Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

For landscapes it's time for a new leaf

An attractive, healthy yard doesn't take a lot of money, or even a lot of time. A simple strategy can yield some eye-catching results.

By John A. Starnes Jr., Special to the Times
Published December 29, 2007

Do you ever pull into your driveway and wince with embarrassment, convinced that yours is the worst-looking yard on the block? You may feel so overwhelmed by the mess that you don't know where to begin. - As someone who ran an organic landscaping business for 19 years, I've accumulated quite a few tricks that you can employ to transform squalor into beauty. - Just use the "Salami Approach" to slice that seemingly hopeless challenge into several smaller, manageable tasks that offer instant gratification. After each "slice" is done, check it off your list, then congratulate yourself on moving one step closer to a yard you can be proud of. After 12 months of small victories, you will have won your War on Squalor.

Curb appeal

- If your mailbox is wobbly and falling apart, buy a new one. Install it in an hour or less with a post-hole digger and a sack of concrete mix.

- If your current mailbox is still sturdy and functional but weary-looking, give it a good scrub with soapy water, dry it, then give it a fresh coast of white gloss spray paint $2 a can. Add new gold or black metallic street numbers.

- Any mailbox is enhanced by flowers at its base, or a swath of flowering vines. Cut out the weeds and grass around the post in a circle with a diameter of 2 feet. Fertilize and turn the soil. Line it with curved concrete edgers. (I paint mine with white latex for a cheerier effect.)

Plant about a dozen easy-to-grow young annual flowers, such as hybrid Vincas or snapdragons, or three reliable perennials, like red Pentas, yellow African Daisy or lavender Ruellia.

If you prefer the grace of a colorful vine growing up the post, using the mailbox as a trellis, consider lovely yet reliable choices like Carolina jessamine, pink mandevilla, yellow allamanda or wonderfully fragrant Confederate jasmine. All are perennial, low-care and free-flowering, widely available at garden shops.

Add 3 inches of mulch, preferably chipped tree-trimming mulch, though the red stuff will do. Water deeply to settle the plants well into their new home.

- Scruffy picket fence? Paint the broad surfaces with a roller; use a brush between the pickets. Use bright-white gloss exterior latex house paint.

Roll out the lawn

- Give your lawn a winter makeover. Around this time of year, look for bags of winter rye or Oregon rye seed. (They're cheapest in 50-pound bags.) Set your broadcast spreader (not a drop spreader) to about halfway open, then pace steadily back and forth across your lawn to spread the seeds evenly. Make a second set of passes at right angles for an especially thick, even winter rye lawn. Be sure not to fling the seeds into your landscape beds. One 50-pound bag will lightly re-seed a tired 5,000-square-foot St. Augustine, Bahia or Bermuda lawn.

- To sustain its growth and to feed your permanent lawn, then broadcast either an organic soil food like menhaden fish meal or Calf Manna from a feed store, or a16-4-8 chemical lawn fertilizer with added trace elements such as iron, manganese, magnesium, zinc, boron and molybdenum. Use 100 pounds per 5,000 square feet of a natural soil food, or 50 pounds of the chemical fertilizer. Don't use a weed-and-feed kind. They rarely work and can damage neighboring garden plants.

Water deeply once a week, and within a month you'll have a soft, inviting carpet. You'll need to mow every five days to mulch the clippings into the soil as free fertilizer. When the heat returns, the rye will add valuable organic matter to your sandy soil as it decays.

Plants for the pond

- Clean your pond water naturally while you feed any goldfish that live there. Buy a few bundles of the native aquatic plant called hot water cabomba from a pet supply and aquarium store. This lacy, bright-green plant oxygenates the water and quickly transforms dissolved phosphates and nitrates that support algae blooms into tender, tasty new growth your fish will love. You can cut back on the number of times you feed the fish. Weekly, throw in a few dry dog or cat food nuggets (no kidding!); they are vastly cheaper than fish food flakes and far less likely to cloud the water. Cost of the plants? Perhaps $3.

