Does your fern have shriveled, brown fronds or a bleached, discolored appearance? We know that people are susceptible to sunburn, but we don’t think of plants as being able to get sunburned as well.

It’s a common problem. When shade-loving plants like ferns are put into a sunny situation, their fronds shrivel around the edges, and their leaf color may become pale and bleached. This may be because you misjudged the amount of light the location gets, or it could happen as a result of a tree being pruned and letting in more light than the plant is used to.

This can also happen with new plants. If a plant’s been under cover in a greenhouse and hasn’t been properly “hardened off”, it can get sunburnt, even if that variety would ordinarily do well with that amount of light.

Here are some photos so you can compare and contrast healthy with sunburned ferns:

Happy tassel fern:

Tassel fern with sunburn:

Happy autumn fern:

Autumn fern with sunburn:

Now, this browning due to sunburn isn’t to be confused with the normal shedding of leaves. Ferns usually retain their leaves for 1-2 years, and then the oldest leaves usually turn brown and die back. You know you have a problem if your fern fronds start looking funky sooner than that. The new growth should stay looking green and attractive for at least a year.

Normal browning of fern fronds usually occurs on the oldest fronds that are closest to the base. When dealing with sunburn, the fronds that are browning are the ones at the top of the plant that are exposed to light. If you shift a brown frond, the ones beneath it are usually nice and green.

You can see in this photo of sword ferns in the wild, that the natural die-off of fern fronds happens on the lowest fronds only:

So, what do you do if you suspect your plant is sunburnt?

First, make sure it’s not a watering issue. Too little water as well as too much can cause the same issue of leaves going brown before they are supposed to or shriveling at the edges. Is the soil soggy, or very dry? If so, fix that issue before assuming sunburn is the problem, and wait to see whether the new leaves that unfurl over the next six months or so develop the problem as well. If they do, it is likely sunburn and the plant will need to be moved to a shadier location.

Second, if it’s a newly purchased plant, sometimes just giving it time to settle in and get acclimated is enough to solve a mild case of sunburn. While the plant can’t repair any leaves that have already been damaged, any new fronds that unfurl should stay healthy and green. If they too become damaged either right away or over the course of a few months, you probably need to move the plant.

Once you move the plant to a new location, it should settle in quickly. After the first month, any new fronds that unfurl should come out looking healthy and green, and should stay that way for at least a year.

Ferns are low-maintenance, easy-care plants that rarely suffer from pests or disease. If you give them the light and water they prefer, they’ll perform well for you for years to come.

Read about my favorite ferns here.

Check out a great book about diagnosing garden problems easily, What’s Wrong With My Plant? by Deardorff and Wadsworth.

Lawn care, at first glance, seems pretty straightforward. Mow, water, apply various bagged items, and take the time to frolic playfully on your fancypants expanse of greenery.

But after owning a lawn for any period of time, most of us start to ponder the deeper questions surrounding lawn. Questions like, “dang, why does my water bill double every summer?” and “why does the pull-cord on my mower have to be such a pain?” and, “geez, where are all the birds and bugs around this joint?”.

Issues like these are enough to harsh anyone’s lawn mellow.

The standard rallying cry in response to this is “ditch your lawn!”. While minimizing and replacing your standard American lawn with front yard food or native plants is an awesome goal, it can be an expensive and time-consuming task to tackle all in one go (though this month, my fellow Roundtable members have some options to inspire you to do just that).

Is there an alternative to the American lawn that doesn’t involve outright removal? I’d offer an emphatic yes.

Here are six ways to hack your lawn care routine and have an alternative lawn, without ripping it out:

Skip the blue pelletized big-agribusiness lawn fertilizers and scatter some clover seeds instead

According to Sue Sweeney, old-fashioned lawns used to have about 1/3 white Dutch clover added to the seeding mix, because clover is a nitrogen-fixer – it adds nitrogen to the soil just by growing there. Since nitrogen’s in charge of the green growth side of things, clover’s a perfect lawn companion.

What you should know: clover’s slippery to run on, so it’s not good for  too many racings-about, and since clover is also great for attracting pollinators like honeybees and your local native bees, if anyone in your home has a bee allergy of some kind it might not be the best. But to me, it seems like one of the simplest ways to reduce your footprint and bring life to your lawn.

Vegetarians: quit feeding animals to your plants

While organic fertilizers are the best choice for our gardens (they’re slow-release and nourish the worms and beneficial microbes in the soil), unfortunately the blood meal, bone meal, feather meal, and fish meal are made of exactly the ingredients they sound like. They’re waste products from meat operations.

Even as a meat-eater, I try to buy from small, organic local farms that raise pastured animals, and I’m not convinced there is a fertilizer option that supports that. So how can you give your lawn a boost without sacrificing your values? Try these animal-friendly options:

Alfalfa meal has nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, plus a natural growth stimulant called triacontanol that gives plants some superpower growing mojo.

Kelp meal is high in micronutrients and has both gibberellins and auxins, more of those natural growth hormones that plants make for themselves.

Compost is low in nutrients but encourages all the beneficial microbes and worms to do their thing and produce natural fertilizers. So it’s great for helping your lawn become more self-reliant.

And even if you opt for a normal organic fertilizer, find an OMRI-listed one, which has organic and non-GMO ingredients.

Grow your own on your lawn

As countless people in my hippie-town have found, growing food on your lawn is pretty dang easy. You construct a raised bed on your lawn (8″ or taller), put some cardboard down at the bottom of it to keep the lawn from growing up through, fill with soil and plant!

