The Newsletter for Lazy Gardeners

Welcome to the New Year. Did you know that celebrating New Years started sometime around 4000 years ago in Babylon and the custom of making a resolution started then as well? I’m told that today’s most common resolution is to lose weight but the most commonly recorded resolution in Babylon was to return borrowed farm tools. Never lend tools to an ancient Babylonian!

There’s lots of new pages up over at the water gardens information website. I’ve been putting them up regularly in December. Too many to list here. But there are lots more to come in the next few months as I bring that site up to useful status. I’ve also added some tool evaluation reports to the perennials website The newest website beginner-gardening has been added to the mix but there’s nothing on there yet. I just opened up the url and I’ll be uploading pages over the next few months. I’ll keep you all informed as I develop all three sites.

Before you ask… :-) Yes, I intend to add garden pictures to almost every page. The pages will be graphic intensive and yes, I’ll tell you about all the new garden photographs as I add them. But one thing at a time. And yes, I still have to write/work to make enough money to support my website habit. :-)

Useful Link

Want to drool a little bit over some new plants? Want to know the next best thing to come out of European gardening? Click on this Plant Spotters site to see some of the fantastic new introductions coming your way this coming spring. Read about the people who actually bring you these plants. Find resources to purchase them. Tell them what you think of their plants in their interactive community discussions. I’m looking forward to trying these plants in my garden this year and I’ll let you know what I think about them. I can hardly wait to see those delphiniums bloom. In the meantime, put a bit of plastic over your keyboard. :-)

Questions

I have butterfly garden w/all native MN plants in my back yard. It is along the north side of a south fence, so it gets about 4-6 hours of sun a day. I have plants that are suited for wet mesic soil. What I am wondering is, I would like to mulch to keep weeds under control but am nerveous because the soil is clay like and is always somewhat damp and moist. Should I mulch? If so what kind of mulch, shredded bark, bark chips, etc? I would like to keep it natural looking and enviromently friendly. If I shouldn't mulch, what should I do to keep weeds under control?

A: Well, mulch on wet soils will keep the water in. It will also encourage snails and these can be a major problem under a well-mulched damp clay soil. If you chose to mulch, you’ll have to get some E-scargot or other iron-phosphate based solution to control this pest. Compost and compost-tea (particularly compost tea) has an interesting side effect in that weeds tend not to like soils that have high bacterial and fungal counts. There’s increasing research that suggests weed problems slow down as the compost tea applications increase. I’ll be writing more about this in the new year as well as putting up web pages about the subject. Stay tuned for that.

The kind of mulch you use depends on what you like the look of and what you can afford. It is mostly an aesthetic thing rather than a functional thing. I do find that larger chunks of mulch tend to be easier for tender or small plants to push through. Cedar can have a growth reduction habit if you are using western red cedar mulch or have worked it into the soil due to chemicals the cedar contains. And no, mulch does not reduce the nitrogen content of the soil unless you work it in.

Mulch will also reduce the self-seeding of plants. The mulch effectively suppresses these as well as the weeds. So, if you have aquilegia or other short-lived plants that require self sowing to survive, you can say goodbye to them after a few years. The only mulch that actually encouraged these types of plants is a stone mulch – something on the size of pea-gravel (approx ¼ inch) and you’ll find self-sowers can become weeds. In the old farm gardens, I moved all those plants into a rock garden area and pea graveled the rock garden. They thrived up there (so did the weeds) and the regular perennials did well under the straw mulch I used (straw being cheap and locally available). Our formal front yard gardens were under a larger pine chunk bark that effectively reduced weeds.

And finally, I guess if I was in your shoes, I’d tend to experiment a little bit with the mulch. I’d mulch those plants that were herbaceous and didn’t require self sowing as an experiment. I’d keep the mulch to one to two inches deep (on sandy soils, I’d go three to four inches deep) and I’d see if the plants liked it.

You will find that as the mulch decomposes (particularly if you use a straw based or other rapidly decomposing mulch) the top layer of soil will also change to a more organic soil rather than a clay soil. One of the reasons I used straw on sandy soils was to increase the organic matter and increase the fertility of those soils. You’ll find the same thing will happen on your clay based soil.

And if you don’t mulch. Well let me paraphrase Santa Claus. “ho-ho-ho”

Doug

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I am very new to gardening and am trying to plant a herb garden, i live in a block of flats and get early afternoon sun for about an hour and a half, please advise what plants / herbs i can plant and how to pot them for filtration in the soil. Thank you Lindsey

A: Lindsey – you can grow anything in a container, from herbs to roses to fruit trees. The real question is, “what can’t you grow?”

But your problem is a lack of sunlight. The hour and a half is unfortunately only good for growing shade loving annual and perennial flowers. You can still enjoy a garden but you won’t be able to grow any of the common herbs or vegetables with that amount of sunlight. You need at least six hours of sunlight a day to grow herbs/vegetables.

