gardening with nature

A lot of you already know the secret to good, water-conserving soil: compost.

But there may be a few of you who don’t know that you can cheat.

Oh, you can’t cheat if you want that black, crumbly stuff all gardeners crave; it takes time to make that rich, humusy-smelling substance. Compost like this is the grade A+ soil amendment. It provides nutrients, enzymes, attraction for earthworms, aeration - and it holds water like a charm.

Any organic matter can help your soil do that, though, even if it’s not in the absolute top-notch way completely composted organic matter does. And  a lot of the time, you can scavenge the materials to do it. Which means it’s saving you money, too. (Priced out a load of delivered compost lately?)

If you live in a more rural area, scavenging’s easier, but cities have their own rich supplies.

First, there are the chopped branches and leaves often offered at both city and rural dumps or other sites. After crews clear away branches for power lines, or finish schwoomping up leaves, all that stuff has to go somewhere. In many places, they grind it up in civic grinders and offer it for free. Some places even deliver it.

A few cautions: First, you’d want to be sure you weren’t taking leaves from trees heavily sprayed with pesticides.

And, since it has a lot of woody matter in it, this sort of organic matter is better as mulch. (A friend of mine actually used it for a sort of soft playground surface for her kids.)

Wood takes a while to break down. Some people claim that this changes the acid balance of the soil, or takes up more nitrogen than it offers. I tend to believe the people who say they don’t see much effect from that, and that the value of the organic matter far outweighs any deficits. I feel the same about pine, fir, and cedar needles, other materials that need to stay as a mulch on top until they rot entirely.

If you gather your own leaves, you can pick and choose. In open areas, just go for a spot where there are a bunch of fallen leaves, and start gathering.

Underneath the leaves you will find a darker, moister layer of falling-apart leaves. This is called leaf-mold, and used to be taken into gardens not only for its organic matter, but for its enzymes and mycorrhizal activity, the things that make soil come alive.

Be thoughtful to the trees who are so kindly providing this rich substance: they can spare some of it, but they need it to thrive, too, as does the rest of the plant and fungal community around them. When I gather leaves, I move from spot to spot, and I don’t go all the way down to the soil.

Of course, there are always the leaves from our own gardens, left when the season’s done. All my tulip foliage (after it’s really brown) and dead leaves go into the compost.

And there are the leaves from trees which fall on our own gardens, rotting quietly through the winter, contributing rich, water-saving organic material without any work on our part.

In the city, you might find people who want you to take their leaves - after all, many people pay gardeners to blow or rake or burn their leaves away. Another source of leaves is restaurants. If you can establish a good relationship with a restaurant, and prove yourself reliable in taking away their compost and bringing back buckets, you will have a rich source of leaves. Restaurants that serve a lot of salads or soups are more likely to have leafage, but any place will have some.

Other sources? Horse stables will have plenty of horse manure, which is basically grass or alfalfa held together by other matter, and not at all obnoxious to handle, especially when dry (it’s lighter and easier to haul when it’s dry, too). If you’re willing to shovel it out, the stable owners will often let you have it for free. I’ve also gathered dried horse manure from the fields. Cow manure, too: I’ve found that when cows graze, or are fed alfalfa, their manure is not as hot, especially after it’s been baking in the sun for awhile. You still have to be more careful of it than horse manure, though.

Sometimes feed stores or farms have spoiled hay, hay that’s been out in the rain, and is sold for a pittance. Grass clippings work, but they are so high in nitrogen that they need to be put in a bin so they can burn their heat out. (My grandfather once had me put my arm into one of his triple grass-composting bins. I was shocked at how hot it burned. He proudly showed me the thermometer reading.) You also want to be sure about the provenance of your grass clippings: for some reason, at least in the US, we put our most deadly poisons down where we like our little children to play. Conventional lawn care involves a lot of toxins.

I’m sure there are many more clever places to scavenge organic matter (stuff that isn’t quite, yet, compost).