Keep in mind that if you have some lawn around it, you’ll want to leave easy mowing access on all sides. But this is one of the easiest ways to make your lawn a place you visit and use and not just a dead zone of green monoculture.

(Read The Edible Front Yard for tips on making this pretty rather than farm-like. The photo shown is from her book, illustrating a hellstrip planting with an industrial-cool corrugated metal raised bed.)

Ditch the corded electric mower and the retro-style push mowers

For a while, the latest trend was electric mowers. The problem with a corded electric mower should be obvious to anyone who has ever run over the cord while vacuuming. A mower has blades down there. And while the ones with batteries sound good in theory, my landscaper friends scoff at their performance, and the eco-peeps say the (mostly lead) batteries they use are pretty harsh on the environment.

Then those old-style push mowers came into fashion. Which is cool, except they’re heavy and don’t work that well. I have a friend who bought a push mower, lasted about three rounds with it, and hired a lawn service. And she works out!

That’s why my latest love is the Fiskars Momentum Mower – kind of a new-skool take on the push mower that solves the issues the old ones had. It’s been one of the top-selling mowers on Amazon for some time, and has gotten incredible reviews. (I’m giving one away this week to a lucky commenter!) I tested it out on a few stunt lawns, and in my opinion it’s far and away the best option out there.

Have a green lawn without watering much

Have you ever noticed that when you don’t water the lawn, the only thing that stays green are the weeds? Well, why not take advantage of the fact that some other types of plants can co-mingle with your lawn and stay green with less juice?

Wooly thyme, blue star creeper (in shade), Roman chamomile, dwarf yarrow, and English daisy (shown) are all things that can be seeded or planted in your lawn come fall (plant or seed with some compost and time it with the first fall and winter rains) so that next summer, your low-water lawn has some color and scent to enjoy. Two sites to check out: Hobbs and Hopkins Lawn Flower Mixes, and Ecolawn.

As a bonus, a lot of these lawn companions attract the happy bees and pollinators that make your garden fun to be in.

Dodge the lawn peer-pressure thing

If you have ditched your lawn, my local friend-in-the-dirt Donna Wildearth came up with a clever prop to sidestep the haters.

Just plant up a cool little pot of grass and set it within your landscaping. Anyone wondering why you don’t have a lawn can be deftly reassured that indeed, lawn is a vital part of your design scheme (and hey, a small patch like that is a lot easier to maintain!).

(Thanks to Donna for letting me show off her bit of lawn!)

Want to read more?

Check out the rest of the Garden Designers Roundtable posts on lawns, and welcome our special guest-posters this month from The Lawn Reform Coalition:

Susan Harris : Garden Rant : Takoma Park, MD

Susan Harris : Gardener Susan’s Blog : Takoma Park, MD

Billy Goodnick : Cool Green Gardens : Santa Barbara, CA

Evelyn Hadden : Lawn Reform.Org : Saint Paul, MN

Saxon Holt : Gardening Gone Wild : Novato, CA

Ginny Stibolt : Florida Native Plant Society : Green Cove Springs, FL

Tara Dilliard : Vanishing Threshold: Garden, Life, Home : Atlanta, GA

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA

Shirley Bovshow : Eden Makers : Los Angeles, CA

Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT

Rochelle Greayer : Studio G : Boston, MA

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Pam Penick : Digging : Austin, TX

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK

Laura Livengood Schaub : Interleafings : San Jose, CA

Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO

Ivette Soler : The Germinatrix : Los Angeles, CA

Douglas Owens-Pike : Energyscapes : Minneapolis, MN

Debbie Roberts : A Garden of Possibilities : Stamford, CT

And, check out my post today over at the Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens blog, entitled: Chipping Away at the Lawn.

Photo credits: clover by steve p2008 on Flickr, front yard raised bed by Ivette Soler from her book The Edible Front Yard (copyright Ivette Soler and courtesy Timber Press), English daisy by Hobbs and Hopkins.

A couple weeks back, I reviewed this deliciously funny and extremely useful guide to sustainable landscaping by Owen Dell. You can check out my video and written review here.

I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to share an excerpt with you, so you could get a feel for Owen’s writing style, which is useful, practical, and off-the-cuff. Without further ado, here’s:

Ten Projects That Pay You and the Environment Back Big Time (an excerpt from Sustainable Landscaping for Dummies):

“In this chapter, I introduce some projects you can tackle right away (for
relatively little or no money!) that make a big difference to you and the
environment. They’re all easy, and most of them don’t require the use of
heavy equipment, chiropractors, or bad language. Enjoy.

Make Your Lawn Smaller

Most lawns have parts that are never used for anything other than giving the
lawn mower its weekly workout. Do what savvy sustainable landscapers
everywhere are doing: Cut that lawn down to size! (Refer to Chapter 19 for
the scoop on lawns and lawn alternatives.) Make a lap lawn — a phrase
coined by a gardener I once met. Long and narrow, this type of lawn is still
perfectly suited to hosting a friendly game of catch or a chase with the family
pooch. After its midriff bulge has been whacked away, your svelte new lawn
is ready for sustainable action. Consider a maximum size of 20 by 40 feet —
a total of 800 square feet. If you can do with less, great.

Tip: In making the lawn smaller, you create new borders. Plant these borders with
useful, beautiful, climate-appropriate plants that need less care, water, and
fertilizer than the original lawn did. Drip-irrigate and mulch the borders to
save water. Don’t forget to move your sprinkler heads to the new edges of the
lawn to save more water (and money).

Tune Up Your Sprinkler System

Out-of-whack sprinklers result in water waste and poor lawn performance,
so you need to give the system a tune-up every so often. Turn the system
on one valve at a time so you can test it and get everything working right.
(See Chapter 10 to find out how to maintain your irrigation system.)

Reprogram Your Irrigation Controller

Conventional irrigation controllers have no idea how much water your plants
need. They’re just timers, faithfully carrying out whatever instructions you
gave them the last time you programmed them. Umm, you did adjust your
controller at some point, right?

If you haven’t, now is the time. Get out the instruction book for your controller
so you can make sense of the simple-yet-often-obscure ways of programming
these pesky beasts. Then read Chapter 9 of this book to discover
how to make seasonal adjustments to your controller. Reprogramming your
irrigation controller isn’t terribly difficult, and it saves you a bunch of money.
Your plants will thank you, too.

Install a Smart Irrigation Controller

If you don’t want to reprogram the controller you already have (see the
preceding section), yank that old clunker off the wall and put in a smart
controller. A smart irrigation controller receives signals from — get this —
outer space. These signals reset the controller’s program continuously,
based on current meteorological data taken from local weather stations.

To install and program a smart controller, you just have to answer simple
questions about your soil, plants, and so on. You tweak it a bit over the first
few weeks, and when you’re done, you probably never have to touch it again.

These units have generated water savings of 25 to 50 percent, which means
that your water bill will go down. Even better, you can gloat when the
neighbors come over. Sustainability is just the coolest thing. See Chapter 9
for more on smart water management.

Tip: Many water districts offer rebates for installing smart controllers.

Axe Your Overgrown Plants

Take note of how many hours per month you spend keeping plants from
growing too big for the space they’re in. You could’ve spent that time
enjoying a nice, sustainable activity, such as loafing.

Plants don’t ask you how big you want them to be. If they’re programmed to
get 100 feet tall, they always try to do so. So if you want an 8-foot-tall plant,
you need to choose one that grows to 8 feet at maturity. Then you’ll never
have to trim it. Plus, it looks better and is healthier when left alone. (And
you’ll look so relaxed in that hammock.)

Pull Up Sissy Plants

Go around your yard with a shovel and perhaps a digging bar, swiftly and
mercifully eliminating namby-pamby plants of whatever kind. Or at least
move them where they’ll perform better, if location is the problem. Probably
80 percent of gardening problems are caused by 20 percent of plants. You
know which ones they are. Go get ’em.

My favorite sissy plant to weed out is the rose. I know the term may offend
some people, but hybrid tea roses aren’t so great at taking care of themselves.
It hurts me to ponder the rust, the leaf spot, the bugs, and all the
other ills and ailments that plague these pitiable creatures. I consider it a
public service to replace them with something a little more durable.

Dump Your Chemical Arsenal

Exactly what excuse does anyone have for holding onto that noxious-smelling
collection of insecticide, weed killer, and fert-’n’-hurt? C’mon — you know
you’ll never use that stuff again. You’re a sustainable gardener now! Put
your old chemicals in a sealed container and then take them to your local
hazardous-waste collection center for safe disposal. Then go home, perform
a cleansing ritual or two in your garage, and get on with your life. Feel good
knowing that you’ll probably never have to make the trek to the toxic dump
again.

Warning: Some of this stuff is truly treacherous to your health, so be sure to wear
protective gear and be very careful not to spill anything.

Trade Your Power Tools for Hand Tools

Shop around for some truly good, lifetime-quality hand tools, and leave the
power ones out at the curb for some other fool to struggle with. You’ll be
glad you did.

Power tools actually don’t save much effort. First, you have to work pretty
hard to earn the money to buy them. Then you have to store them somewhere,
do tune-ups and repairs, fuel and oil them, wipe them down and
sharpen the blades, and adjust the dang carburetor over and over because
nobody but the high priests of internal combustion can get it right the first
time. Besides all that, think about the number of times you’ve pulled the
starter cord with no result. Must be in the thousands, right? You could’ve
had the lawn mowed with a simple push mower by the time you regained
your composure and got that wheezy old mower running.

Mulch Your Beds

Naked beds don’t work. The soil dries out too quickly, root systems suffer
heat and cold, weeds come up everywhere, rain washes earth away,
beneficial soil microorganisms suffer, drip tubing shows, mud sticks to
your boots . . . I could go on and on. In nature, organic material rains down
from plants constantly, creating mulch and returning valuable nutrients to
the soil. The sustainable landscaper mimics this elegant system by practicing
chop and drop pruning (refer to Chapter 20) and by spreading some form
of organic mulch on the surface of the soil. For more on mulching, see
Chapter 16.

Grow Food

What better use can you have for your land than growing your own food? The
list of advantages is a mile long (but I won’t bore you with the details). Plant
a few crops that are easy to grow in your area and then devote a little time,
money, and effort to reap the rewards. Flip to Chapter 18 for more information
about sustainable veggie gardening.”

Want to read more from Owen Dell? Check out these recent blog posts:

Do Rain Barrels Really Work?

Adversarial Horticulture

The Attack of the Designosaurs

Or, check out Sustainable Landscaping For Dummies on Amazon.com.

***Giveaway below! Comment to win one of SIX sets of slug shields!*** EDIT: Winners have been chosen and contacted. Thanks everyone for entering!

