George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Before and After: Dejungling My Almost Landscape

October 26th, 2021

   It’s hard to believe three years have gone by since my wife and I moved from our long-time home (and gardens) in Cumberland County to the suburbs of Pittsburgh.

Me “dejungling” the inherited “landscaping.”

   The house we bought was in worse shape than it looked, and we’ve spent a ton of money and sweat equity fixing everything.

   The outside has been just as much of an uphill battle, but at least we could see what we got ourselves into there.

   After three years of pulling weeds, cutting down dead trees, scratching poison-ivy rashes, lugging wall stones, putting up fences, shooing deer, digging drainage ditches, working compost into Play-Doh-like “soil,” moving mountains of mulch, and finally, planting, I can say the yard is starting to look almost like a landscape now instead of a jungle.

   Also that I’m tired. And frequently sore.  The good news, though, is that I accomplished all of the above with only one trip to the emergency room.

   Things are far enough along now that I thought I’d give you a sort of “before and after” rundown of what I did and why – both to help with any re-do’s you might have in the works as well as for your general amusement (and/or horror, as the case may be).

   I should mention right off the bat that the neighbors told us that the previous owners were scarcely outside in the eight years they lived there. They had moved out altogether for the two years before we bought.

   I was suspicious about their yard-care acumen the one time I met the previous owner-guy. As we were walking around the yard, I asked him what was under that 4-by-8-foot timber-lined box that was next to the shed and covered with a well-worn sheet of plywood.

   He said, “I don’t know,” which I found to be a strange answer for someone who’d been living there for eight years.

   It turns out the mystery box was a sandbox from two owners ago. That was clue No. 1 that maybe the recent owners weren’t spending a lot of time out in the yard.

   Anyway, let’s start at the driveway leading up to the house…

   The steps to the back door split a pair of brick-supported, terraced beds that probably went up when the house was built in the 1950s. When we got there, both beds were overtaken with floppy grasses, seeded-in euonymus, and rose-of-sharons that had grown into a mini-forest, and lots of weeds.

   My solution (after first clearing out all of the junky vegetation) was to install a fence (above). One reason was to draw a boundary between the driveway beds and the back yard. Another one was to give some privacy to the back yard. And a third reason was to keep the herds of local deer out of the back yard.

   We went with a low-maintenance, white-vinyl fence and used a wooden, gated arbor we brought with us from Cumberland County as the “doorway” into the back yard. We painted it white to match the fence.

10 End-of-Season Yard Jobs

October 19th, 2021

   As the curtain closes on a wet and buggy 2021 gardening season, it’s time to do a few things that fall under the category of so-called “putting your yard to bed.”

There’s no need to remove every last leaf from the yard in fall.

   If you don’t already have your own list, here are 10 season-ending, winter-prepping yard jobs.

   1.) Clean but don’t “sanitize.” It makes sense to get rid of diseased or bug-ridden foliage and excessive leaves that threaten to smother the lawn and groundcover beds, but you don’t have to remove every last bit of organic debris from the yard.

   Consider leaving the leaves at the base of trees and shrubs, around dormant perennials, and over top of bare annual-flower and vegetable gardens.

   Mow light layers of leaves right into the lawn.

   And for heavier leaf layers that threaten to mat down the lawn or evergreen groundcovers, gather them, chop them, and add them to your compost pile.

Read George’s past leaf post on “Love ‘em and leave ‘em”

   2.) Yank the dead stuff. Frost-killed annuals and vegetables can be pulled and composted – if they’re not diseased. If they are diseased, bag and toss them.

   3.) Clip the browned-out perennial flowers. Perennials that have died back can be cut and the foliage composted as well.

   However, consider leaving some plants stand that provide food for birds over winter, such as black-eyed susans, coneflowers, liatris, sedum, and sunflowers.

A Carpet of Sedum

October 12th, 2021

   I don’t normally buy plants at box stores, but back in the spring when I was walking through the nursery at Lowe’s, a display caught my eye.

Garden Tiles trays look like this, priced at $21.98.

   Colorful trays of mixed creeping sedum varieties were stacked on an end cap with tags reading, “Garden Tiles.”

   I’d seen this idea – sometimes called “sedum carpet” – in a few garden centers and catalogs lately, too, so I decided to give a tray a try.

   The sedums were growing in standard-sized, 10-by-20-inch, hard-plastic black trays but ones that were unusually shallow – only about an inch deep.