Much from mulch

- Nothing spruces up a landscape more quickly than a deep layer of fresh mulch. It keeps the soil beneath it cool, damp, fertile, teeming with beneficial creatures. It discourages weeds and eliminates need for frequent watering.

Those perky red mulches we've all seen or even used are primarily decorative, perhaps used as a top dressing over a truly functional organic mulch 6 to 8 inches deep. But many gardeners prefer more natural-looking mulches that truly heal our sandy or calcareous soils and are usually much less expensive, or even free.

My personal favorite is the chipped tree-branch mulch delivered free by tree-trimming companies. Applied 4 to 8 inches deep to landscape gardens, it instantly gives a landscape a fresh look as it decays into a rich humus. Order it in spring and summer to get a mulch rich in pulverized nitrogen-rich green leaves, which help minimize the period of nitrogen deficiency a wood-based mulch can trigger as it decays. Applied 8 inches thick, this mulch will soon settle in a layer 6 inches deep that smothers out most annual weeds while it traps moisture in the soil beneath. A mulch application is a "bank account" that saves up water in the soil for later use.

Organic fertilizers like fish meal or manure, or quality chemical fertilizers like Sunniland Palm 8-6-6 Fertilizer, with trace elements (great for all garden plants, not just palms), can be spread right on top of a thick mulch layer. They will leach their nutrients steadily and help the mulch decay into a rich, spongy layer. Decaying wood forms lignin, a remarkable soil component that holds many times its weight in water while harboring beneficial organisms. If you've ever encountered a fallen log in the woods that was so old and soft you could crush it with your hand, you've met the lignin our soil sorely lacks. Chipped tree mulch is the easiest way to add it to your soil.

- Horse stall sweepings, a mixture of sawdust, horse manure and horse urine, is another great mulch, usually free for the taking from local stables. Some will even deliver. The animal waste portion is loaded with beneficial bacteria and nutrients, especially nitrogen, and the sawdust decays into lignin. Applied to a depth of 2 inches, this mulch will do wonders for impoverished soil, especially a vegetable or rose garden. Horse manure may carry the tetanus germ, which could enter a puncture wound, so keep your inoculations up-to-date.

Recycle oak leaves

- In late winter, you'll see bags of oak leaves out on the curbs on trash day. Pick up half a dozen bags and spread them all over your gardens. They visually freshen up tired-looking, weedy beds. They decay into a rich, acid-forming mulch that combats the excess alkalinity of beachside soils and limestone marl soils. Inland, that acid will be counteracted by your annual spring sprinkling of dolomite.

Earthworms thrive in decaying oak leaves, transforming the leaves into the black humus our sandy soil needs. Why buy black peat when free leaves will do the job? Acid-loving plants like azaleas, gardenias, camellias and ixoras love oak-leaf mulch.

- I've never used cypress mulch and never will. There is long-standing evidence that natural fungicides in it suppress beneficial soil fungi that foster soil fertility and health. It does little to trap moisture or add humus. It is obtained by grinding up what little remains of Florida's formerly majestic cypress forests. Sure, it's pretty when new, but the color fades quickly, so if it doesn't heal and protect your soil, why spend money on it? That's also why I don't use colored recycled rubber mulches, or bagged stones.

Steam bath for weeds

- Weeds in the seams of your driveway, sidewalk and patio can be an ugly eyesore. But who wants to use an even scarier herbicide? Once a week, bring a tea kettle of water to a boil, then go straight from the stove and pour it on them to cook them; skip the fuss of pulling them. They will die on the spot and slough out with a coarse broom a week or two later. Straight vinegar sprayed on them in the morning on a sunny day can kill them too, though a second application a week later may be needed.

A grand new year full of promise and opportunity awaits us. Resolve today to use it to steadily transform landscape embarrassment into pride.

John A. Starnes Jr., born in Key West, is an avid organic gardener and rosarian who studies, collects, cultivates and hybridizes roses for Florida. He can be reached at johnastarnes@msn.com.

[Last modified December 28, 2007, 16:48:31]