Garden - 2018

I can't recommend enough that you check out Mike McGrath's YBYG archives and articles on Garden Plot at WTOP for info on how to have a beautiful yard without poisons -- and also saving you money by not wasting it on harmful practices. As  well as obeying the law.

My HOA is telling people to do things that are harmful to their plants but conform to somebody's idea of how things  should look and also safety issues.

So here is your schedule for next year; you can start now.

1) You can buy open-pollinated seeds for plants that attract beneficial insects, pollinators, and birds NOW. Also buy fully-composted leaf mulch and lay it down no more than 1 inch deep, as bedding for the seeds. The soil and sun will be warm enough for the next couple of weeks; after that you will have to wait until the risk of frost is near zero, about May in the DC region.

2) STOP using any mulch but what is fully composted, and get rid of the old crap in your household trash -- don't send it to city yard waste recycling. Look for the OMRI label on the bag; if it ain't there or it ain't bagged, JUST SAY NO.  I go to my garden store, buy composted leaf mulch, and get somebody to cart it. I know exactly what I'm getting because I have a receipt I can check against the delivery. Don't let your lawn service make this decision for you.

3) Permanently set your lawn mower to 3 inches .  If your lawn service insists on scalping your grass, FIRE THEM. Scalping the lawn encourages Japanese beetles. It also encourages violets but they are pretty and edible and feed the caterpillars of fritillary butterflies, a pollinator. Move some of the violets to a shady moist place and you can get all the benefits without encouraging Japanese beetles.

4) DO NOT PRUNE ANYTHING. Not until mid-January.  From then until the end of March, prune only things like privet. Spring-flowering shrubs like rhododendron (azalea) or forsythia should be pruned soon after the flowers fall. Fruit shrubs should be pruned after the fruit is gone. My exceptions are pruning the twigs that may grow over a sidewalk used by city services, and cutting the stalks that had hydrangea flowers this year.

5) STOP MOWING during summer drought, and after mid-October. The grass will go dormant and not grow. It will take a couple of toad-strangling rains to wake it up again and then you can mow as long as it's not mid-October yet. I have seen  jackasses mowing in December just because it was warm. That was for their satisfaction; it  didn't do the grass any good.

6) SHARPEN YOUR MOWER BLADE. That is, if you are going to keep it once you find you can't set it higher than 2.5 inches. The three-inch setting means from now on you will be cutting grass blades and not grass stems, and the blade won't go dull so fast. Also, the mower blade won't bite into dirt, another reason it goes dull. A low blade setting means you may be digging your own lawn's grave.

7) IN OCTOBER/NOVEMBER plant new shrubs or trees. If you know your USDA Zone, you will know which ones are winter-hardy; they will get all the benefit of the snow as well as the spring rains. Planting them in a summer drought means you will have to spend lots of time every day watering them heavily to preserve your investment. Make sure you know how much distance to leave from other trees, houses and utilities, because if your new sapling has to be cut down, that's another waste of your investment.

8) START ERADICATING TERMITES. McGrath has a list of steps for this and they are all free. One is, do NOT put compost within 6 inches of your house and the further away the better. Another is TURN OFF ALL OUTDOOR LIGHTING AT NIGHT. If you are not a farmer you don't need a dusk-to-dawn light anyway and it attracts termites. It also discourages bug-eating bats and mole-eating owls. (Terminex admitted to McGrath that they know all about this. One of his best posts.)

9) Control mosquitoes. Dumping water only helps with our old-fashioned skeeters. The Zika ones hang on to the surface once the water is dumped. Skeeters also lay eggs in the cups of small flowers. BUY GRANULAR BTI, a bacterium that kills the larvae and so far is known to affect only mosquitoes. Place jar lids upside down around your flowers.  Mix up the BTI with water per directions, and fill the jar lids. The skeeters will lay in what seem to be safe places, but nothing will hatch. You can also plant lots of things that will repel skeeters, from lemon verbena in the south to Mexican marigolds to bee balm and rosemary, mints and lavender.

