The fence delusion

Where I live, a lot of yards are fenced. We found a cedar stockade fence enclosing our fifth of an acre lot when we moved in. Now that we have a small fish pond, we’re legally obligated to maintain the fence to keep people from drowning. That fence can sometimes fool me into thinking my garden is separate from the rest of the neighborhood. The enclosed yard feels like a separate ecosystem, even though it’s not.

            The tendency to put faith in fences reminds me of the day when we first brought our dog Nadia home from the shelter. We opened the hatchback and let her jump into the far back of our station wagon, imagining she’d know to stay there. Of course she quickly jumped over the back seat and landed in our laps, happily oblivious to our idea that the seats were for humans.

            Only humans recognize our property rights. Like Nadia jumping into the front seat, the wild animals in my yard don’t let artificial boundaries deter them from roaming free. To a raccoon, the fence is probably like any other geographical feature, less interesting than a tree or a pond. When male chickadees maintain and defend territory with their song, they don’t set boundaries by my fences. And fences don’t keep wind-borne seeds from leaving my yard.

            In suburbia, good fences don’t make particularly good plant neighbors. If I grow invasive plants, imagining that I can keep them under control, it’s unrealistic to think they’re going to stop at the fence line. I’m growing a silk tree (Albizia julibrissin), a species from the Middle East and Asia listed as invasive in the Southeast US but so far not in my home state of Massachusetts. I’m attached to that tree because I grew it from a seed that I got at a propagation course. It’s at the edge of its hardiness here, but it has grown steadily, and a few years ago it added bottlebrush pink summer flowers to its attractive feathery foliage.  

Silk tree--the view from below

It also started producing lots of seed pods, and I started pulling its seedlings. 
            With climate zones creeping northward, I may be acting as my neighborhood’s Johnny Appleseed for silk trees. I can say I’ll track the seedlings and pull them all out. I can actually do that in my garden, but local custom doesn’t permit me to barge into my neighbors’ yards even for purportedly neighborly weed pulling. And if I dropped dead tomorrow, the silk tree would have reproductive free rein.

            So it probably doesn’t make sense to keep the silk tree. Right now, my goal is to add native plants to my garden and invite in native insects and birds. The nonnative silk tree is a beautiful zero in that regard. Eventually it may have to give way to a native. This could be my chance to try growing a persimmon tree.

Waste not, want not

California’s drastic drought has me thinking about the way I use water in my ornamental garden in Massachusetts. Someday I may be forced to change my profligate ways. I’m starting to think sooner would be better than later.

            My earliest gardens were small enough to water with a big watering can or a hose and watering wand.  When I cultivated more ground, I switched to rotating sprinklers.

The biggest negative to that approach was the operator—me. I hate to think how many hundreds of gallons I wasted by forgetting the sprinkler was running. 

            Finally my garden got so big that I moved up to an automatic sprinkler irrigation system controlled by a computer in the basement. The computer doesn’t forget to turn the water off.  It’s programmed to start watering at 3 AM, when the air is cool, but some of the water still evaporates. In retrospect, drip irrigation would have been a more water-saving approach for trees, shrubs, and perennial beds.

            The sprinkler irrigation system uses a lot of water. Comparing water bills before and after we installed it brought me up sharp. I’d tripled our household’s summer water use. I started paring down the water allotted to each irrigation zone, especially the lawn areas, letting the grass turn brown in August.

            We in the eastern US have skewed assumptions about water availability. We’re used to thinking of water as cheap and unlimited, almost like air. That's because the twentieth century was one of our wettest on record. In the future we may be forced to manage with a limited water supply. Using drinking water to irrigate an ornamental garden like mine may become prohibitively expensive or just impossible.

            I wish I’d planted with water conservation in mind, grouping thirsty plants together. Since I didn’t, I’m working on paying more attention to which plants really need supplemental watering. A rain gauge attached to the irrigation system is supposed to prevent automatic watering when rainfall is sufficient. I’d been relying on that and a fixed watering schedule to determine how much water each zone gets every week in the growing season. Established trees and shrubs may not need any extra water, whereas my vegetable garden, annual flowers, and newly planted shrubs and perennials do need regular watering. 

            My plan is to poke a finger in the soil periodically, find out whether it’s actually dry, and see whether plants are drooping. This should allow me to devise a less wasteful watering schedule.

            To this, residents of the Southwest probably say, “Duh!” I’ll catch up eventually.

Water barrel dreams

As I’ve shifted toward more sustainable gardening, I’ve become more aware of stormwater runoff. To keep rain from running down the driveway into the street, two years ago I hooked up a rain barrel to the downspout at the corner of the house and got two strips of porous paving dug into the driveway. 

            The barrel feeds a soaker hose that waters a clump of shrubs near the street. When heavy rain fills the barrel, the porous paving lets the overflow soak down into the soil. During rainstorms it’s quite an amazing and satisfying sight to see sheets of water disappear into the ground as they hit the porous paving, instead of puddling in the gutter. It’s good to be doing my part to prevent stormwater from running into the storm drains, but I’ve started to wish I could capture that water for use in the garden.

