Dawn of the Carnivorous Babies of Lotusland!

One of the most sustainable things that can happen to your garden sounds a little like a zombie movie. I’m talking about little babies eating grown-ups. As they say in Hollywood, here’s the story treatment. Santa Barbara being so close to Hollywood, I’ll give it my best shot.

Just before dawn, as an waning moon sets over the gnarled and twisted trees, a barely visible white oval, perched on a slender filament, slowly splits open, revealing the hideous baby within. (Pretty spooky so far, eh?). Barely newborn and craving its first meal, this grotesque creature prowls for a living prey. (O.K., now I’M getting creeped out.) The sun breaks the horizon and the creature’s neighbor begins to stir. Suddenly aware that a terrible fate is about to befall it, the neighbor, disoriented, attempts to escape, but it’s too late. It becomes baby’s first meal and the taste of living flesh is forever imprinted in its young mind. Sorry. Not flesh; make that “chitinous exoskeleton.”

Gotcha! You were picturing something like the Gerber baby, but with a hideous misshapen mouth. Nope. Just our friend the lacewing larva, out for a quick snack, biting through the luscious, crunchy surface of a destructive mealybug.

I’ve known for a long time that beneficial insects beat out toxic pesticide sprays any day. That’s why it’s usually rare to hear anyone complain about ladybugs in their gardens. But my visit to Lotusland yesterday helped fill in the blanks. Owen Dell and I were taping a new segment for our TV show, Garden Wise Guys, at Ganna Walska’s Lotusland insectary and butterfly garden. Lotusland has been pesticide-free for years, and their insectary gardens are strategically placed to offer good habitat for good guys.

Virginia Hayes joined us on camera on very short notice and shared some very cool information with us. Virginia is not only Lotusland’s curator, but also writes a delightful weekly column for the Santa Barbara’s weekly Independent chock full of great garden info.

We stumbled through a few hours of taping and will probably end up with about 5 minutes of information and madness. No, not fair--I stumbled, Owen nailed it, and Virginia was as smooth as silk. But what I learned in those few hours should be shared with all of you.

Here’s a quick preview of what you’ll learn when this segment airs in mid-fall. We hope to add one more good reason for you to abandon the use of toxic chemicals in your landscape and adopt a more sustainable model for your maintenance.

First, beneficial insects come in all shapes and sizes, but what most have in common is that they are first attracted to your garden by a source of food (generally nectar-bearing flowers), then take up residence to lay eggs. When the babies hatch out, they’re the ones that eat the larva and adult pests in your garden. If you get this part right, you have an endless supply of garden helpers.

Next, the more diverse your offerings, the more diverse will be the range of beneficial insects. The tiny good guys generally seek out small flat flowers that have their sweet nectar within easy reach (native Buckwheat, parsley, carrots), whereas the dudes and dudettes with long “drinking straw” feeding tubes can slurp nectar out of deeper tubular flowers, like the plants in the mint family (sage, lavender, Lamb’s ear).

To be sure they will set up housekeeping and hang around to feast, be sure there’s some dense cover. Planting a few of the big ornamental grasses works well and they look great year round.

I continually extol the virtues of mulch as a way to keep down weeds and conserve soil moisture, but it’s got an equally important role. The insects that inhabit your decomposing mulch can also act as a food source during certain parts of an insect’s life cycle. So keep that mulch layer nice and thick and you’ll get even more benefit!

For more information about Lotusland's Best Management Practicices, click over to their site.

With all the big Hollywood film industry folks that live around here, maybe this blog will get me my first horror flick screenwriting job. Hey, I guy can hope!

Nominations for Santa Barbara Not-So-Beautiful Awards

It’s about time for Santa Barbara Beautiful to issue their awards for all the great commercial building, residential, and landscape projects that continue to make our hometown such a fabulous place to live. SBB is all about shining a well-deserved spotlight on the property owners, designers, contractors and maintenance personnel who make the extra effort. We owe SBB a debt of gratitude for continually raising the bar and for providing funding to worthy beautification projects.

Out of necessity, or maybe kindness, they do not have an evil twin organization to rant about the aesthetic blight perpetrated upon the community by folks who plant and tend some of the landscapes we are daily subjected to. These are the tortured trees, chaotic colors, and hacked hedges that make me want to fly over with a napalm drop and put us out of our collective misery.