10) MAINTAIN YOUR YARD. You have to know what to do to keep your plantings from becoming invasive.  Most of the "weeds" in our yards were originally planted for specific reasons and got out of control. Examples are dandelions (you can get your revenge by eating the leaves before they flower) and ground ivy AKA creeping Charlie. In my town, we constantly have to cut Rose of Sharon seedlings to keep it from taking over, although most of us leave some for bees and hummingbirds.

11) DISPOSE OF YARD DEBRIS PROPERLY. All  of your grass clippings should be left on the lawn as mulch, so that everything pulled out of the soil goes right back in. Same thing with weeds when they are fully composted. All of your tree leaves should have your mower run over them to crunch them up, for the same reason. You don't need to pay for composted leaf mulch if you or your neighbors have trees. Ground ivy can be composted. English ivy can't, it doesn't decay.  English and  poison ivy should be bagged with the household trash, not sent to your town yard waste recycling center.

12) No drugs. No herbicides, pesticides, or chemical "food".  Those labels saying "harmful if ingested" go triple for our beneficial insects and birds. Monsanto bribed EPA officials to suppress carcinogenic data about Roundup and Bayer's "shrub control" drug kills pollinators, ruining our food supply. The first time your new lawn service shows up for a full treatment, make them show you every package they take out and write down the name of the active ingredient(s). Then make them wait while you google the products. You might end up firing the lawn service immediately.

13) NO HARDSCAPING.  Fireflies, which are beneficial in both adults and larvae, are on the decline due to hardscaping. Once you hardscape, you can't mow. Weeds survive by growing where nothing else can; hardscaping won't prevent weeds and you have to get down and pull them since you can't mow. Also see #12 above.

14) KNOW WHEN AND HOW TO WATER. Look, grass doesn't produce food so don't water it. Let it go dormant in the summer drought. For other things, water THE ROOTS deeply before 10 a.m. every other day if it's not going to rain. Spraying it on the leaves -- of grass as well as other plants -- creates a billion little magnifying glasses that concentrate the sunlight, which burns the leaves, and it's wasteful. Night-time watering brings the slugs which you wouldn't have if you hadn't hardscaped over the firefly larvae.

15) Never let anybody touch your landscape if they can't show certification of expertise or they won't give you all the time you want to read the contract. Maryland has a tree expert licensing program. University of Maryland's state extension service runs a Master Gardener program. Most lawn services either use poisons or  they do the same dumb things that already caused problems with your yard, only they make you pay for it. Make sure to read cancellation clauses in your contract carefully. One "green" company is also known for making cancellation nearly impossible. Never contract with door to door sales for anything. No, I mean it, ANYTHING.

Now when I tell you not to hire a yard service, the first thing you think is "she must be nuts, I don't have time for all that work." But look again. I told you DON'T mow when there's a drought; DON'T prune except once a year at the right time for your shrubs; DON'T get out that damned fertilizer spreader but use the compost nature provides; DON'T run around spraying poison on things; DON'T hardscape or you'll have to weed by hand; DON'T rake up your grass clippings or leaves and bag them; DON'T spread all that hardwood mulch that you'll only have to throw out when the problems start; DON'T plant fancy hybrids that you have to fuss over and replant every year because they won't breed more like them; DON'T dump your birdbath every day but dope it with skeeter killer.

I've also saved you all the money you used to spend on poisons and yard drugs and the emergency room fees when your kids or pets got sick from them, and the labor you used to pay your lawn service for (labor is always more expensive than consumables), and the price of replacing landscaping that died because you didn't treat it right, and the gasoline in your mower, and the money the garden shop talked you into spending on things that are bad for your plants.

I have posted most of this info before but every day there are people moving into houses with yards and wasting their money on goods and services because they don't know what they're doing, or because they copy people in their neighborhoods who are also clueless. And I'm just a pale shadow of the help Mike McGrath deals out all the time. Every time you have a yard problem, go to his archives for the fix. The 15 steps above are the ones that cause the most trouble, but YMMV.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved