Monthly Archives: May 2008

Renovating My Lawn: ready, set–wait.

Having spent most of the past six months researching and writing about this topic (and yesterday writing about one aspect of it), I’m gearing up to put all my new theoretical knowledge into practice. One thing is sure: if it works on my lawn, it’ll work anywhere.

Indeed, if you saw my lawn, you’d probably look elsewhere for advice on caring for yours. Bkyd6_3 In my defense, let me say that neither lawn nor garden (nor house, for that matter) had received any care from the previous owner, one of Bozeman’s many avid outdoor folk who used the house to sleep in, but who for all intents and purposes lived outside–not in his back yard, but in the mountains nearby.

So for the twenty odd years of his tenure, the grass that was here got mown, but that was about it. And truth to tell, it hasn’t gotten much more from us in the seven years we’ve lived here. I did undertake one major task, digging the creeping bell-flower roots out of one section of lawn, but that is definitely a post unto itself.

This spring, I’ve been weeding sporadically, trying to get things cleaned up enough to start the sequence laid out so neatly in the article I’ve been working on: weed, aerate, amend, overseed. (If my amendments are good enough, I may not fertilize till fall.) I’ve never aerated, and I’m dying to see what transformative effects it will have. I’ve gotten a seed mix from a local greenhouse, their low-water use mixture of native fescues, which should do well in our largely shady yard. This is the year—this is when it will happen—this is it, I’m sure.

If it ever stops raining.

Northern Lawns, Made in the Shade

I’m driven to write this because I saw something recently advising anyone trying to grow grass in the shade to use sod, not seeds. But the right seed mix will overcome most seeding problems, even in the shade.

The problem with sod, in the north, at least, is that very few types of grass are available, so if people are looking for sod in the north, they’ll all too often end up with Kentucky Bluegrass. Kentucky blue is a lousy choice anywhere in the western US or Canada because it requires a lot of water, and a poor choice for shade, because it requires a lot of sun. (More on the water issue in upcoming posts.)

A couple of companies (see below) have recently developed seed mixes specifically for northerners, consisting of several different fine-bladed fescues. These grasses, developed from natives that grow well in shade, put down deep roots (for grass), which makes them extremely drought-resistant. They grow more slowly in summer (needing less mowing) than in spring or fall, and top out at about eight inches, so in some places it’s not necessary to mow at all. Fescue mixes are therefore ideal for lawns in the north, in the west, or in any cooler area where water-use is an issue–which means just about everywhere, these days.

Establishing such grasses certainly takes longer than establishing sod or even than growing Kentucky bluegrass from seed. KB has rhizomes, shoots that extend outwards from the roots and start new plants. Most fescues are bunch grasses which propagate through seeds (and seeds never develop on most lawns) or through tillers, new shoots that grow up on the outside of already established plants, extending their size.

Since fescues sprout more slowly than some other grasses, weeds have an excellent opportunity to move in and take over. This is one of the reasons many people advise against seeding lawns with fescue, especially in shady areas, since shade will slow growth even more.

The solution is to include an annual ryegrass in the seed mix. The rye-grass sprouts quickly and will help hold the fort till the fescues establish themselves, then dies off in the fall, leaving the field (or fort) to the fescues.

I haven’t tried seed from either of these companies, so please don’t take this as an endorsement!  They’re just the two I happened to encounter in the course of my research.

Bluestem Nursery Enviroturf
http://www.bluestem.ca/enviroturf.htm

Wildflower Farm EcoTurf
www.wildflowerfarm.com/index.php?p=catalog&parent=4&pg=1#Drought

Blame Blotanical–it’s not my fault!

And so, I have just wasted used employed whiled away another whole delightful morning (and then some) on Blotanical, the only gardening forum I’ve joined so far where I actually spend any time. Way too much time, at that–so much I may find myself without a job, a husband, or even a garden, as I’m spending time online I should probably spend digging and planting.

Stuart, who runs the site, recently asked for patience as he struggled to fix a malfunctioning page; he pointed out that he was managing the site on top of a full-time job and a family that needs him. My family needs me too! (Of course, it’s a bunch of guys who’d rather slit their throats than admit it, but Stuart doesn’t know that.)