Here are my two main beefs…

1) People (out of ignorance, not malice) put plants in places they have no business being planted. If a plant is genetically imprinted to grow twenty feet high and twenty feet across, don’t put it in a 6” deep window box. That casts the die and assures unnecessary butchery for the live of the plant. Worse, some folks consider the pruning of a plant to be an artistic endeavor on par with avant garde sculpture.

2) Just ‘cause you own a smelly, obnoxious, gas-powered, pollution-belching hedge trimmer doesn’t mean you have to use it on every plant in the garden. And if you do whip it out, how about creating a somewhat natural form out of the plants you assault?

So permit me to offer the 1st Annual Santa Barbara Not-So-Beautiful Awards for Absurd Horticulture. I’m seeking your nominations. Here are the guidelines and a few pictorial examples to get you started. Leave your nominations as comments at the end of this post…

Category: Best Use of Inappropriate Technology To Perform Needless Work

This award will go to the Plant Janitor who has apparently never visited a real garden or ventured into the natural environment. Note the avoidance of the term “gardener” as this lofty title is reserved for those who recognize that plants are living things, that each has its own particular growth habits and cultural needs, and that, when properly selected and placed, can exist quite well with no reshaping from anyone, thank you very much.

Example...


Category: Most Absurd Location To Plant A Bougainvillea

Most Bougies fall into the category of aggressive, thorny, don’t-mess-with-me brambles that will take over a football field if left alone. Their allure, however, is their delightful color, imparted by bracts (not actually flowers) that range from purest white to copper, red, purple, and pink. It’s that beautiful color that makes folks plant them anywhere, regardless of the torturous abuse needed to subdue them in the ridiculous spaces we force them to occupy. It’s NOT a freakin’ petunia folks! Furthermore, when you slice them and dice them, you’re cutting off the tips that produce the color. Smooth move! So lemme know where the most absurd examples reside.

Example...


Category: Abused Plant Most Likely To Be Featured In A Dr. Seuss Illustration

How far can a plant janitor stray from the inherent form of a plant before we lose all connection with Mother Nature? How misguided and unobservant does one need to be to create the Twilight-Zone tableaus we find dotting the landscapes of Santa Barbara. When does it make more sense to throw some plastic coat hangers in a furnace, pull them out and shove them in the ground? You know they're out there—now go find them.

Example...


I think that’s enough to get you started. If you think of other categories, send them along and maybe we’ll try another round. In the meantime, while you’re looking for candidates, keep your eyes on the road—wouldn’t want to lose a REAL gardener.

Santa Barbara County Hort Society Tour

Plants! Where would we be without them? We’d be hungry, breathing toxic gases, sporting various sun-related skin conditions, and thoroughly perplexed with our irrational urge to visit the garden center on beautiful weekends.

I’m in a minor panic at the moment, sitting here at the keyboard putting together my thoughts before taking an enthusiastic group from the Santa Barbara County Horticultural Society (founded in 1869—who said we don’t have our stuff together?) through the Thayer’s garden. No offense to my other clients, but that’s still my fave rave of all the places I’ve done over the decades.

Who joins the Hort Society? Not to generalize too much, but it’s folks who just plain love plants—weird ones (the plants, not the people, although…) rare ones, drop-dead-gorgeous ones, odd ones, fat ones, skinny ones, plants that climb on rocks. Knowing from my own temperament, sometimes the possession of the plant overwhelms the necessity of fitting it into the overall design. “I just HAVE TO HAVE IT! I can always move it later” is the primal brain response from somewhere deep in the cortex.

I know I’ll be asked to “address” the folks before we turn them loose in the garden. So what gem can I impart that if they retain nothing else, will make this visit worthwhile? It’s my handy dandy system for taming potential chaos.

A couple of years ago I was asked to create design guidelines for the main meadow area at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. Honored? Stunned? Humbled? You bet. More on that another day.

The key idea was to tame the potential chaos of this grand palette by viewing the entire area as four or five major groupings of plants, each held together with a harmonizing theme.

Huh? Here’s an over simplification, but what if there were 100 varieties of plants to display. Do we combine them alphabetically by genus and species? Not likely. How about by the zip codes of the area in which they commonly occur? All the plants from downtown Santa Barbara’s 93101 would be in one group, the plants that naturally occur on the Mesa in another grouping…nah.

