Archive for the ‘Sustainable Gardening’ Category

Invasive Vines

There are a number of ornamental vines that have turned parasitic in our area, meaning they take territory and kill everything they get their tendrils on. Many were cultivated as ornamental vines without thought or knowledge that they might turn on the rest of the plants in our individual gardens of eden. This time of [...]

Sustainable Gardens?

  Looking at the Sustainable Sites document (www.sustainablesites.org) the thrust is to install local, low maintenance plantings. For those of us who have been practitioners of eco-friendly landscape design for soome time now, this is not a big eye opener. Conservation of resources and preservation of pre-existing natural relationships has been the groundwork of what [...]

Some Experience From This Year

People love the idea of reducing their carbon footprint, but we all know they are ambivalent if it means spending to much more. The most controversial area in eco landscape care, after chemicals of course, is noise. Folks hate leaf blowers, and they don’t want to pay more for raking. Just to correct a stand [...]

Roots of Eco-Landcare Theory

The idea of Mass production and centralized processing is a given in the United States. The great industrial age of   America was founded on the idea that it is more efficient to produce and process centrally than it is in small batches. This idea has been applied to every facet of American life including [...]

Should We Ever Use Chemical Fertilizers?

 Should We Ever Use Chemical Fertilizers? Our basic stand on chemical fertilizers has two legs. The first is that chemically produced nitrogen comes from oil and has a tremendous carbon footprint-6.7 pounds of carbon go into the atmosphere for every pound manufactured. The second is that chemical fertilizers kill microbes that breakdown organic material in [...]

Water in the Care of Gardens

Hand watering, though very gratifying in the sense that one is directly nurturing the plants, is most likely the least efficient and reliable way to water plants. People love to water in full sun during the day, which leads to high evaporation rates. Also, in splashing what appears to be a large volume on top [...]

An Argument For Composting

I grew up in New York City, the heart land of waste removal and disposal. You put your garbage outside your back door and it goes away. Your home is as cluttered or uncluttered as your ability to put things out the door. The other side of this was that if there was a garbage [...]

Converting To Organics From Chemicals:

      I converted my lawn from chemicals to organics by making it go “cold turkey”. I stopped applying pesticides and fertilizers  and  kept my fingers crossed. Anyone who has tried this knows exactly what happened, the lawn deteriorated steadily over a year and by the following spring I had a terrific lawn of crab and [...]

Greener Landcare Through Onsite Leaf Mulching

In an article on line in grounds magazine, Zac Reicher and Glenn Hardebeck Reviewed studies done at several well known universities on this topic. In reviewing these studies, leaves were mulched directly into the  turf. Formal mulching devices like the flowtron mulcher were not needed, instead, leaves  were mulched with a mulching mower on top [...]