   The mix had at least five different varieties of creeping sedum – some golden and ferny (‘Angelina?’), some more succulent and blue-tinted, and some with pinky-nail-sized green and/or burgundy-tinted foliage.

   The label said the plants were growing in an inch-thick coco-fiber mat and could be planted as one whole, 10-by-20-inch carpet or torn apart into five-inch pieces and planted separately.

   Figuring these were going to spread quickly, I decided to go with the tear-apart option.

The mats are only an inch thick.

   I used a garden knife to slice the mat into eight, five-by-five-inch pieces, then pressed the pieces 10 inches apart in front of my mailbox and in the front of a roadside rock garden.

   At a cost of $21.98, getting eight good-sized clumps of creeping sedum is a good price – especially if all or most of the varieties are perennial types. I think they are – from the looks of them and from the indication that the plants were grown by Corso’s Perennials of Sandusky, Ohio – but the label doesn’t specify hardiness zone.

   The label did say, “No digging required,” but also mentioned that planting into “loose” or “recently tilled” soil gives the best results.

   I loosened my soil a few inches, pressed the pieces into the surface, firmed around the edges, and gave the plants a good watering.

   Then I left them to fend for themselves – watering just twice over the summer when the weather got hot and dry for more than a week.

Are Lawns Horrible?

October 5th, 2021

   I detect a growing sentiment – apparently a corollary to the native-plant and save-the-pollinators movements – that we all should stop growing lawns.

Is this evil incarnate?

   It seems to go beyond just shrinking lawn space in favor of something more useful into a belief that lawns are downright evil.

   I’ve gleaned smatterings of that the past couple of years and heard opinions to that effect in a class I taught on lawn alternatives for Phipps Conservatory last summer.

   What nailed it down was an email I got from a reader (following a lawn-care post) that bluntly said, “Don’t you know that lawns are horrible? They are a desert for insects and thus birds. Plant a meadow.”

   So are lawns ecological wastelands that we all should get rid of as soon as possible? Are lawns really “horrible?”

   While I’m far from a lawn fanatic, my view is that like any other plant, turfgrass has its pros and cons as well as legitimate uses in our landscapes.

   I agree that meadows, native-plant gardens, and generally more diverse plantings are better at “servicing” the ecosystem.

   I agree that lawns cover an inordinate amount of our yard space, mainly because they’re cheap and easy to install, familiar to people, and ideal for foot-traffic uses, such as kids’ play space, entertaining, and pet runs. Turfgrass is basically our default plant choice.

   And I agree that lawns are a key source of water pollution, given all of the fertilizer, crabgrass preventers, grub controls, insecticides, and fungicides that some people use to achieve their green carpets.

   But horrible? An ecologic desert? I think that’s taking it a bit too far.

Cross These Off the “Deer-Safe” List

September 28th, 2021

   No plant is safe from the gnashing teeth of a hungry deer.

What’s left of my new Cornelian cherry dogwood tree after deer munched on it.

   That’s the lesson I learned first-hand last week when I looked out at my strangely barer driveway-bank bed, only to discover that “deer-resistant” plants the deer had let alone for two years were suddenly gnawed.

   A golden elderberry, a dark-leafed elderberry, several variegated Solomon’s seals, three panicle hydrangeas, several dwarf Virginia sweetspires, three fothergillas, a weigela, a diervilla, a dwarf lilac, and even a planting of the tropical wandering jew (how do they even know what that is?) were all browsed.

   And my patch of knowingly “risky” coral-colored, mildew-resistant Beacon impatiens? The ones that had gone untouched since May? Completely devoured, save for a couple of bare stem stubs.

   I can’t say I was completely surprised. I’ve heard the saying that there is no such thing as a “deer-proof” plant.

   But this was late summer after plentiful rains, meaning that unlike in the middle of winter, there were plenty of other dinner choices out there.

   The chewed plants (except for the impatiens) also were ones fairly low on most deer-resistant plant lists and ones I planted in my unfenced outer yard precisely because they typically aren’t deer favorites.

   I didn’t even attempt to plant hollies, roses, daylilies, hostas, any fruit or vegetable, or anything else on their preferred list out there, reserving those for use inside the back-yard deer fence.

   I thought I was in the clear outside the fence, though, after two years of real-life testing.

   Go figure. All it takes is one curious deer to polish off half a landscape bed in a single night – even plants his/her furry colleagues have passed by and passed up many times before.

   Just when you think you have them figured out…