You’d think, then, that he’d have more sympathy for the rest of us, but no, he just goes merrily along adding new members  whose sites one must check out and interesting features and so on. I thought I’d at least get a breather while the Picks page was down, but that was only a day or so ago, and it’s already up again! Is there no mercy?

I swear, every day when I log on, I promise myself I’ll be off again in an hour at most. But first I check my own "plot" to see if I have any new messages (one of the neat features at Blotanical is that you can message other members directly and EASILY), and of course I have to respond to anything new, and check out the plots and blogs of all the folks I’ve heard from or gotten to know, and then there’s the infamous Picks site, (the one that went blitzo the other day), where one can view a list of the 200 most recent posts by members (on their own, independent blogs) and "pick" ones you like. Of course, it’s absolutely necessary to check the standing of one’s own most recent posts and e-mail thanks to anyone fool kind enough to pick them–one of the best ways to waste time get to meet other bloggers.

Today the site has a new, format–each post-title is followed by a line or two of text–which is neat in itself, but which makes getting through them all very time-consuming and searching for a particular post downright maddening. So really, it’s Stuart’s fault, entirely, that I’ve gotten no "real" work done yet today. (We will, please, ignore the many other mornings when I spent as long on the site, even when the Picks page was, indeed, a single page.)

So what with picking a few posts and commenting on a few others, and finding a hilarious post on The Garden Monkey and searching for it through all those pages of new picks so as to give it my personal thumbs up, and discovering two new forums and registering with them and writing a comment to Stuart about not liking the new Picks page, and so on (not to mention doing THIS), I haven’t gotten a whole lot done today.

If I do lose my job (I work at home, so no one’s watching over my shoulder) do you think I could sue Stuart for lost wages? (Don’t worry, Stuart, you wouldn’t be out much.)

HELP WANTED–2nd Year Onions?

You know that stage of budding friendships when people stop discussing their successes and start revealing their insecurities, their BO, their failings, their lapsed credit? (In my youth (a word which in my mind is now always pronounced as Danny DeVito does it in My Cousin Vinny, viz, ‘yoot’) I knew we’d reached that stage when the other person said something like, "So—just how tall are you?") Well, folks, I feel we’ve reached that stage. I hope we have, because otherwise your system may undergo a shock.

Yes, I am about to reveal information which will permanently dislodge me from that gardening pedestal upon which I have hitherto resided. The aura of perfection will be shredded; the mantle of infallibility will fall, and I will stand before you as a (very short) human being.

Leeks1 The question itself is simple: how good are leeks and onions which didn’t get picked in the fall and resprout the following spring? The ones I have in mind—or at least in my garden—never reached maturity, and seem perfectly healthy. Some are budding. Is it important to pull them before they flower or go to seed? Are onions that winter over of lower quality?

I’ve found that overlooked carrots, for instance, are woody and often pocked. What about onions?

So now you know. I don’t even harvest everything in my garden, I don’t clean out the beds in the fall, and I plant so late that some things don’t have a chance to fulfill their potential. I know it comes as a shock, but there it is. If you can’t live with that, maybe we should rethink this whole relationship..

Algae Blooms, Red Tides, and Dead Zones–another reason to go organic

Yesterday’s post on the environmental impact of synthetic fertilizers got so long I split this part off to post separately. One of the articles published in Science was about the effect of fertilizers once they reach the ocean, and the description I read in the Economist mentioned the stuff listed above–algae blooms, red tides and dead zones. I’d heard of each of these, but hadn’t been clear on the definitions or connections  till I poked around a bit for this post. Here’s what I found:

Dead zones in the ocean are just what they sound like—areas where nothing lives, because fertilizer has been washed to the sea, often by spring melts and floodwaters. The fertilizer doesn’t directly kill anything; instead, it causes algae blooms as oceanic plants are stimulated to sudden growth by nitrogen in the fertilizer. All fine and good—but the plants also need oxygen, and somehow they seem to be more aggressive and successful in getting it than anything else around. The result? Fish, clams, mussels, crabs, shrimp, all die. Continue reading