A shared garden

Permaculture is a philosophy that inspires me, although I don’t anticipate fully realizing its ideals in my garden. It envisions a lightly managed landscape that provides for all living things, including humans.

Permaculture gardens combine many kinds of plants in a productive whole

 

     Reading Toby Hemenway’s book Gaia’s Garden, my introduction to this approach, I wondered about his suggestion that a home gardener grow multiple fruit trees as members in “guilds,” communities of plants that work together. What if I really had productive apple, pear, peach and cherry trees in my yard? I imagined I’d have far more fruit than my family could possibly eat. Composting fruit we couldn’t eat or letting it rot on the ground didn’t sound desirable or sustainable. 

Why grow more apples than you and passing raccoons can use?

    In a chapter on urban permaculture, Hemenway proposed viewing a whole neighborhood as a permaculture garden. I could grow an apple tree, another neighbor a pear, and we could share the fruit. That sounded more neighborly and much more practical. 

    When I’m walking around town coveting the flowering trees and shrubs growing in other yards, I’m reminded of Hemenway’s idea. We share the spring landscape. We all get to enjoy trees covered with sublime blooms. They’re a community asset, even if each tree grows in someone’s front yard.

Someone else's azaleas

    I don’t own a flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), which is one of my favorite native trees. I didn’t plant one when I started my garden because I thought they were all going to succumb to anthracnose, a fungal disease on the rise at the time. As we know, that didn’t happen. I can’t see where I’d shoehorn this understory tree into my landscape at this point. That’s OK, though, because so many beautiful white- and pink-blooming dogwoods grow in my neighborhood. 

Dogwoods are blooming in my neighborhood now

    I also don’t need to own pink lady’s slippers (Cypripedium acaule). These shy native orchids bloom at this time of year on woodsy hillsides with high shade from conifers. 

I came upon these lady's slippers during a walk in the woods

You can buy ethically grown specimens propagated in nurseries from seed (not plants collected from the wild, which is illegal on federal lands and undesirable anywhere else). But why take the risk? I don’t want to bring home a precious plant and kill it with the wrong growing conditions. Better to enjoy it where it grows naturally in local conservation areas.

    Oriental poppies (Papaver orientale) are among the beautiful perennials that are never going to grow in my yard. 

Oriental poppies don't work in my garden

I tried a few, but I just couldn’t offer them the right site. There was nowhere sunny enough in my yard. The one or two flowers they produced leaned hard toward the western light coming over the back fence, hiding their faces from our view. But I know of a front yard a few blocks away where a talented gardener displays a luscious swath of these flowers every June. All I have to do is stroll by this neighborhood asset.

    I remind myself that I don’t have to own one of every plant I admire. I can enjoy them in the larger garden that we share.

More irises than will ever bloom for me, in a neighbor's yard

 

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

Why are landscape contractors so attached to work they can do with machines? A recent conversation with a fellow gardener reminded me of this frustration. Her lawn service uses a weed wacker—a string trimmer—to cut back weeds in her yard instead of uprooting them. 

A string trimmer shortens weeds but doesn't remove them

As I pictured it, they’re leaving the weed plants a couple of inches tall. From the weeds’ point of view, this is helpful pruning. They marshal their underground resources and send up more growth. She finds the weeds are spreading. The crew leaves her property looking neat, but they’re not serving her gardening purposes.

    I have the same experience, and it’s getting more acute as I shift toward my version of sustainable gardening. I employ a landscape contracting company that I’ve known for years. I know that the leadership of the company includes several people with strong horticultural knowledge. The actual mowing, though, is done by a team of two or three young men with many stops on their schedule for the day and little time for tailoring their approach to suit my wishes.

Can I buy lawn care that's consistent with my sustainable approach?

    Last time they visited, I happened to be out in the garden. The team leader stood next to my new perennial bed, painstakingly mulched with shredded leaves, and asked whether I wanted them to use the leaf blower. He remembered that I’d said no to leaf blowers in the past, for which I’m grateful. But I had a strong feeling that if I hadn’t been at home, my leaf mulch would have been blown off the bed in a few seconds, and I’d have been stuck buying bark mulch from the garden center.

I put that leaf mulch down on purpose

    That would have wiped out all my efforts to mulch with materials I find near home, minimize carbon cost, and maintain habitat for native insects.

    I’ve talked with the supervisor of the team at least annually about how I want to maintain the garden. I’ve put up signs asking the men not to remove fallen leaves from the property. Things have improved, but there are regular relapses. My approach just doesn’t seem to compute for them.

    Another sore spot is grass clippings. It took effort to get across the message that I don’t want them removed from my yard. That’s organic material that should stay here and build soil. I ask to let the clippings lie on the lawn. 

Instead of moving clippings to the compost bin, you can let them compost in place on the lawn-photo anneheathen

Yet each spring I’ve had to call and beg for this request to be honored. It’s not the way the team is used to doing things, and it probably looks messy to them.

    It may be more efficient for landscape contractors to do the same work in every yard and to work with power tools—gas powered mowers, leaf blowers and string trimmers--despite the dust and exhaust the operators inhale and the hearing loss they incur from the noise. But we customers are paying for this one-size-fits-all service. It’s time for us to vote with our pocketbooks and seek out contractors who are equipped to accommodate a more plant-friendly and environmentally conscious approach.