O.K. Back to the four or five major swaths, one with predominantly yellow and golden flowers, another made up of plants with a spiky form, another with gray and silver foliage. From a distance, there would be a sense of order due to the common visual characteristics, but if we move closer into the meadow, we’d see subtle and not so subtle contrasts between the various plants in each grouping.

Within each major block can be associations of plants of different species, but they’d all fit within the common theme. This allows a large variety of plants to be combined while simplifying the overall scale of the bed.

So what about trying this in your own garden, but scaled down to fit the spaces? I think the best example of this approach is the combination in the “Big Sur” garden at the Thayers (pictured above). Aeonium and Echevaria planted in blocks. Each has the same form and structure—flat succulent leaves held in a rosette. But the yellow-green of the slightly more robust Aeonium paired with the gray-green smaller Echevaria create a mass that from a distance, appears to be a single entity. But move in closer and there’s a subtle mix that provides another layer of complexity.

Too similar? I understand your concern, so we sparked things up by backing up that mass with Myer’s Asparagus, the common link in this grouping being the yellow-green foliage that complements the Aeonium, but with a radically different form—in this case, something like Rastafarian dreadlocks heading skyward.

Nuff for now. I can go on and on about how I visualize and compose with plants, but my hope is to give my readers a starting point for taming the one-of-each plantings I see in so many gardens owned by plant fanatics. Round up all the plants you’re thinking of using and see if you can categorize them by some common characteristics. Within those groupings, play with varying degrees of harmony and contrast.

Lemme know if this helps.

I Don't Hate Scotts Lawn Products -- Or Do I?

I’ve been reading lots of blogs and I’ve determined that I have to do something bold to grab your attention, so here goes:

[BOLD LEAD PARAGRAPH]

Dear “The Scotts and Miracle-Gro Company”:

I don’t hate you. I’ve never even met you--not that I’m aware of. I just hate what you stand for. You’re not alone in keeping us shackled to the questionable ideal of the suburban lawn—just kinda the big target with the “kick-me” sign, so I’m picking on you because it’s easy.

Per your web site, it is heartening to see you giving a small nod to using organic materials. Of the 13 products shown on your lawn fertilizer page, the Scotts Organic Choice looks pretty lonely. At least you’re trying to build a little green “street cred”, but we know where your real profits come from and which products get all your promo bucks.

I guess my gripe is that you live and thrive by helping to sustain the myth that a “real” garden has to have “thick, lush, green turf” even if nature and the environment continually remind us that without your toxic products, copious amounts of precious water, herbicides and insecticides we might succumb to YELLOW LEAVES!, NASTY BUGS! (don’t want any of THOSE near our kids) and the silent scorn of our neighbors.

[Pretty damn bold, eh? I’m waiting for their corporate jack-booted thugs to come pound on my door.]

TRANSITION (can’t suddenly switch gears…I have to back my way into the real content)

My last two blogs have set the stage for murdering your lawn and lots of readers seem to want to take it to the next level. I’d love to help, but first a disclaimer. My 35-year experience in the green industry and landscape architecture is from a career based in the benign coastal climate of central and southern California. So when I’m asked by readers from around the country to help them with lawn alternatives the first problem that arises is finding appropriate plants for your specific locale. The environmental and cultural conditions are just too varied for me to claim to be all things to all readers.

SUBSTANCE (here’s the payoff)

So how about I just do some coaching to help you move in the right direction? It’s gonna take me a few more postings to get you there (I just moved to a new home, so writing time is a bit scarce) but keep checking in and I’ll try to get you where you’re going. I also welcome any comments based on your own experiences. Just tell us where you’re writing from.

First things first—are you REALLY going to remove every blade of grass from your current lawn? Do you really need to? Form follows function, so if you’re doing this because you’re just tired of the work and environmental impacts of being a recovering lawn owner, do you have to actually remove the lawn? What if you just tinker with it and let it revert a Darwinian approach? I think that’s still taught in some schools—Survival of the Fittest.

What if you just stopped mowing and watering? What would move in to fill the void? Nature abhors a vacuum, so something is going to find these new conditions very attractive. Yes, the weeds you’re currently keeping at bay might take advantage, but not necessarily. If the watering stops and you rely only on natural rainfall, some of those weeds that thrived on the life-support you provided for your lawn just might give up.

