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Spring Forward

13 Mar IMG_1301

Wave goodbye to winter with a little spring-cleaning — in your garden that is. I couldn’t have asked for better weather for doing just that this past weekend. Here are some tips for waking up your garden in the spring:

Do overseed your lawn and put some grass seed down. Spring and fall are the best times of the year to renew your lawn.

Do rake out your garden beds, gently removing all brown and dead leaves. It is great to remove all annuals.Do NOT cut branches of hydrangeas or tree peonies, as even though they might look dead and brown in March, they will bloom soon enough. They bloom on old wood, so you will have way more blooms if you leave them alone.

Do trim trees and shrubs. This is the BEST time of year to trim your trees back. I had the pleasure of trimming and training my pear trees behind my garage, flat to the garage in espalier form. This is their 3rd season in my garden, and it is a great way to maximize space in a smaller yard like mine.

Do cut back ornamental grasses and all annuals.  This is the best time for cutting back grasses.

Do apply a nice layer of compost. Your garden will more than reward you later this summer.

Of course I rewarded myself after I hauled a nice pile of dead and dried garden debris to my curb by…what else? Buying and planting pansies in my window boxes! The 10-day forecast looks great, and they can take it pretty cold. I felt so refreshed and renewed, you would have thought I’d spent the weekend at Sundara Spa! Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Organic lawn management

15 Mar

Organic Gardening Magazine had a terrific article, The Dark Side of Lawns recently that covered all the great reasons why you should refrain from using the various synthetic fertilizers on your lawn.

I found the discussion on “weed and feed” practices particularly relevant.

The situation gets worse with the widely popular “weed and feed” products that combine a synthetic lawn fertilizer and herbicide in the same bag. “No lawn is 100 percent weeds, but people are spreading these chemicals over the entire lawn,” says Paul Tukey, author of The Organic Lawn Care Manual and spokesperson for SafeLawns.org. So if your lawn is 2 percent weeds, 98 percent of the herbicide product applied to the lawn serves no purpose, and it may wash into rivers and streams, leach into groundwater, or volatize into the air we breathe. One of the most common herbicides in weed and feed products, a chemical called 2,4-D, has been linked to human health problems, including an increased risk for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

I like a great looking lawn just as much as the next person, but these chemicals present a broad array of problems that we easily forget about. The health risks come from multiple angles – water, pets, children, and even indoor air quality when the contaminants are dragged inside on the bottoms of our shoes.

It’s a terrific article and well worth your time to read the whole thing. You can find it here.

Growing Green Golf Course Grass

6 Mar

Here is my recipe for golf course grass (organic of course).  I learned this method of growing grass from my dad, who is known for his beautiful putting green yards.

Ingredients:

  • 1 bag of high traffic grass seed
  • 1 bag of sun and shade grass seed
  • 1 bag of shade grass seed
  • 2 bags of organic garden soil
  • 2 bags of sand

(Madisonians, you can find the orgainic garden soil ($1.99/bag) and sand ($0.99/bag)at Johansson’s and they load it into your car for you!)

In a wheel barrow, combine 1/2 bag of each grass seed with one bag of the dirt and one bag of the sand, mix well and apply throughout your lawn – filling in bare and trouble spots.  It is best to apply to a wet saturated lawn.  You can either apply it after a good rain or a good afternoon of your kids running through the sprinkler.  Repeat the process with the remaining seed, soil and sand, 2 to 3 weeks later after you see where the grass neglected to come up.

Watering is also key to growing lush green, grass. Water conservation is not my greenest strength, I am a work in progress. Tips for this would be emptying your de-humidifier, which is liquid gold, installing and using a rain barrel, and taking advantage of mother nature and doing this process during a rainy week.  Let me know if you have any questions!!

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