Green Garden Design

This is the start on a series about green garden design so hunker down and stay with me as I outline where my garden design is going.

Last week, I asked about tillers. This week, I’m not going to go down that road. Things change in my gardening world and this week, I’ve been sensitized (once again) to the entire issue of global warming and the environment. I mean, it just ain’t going away is it?

The Princess and I spent last winter on Dauphin Island, one of the barrier Gulf Coast islands off Alabama and witnessed first hand the devastation that tornadoes and hurricanes create. Here we go again - only this one is called Gustav and I’ll be darned surprised if there’s much left of Dauphin Island after this season. Katrina took 4 feet of sand off the island, split the island in two, put 400 homes into the Mississippi channel and left much of the inhabited western end barely above sea level. We’ll see what another big storm (of whatever magnitude) does to the remaining sand and homes.

But that little bit of personal experience (we were there for some tropical storms and tornadoes) simply reinforces my own decision that whatever I’m going to do in my own garden, it has to be a green garden design. My contribution to global warming had better slow right down. Here’s what I’m doing and by example, what you can do as well.

Landscaping Area

Let me set the stage. There are 5 main areas I have to deal with in garden design. The one acre of house area and landscaping is the primary one. The trial gardens are the second. The orchard and 7 acres of land surrounding the house landscaping is the third and the laneway and access area is the fourth area of concern. The shoreline and waterfront is the fifth. There are some overlaps in these areas but I can break them down into these design problems.

So what’s the problem?

The issue is reasonably simple. I want to further reduce my footprint on the environment while maintaining a garden and my business of garden writing. I understand that it’s not just my one bit of gasoline to mow the lawns that’s a problem but rather that one bit of fuel magnified by 100 million gardeners doing the same thing. Every time we use a gallon of fuel to mow a bit of grass, we create demand on the system that translates to pollution right from the oil wells, right along the distillery supply chain, to the transport trucks who deliver it to the little bit of spillage at the service stations right to my driveway where I manage to put a bit or two onto the ground in the process of filling. All those bits and pollution risks add up over 100 million gardeners here in North America when it comes to lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, leaf blowers, tillers and other petroleum powered machinery. Even if we don’t spill anything, how much gasoline do we use every week just in cutting our lawns?

Electrical Tools

And what about electric tools? Well, the supply chain still runs to the electrical generation stations and here in Ontario, we’ re going to see “smart metering” where these tools will draw power during peak periods and you’re going to see the true cost of running these tools isn’t cheap nor does it have a particularly small power footprint.

Interesting Choices in Green Garden Design

This creates some interesting choices for me in designing this new garden and begins to put the problems of green garden design into play - right from the main conceptual design right through to small problems such as garden edgings and maintenance. I’ve broken the problem areas into two main ones. The first is the home landscaping - immediately around the house for approximately one-half to one acre of land. The second is the other 7 acres and semi-commercial areas of the property that will be explored in more detail in subsequent posts. But what this does is give me the opportunity to explore the problems we all face in our home gardens as well as allow me to explore a somewhat larger perspective on larger areas.

Decisions

So the lines have been drawn and the first decision was that I was going to stay “organic”. After all, I’ve been doing this for many years now so why change. That’s a given.

The second decision was more painful but I’ve decided to forego investing in power equipment and using it as a main line of garden maintenance for the home landscape. Now this decision creates ripple effects right through the entire design process - and I’ll be writing more about this in the near future. But generally, my garden size is now whatever I can manage without the use of power machinery. What I can’t manage will have to be designed for zero or extremely low garden input. Or the garden will have to be redesigned or made smaller. This is also a perfect way for me to show you how to do the same thing in your own garden.

Larger Issues

The 7-acre property, trial beds, landscape and maintenance creates larger issues for machinery. For example, our driveway is approximately 800 feet long and snow drifting across the fields pretty much means I can’t be hand-digging this distance. So some form of machinery is going to be necessary.

Similarly, the fields (former occupants mowed the entire area) are not going to be mown but we do have to control noxious weeds according to municipal standards so we need at least a yearly knockdown at seed production time. These areas will be covered in future posts but manual labor is not an option for some of these areas so we have to figure out ways of reducing the input while meeting the needs of those areas.

Summary

It is indeed an interesting problem as I start working on design issue and figuring out the best ways to create the garden of my dreams while decreasing my footprint on this planet. I hope you’ll participate in this adventure and maybe, just maybe take some steps of your own when it comes to green garden design.

As a final note, I do not have all the answers to these design issues yet, I’ve barely even begun the process. It is a process and the first one of course is to identify the questions and problems to be solved in each area. But at least I have a start - I’ve made the decision to go that route. This should be an interesting garden adventure.