I’ve written before about how nasty the usual snail and slug baits are. In fact, here in California, metaldehyde snail bait is the #1 poisoning agent of dogs. Hmmm…. Fido or slug-free plants? Not a hard choice. Luckily, there are a lot of excellent organic options available, and the Slug Shield is one of them.

You’ve probably heard that copper repels snails and slugs, and you’ve probably also read that snails and slugs don’t like to glide across scratchy surfaces. The Slug Shield works by combining both of those actions into one control.

It’s basically a scratchy, tangled mass of copper that you wrap around the stems of plants to prevent snails and slugs from crawling up. It works on anything where you can totally encircle the base of the plant with it, and on plants where you can keep the plant’s foliage from hitting the ground.

It’s even purported to work on lettuces and cabbages, which is awesome, because I just dug up a delicious lettuce the other day only to find the center of it overrun with slugs. Um, yeah – the chickens got to eat my lovely buttercrunch lettuce after that. You just wrap the slug shield around the bottom of the head, touching the soil, and as long as no leaves flop to the ground and form a leafy bridge for the snails and slugs to travel safely onto the plant, you’re good! No bait needed, even the organic kind.

Now, obviously this doesn’t work on every type of plant. My artichokes, for example, seem like a good candidate but have a terrible habit of flopping onto the ground every time a breeze ruffles them. But I think dahlias, citrus, lettuce, peas, chard, cabbage – even hostas would be good bets to try it on.

(Despite Mackerel’s obvious enjoyment of his Slug Shield, I’m not sure they should be used as kitty toys!)

If you have a thicker-stemmed plant, you can tie multiple slug shields together to make a longer wrap. They do expand with plant growth, so they won’t hurt your plants as they grow. You can even put a slug shield around the bases of freestanding trellises, for vines or climbing veggies that are disturbed by snails and slugs.

Want to try the Slug Shield for yourself? They’ve donated a whopping SIX sets of Slug Shields for you guys to win. Just leave a comment below, and I’ll hold a random drawing in one week. EDIT: Congrats to the six winners! I’ve sent you each an email.

All gardeners evolve. There is something about being outside and working hard in nature that inspires learning and growth.

The issue of fall leaves is one I’ve been struggling with lately. Last year I wrote about why you shouldn’t let your fall leaves stay, and all of those reasons are still true, but…

This year as I’ve learned more about the importance of insects in our ecosystem (they feed the birds, pollinate, eat other “bad” bugs, and generally play an important part in the natural cycles that keep our food growing and our world pleasant), I’ve also learned that many insects overwinter in our fallen leaves.

If you use plants to attract birds, or put out a feeder, but you rake your leaves up, you are kind of sabotaging your efforts to care for wildlife, because the birdies love to eat bugs! In addition, leaves add nutrients and softness to the soil, and can be good protection from the frost in cold climates.

The problem? Leaves can also rot perennials, shade out sections of lawn or groundcovers, and can overwinter BAD bugs too! Not to mention, the wilder aesthetic of leaving the leaves where they fall isn’t right for every garden.

So what’s the conscientious gardener to do? I do think it’s possible to care for wildlife and the environment while still having a clean-looking garden and taking care of our ornamental plants. Here’s some of the middle ground I’m finding in the to-rake-or-not-to-rake debate:

Pro: Good bugs overwinter in our leaf litter.

Con: Bad bugs do too.

A number of garden plants are really susceptible to disease because they’ve been bred heavily for flowers or fruit instead of for disease resistance. Roses get all kinds of bugs and fungus, Camellias get petal blight (brown mushy flowers), Rhododendrons can get thrips, and fruit trees can get any number of insect and fungal diseases.

All of these issues can overwinter in the warmth and protection of leaf litter. In addition, if you have snails and slugs in your garden, they love to lay eggs in fluffy fallen leaves, particularly in fall.

The solution?

I rake up fall leaves from around anything that I have experienced pest problems with or that I know is susceptible to problems like that (Roses, Rhodies, Camellias, hybrid Fuchsias, peach and apple trees, citrus), and I take that leaf litter to my city’s compost, which I know will get hot enough to kill any diseases.

For snail reduction, you can remove the litter around susceptible perennials and compost it on site, or just spread the leaves around trees and shrubs.

With other areas of the garden, leave things as natural as possible to promote the overwintering of salamanders and “good” bugs , both of which eat garden pests, and the native insects that so many birds love to eat.

If I need to rake in some areas, I try to compost it myself to avoid the gas, time and expense of taking leaf litter to the compost site and then bringing purchased compost back from there at a later date.

Pro: Leaves are great protection from frost.

Con: In wet climates, matted leaves can shade out sections of groundcover or lawn, and can rot sensitive perennials.

In my climate, we get a ton of rain and some frost. I’ve seen maple leaves mat down over large areas of groundcover or lawn and totally shade and kill an area in a month. In addition, so many perennials can be smothered and rot from a nearly impenetrable mat of fall leaves.

The solution?

Gently remove leaves that are directly on top of any plant, whether that’s lawn, groundcover, perennials, or even shrubs if you get a clump of leaves matted on them! Then shred the leaves, either in a shredder or by running on top of them with the mower a few times.

Because shredding the leaves makes sure they can’t form a thick, killing mat on top of plants, you can then toss the  finely shredded leaves back into your garden beds, or just compost them for next year’s use.

Pro: Leaves are one of the best types of compost available for improving your soil.

Con: Landscape fabric and wood chip mulch don’t allow the composted leaves to contribute to the soil.