            Ken Dews, an expert in rainwater harvesting systems, told me that he got started in the field when he set up a rain barrel at his house and saw it fill up and overflow after one heavy rain. His reaction to the overflow was, “That’s my water!”

            I feel the same. The rain barrel has me thinking differently about rain. Suddenly it seems silly to be using tap water for irrigation. If  I can water one small bed with rainwater, why not the whole garden? I could be solving two problems at once—irrigation and runoff—if I captured the rain falling on our roof, stored it, and used it in the garden. Massachusetts hasn’t yet made it easy to get permits to set up a greywater system, using water from the shower, dishwasher and clothes washer for irrigation. But I could arrange to drain water from house gutters into an underground cistern in the backyard and run the garden sprinkler system off that water supply.  

            Today it rained heavily. As I watched water pour out of the overflow of the rain barrel, I thought it was high time to make the investment in that rainwater harvesting system.

Tree planting--worth doing well

Planting trees is a good thing, we can all agree. Trees bring beauty into our lives, provide shade, lower summer temperatures, clean the air, help manage stormwater, and sequester carbon from the atmosphere that would otherwise contribute to climate change. Tree planting has accelerated in my town over the past decade. I just wish some of it had been done more sustainably.

            Both a nearby shopping plaza and our main public library have planted trees, including red maples and pin oaks, in raised beds. In both places the trees are suffering a slow death.

            The idea of the raised beds must have been to keep cars away from the trees. Curb-like granite edging protects each bed.  The problem is that each enclosure was filled to the top with soil, raising the ground level at least 10 inches above the surrounding asphalt.

            With our sandy New England soil, the raised beds just create even faster drainage.  As a result, the poor trees are gradually dying of thirst. They get no supplemental watering and no pruning. Instead of an enhancement, these trees are a sad sight. This spring, after a particularly hard winter for trees as well as people, many of the trees at the shopping plaza and the library are down to their last live branches.   

What did this tree do to deserve this fate?

It’s a waste of time and money and a shame to plant trees in adverse conditions and then neglect them throughout their short, sad lives.

            In contrast, the local Tree Conservancy offers to plant street trees in the strip between sidewalk and street. Thanks to our city’s director of urban forestry, the planting is done right--and not in raised beds. Volunteers do the work of planting on the condition that for each tree, a neighbor or group of neighbors commits to water weekly for the first two years and keep the surrounding mulched area weeded. A drip irrigation bag is wrapped around the base of the trunk to be filled with 20 gallons of water approximately once a week from spring to fall. 

           This partnership between the Conservancy, the city, and individual citizens has enabled the planting of hundreds of trees in recent years. The trees start out with the best chance of a long and healthy life. That’s sustainable.

Welcome to the all-you-can-eat buffet

Now that I’m trying to encourage biodiversity in my ornamental garden and provide habitat for wildlife, I notice how much time I’ve been spending trying to foil animals, especially squirrels, rabbits and birds, who are pursuing their legitimate aims.

            Last weekend I spent an hour planting sunflower seedlings I’d started in the kitchen and surrounding each one with a foot-tall tube of fiberglass window screen tied together with bits of wire. I anchored the tubes to the ground with earth staples. The reason for all this fussing is that in previous years, squirrels bit the seedlings off at ground level, apparently enjoying a snack of sunflower sprouts. If I can give the sunflower stems time to reach a height of two or three feet, they’ll be woody enough to lose their gustatory appeal. Meanwhile, the visual effect of my arrangement is what my husband Steve once dubbed “the garden at Checkpoint Charlie.” 

Protected from squirrel attack

            Rabbits have moved into the neighborhood in the past few years. I thought having a dog would protect my garden from their nibbling, but not so.  They barely glance at Nadia, our German shepherd mix, hopping away casually if she gets too close. She seems a bit scared of them.

            After a summer when rabbits chewed my green beans to the ground as soon as they sprouted, I gave up and ringed the vegetable bed with a waist-high rabbit fence of half-inch wire mesh that’s sunk into the ground a foot deep to discourage the bunnies from tunneling under. That’s holding them off so far, but I figure it’s a matter of time before they find the weak spot in my defense—the narrow space between the ground and the lower edge of the gate. They still have free range in the rest of the yard.

            The fence allows me to grow vegetables for our table, but outside the fenced vegetable area, my preference is to share with other inhabitants of the garden. Sometimes this means changing my point of view.

            For example, years ago I planted six blueberry bushes, but I harvest about three blueberries per summer. That’s because the birds always get there first. I’ve tried covering the bushes with bird netting, only to find that birds have no trouble plucking berries through the netting. I, on the other hand, can’t lift the netting without tearing off berries and leaves. I could build a conspicuous frame to hold the netting off the branches, but instead I decided to change my attitude. I’ve declared that the blueberries are there to provide food for birds. That way I can be happy when the ripening blueberries disappear. I still harvest some raspberries and the paw paws that raccoons don’t get.

            By providing seeds, fruit, shelter, and nesting opportunities with native plants, I aim to provide more stable support for birds instead of putting out birdseed in the warm months. My sunflowers will help—if they survive the marauding squirrels.