What if you introduce a few new non-turfgrass plants? Here in Santa Barbara, I’d be looking at things like creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum), Lippia (Phyla nodiflora), some sedges like Carex praegracillis, English daisy (Bellis perennis) or common yarrow (Achillea millefolium). My local favorite to mix in is Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium bellum), shown in the photo at the beginning of this post. Now where you live, these might not grow, or they might become noxious weeds (Lippia is a scourge in New Zealand).

Your assignment this week: Do your homework by finding some plants that you can allow to infiltrate your current lawn, and start thinking of it as a naturalized meadow. Visit a garden, check your plant catalogs, talk to some experienced gardeners. Let me know what you find.

I’ll be back soon. Promise.

Murder Your Lawn II - What Would Tony Soprano Do?

Looks like that last post stirred folks up a wee bit. There’s some passion attached to that patch of green, but the vast majority of you seemed to be raising your clenched fists up high and shouting “Right on, bro!”

So let’s say you’re ready to, as Tony Soprano would say, “put a hit out” on your turf. First we’ll agree that it has to be done in an environmentally responsible manner. In George’s comment, he wants to know if I want to be his Dr. Kevorkian but worries about harming his Norfolk Island Pine.

Good news. What if you could use zero toxic substances, protect existing trees AND actually increase the health of your soil?

It’s called sheet mulching and it couldn’t be simpler. What you’re doing is converting the turf or weeds into beneficial organic material. Follow these simple steps and start working on the redesign:

1. Mow the grass or weeds, but leave the clipping in place. We want this stuff to decompose.

2. Lightly cover the area with about a half-inch of compost, manure or grass clippings, etc. It will also decompose and add nutrients to the soil.

3. Get your mitts on enough corrugated cardboard to cover the soon-to-be victim. Depending on the size of the impending corpse, you might have to drive down some dark alleys and practice a little dumpster-diving. If cardboard is scarce, you can cover the area with a layer of newspaper about 5 sheets thick. Wet it down to start the decomposition process. We’re almost there, so don’t chicken out.

4. Using the free wood chips you can probably get from a local tree service (Santa Barbarians can get free greenwaste mulch from the County Transfer Station) cover the cardboard with about 5” of mulch. Don't worry about the mass of stuff; it will settle down to a thin layer. If you can’t get chips, any organic material is fair game.

You’re done! If it’s a warm time of the year, some articles say you can just wait a few weeks, cut holes in the layer and plant. A Google search for “sheet mulch” will turn up lots of variation on this theme and the timing, so check it out. For my money, I’d wait at least two months. While your plants start growing, earthworms are moving in, destroying the evidence, humus is building up in the soil, the roots of the old lawn are turning into good stuff and you’ve got yourself a dead lawn. One caution…if there are trees in the area, keep the mulch about a foot away from the actual trunk to avoid rotting the tree's crown with moisture.

Sleep easy. There ain’t a jury in the world gonna convict you for this caper.

So, if your excuse was avoidance of chemicals or the hard work of cutting out the old green monster, sorry. Now raise your fist in the air, gather up the materials and start picking out the new drought-tolerant plants you’ll be planting graveside.

Murder Your Lawn - Now!

How many of you watered your lawn this week? Come on, raise your hands, don’t be shy. Good.

Next question. If the average annual rainfall in Santa Barbara is between 18 and 21 inches, and we only received 6 this year, and a chicken gets on a train in Miami heading north at 60 mph into a 6 mph headwind, how long will it take to water your lawn when the reservoirs go dry?

O.K. I’m ready to rant. That’s not usually my style. I try to gently convince people of my views without putting any guilt trips on them. I’d hate to make anyone feel uncomfortable. I’ve never been a hardcore activist about much of anything—more of a quiet “you have your opinion and I’ll have the right one” manifesto.

But last week’s LA Times article (Public Enemy No. 1, July 5) about the astounding impact of our obsession with lawns has got me cursing out loud about the gardens I see in this town and around the nation.

Would someone PLEASE tell me why there are lawns in front of houses? The kids are in their rooms playing computer games, chatting on AIM, or downloading pirated videos, so don’t tell me it’s about a place for them to play. Lawn in the backyard? Maybe. Into nude sunbathing? Get a chaise lounge. Something for the kids and dog to cavort on? O.K., there’s nothing to completely take the place of a patch of turf, but how many thousand square feet do you really need?