Having said that little bit of bad news – check out the shade gardening pages on the perennial information site and see the articles on container gardening on my other site at

And I note that there’s quite a few articles over there that will solve some of those beginner type of questions. Feel free to browse.

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Glad to see you writing again. Question? I have something called Bunny Grass. This is the first year of last years fall planting. How big will it get and does it transplant well if I need to move it? Heather

A: Heather, this grass is named Penisetum alopecuroides or “Little Fountain Grass” or “Bunny Grass”. It is hardy to zone 5 and is treated like a regular garden grass plant. You can transplant in early spring (divides very easily) or late fall although early spring is far better. Big? Nope, this is a dwarf plant and you’re looking at somewhere around ten to twelve inches tall and eight to ten inches wide. Don’t put this one at the back of the garden if you ever want to see it again. :-) If you are growing it in zone 5 or colder, you may want to mulch it to protect against severe weather. Ice forming on the crown can be a bit of a killer.

From My Garden To Yours

The wonders of a new year have almost caused me to wax poetic about the possibilities of a new beginning for my gardening. A chance to throw off the shackles of past gardening habits and try something new looms large in my options. I even thought about taking a year off gardening but as the former British Prime Minister Sir Benjamin Disraeli said, “How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.” Taking a year off from gardening amidst the toils of existence really isn’t an option when the love of gardening is rekindled. And, if famous author Emily Bronte could love “The garden walk with weeds o’ergrown, I love them – How I love them all!” then it is not for me to pass on the chance to have a few weeds here and there in my garden and wax poetically about them.

In fact, author Frank Waugh put it quite well when he wrote, “It is well and sadly known, of course, that tens of thousands of individual house lots have not been planted. In other words these houses have not been converted into homes.” I have clearly decided that even if I’m renting for the moment, I want to convert my house into a home and the easiest way to do this is to plant a garden. It might be a container garden with my perennials but an annual garden is clearly called for to reduce the costs. Several packets of seeds will go a very long way toward creating a summer’s oasis. And it is this oasis that actor Helen Hayes wrote about when she said, appropriately enough for this wintery time of year, “All through the long winter I dream of my garden. On the first warm day of spring I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth, I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar.”

In fact, my spirits have indeed soared as I contemplate next year’s garden. And in designing it, I’m quite likely to follow author Robert Louis Stevenson’s advice, “It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.”. Ah, yes I do believe my garden will have to have fragrance as its main theme next year. I’ll choose fragrant perennials as well as fragrant annuals. There’s a worthy challenge. Plant nothing but fragrant plants this coming spring to keep a garden fully alive and vibrant all season long. The Song of Solomon (4:16) puts it nicely. “Awake, O north wind; and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden, lete its fragrance be wafted abroad. Le my beloved come to his garden, And eat its choicest fruits.”

For while fragrance might be the theme for lovers, a garden is also a restorative place. As author Hanna Rion wrote, “The greatest gift of a garden is the restoration of the five senses.” She expanded this thought, “Garden making is creative work, just as much as painting or writing a poem. It is a personal expression of self, an individual conception of beauty.” And so, I find myself thinking of this new year as one of being creative again. Of putting a new garden together, of designing for fragrance and of looking at this entire exercise as a creative process. Freud put this in perspective when he was quoted as saying, “Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”

Freud never visited my garden when the monarda tried to eat the rose bushes for lunch or the nepeta grew right over the nearby iris. Freud was wrong. Of course flowers have conflicts, and these conflicts point us to the essence of being a gardener. Reflecting our own conflicts, gardeners manage their plants, putting them into perspective and focusing energy on what can be done, what can be achieved by individual plants. Poor gardeners never learn from their mistakes or having avoided a mistake one year, simply repeat the same combination year after boring year. Good gardeners work with new plants, new combinations and new thoughts on a yearly basis. Good gardeners make lots of mistakes but they learn from them and absorb this learning into their very souls. A good gardener rarely makes the same mistake twice in a row.

This is not to say gardening in this new year will be without challenges. Gardening is the second most challenging thing I’ve done in my life. Decorating guru Martha Stewart plainly agrees, “Gardening is a humbling experience.” and this may be “a good thing”. Weeds abound and challenge our creativity and our patience. Humourist Dave Barry noted, “Crabgrass can grow on bowling balls in airless rooms, and there is no known way to kill it that does not involve nuclear weapons.” This might be overstated but cultivating a tolerance for weeds and a certain proportion of disorder in your life and garden is a requisite for being a great gardener. For as Robert Pyle said, “But make no mistake: the weeds will win: nature bats last.”

And nature does indeed bat last but in the meantime, the coming year will be a great gardening year. All of my containers are empty in the man pantry awaiting new plants and designs. The garden out my kitchen window is surrounded by trees and fragrant shade gardens beckon in my imagination. 2005 will indeed by a good year for creative gardening and soul restoration here in my world. I can only wish the same for each of you.