Wherever you get it, there are a few things you can do with organic matter when you bring it home to the garden.

Of course you can put it in a compost pile and compost it properly, but that isn’t cheating. I’m here to provide you with the easy, cheating ways.

One is to use your organic material as mulch, and let it gradually rot, improving your soil. The barrier of mulch on top is a great way to keep water from evaporating. And the microbial activity of the mulch breaking down feeds your soil, as the mulch gradually turns into lovely, fluffy, composty soil. Soil that holds water just right.

Another method (especially good for soggy stuff like restaurant leavings) is to tuck your organic matter under mulch.

This is the Ruth Stout method, politely called “sheet composting”. (When she first started composting this way, she didn’t hide the garbage under the compost, and concerned friends started wondering if she’d got a screw loose.)

Of course you can’t use the Ruth Stout method unless you have some mulch to begin with. If you used municipal wood chippings, for instance, the mushier vegetable leavings would start to condition your soil immediately for better water retention, while the wood chippings made a barrier, keeping moisture in.

The most labor-intensive method of dealing with compost is, of course, the one that gets the quickest results: tilling it in.  Tilling in requires muscle power and/or machinery, plus being picky about your compostables, so you don’t end of with chunky, hard-to-work soil.

If you have reasonably decent soil, you can also use the compost to build a new bed, using the cardboard method described in the last post.

Whichever method you use,  your soil will hold more water, and get better at holding water (and delivering nutrients) with each passing year.

 Well-aerated humus-filled container soil makes it easy for this tulip to emerge and flourish

It’s not a glamorous subject. But sometimes, you just have to get down to dirt.

The kind of soil you have is a big decider in how much water you use. Not to mention how well your plants do. Last June, I gave out ideas on how to make container soil ideal for conserving water. I still use those methods, and they still work.

But if you have a big garden, in the ground, a lot of those container methods just aren’t practical, unless you want to pay the big bucks to have your entire garden’s soil trucked in, pre-mixed. Or do it yourself, a task that puts you in superhero league.

Some container methods might work in a big garden: for instance, adding earthworms to your soil is an excellent idea in containers and out. By running it through their digestive tracts, earthworms turn soil into something more humusy, nutritious, and aerated. Humusy and aerated is ideal for conserving water; it means your soil structure is the perfect structure for holding water and delivering it to plants.

If you have time, you can actually accomplish a lot of this by earthworms alone. One way of making a garden bed is to lay cardboard, covered with straw or leaves or whatever organic matter you have a lot of, over the patch of ground you want to work next year. In our warm-winter climates, it’s best to do this in the fall; by spring, the ground is likely to be workable, unless it’s a patch of decomposed granite. Even earthworms can’t perform miracles.

This high mountain soil is pretty much all decomposed granite. No earthworm action here, and laying on cardboard wouldn’t make it different

The cardboard forms a moisture barrier, the rotting straw or hay provides organic material, and all this is like hanging out a free lunch sign for the earthworms, who come from far and near to compost and digest.

How can you tell whether this method will work in your soil? The easiest, most ancient test, is to pick up a moist (not wet) handful, and squeeze.When you open your hand, the soil will do one of two things. It can break up, which means you’ve got sand or other types of decomposed rock. That means earthworms are not likely to gather around unless you give them more encouragement than a little cardboard and straw.

If the soil stays in a palm-shaped clod, that means there’s clay or silt in there, in which case, you go on to the second test.

The second test is just to take your thumb and tease out a ribbon from the soil in your palm. If the ribbon is shorter than an inch (2.5 cm) when it breaks, that means you have a lot of sand. If it makes a ribbon 1-2 inches (2.5-5cm) long before breaking, you’ve got soil with some clay and some organic matter. Longer ribbons mean clay combined with sand or silt (the very fine soil from waterways).

There are many more variations and shades to this test, but this is enough to let you know how much water your soil will use.

