiamoth caterpillar at the Wildflower Center

More than 90 garden bloggers got together for three days of garden touring in Austin last weekend. It is a return to the first such get-together, which took place in April, 2008. I was one of those Austin, 2008 bloggers, organized a similar weekend in Buffalo in 2010, and have attended other Flings, as they’re called, in Chicago, Seattle, Asheville, Toronto and the DC region. (I missed the ones in San Francisco, Portland, and Minneapolis.) So there was no way I could miss the return to Austin and boy, am I glad I didn’t.

Pam Penick’s pool area—we saw many great pools

The great thing about these Flings is that they are pure garden-viewing pleasure. No sessions, few (if any) talks, and lots of time to hang out. There is always at least one group dinner with raffles and a couple short speeches. One can spend an entire weekend with professional colleagues without once having to sit in a poorly lit hotel seminar room with inexplicable carpeting. Instead we sit on the steps overlooking a fabulous pool or a jaw-dropping burst of perennials and discuss the garden or just catch up on each others’ lives. That’s the way it should be.

Our discussions included:

From one Stocker garden area to another

• After viewing the amazing Jenny Stocker garden, which is one of the truest and best example of how to create “garden rooms” that I have ever seen (you won’t be able to tell from my images, sorry), fellow Buffalonian Jim Charlier and I had an interesting talk. He said he liked the garden all the more because the couple who lived there had done much of the labor themselves. I objected to this—what if they simply directed other (younger, stronger) people to do the work according to their original design? Why would that be not as admirable? We never resolved this. In any case, I would never be able to do it, but the rockwork here is spectacular. Hard to photograph really well; you’d want a drone.

• One of the few talks was given during lunch at the Natural Gardener by the founder of this wonderful nursery. John Dromgoole (above) fought the good fight against a pesticide-prevalent gardening culture back when it wasn’t popular to do so. He did it through gentle persuasion and beautiful display gardens grown without unnecessary chemicals. I was moved by his sincerity.

This garden had fabulous Cor-Ten hardscaping

• One of my favorite companions during the tours was longtime friend Layanee DeMerchant (Ledge & Gardens), who is part of a group that first met in Austin, 2008. We’ve all stayed in touch but actually see each other in person far too little. Layanee and I kept up an ongoing discussion of the garden critique. Her view (and I suspect most of yours): if it works for the gardener, it’s OK. I see the value of this perspective, but the critic in me refuses to be suppressed. I’m happy to say that critic made scarcely a peep while touring these gardens—the point of the Flings is to show off the best as well as provide good variety. Austin succeeded magnificently in this regard.

Congratulations to the Austin planners Diana Kirby (Sharing Nature’s Garden), Pam Penick (Digging), Laura Wills (Wills Family Acres).

Austin: ten years later and even better originally appeared on Garden Rant on May 8, 2018.

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Backyard Carbon Farming by Thomas Christopher

If there was a twelve step program for gardeners like me, I would begin each session of course by introducing myself to the room and then admit to my addiction:  I love the look of a freshly dug and raked bed.  The fine, brown loam, all the clods broken into crumbs, the smooth, billiard-table-flat surface, is synonymous with spring in my mind.

 

I picked up this appetite as a student at the New York Botanical Garden, from the old world gardeners who had brought it with them from Italy and Germany.  Theirs was a tradition that extended back to the 18^th century at least.  That’s when Jethro Tull (the farmer not the rock group) popularized the notion that the fertility of the soil depends on pulverizing and aerating it.  In fact, such cultivation can lead to a temporary boost in fertility, for incorporating more air into the soil will speed the decomposition of its organic portion, which  releases a short-lived surge of plant nutrients.

Long term, however, the effect of such practices is to deplete the soil.  In fact, the most prevalent problem I have seen in garden soils during a 45-year career as a horticulturist is a nearly universal deficiency in organic matter.

Robbing the soil of its organic content has another, far more serious consequence.. When practiced widely enough, this sort of humus-squandering agriculture leads, as I learned from a recent New York Times article, to releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere: 135 billion metric tons since the beginning of the industrial revolution, by one estimate.  The impact on global warming has been significant.