Annual Flowers - Garden Trials 2008

This is a quick peek at my visit to the Landscape Ontario garden trials where several hundred varieties were on trial during this wet, cool summer. The plants here are my picks for great performance in a variety of classes. But all are short and suitable for container gardening use.

Fall Gardening - It’s Your Choice

If you’re interested in a few new plants for fall gardening and extending your bloom time well in October, here are a few suggestions I made this week in my radio podcast. Click here to listen

Rototiller Review

One of the things that’s very clear to me is that with my tractor dead, I’m going to need a small tiller for garden maintenance and creation in some parts of the garden building process. I’m not going to put one on the new tractor as that would be serious overkill.

And I don’t need a serious workhorse of a machine that will do acres but rather a smaller unit that is easily handled and will only be used occasionally (remember I mulch my main gardens) to turn old straw in on the veg patch and make new garden beds - working in the peat moss and first application of compost kind of things. Light duty - only used several times a year.

So tell me what you like or don’t like about your rototiller. What would you recommend for light duty work.

Ongoing Garden Design

Garden design thinking continues unabated here on the island. I’m still sketching away as the roof goes on the garage and we start getting ready to finish off the concrete floors before moving tools into place.

This concept is a little more “formal” in that the lines are straight and the beds are clearly defined - probably with raised beds and timbers. This came about because I’m looking at what I really enjoy doing (growing interesting plants) and experimenting a lot (new seedlings, my own plant breeding) and doing this in the context of a jumbled cottage garden seems a tad more disorganized. The main perennial beds will be to the other side of the driveway behind the views we’ve been seeing (in front of the house) and behind the house surrounding the gazebo-to-be and in the shade. So I have a lot of areas for large established gardens with a bit of soil. This area “might” become a test area, a breeding and evaluation area for new plants where I can document them and play around with them before they hit the main gardens. I might even hedge these in more than they are now with a hedge between the walkway and the garden but….

Here’s concept for garden design #3. Square beds, long rows separate by easily worked aisles (wide enough for the wheelbarrow and wagon) The beds along the guest cottage side would be bulbs and shallow soil plants in a garden setting. The other two long beds would be trial beds for new plants and evaluations.

A Way To Garden

I interviewed Margaret Roach of A Way To Garden.com the other day and was clearly enchanted by this talented writer. We had a great talk and I thought ahead to record it as well. It took a bit of editing but I think I have it clearly enough so you can hear Margaret’s advice yourself in her own words. Be prepared to turn your volume up to it’s highest setting.

For those who don’t know her, Margaret and her blog have taken the gardening blogosphere by storm. A former editor and publishing director with Martha Stewart (in fact the first editor of the gardening side of things at all things Martha) she knows her stuff both as a writer and confirmed gardener.

I have a relatively few garden blogs on my reading list - Margaret’s is one of them. Enough said - go there, sign up, learn something.

On a technical level, I note that this is indeed the right link and if you can’t listen to it or download it (Vista computer alert here!) then it’s a setting somewhere in your system and not here at this end.

Click here to download or listen

Gardening Bloom Day

I have to confess that these coneflowers are one of my favorite plants, I particularly like the way they collect morning light.

If you want to see other plants in bloom right now in the blogosphere, Carol at MayDreamsGarden has a full listing on her blog right here.

But I note the only problem with having a plant looking great in the morning light is that you actually have to get up to see it.

Garden Design at Someday

Regular readers may recall that we named our garden and home “Someday” because this was someday for us. We’ve landed, we’re enjoying life, and this is what we’ve worked for. No sense putting off till tomorrow what you can enjoy today.

This picture shows the overall layout - between the garage concrete floor - the location of the garden shed (unpainted as of yet - family volunteers are not coming out of the woodwork) and the guest cottage (also unpainted in the new colors - hint - hint to family)

This is the next sketch in my book. You can see the garden shed has taken up a place at the end of the garden. With the location of the garage, this shed turned out to be in the middle of the driveway so the decision point was whether to hide it away behind the guest cottage (bunkhouse or bunkie in our family) or make it an integral part of this garden. I decided it was going to be an integral part of the garden and would be upgraded significantly as well in the process.

The garden design is now a little more like a garden. Some of the collections have been moved right away from this area because of soil depth. The beds are a little more winding and not as loose - it looks a bit more like a garden here.

Note the addition of the deer fencing (more on that later) in the top of the sketch. This is going to be necessary to protect the plants and will wind up protecting about 2 acres of ground (including the fruit orchard).