Pushing up through the leaf mulch

 

Planting trees

I recently spent a fun morning planting trees in my neighborhood with the Newton Tree Conservancy.

The NTC is replacing street trees that have died

    The NTC and the city had made all the preparations, leaving us volunteers with the happy task of actually planting the young trees, each with a trunk diameter of about 1 to 2 inches. Our director of urban forestry, Marc Welch, had chosen a mix of species, minimizing the risk that one pest could wipe out all the new trees. Homeowners signing up for street trees in front of their houses had agreed to some conditions: they’d be present on planting day, they’d provide a hose and water access, and they’d be responsible for watering the trees for the next two growing seasons.

    The city team dug a hole where each tree would stand. Beside each hole they left a sapling wrapped in a large plastic bag, to keep it from drying out, a small pile of bark mulch, and a watering bag. You may have seen these cleverly designed green bags around the base of newly planted trees. The bag zips around the trunk and has a double lining, creating a pouch that holds 15 gallons of water. 

A tree watering bag can be filled up with a hose

Tiny perforations at the bottom of the sack allow water to drip out gently over five to seven days, keeping the soil moist.

    Our job as planting volunteers was to make the hole fit the roots of each young tree. Some had spreading roots, others headed deeper into the ground. We were careful not to bury the trunk’s flare, the widening where the trunk meets the roots. That’s because planting too deeply starves the roots of oxygen. 

Central Park. A trunk should flare at the base like this.

 We needed to deepen some holes and replace soil in others. Once the tree was in the hole, a popular way to judge how high it was sitting was to lay the handle of a spade across the hole. We had to make our holes wide enough so that the roots had room to spread out.

    One person held the tree trunk straight, while another gently shoveled soil into the hole. When the soil in the hole looks poor, it’s tempting to enrich the backfill with compost or other amendments. Research shows that it’s better for the tree if you don’t. If the roots find enriched soil in the hole, they’ll stay there and not grow out into the surrounding soil. We returned the original soil to the hole without embellishment.

    We mulched around the trunk of the new tree, being careful to leave a space around the trunk and form the mulch into a saucer, not a dome. Over-mulching prevents needed air and water from reaching the roots.

 

Far too much mulch. Four inches is the maximum safe depth.

Then my planting partner Hal showed me how to set up the watering bag and fill it with water. 

     The weight of the water tended to tilt the trunk at first. Walking by the trees this week, I see that with the watering bags less full, the trees are upright. It’s great to see the young trees settling in.

Felix checks out one of the trees we planted

   
   

Wake up and smell the leaf mulch

Last fall I changed a longstanding fall garden clean-up routine: I didn’t rake fallen leaves from the garden beds and chop them up in the leaf shredder. I didn’t mulch those same beds with the chopped leaves. I didn’t cut the dead perennials’ foliage and flower stalks to the ground. I just let the tree leaves lie on top of the plants and left the dead stalks standing.

Meadow rue (Thalictrum aquilegiifolium) emerging through the leaf litter

    My reason for this change of approach was that I’d learned that native insects shelter and lay eggs under fallen leaves, in crowns of dormant perennials, and in those dead flower stalks. If I left those insects alone through the winter, they’d have a better chance of surviving, reproducing, and contributing to the garden ecosystem in spring. It was hard to hold myself back from cleaning up at the end of the garden season. I have to admit it was also a lot less work.

Beneficial lacewing finding winter cover

    Through the winter, I watched those ragged stalks and those whole leaves, especially on the new perennial bed that’s right next to the back deck. The leaves are mostly red oak, with some Norway maple mixed in. The garden’s usual winter look, bare but neatly tended, had morphed into either a sloppy mess or a more natural scene, depending how I felt on a given day. 

The backyard scene in March

Now is the time to assess how this lazy approach to preparing for winter worked out.

    I waited impatiently for daytime temperatures to stay in the fifties, indicating that the time had come for lifting the leaves off the new plants and moving them to the compost pile. I was anxious to know how the plants were doing under there. For the past two weeks I’ve been gradually uncovering the deck bed. 

Perennials and a dwarf juniper under the leaves

Dry leaves formed the top layer, but beneath these I uncovered wet, matted leaves plastered to the ground. I chose overcast days with rain in the forecast, not hard to find recently, for exposing the covered plants to the light. Their new foliage was pale from growing in the dark. I didn’t want them to get sunburned from sudden exposure to full sun.

    With the whole bed uncovered, I see that most of the new perennials made it through the winter. Of course, they benefited from other factors besides the leaf cover. Snow covered the bed during much of the winter, protecting the new plants from desiccation and temperature extremes, and there’s been plenty of rain this spring.

    To mulch the uncovered bed, I shredded leaves that I’d stored in the garage in paper yard waste bags. 

Shredding makes mulch that doesn't mat or blow around like the whole leaves

If insects took refuge in the bags last fall, they should have moved out by now. Birds are very active in the yard, which seems like an indication that they’re finding insects to eat. 

A cardinal couple is building a nest

     I’m hoping that more native insects will enrich the garden’s food web this year. Not only animals will benefit. I’m aiming for plant-friendly balanced populations of pollinators, leaf-eaters, and the beneficial insect predators that will keep leaf-eaters under control.

Leaf litter and native insects make congenial conditions for woodland plants