The alternative, as described in the article, is something called “carbon farming,” which is a collection of techniques designed to store carbon in a stable form in the ‘pedosphere”(the outermost layer of the earth which includes the soil).  A lot of these measures are not adaptable to gardening, but others, including the reduction of tillage and keeping beds blanketed with cover crops when not in use by food crops, certainly are.

Will transforming my vegetable gardening techniques have any measurable effect on the atmosphere?  Obviously not, and yet it’s something I need to do.  It can make my garden an example of what is possible, and maybe an inspiration to others.  I have always thought that gardeners are ideally poised to become leaders of environmental change in their communities.  If every garden club and organization were to take up this cause, the consequences could be enormous.  Anyway, as the 12-step manuals teach, the only behavior you can actually change is your own.

 

Backyard Carbon Farming originally appeared on Garden Rant on May 7, 2018.

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The New Look for Gardeners Freaked out about Lyme Disease by Garden Rant

Apparel for today’s gardener?

News about the rapid spread of tick-borne diseases, especially the life-changing-if not-treated-in-time Lyme Disease, has me so freaked out that I’m now afraid to tend my garden, much less take a walk in the woods. I won’t stop gardening, but at least for my peace of mind I’m determined to take reasonable precautions from now on.

(Does my suburban location mean I don’t have to worry? A close neighbor was recently diagnosed with Lyme from a tick she got in her own garden.)

In my online research, the best sources I found were LymeDisease.org, TickEncounter.org and a Tick Management Handbook by the State of Connecticut. Here’s what they advise:

• Wear light-colored clothing with long pants tucked into socks to make ticks easier to detect and keep them on the outside of the clothes. Wear long sleeves. Don’t wear open-toed shoes or sandals. (Sources seem to agree that ticks start low and crawl up. They do not jump, fly or drop from trees.) Tie back long hair and wear a hat.
• Use a DEET or permethrin-based mosquito and tick repellent, which can substantially increase the level of protection. A separate set of work or gardening clothes can be set aside for use with the permethrin-based clothing tick repellents.
• After gardening, take a shower right away. This will wash away unattached ticks and offer a good chance to thoroughly inspect yourself. Feel for bumps that might be embedded ticks. Pay careful attention to hidden places, including groin, armpits, back of knees, belly button and scalp. Ticks may feed anywhere on the body. Tick bites are usually painless and, consequently, most people will be unaware that they have an attached tick without a careful check. Most people will be unaware a tick is attached and feeding. The poppy-seed sized nymphal deer ticks (the worst!) are especially hard to find.
• Also remove, wash and dry the clothing. Many blacklegged ticks (“deer” ticks) can survive a warm or hot water wash, but they cannot withstand one hour in a hot dryer. (Other sources say 10 minutes in a hot dryer is enough.)

The “deer” tick nymph on the left is the most dangerous. Credit: CDC

Applying Tick Repellents and Killers

Options include:

• Buying clothes that are pre-treated with the permethrin at outdoor recreation stores. (The protection lasts through 70 washings.)
• Buying permethrin and spraying clothing myself. (Protection lasts 5-6 washings.) “Be sure to treat both the inside and outside of clothes,” one source cautions. Spraying footwear with permethrin will prevent ticks from crawling up your shoes. (In one study, those with treated shoes had 74% fewer tick bites than those with untreated shoes.) Here’s how to spray clothes with permetrin (after which it’ll take 1-2 hours to dry)  and here’s the soak method (which takes even more lead time).
• This video demonstrates that ticks really don’t like permethrin.
• On bare skin, repellents with DEET, picaridin or lemon eucalyptus oil are the most effective.

What Other Gardeners Do

I asked some other garden writers how they protect themselves from the real threat of Lyme Disease:

From Ellen Zachos: “I’ve had Lyme and would rather not have it again. Pants tucked into socks, shirt tucked into pants. Hat. Naked body check in front of mirror immediately upon entering house. Husband checks scalp and hairline. I used to soak my clothes in pyrethrum, but haven’t restocked the soak since I ran out. As a forager, I almost always come home with ticks in PA. If I can’t find one, I look again. Because they’re there. They’re always there.”

Asked what she would do without the nearby husband, she replied that “There are times when I am alone, and then I do a very slow, detailed finger exploration of my scalp. For some reason, that’s where I find most of them: scalp and neck. I can usually feel them on my arms and legs and catch them before they latch.”