If you have wood chip mulch or landscape fabric in place to prevent weeds, the leaves will break down on top of the mulch or fabric and form a delicious growing medium in which new weeds will love to sprout. That makes landscape fabric in particular worse than nothing.

The solution?

If you want the soil-building benefits of your fall leaves, you can rake them up and compost them, then once it’s all broken down into actual non-bulky compost, you can move your mulch aside and spread it, then move your mulch back on top for weed prevention.

If you have landscape fabric, you can move the wood chips aside around the holes in the fabric where plants are, get a good grip on the edge of the fabric around those holes, and lift it up so you can tuck handfuls of compost under the fabric to feed the plants.

If you do this, you’ll need to be careful to spread the compost evenly under the fabric and reach as far out under the fabric as possible so you don’t just dump soil on the base of your plants (plants don’t approve of that). It’s a bit of a pain, but slipping fresh compost under your landscape fabric can really help your plants thrive.

If you want the wildlife benefits of leaving your leaves, I’ve found it’s fine to just rake them in spring and compost them then. I’ve never seen a significant buildup of compost on top of chips or landscape fabric from leaving whole leaves through one winter.

Pro: I love the benefits of leaves.

Con: I hate how messy they look!

Our personal aesthetics vary so much. The contrast between our garden and a neighbor’s, more crisp lines of architecture vs. the softer style of a country home, and the style of planting we do in our gardens all have an impact on whether or not fallen leaves fit in with our garden’s style.

The solution?

If fallen leaves currently look out of place, you can help your garden and your own eye evolve to make them a better fit, or you can just do what you can to reap the benefits from them without having an impact on how things look.

If you want to go the design route and help your garden be a place where you don’t notice fallen leaves, there are a few things you can do:

• Plant year-round, evergreen plants in the foreground of your garden beds so that fallen leaves towards the back aren’t so visible.
• Plant in larger groups so that the overwintering plants make a bolder, more intentional design statement. If your eye is drawn by a stand of red-stemmed Dogwoods or a drift of Hellebores, you’ll be less likely to see the drifts of leaves as a messy element and more likely to see the poetry in the way they fall.
• Draw the eye upward with hanging bird feeders, structural or sculpture elements, and taller planting elements that bloom in winter, like the evergreen Darwin’s Barberry (Berberis darwinii) shrub, a Hardenbergia vine with purple or white flowers, Silk Tassel or Garrya elliptica with its hanging white tassels, or a Coral Bark Japanese Maple for tall stem interest.
• Spend more time in nature and notice how the palette of browns and greens in winter has a relaxed sense of calm. Visit natural gardens and start to intentionally find the beauty in a garden left naturally.

If you love your garden as it is and prefer the neater appearance of fewer fallen leaves, but still want to help wildlife and get the benefits of healthier soil from your fallen leaves, here are a few things you can do to find a middle ground:

• Rake up leaves from high-traffic areas and places that you can see easily; leave any leaves you can’t really see and let them compost naturally where they fall.
• Try to avoid the gasoline-intensive cycle of using a blower or vacuum to pick up leaves, setting them out for the city to take, then going to purchase finished compost from them later on. Instead, rake by hand, compost on site, and re-use your compost in your garden in spring.
• If you won’t be growing winter vegetables, you can layer leaves on your vegetable beds to hold down weeds all winter while supporting native bugs and improving your soil. In spring, the leaves will be mostly composted and you should be able to plant.
• Plant a few natives in your garden to help support wildlife in other ways. Peter Haggard has some tips on the best wildlife-supporting native plants for coastal Northern California.

Where do you fall in the Great Leaf Debate? Let me know in the comments below, and be sure and check out what other gardeners are saying on this topic:

Kylee Baumle, The Problem with Leaves

Beautiful Wildlife Garden Who Lives in the Leaves?

Heather Holm, Leave the Leaves

Carole Brown, I am the Lorax I Speak for The Leaves

Debbie Roberts,  Weighing in on the Great Leaf Debate

Debbie’s post over at Garden of Possibilities was a catalyst for me to really think over an issue I’ve been having a lot lately – the Neat VS Natural debate.

It’s not a debate I’ve been having with anyone else, it’s more been an internal struggle. You see, the more I learn about gardening, the more I want to garden in a way that’s a little more natural, a little more wildlife-oriented.

The problem I encounter is that so much of what I’ve been learning to do for wildlife just looks messy to me. I’m sorry, but it does. Fallen leaves piling up, masses of brown flowerheads and dead foliage scattered about…

You don’t spend nearly 15 years running a landscape maintenance company without developing a bit of a neatness fetish in the garden.

I’m not saying I don’t appreciate a bit of intentional leaving it be – the artfully-left seedpods, the carefully-chosen flowerheads that stand brown and proud, and the fallen leaves that are still a lovely array of colors. But when it starts to veer from artfully-placed into the realm of out-of-control, I kind of lose my appreciation for it.

But I haven’t lost my appreciation for native bugs, for the songbirds they feed, the butterflies they become, or the happy thrum of native bees in the summer garden.

So when I hear that a lot of good bugs overwinter in leaf litter, I feel like a jerk for raking it all up and composting it. And I love to watch birds scratching and pecking in the garden, but if I suggest we leave some dead flowerheads and foliage till spring, I worry that my clients will think I’ve lost it.

This is the crux of the issue for me: in my own home garden, I’m cool with lettings things go for a bit. I’m down with a casual look – my chickens have made sure of that! But when gardening for clients, most of them have an entirely different kind of garden.