Basically, it works like this: sand has the biggest particles. Unless those particles are filled with clay (the dread cement-like sandy clay), the spaces between the particles form air chutes that water runs right through. That means plants barely get a taste of water before it runs on by, down into the secret crevices of the earth. Nutrients get washed down, too.

Silt’s particles are medium-sized. Silt is formed by  water-worn minerals, and acts a lot like sand in the soil - except that its particles are smaller and it has more available nutrients. In your garden, silt will hold water and nourish plants, but it will also form flat plates which resist water by forming a barrier.

Clay has the smallest particles, which means water seeps through slowly. Clay also has a negatively-charged ions that hold on to water and nutrients, giving your plants a wide range to absorb. The problem there is that plants need air as well as water, and the small clay particles don’t allow that. While some plants are adapted to grow in clay, a lot of garden plants get stunted in pure clay, and it’s very hard to work.

The ideal soil, which almost no one has, is a combination of all three, called loam. This is the soil that can feed your plants, and retain water without turning into a swamp. Everyone wants loam, and few people have it.

But wait - there is a solution. A savior. A panacea.

Organic matter.

Tune in for our next post: Paydirt: Organic Matters

Last year, I talked about the joys of self-watering planters, the types I use (including one especially for water plants) , and the enormous amounts of water (and plants) you can save with them.

This year, I’m going to broaden my self-watering horizons a little, and introduce more ways to have affordable water-saving containers for different garden purposes. All the photographs here are from my own self-watering containers, to give you some ideas on how you can use them in the garden.

Even those of you who mostly plant in the ground could take advantage of self-waterers.

What about all those seedlings and small plants that need constant watering to make it to the point where you plant them? If you have a timed watering system, great, but if you can’t afford one, or you want something more water-conservative than a sprinkler going off four times a day, you might want to consider these humble self-waterers, made out of old 2-liter plastic bottles.

The simplest big self-waterer are the kinds I’ve described in past posts: put a large pot in a large bowl, or put a short bucket in a longer bucket.

A little more sophisticated, but along these humble lines, is this amusing, fast-paced video on making self-watering containers out of 5-gallon buckets.

A system that  some refinements, not to mention more space to plant, is the tote-box-container method at Josho.com, laid out in text, with good clear instructions and photos.   One writeup I saw on this method extolled self-watering tote boxes for their greatness for tomatoes. They would also work well with other large plants, as well as being good containers for a crowd of plants instead of single specimens.

If you prefer a more stately approach, try this video from Tom Cole, head of department at a horticultural college in London.  (If you’d rather read directions that watch a video, there’s a list of instructions on the same page. ) It’s a more elaborate video on the same topic, with a careful and thought-out approach. You could use the same 5-gallon pails, or you could use the garden container of your choice, as long as it doesn’t have a hole in the bottom.

This page  shows the two-pot method, where you put two pots together to create one self-watering container. In the photos, they show terracotta pots, though, and these pots are heavy water-users, since they diffuse water through their porous walls. They do show one painted, which helps, but if you’re really looking to save water, don’t use terracotta. Unless you’ve got some plant, like a succulent or Mediterranean herb, that really doesn’t want much water - just some.

Mike Lieberman gives a low-key, low-price approach to making self-watering containers: the container-in-container method, the container-with-a-pipe method, and the vinyl tile method, which was new to me.  This is just a guy sitting in his basement, but he really knows his stuff, and shows it to you clearly.

In these videos, the urban organic gardener (as Mike Lieberman styles himself) gives you everything, including his tips on where he gets free materials for containers, how to keep track of your containers, so you know which proportions of tank to plant work best, the principles of self-watering containers - plus really good directions on how to actually make them. He gives written material lists, to make it easy. Even I, challenged in handiness skills, was not intimidated by his anyone-can-make-it-dirty style.

With a little ingenuity, most of these DIY versions can be adapted to use scavenged containers that are a little more appealing than a 5-gallon bucket. Flea markets, garage sales, dumps, trash for removal on the street can all be rich fields for mining container material. The essence of DIY is to open your eyes and use what’s around you. DIY can save more resources than water. We just have to use our imaginations more than our pocketbooks.