Lois de Vries replied that she’s had Lyme Disease five times! “You live in the woods, you get ticks. I usually get by with wearing light-colored clothing and sneakers, white socks, and a light spray of DEET on my socks, pants legs,shirt sleeves (I always wear long sleeves), the back of my neck, and hair. Full-body tick inspection on coming indoors, then a shower. Fortunately, I’ve become sensitized and alert to the tiniest movement of small feet moving around on my body and generally catch them before they bite.”

Lorraine Ballato adds that “I disrobe in the bathtub or shower to contain whatever is still on me. Always shake out the day’s gardening clothes and never put them on the bed. If they wind up on the floor/carpet without being shaken out, vacuum said carpet. Those six legged beasties travel far, wide and fast! Remember that rodents are vectors so even with a deer fence which we have, ticks are ever present.”

And Trisha Shirey is “thankful for fire ants which have virtually eliminated ticks in South Texas when I read these comments!”  Thankful for fire arts?!  Yes, that’s what it’s come to.

Still Questions

• Okay, if I put DEET on my skin and permethrin on my clothes, then after gardening put all the clothes in the dryer for 10 minutes (or an hour?) is that enough? Is washing the clothes every time still necessary?
• Without someone else in the house to check my entire body for ticks, and without the eyesight of a 20-year-old, how am I supposed to see the damn things? A neighbor tells me she takes photos of the body parts she can’t see close-up and then examines the photos carefully for signs of ticks. To accomplish that, I fear I might need a selfie-stick.
• If there’s no one to inspect my scalp, am I supposed to shampoo immediately after gardening each time?
• After being outdoors (and this may be my imagination) I think I feel creepy-crawlies on my body (especially where clothes are tight, like the waistband) but I can never see them or feel them with my hands. Evidence that it’s not all in my mind is the presumably real itching I feel afterwards. It was somewhat of a relief to read one source’s comment that you cannot feel deer ticks crawling on your body and that the bites don’t itch. Yet, what’s biting me?

Parting Shot 

There’s very little online about protection specifically for gardeners, but Eve at Garden of Eating in Woodstock, NY has it covered. Screen shot below.

See her snarky remark that we’re supposed to avoid “basically, the entire frikkin’ outdoors”? More on that next week when I tackle the really depressing news about how our gardens are making their gardens more safe from tick-borne disease.

The New Look for Gardeners Freaked out about Lyme Disease originally appeared on Garden Rant on May 4, 2018.

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Mowing down the myth of high-maintenance lawns by Carol Reese

Apparently I am not supposed to trust my own experiences. I’ve had lawns at every house I’ve  inhabited, which has been several over my more than half century above the earth. I’m baffled when I read that lawns are high maintenance, bad for the environment, and provide nothing for wildlife.

Really?

I’m watching a robin as I type this and nobody told him to stay off the lawn, and it sure looks like he’s finding worms and grubs. Last week I saw a flicker probing for ants. The pair of thrashers that nest in the shrub mass in front of my office window seem ignorant of the drawbacks of turfgrass. Every spring, I watch them picking up insects on the lawn between me and those shrubs, distracting me from my work as they teach their young to hunt for themselves.

Should the phoebes, bluebirds, wrens and wood peewees be scolded for picking up the many insects on the lawn? I so enjoy watching them leaving their elevated observations posts to snatch a juicy morsel from the evil turfgrass.

One spring my sister called from north Mississippi to report she’d seen on her lawn a vivid painted bunting in with a number of indigo buntings and goldfinches as they were feeding on dandelion seeds.  What a brilliant sight that must have been!

I could recite a longer list of birds that not only will use lawns, but prefer them as hunting grounds, but instead will move on to the bees, butterflies and the less celebrated pollinators that I see visiting the dandelions, spring beauties, daisy fleabane and henbit that spangle my lawn each spring.

Of course I am not keeping my lawn up to golf course standards, and why would I? My imperfect lawn fulfills several functions as is. It is the floor, and the causeway to get around in my landscape. It stops erosion and slows rainwater, allowing infiltration, cleaning and restoring water to deeper soils and eventually to aquifers.

As I watch the dogs run over it, or wrestle in it, or nap on it, I smile. They are the reason for my current lawn, perhaps the lowest maintenance I’ve owned, though zoysiagrass is considered by many to be the Cadillac of southern turfgrass species.

I finished my house in 2012 and moved in just before a tropical depression spun up from the Gulf with heavy rains. The disturbed red soil was soon a mire that moved indoors on my feet,  on the many furry feet of my rescued mutts through the two built-in dog doors. The hard rains moved rivulets of what little friable soil I had down the hill toward the creek.

The small amount of building funds I had remaining was supposed to go toward furniture, but I decided what I needed more was sod. I further decided that if I was going to buy sod, by golly, it would be zoysiagrass. The few times I’d actually suffered a stab of lawn envy was when standing on zoysiagrass. It’s dense and springy underfoot, with crunchy grass blades full of silica. You can hear zoysia underfoot.

So I plunked my money down though it was nearly twice as high as bermudagrass, which I despise for its rampant growth. I call it “Bermuda the Hun”.

Sure, I watered it during its first year, and even sprinkled fertilizer on it twice, but not since, and I’ve never used herbicides or insecticides on it at all. I could care less if it isn’t a lush brilliant green all summer long. It’s green enough, and rain restores its color.

During ideal times of plentiful rain and warm sun, it could use a mowing every couple of weeks, but as summer grows hot and dry, I might do it every three to four weeks. For the first several years, I mowed it all with a walk-behind self-propelled push mower and could knock it out in less than two hours, which is much less time than I spent every two weeks in my mixed borders planting, mulching, weeding, watering and saving meek plants from bolder neighbors.

As my mixed borders grew and became more demanding, I caved, and bought a riding mower a couple of years ago. Truly, the half hour or so spent sitting on a mower with the breeze in my face feels like I am taking a break from the truly hard work of gardening.

No doubt the emissions from the gas-powered mowing equipment I’ve used over the years is undesirable, but that is the only negative I see concerning my choice to have a lawn. In the larger picture, I like to think that negative impact is balanced out by the many ways I manage my landscape for the benefit of the wild things.

If you want lawn in your landscape, don’t let them make you feel guilty. I don’t know who they are, or why their claims run rampant, but I do wonder if they ever actually garden, or even look out the window.

Out my window, I see dogs wiggling, bellies up, probably scratching their backs on the stiff grass blades. I’m going out to join them and throw the ball on the lawn that serves our lifestyle so well with so little input.

Mowing down the myth of high-maintenance lawns originally appeared on Garden Rant on May 3, 2018.

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They built a better rose map by Elizabeth Licata

Charlotte (David Austin)

Those of you who know more about the science of hybridization than I do are already aware that it takes up to a decade to breed a rose that has the desired combination of traits, whatever those may be. A glance at today’s New York Times tells us that laborious process may become significantly shorter and easier. Scientists in France have succeeded in mapping the rose genome more completely than ever before. This will make it easier to edit genes to reduce pesticide and water use and isolate the most desired traits in breeding.

Here’s the sentence I liked:

For centuries, generations of breeding in the quest for longer blooms and petals in shades of nearly every hue have dulled the sweetest smells that once perfumed gardens around the world.

Maybe now, breeders will be able to make roses that are really improved, not just scentless, dull shrubs whose only benefit is that they bloom all the time. (Yes, referring to Knockouts here.)

The Times story includes a link to the actual scientific article, but it wasn’t working when I clicked. Which is just as well, because I had trouble following the interpretation of it provided for newspaper readers. What I got was that the researchers created a rose with just a single copy of each of its genes, instead of the multiple copies modern hybrids have. They sequenced genomes from several types of roses, including Rosa chinensis ‘Old Blush’ as well as other ancestral species and newer hybrids. This date can be combined with what already exists to precisely match traits and genes. Possible goals? Well, for starters, they could maybe lessen the chances of rose rosette, which is threatening Knockouts as well as other types, and perhaps improve the scent and form of other modern hybrids. And, of course, there are many other rose problems that this work could address.

In the meantime, I’m sticking with old roses and roses from breeders who love old roses, like David Austin. I’m in it for the scent and the old-fashioned forms.

They built a better rose map originally appeared on Garden Rant on May 1, 2018.

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Some Good Reasons To Plant Pots For Spring

Our spring has been an exasperatingly wintry sort of gray and cold. April has been a last of the winter month. But today April 30th, we have blue skies. That blue is a giant step towards spring. Every gardener in my zone is on that plane that promises to leave our wretched April weather behind. [...]

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