How can I leave fall leaf litter for overwintering bugs in a garden with landscape fabric and wood chip mulch? Suggesting to them that attracting spiders (which will kill off pest insects) should be adequate reason to let compost build up on top of their landscape fabric is hardly going to go over well!

In these neatly-kept gardens, deadheads don’t look vaguely romantic – they just look out of place. Perhaps there are some ways I could adjust the planting scheme so that the soft browns of the autumn and winter garden fit in better, but for this year, right now – how do I reconcile what I know is good for wildlife with what I know my clients’ eyes have adjusted to see?

I could take the easy road and say that I just do what clients want me to do in their own gardens, because that is absolutely true. But it is also true that because I care for so many gardens, I have a real opportunity to make a difference in numerous small ways. Any change I can make is magnified across every garden I care for.

This is why I’m reading blogs like Wildlife Garden, Ecosystem Gardening, and Town Mouse and Country Mouse. Yeah, they’re fun, and interesting, and the pictures are lovely – but what I’m really hoping is that someone, somewhere will have the magic beans that will allow me to find a happy middle ground, that protects and honors wildlife while giving my clients the clean garden aesthetic they expect.

Yes, it’d be ideal if we all adjusted our perspectives to see natural beauty as the best kind there is. But until that day comes, I’m struggling with how best to “sell” some of these shifts towards the natural garden to my clients and even myself…

Where do you fall on the neat vs. natural continuum?

Have you learned to love the relaxed feeling of a more natural garden, or do you prefer things to look neat and in their place? Let me know in the comments below.

We’ve all heard about the plight of the honeybees by now – pesticides, hive infections, and other causes are combining to make it a very hard time to be a honeybee.

If you’re thinking to yourself that it’s not the worst thing in the world to have one less type of stinging insect around – remember – honeybees are extremely sweet little critters, completely unlike wasps. I’ve had to prune plants that they were happily buzzing and swarming for the nectar, and they took my activities with a cheerful spirit. In 14 years of gardening professionally, I have never once been stung by a honeybee, even though I’ve sheared, lopped, and pruned shrubs and flowers they were drinking from.

If that’s not enough – keep in mind, our food supply still gets pollinated the old-fashioned way, with insects and lots and lots of honeybees. A drastic reduction in their numbers means terrible things for our plates. A Cornell University study estimated that every third bite of food in America is pollinated by honeybees.

What can you do? While we don’t know all the causes of their problems, a couple of things are certain to help. We can be mindful of the pesticides we use, even the organic ones, and we can plant things in our gardens that provide nectar and pollen for them to eat. Today we’ll talk about which pesticides you can use to kill the bad bugs while keeping honeybees alive and well.

Pesticides that harm honeybees

Some common pesticides you may have that are toxic to bees:

Orthene (Acephate)

Seven (Carbaryl)

Diazinon (Spectracide, others)

Bayer systemic (Imidacloprid), which gets into the pollen, may cause disorientation and death in bees

Ambush, Pounce (Permethrin)

Crossfire, Raid Flying Insect Killer (Resmethrin)

Safe only if sprayed at dawn or dusk, when bees aren’t active

These pesticides can hurt bees when wet, but aren’t harmful when dry, so if you use with care, can be bee-safe:

Spinosad (insecticide)

Pyrethrum (insecticide)

Neem oil (fungicide, insecticide)

Honeybee-safe pesticides

While it’s not nice to spray while bees are around, these are fairly non-toxic to them:

Sulfur (fungicide)

Serenade (biological fungicide)

Insecticidal soap

Petroleum-based oils

B.T. or Bacillus thuringiensis (biological control for caterpillars)

Herbicides like Roundup and 2,4-D (though I much prefer organic herbicides)

Of course, prevention of pests and attraction of beneficials using plants can also help reduce the need for pesticides, as can the use of biological controls and beneficials, like hypoaspis miles mites for thrips or ladybugs or lacewings for aphids.

Other tips for keeping bees safe while using pesticides:

When in doubt, don’t spray anything that’s in full bloom. Bees aren’t attracted to plants that are budded or are at the point where their blossoms have dropped their petals.

Spray anything you need to in the very early morning or right before dark so that bees are already safely home, and the pesticide can dry before bees come into contact with them.

Careful not to contaminate the water that bees drink! Don’t dump out your leftover pesticide in a way that leaves a puddle that bees might drink from.

Use less-toxic formulations: Dusts are more hazardous to bees than liquids, and if you see any of the new micro-encapsulated formulas, just avoid them. These tiny capsules are the same size as pollen spheres, so are carried back to the colony and shared.

If you’ve got something that’s particularly attractive to bees right next to your problem plant, consider not spraying or holding off till the other plant is no longer in bloom.

One last note – a big portion of the problem for honeybees also comes from agricultural uses, so eating organic really helps. In particular, the pesticides used on non-organic soy cause problems to honeybees.

Later this week, I’ll talk about some of the flowering plants you can use to feed honeybees! Subscribe to get email or RSS updates.

If you’ve enjoyed this post, head on over to Life on the Balcony, where Fern will be featuring some great posts about how container gardeners can attract and nurture wildlife.

When I was in horticulture school, the old-skool dudes teaching pest control were all about the chemicals – they just didn’t believe organics could be as effective as the lethal stuff. Yet every so often, a hint of doubt would creep into their voices about safety.

I’d hear, “well, this one’s actually pretty bad” or  “ya don’t wanna get too close to this” and “this one’s chemically similar to Agent Orange and I’m not really sure why it’s still legal”. What?!!