Last June, all my blog entries were about water-saving gardening. I’m going to carry on the tradition (if repeating something once can be called a tradition) and dedicate my June posts this year to garden practices that save water. To me, one of the most obvious ways of saving water is using plants who already know how to survive on the free water you’re already getting - your own beautiful natives.

 I have a special fondness for this common wildflower, which I’ve know for many years. It’s the kind of feeling that prompted the Pilgrims to slip in a few flowers amongst their strictly utilitarian vegetable and herb seeds. They carried the comfort of their common dooryard and meadow flowers to this unknown land, flowers like heartsease (Viola tricolor) and dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis). These weren’t the big glamorous garden flowers of today; they were homely ambassadors of modest beauty: the field and hedge flowers of their native landscapes. These personal loves spoke through even all that Puritan guilt and utilitarian duty.

That’s the way I feel about buttercups: they’re not conspicuous, or glamorous, or productive in any obvious way, but I love them. And, I have to say, I purely detest the large swollen ranunculus relatives in the bulb catalogues, swamped in their multiple folds.

For the first time in many years (I spend less time than I should lying in fields of buttercups these days) I took a close look at buttercups, just to see what I could see. And one thing I discovered made me realize how they might have been persuaded to become the bloated patriarchs of the catalogues. For one thing, color. Wild ranunculus often sports a gleaming white petal or two, which hints that it might be amenable to changing its color, if bred for it.

The second thing is petals. The buttercups in my neighborhood (Ranunculus occidentalis) usually have five sepals, and mostly have five petals - but there are a lot of exceptions.

It doesn’t take much looking to find a buttercup with more petals than five. There’s the occasional six-petal flower. There are the ones that splay out multiple petals (the highest count I got when I went out photographing was nine, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others with more). And there are the ones that stack them up in two layers, which looks to me like a prototype (if you have an evil-genius mind) to those big fold-on-fold-on-fold ranunculus in the catalogues.

When it comes to a discussion of buttercups, there’s an important issue that can’t be avoided: do you like butter? I have no idea where the custom of holding buttercups under people’s chins, to see the yellow reflection, came from. It’s one of those bits of myth that gets passed from child to child (for how long? “Ring around the rosy” comes from the Black Plague), but is seldom noticed by adults.

Maybe it’s an old health question: in winter, people didn’t get much in the way of fats, once the cows or goats went dry and the fall butchering was eaten. Maybe it was a way of checking to see if a person’s skin had enough oil to be healthy. I realize this is far-fetched, and I invite you to add your own theories, far-fetched or close at hand.

Of course I have to admit, I didn’t learn my butter-liking techniques from Ranunculus occidentalis (occidentalis means “west” in Latin). Though I am a native California, my parents transplanted me to New Jersey at a tender age. So the buttercup I learned to put under people’s chins, sometime early in elementary school, was Ranunculus abortivus L., the littleleaf buttercup native to New Jesey.

There is more than one kind of native buttercup, even in California. The white water buttercup (Ranunculus aquatilis) grows in ponds or small streams, as the name implies. Ranunculus californicus has some of the same range as R. occidentalis, but R. californicus has  9 to 16 petals as a standard, not a variation, and grows in moist places.

Whatever their type, wild buttercups can be replanted for years of pleasure. The easiest way to seed them, of course, is to leave them uncut until the seedpods mature and they seed themselves. You can also gather ripe seed from elsewhere, and scatter it nearby, acting as a part of nature (which is, after all, what we properly are).  Of course you’ll want to be sure you’re harvesting only a small portion of seed from a good stand - you want the wild plants to flourish in their own chosen spot, as well as near you.

Where to plant them when you get the seeds home? My buttercups prefer moist water-meadows, but they will grow - for a briefer time - on the winter-rain-soaked dry upland meadows.

At least that’s true for Ranunculus occidentalis. Prairie buttercups (Ranunculus rhomboideus) like dry, well-drained soil.  Other US species don’t seem to care if it’s moist or dry.

And that’s not the end of the likes and dislikes of various kinds of buttercups. In my search for buttercup identity, I came up with scads (a specialized botanical term) of species from all over the world; they seem to especially love very far north Eurasian lands like Finland and Russia. It’s likely that, if you live in a temperate region, there’s a wild buttercup near you, just suited to your climate and rainfall.

So it seems I’ve started this post trying to tell of  a personal love, and wound up in global mystery. Love is like that. What are the homely plants that play a large part in your own inner landscape?

If you’re interested in more on natives, I’ve written up a lot of my own Northern California ones  (just select the Wild Plants). Or try Lost in the Landscape for witty, informative, and beautifully-photographed posts on Southern California natives. For California natives in general, Las Pilitas will fill you in on a plethora of varieties, uses, and habitats - plus they sell the plants in question. And there’s always the California Native Plant Society.

Those of you in Texas might enjoy Conscious Gardening, which has a lot on natives and other ways to save water in the garden. If any readers have suggestions for other reliable native plant sites outside of California, I’d really like to know. Some of the New Jersey wildlings of my youth are also dear to me, and I’d love to know to get a refresher on what their natural environments are.

I never really got what the big deal about Juno irises was.

But last fall, when I did my very-last-minute-end-of-sale order, Iris bucharica was still on the list of one of my favorite bulk suppliers. It’s one of those ones I was always planning to try, and always knocking off the list as I honed down my original thousand-dollar wish list to a ghost of its original self.

Now I was left with the ghost list to choose from, and I picked these irises.

As is my thrifty habit, I put them in a container with some of the mid-season tulips I bought, ‘Golden Melody’. I wouldn’t honestly have bought ‘Golden Melody’ usually, either, but it was one of the few tulips left on the list. I’m not actually a big fan of really bright colors in tulips, but how bad could bright yellow be?

As it turned out, not bad at all. ‘Golden Melody’ exactly matched the buttercups in the field behind and around them, and had a nice sturdy quality that made it an excellent cutting flower. I gave away a lot of bouquets involving ‘Golden Melody’, and of course I had it in the house myself.

But my favorite ‘bouquet’ turned out to be in my container.

It wasn’t an auspicious start: when I first saw the Iris bucharica foliage, I thought the chickens had been in my plant pots again, biting off foliage to little layers of whacked-off leaves.

All the other irises I’ve grown have had nothing like the fantastic pleated unfolding of Iris bucharica foliage.

And each level of foliage (doesn’t it remind you of polygonatum?) puts out a stubby flowering stem, so Iris bucharica blooms a long time.

I loved watching the snub-nosed, finely-marked buds of Iris bucharica open out into two-colored marking-etched flowers.

I had originally figured that the Iris bucharica would bloom early, and ‘Golden Melody’ would take over about the time they were giving out. I hadn’t known about the multiple blooms of Iris bucharica, and I hadn’t known we were going to have such a cold rainy spring: flowers lasted (and in some cases are still lasting) weeks beyond their usual time.

So I wound up with a big bouquet of Iris bucharica and ‘Golden Melody’ in a container - and it was a pleasure to watch it develop and flourish over the course of almost a month. (That’s crimson-and-yellow-striped ‘Professor de Monsseri’ in the background.)

It’s sad that I didn’t do the research on Iris bucharica first, the way I usually do. I didn’t know it had multiple flowers; I didn’t know, as Janis Ruksans points out, that in the wild it has many variants, (His favorite form is one collected near the Afghanistan border, a lemon yellow with green markings, which he selected.) The form most commonly used in the garden, he says, is a good grower and an exellent increaser.

I’m glad it’s going to increase, because not only is Iris bucharica beautiful and long-lasting, it’s fragrant. I only found that out toward the end of its life, though, and sniffing fading irises in the rain is not a true indicator of scent. I didn’t get any.

But you can benefit by my loss. When you order your own Iris bucharica, be sure to inhale.