Let me go on record as stating that a lawn that is not used for recreational purposes is an act of environmental arrogance. (Geez, I can sense someone out there feeling uncomfortable—better pull back. NO! I’m going to overcome the “everyone has to like me” urge.) I’m talking about arrogance in the form of a blatant or ignorant disregard for the multiple environmental impacts of growing turf, at least the way the vast majority of people approach it.

Arrogance is the use of toxic pesticides to maintain that perfect suburban carpet. I screamed at my radio this spring when those lovely folks from Scott’s Lawn Care Products unleashed their campaign about protecting our kids from “nasty bugs.” They don’t really define “nasty.” I’m not sure if it’s a Donald Trump “you’re fired!” kinda nasty or “Mature Audience” nasty, but we’d better make sure we indiscriminately kill everything, just to make sure.

Arrogance is having an irrigation system that hasn’t been adjusted for the season, checked out for leaks or had the heads fine-tuned to keep them from soaking the sidewalks.

Arrogance is having your gardener run their inefficient mower that spews 10 times more emissions per minute than a car. Then, since no one is enforcing the local ban on gas-powered blowers, the clippings are blown into the gutter and then on to the creeks. Since most folks don’t really care if the gardener complies with the rules (the faster they mow, hoe and blow the less you have to pay), we have the insult of all that dust and exhaust going airborne with the grating noise as the sound track.

Ya get the idea? Do you really have to have it? Imagine life without a lawn. Imagine a diverse, low water-using palette of texture and color that attracts birds and other fun critters.

Consider taking the pledge. Join a support group for the forlawn (use a pun, go to jail). Be the pioneer on your block. Murder your lawn and set yourself free! Up next - murder without herbicides!

(photo credit - Yvonne Cunnington - http://www.flower-gardening-made-easy.com)

A Little Diversion...

Fellow blogger and Santa Barbarian, Queen Whackamole "tagged" me a few weeks ago. The game is a challenge to list 8 fun facts about myself, "tag" eight other bloggers, and off we go in an ever expanding web of useless but interesting bits. Her tagger was Amy, another S.B. blogger.

So, here are the rules (required ingredient) and my great eight.

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are “tagged” (as in “Tag, you’re it!”) need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Eight Facts

My life-long love of drumming started at age 5 when I heard some Puerto Rican drummers “under the boardwalk” at Coney Island.

I proposed to my wife via a fortune cookie. She said yes.

My wife went on to win our Ireland honeymoon on a St. Paddy’s Day radio contest. She was the one-hundred and first caller. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve been. Thanks again, sweetie pie.

Brushes with fame: Little Richard came on stage with my band in Las Vegas and sang a few tunes with us. Another band also used to open for the Jackson Five. In another band, I met Huey Newton (Black Panther leader) and partied at his pad in Oakland, CA all night. Oh, yeah—I was on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour when I was in junior high with a Dixieland band. That’s my 15-minutes of fame.

My entrance to the world of plants was through the art of bonsai; that simple, natural aesthetic still drives me. Conversely, people who butcher plants into geometric shapes that have nothing to do with nature cause me to scream outloud when I drive down suburban streets.

My son, Ben, loves me, but if I make Moroccan Vegetable Stew, he loves me even more.

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, we’d spend summers in the Catskill Mountains and my brother and I would make bows and arrows out of birch saplings.

If I could achieve all the health and nutrition required to live from only one food, it would have to be ice cream. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Nummers!

Now for my bloggers to entice:
1. My home girl, Rachel Thurston (bandmate, world travel writer, African drummer, and all around groovy chick); 2. Susan Harris, co-author of the GardenRant, who has inspired me to write some fun stuff; 3. Trey Pitsenberger, Sierra Foothills nurseryman fighting the good fight for garden education; 4. Kim, at "A Study In Contrasts" because I've admired her blog from afar; 5. Xris (Flatbush Gardener) 'cause I'm originally from East Flatbush; 6. Ken Foster, extoller fossil-free approaches to gardens; 7. Useful Chemistry, a chemistry blog I just ran across, because sometimes we have to reach out; 8. And last, but not least, my favorite TV personality, Anthony Bourdain, 'cause he's just a kick in the head.

There I've done it...get on with it!