“Agent Orange on your lawn” has never been the special Genevieve mojo I wanted to share with my gardening clients!

All right, geek talk ahead:

Weed N Feed and Weed B Gon contain 2, 4-D, which has some of the same toxic components as Agent Orange (read this Wikipedia article under the “manufacture” section for more info).

You may think of Roundup as being safer because studies have shown that it breaks down quickly in soil, and the company has claimed that Roundup is “practically non-toxic” to mammals, birds, and fish. However, recent evidence has shown that these old studies were deliberately falsified, resulting in 20 felony charges, fines, and jail time for those involved.

Recent studies not involving jail time show that Roundup is an endocrine disruptor, which means it messes with our reproductive systems and hormones. It also causes DNA damage and chromosomal aberrations. I don’t pretend to know what that translates into (cancer? thyroid issues? loud snoring?), but I know enough to not want that happening in my body.

(non-geeks, you’re safe to read again):

So recently I found a type of organic weed control called Weed Pharm that is actually food-grade.  Seriously! Lest you think, like my old hort. instructors, that food-grade means “doesn’t work”, I tried this stuff out in my own garden to see. You’re supposed to wait for outdoor temps to reach 60 degrees or hotter for it to work, but I didn’t – I just waited for a dry day and coated my weeds in it.

Three days later the weeds were toast! Light brown, shriveled, and dead. It’s been two weeks and they have almost completely disintegrated. After two weeks I had one dandelion return out of all that I sprayed, which is really good – that’s comparable in effectiveness to Roundup. More established weeds will likely need a second or even a third spray, but mine were fairly new.

Like Roundup, it will kill any foliage it touches, so you can’t just spray it willy-nilly on your lawn. But you can kill dandelions in your lawn using Weed Pharm, via injection. (Learn what other techniques you can use to get rid of weeds organically in your lawn, in my eBook Guide to Organic Weed Control.

So, the good:

You can spray in vegetable gardens and places where you grow edibles, as well as garden beds around tree roots and in sidewalk cracks – just put a piece of cardboard between the spray “drift” and the foliage of any plants you would like to keep, and you’re safe. The residue’s gone in a day.

It works fast.

No chromosomal aberrations! Yay!

The bad:

It’s more expensive than the icky stuff and there’s no cheaper concentrated version available yet.

It burns the tops of weeds off, so if you have ancient established weeds that have set up residence in an area, you’ll need to spray a second or even third time to kill them completely. If you keep up with your garden weeds somewhat often though, it seems to take care of them in the first try.

The odd:

It’s made of vinegar. Like, super-concentrated not-your-mama’s-salad-dressing vinegar. So your garden will smell of salad dressing. The gloves you wear when spraying will smell of salad dressing. And every time you walk by your garden storage shed you’ll wonder why you have an inexplicable craving for greens. (it beats the hell out of smelling endocrine-disruptor fumes though, doesn’t it?)

Ready to try it?

If you’d like to try Weed Pharm in your own garden, you can find sources for it on my Garden Tools page.

Want to learn more about organic weed control?

My eBook Guide to Organic Weed Control

How to Kill Dandelions in Lawn Organically using Weed Pharm

How to Kill Weeds Organically: Your Best Options

Wikipedia articles: Roundup, 2,4-D (Weed and Feed ingredient), Agent Orange

I just got a nifty tip on how to kill dandelions organically when they are growing in your lawn or in the center of another plant: injection with vinegar-based organic weed killer.

You may have found that if you spray non-selective herbicide, organic or otherwise, on your dandelion that you end up with a dead patch of lawn to match your dead dandelion, which is so not cool. You can try getting the long taproot out manually with your soil knife, but it often takes a few tries because if you leave any portion of that taproot, you’re in for another dandelion soon.

It’s even harder to get rid of dandelions in the center of perennials or small shrubs, because you don’t want to injure your good plant with vigorous digging at the taproot, and you certainly can’t spray.

So when Susan Lewis, maker of Weed Pharm (a food-grade organic herbicide made from concentrated vinegar/ 20% acetic acid), gave me this tip, I was thrilled!

Here’s what you do:

• Get a small syringe without a needle (the ones used to give cats medicine by mouth, about 40 cc’s, work great)
• Put 3/4 of an ounce of Weed Pharm in the syringe
• Inject your dandelion deep in to the head (or growth node) with the Weed Pharm, aiming for the central spot where all the leaves spring from, or alternately lift the foliage and come in at the top of the taproot from the side
• Wait patiently for two weeks, during which time your dandelion will look perfectly happy
• After a couple weeks, you can lift the top of the dandelion right off of the poor, pickled taproot

The whole injection-by-hand thing may sound like a pain, but if your dandelions have really good taproots and keep coming back, I’d think 20 seconds per weed is well worth it being gone forever.

Susan’s working with some folks to develop an injection system that can be used standing up, which is great news for pros or those who just have a lot of stinkin’ dandelions.

Another cool thing to note is that while spraying herbicide (any kind) is only effective on dry days with temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit, injection of herbicide can be done in the dead of winter with the rain pouring down.

We’ve been talking about how to prevent pests on roses and flowers, and how to treat them organically if you do end up with problems. Today I want to talk about one of the biggest things that keeps us from gardening organically – our expectations and attachments to a specific kind of garden or plant.

Expectations are a funny thing – there is so much incredible beauty in nature and the plant world, but sometimes our desire for a certain kind of garden or plant makes the flaws we percieve in our gardens really stand out.

