How To Plot The Perfect 2012 Gardening Resolutions - 2

Brush pile teepee bird habitat
Spring cleaning in the garden can be immensely satisfying and provide a big visual payoff for a weekend of labor. But don’t start too early. You want to avoid compacting the earth by making multiple trips across a soggy lawn or flowerbeds.

This is also the time to build brush pile habitats in out-of-the-way places. This is an easy-to-do project that even the kids will love. Gather up unwanted saplings and fallen branches and loosely pile them up, alternating the direction of the layers. Birds and small mammals will take shelter and feed here. If your property is challenged for space, try assembling the brush pile in the form of a teepee and plant pole beans, squash, morning glories, clematis, ivy, or other vines to make it do double duty. 

Cut up fallen trees and limbs for fences or firewood, and stack them for later use. If it will be a while before you get to the reuse project, be sure to “stick” the wood to ensure air circulation and keep the wood from rotting.

Next, identify at least one project that will have a major impact on how the garden looks, how you use the space, or how you feel when you’re in the garden. This should be the thing that makes your heart sing. It will provide the siren song that lures you outdoors and carries you along when nothing else will.

Start the gardening resolution process by selecting no more than one major project or purchase, deciding whether it can be a diy project, or require hired help, and figuring out a budget. List four or five maintenance jobs and assign a completion date for each. Gather your books and plant catalogs together and start a wish list for trees, shrubs, perennials, edibles, and annuals.
--More next time--

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have
Keep reading