Take lawns, for example. I have a wonderful gardening friend who lusts after a perfect, flat, weed-free chemlawn. The problem with that? She has a casual rolling lawn with apple trees and bird feeders dotted through it, and naturally sloping beds around the edges.  All organic.

Her lawn is a lovely natural place where she watches the birds and wildlife, and attempts to flatten it out and remove every weed would make it feel out of step with the rest of her gentle country garden. She’d spend more time than she wants to keeping every last weed out organically, and she’d have to get rid of or put concrete under the bird feeders to keep them neat.

She knows in her head that a “perfect” magazine lawn wouldn’t fit her lifestyle or the rest of her garden, but… she still dreams of that lawn, and was shocked at my suggestion that she might embrace what she has, and introduce some tough stepable groundcovers to flower within her lawn area – chamomile, or blue star creeper – and run with the meadow-like theme.

It’s not just perfect lawns we get attached to, either. Many of us are in love with the idea of a certain kind of flower. Maybe you grew up back east and dream of lilacs in spring, but live in such a mild climate that they don’t really thrive. Perhaps you love roses, and want to grow all the latest hybrid teas, but despair of the black spot come August.

Whatever it is for you, coming to terms with what your garden supports and letting go of those things which simply aren’t working will bring you such peace, and will make organic gardening so much easier. A healthy plant that loves where it’s been placed won’t need spraying.

Here’s how to stop chasing the things that aren’t working, and start loving what is:

First, think about what attributes you really want:

Say you grow those giant ruffly Fuchsias that are so prone to Fuchsia Gall Mite in our coastal climate. What is it you really want out of them? Loads of purple and magenta flowers that will spill over in a shady container?  Something to attract hummingbirds? There are substitutes for each of those attributes.

Maybe you have a shady woodland garden under the trees, but long for big bodacious blooms like you think of for sunny gardens, and keep planting things that say “full sun to part shade”, hoping that “does well in part shade” will translate into “does well in full shade” once you get them home.

Once you finally give up the sickly roses and move towards the shade section in the nursery, you can find loads of cheerful color, cut flowers and foliage for vases, and fragrance. The shade won’t hold you back from an amazing flower garden (I promise!) – it is the expectation that your shady garden support specific sun-loving plants that leaves you feeling let-down.

Whatever it is you’re doing that’s not working for you, think about your real goals:

Is it a specific color or flower shape? Fragrance? Stems you can cut for a vase? Or something that reminds you of your childhood home?

Perhaps there’s another plant, or couple of plants, that can give you what you want without needing spraying or fussing with.

Next, swap out overbred, disease-prone plants for their sturdy, old-fashioned, or simpler-flowered counterparts.

With roses, we often want a large hybrid tea rose, bred for big gorgeous flowers that we can cut and bring indoors. But breeding for one specific attribute like flower color or size can lead to a plant with a perfect bloom, but without the vigor to withstand everyday stresses.

As Pomona Belvedere points out in the comments for this article:

I love some of the hybrid teas, but it is a fact that they are the most disease-prone high-maintenance roses around.

David Austin roses are a wonderful reblooming alternative, as are many other shrub roses, grandifloras, and floribundas. Tea roses (precursors to HTs) do well in hot climates; hybrid musks are great in semi-shade; Buck Roses are good for cold climates. So are a lot of old roses, though many of them bloom just once. But beautifully. And historically.

If you love roses but hate spraying, try these disease-resistant rose varieties for the coastal Pacific Northwest.

Are you a fan of Fuchsias? Fuchsia thymifolia, with tiny fairy-sized flowers, and Fuchsia magellanica, a large shrub with slender, drooping bells in either magenta with purple, or pale pink (‘Alba’), look a lot different from the giant pom-poms we see in so many Fuchsia hybrids, but they are resistant to the Fuchsia Gall Mite that distorts the leaves of so many hybrids.

Many ruffly Camellia flowers hold moisture and get a bacterial disease when they bloom, which turns their flowers brown. The simple beauty of Camellias that only have a single row of petals on their flower is enhanced by the fact that the plainer flower doesn’t get diseased. Check out simple-flowered Sasanqua Camellias like ‘Yuletide’, or the variety ‘Fairy Blush’ for a flower that won’t turn brown and mushy in the rain.

Maximize your enjoyment of plants that need extra care by placing them where you’ll really enjoy them every day.

Instead of having five in the garden, just put one near your front door where you’ll appreciate it every day, and choose sturdier plants for the rest of the garden.

Start thinking of bugs as being kind of cute, because they kind of are!

Bees buzz cheerfully around your garden, little inchworms and caterpillars curl their bodies around leaves and twigs, and beetles and bugs soldier their way through soil and foliage, sometimes pausing atop a stem for a bit of sunshine.

If our first reaction to bugs is that they are a natural part of the garden and an element to enjoy, then we won’t get so freaked out if they occasionally nibble our plants. I’m not advocating leaving pest problems to fester, but allow for a few nibbles here or there without bringing in the big (spray) guns.

Adjust your definition of beauty to notice what is beautiful now, rather than what you wish was beautiful.

If we’re expecting no weeds, flawless leaves and ginormous blooms, we may miss the beauty of a dandelion flower mingling perfectly with our Hardy Cranesbill, or the pretty serration of an eaten leaf.

Your garden is alive, and just like you and me, it’ll never be perfect. Sure, let’s move plants around and weed and thoughtfully spray if needed, but at the end of the day, just take pleasure in what is, even if that includes some beauty that we might otherwise see as an imperfection.