Hedges have also reared their head to differentiate some of the garden areas. The workroom with compost bins etc is going to be hidden away behind the guest cottage but I’ll need tractor access to this area for turning and collecting. (more on tractors later) And I do want manual access for wheelbarrows etc to this area for the cold frames and seedling germination areas.

The overall design is now more like a garden rather than a collection - the soils to the north will be left undisturbed (if soil is a term we can use on this rock shale) because it should provide an excellent area for species bulbs and some plants that demand excellent drainage. The area to the right of the picture will be completely rebuilt with excavation and soils being brought in to augment and replace the rock strata here.

The shaded in areas are pathways - from the garage to the house - from guest parking to the house and again back to the garden shed and a pathway inside the garden off to the south.

Again, this was a concept drawing for thinking on but it’s closer to what I want than the previous one.

Garden Design Process

As regular readers know, the Princess and I bought a place together last year and have decided to make a garden. (As if that’s going to come as a surprise to any of my friends or readers.)

The garden is going to be a lot bigger than most sane people will have but I thought I’d share the design process with you over a few posts and show you pictures of the garden development as it is built.

What I’m going to be showing you is a work in progress - it’s not the finished work. You’ll see the initial sketches, the thinking and the rough layouts as I go. The first thing to understand in this first series is that *everything* changes. Everything.

The initial thinking was that many of the herbs and plant collections could go into the space between the garage and guest cottage. This is not the case as you’ll see in later developments. The soil turned out to be extremely shallow and not workable in this area. So I have a choice of major construction here or giving up the thought of having a garden in this perfectly situated area. You know the choice.

So here’s drawing one from back in June when we decided to put a garden in this area. This is from one of my sketch books and wasn’t intended for publication (but these things change) - you’re getting the raw data I work from here and my original thinking. Remember things change.

This design was based on creating circles in the garden - laying out blocks of plants and putting them together in collections. Remember it was to be a collector’s garden.

And here’s the original area with Nole and his backhoe excavating for the garage area - he’s on bedrock with the excavation at that depth.

Is this a good thing?

So here’s a problem for you.

I know you’re against genetic modified foods.

But it’s going to be possible in the very near future to genetically modify a potato (and they’re working on it) to make a plant that is resistant to blight.

They take genes from a bunch of potatoes and mix ‘em up in one plant to produce a plant that doesn’t die when exposed to blight (I note that may be oversimplifying the process just a tad)

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? And where do we draw the line?

Another Fall Online Order

I went to Fraser’s Thimble Farm as well to see what was on offer out there in BC this fall. And I filled up my order from this small specialist plant nursery. Check ‘em out - I think you’re going to like the plants.

Now - this is a small family nursery and I don’t expect the same level of Net-service as I do from the big retailers. (Ever notice how the smaller the operation - the more idiosyncratic the owners - and the more interesting range of plants?)

And I wasn’t surprised. No online ordering forms, no credit card taking. An online catalog (oh yeah, can you drool over those plant descriptions because there’s no pictures) for a plant nut who has to look stuff up before ordering (they warn you about this). This is not for beginners. This is for those who would be serious gardeners.

As a would-be serious gardener, I ordered.

Mind you, I sent in the order via email and now I have to figure out how to get my credit card number to them to complete the transaction. They only open their email every few days (preferring fax - but I don’t own one of those anymore) so we’ll see how this goes. Why not put my order in over the phone - well, because they don’t take phone orders.

So here’s a company that puts a ton of stuff in the way of you placing your order yet I still ordered. Go figure. Mind you, the prices for the bulbs I wanted from these folks were lower than Garden Import and the service charge appears to be a one-stop price so while the order total was higher (I couldn’t resist adding just a few other bulbs to my order) the shipping is far less.

They ship to Canada and the U.S. (but US gardeners will require a few extra bucks because of your phytosanitary and security issues for permits).

I’ll be reporting on the quality of plants from both of my orders this fall when they arrive.

And if you’ll excuse me, now I really have to get my garden-building going.

The signs are here.

The Cormorants are massing. A flock of several hundred flew west along the coast of the island last week.

I heard my first training flight of Canada geese this morning. This is when several families get together with the first-year birds and fly around in v-formation seemingly for the practice and fun of flying. Lessons in group co-operation are being passed along to the young birds.

Grackles have almost gone from our bird feeder - only 2 left and our bird seed consumption has dropped dramatically.

No massing of swallows yet.

No massing of loons in the channel yet.

But the signs are here.

Sigh.

Ordering Fall Plants Online

I’ve just had an interesting experience ordering plants online that I thought I’d share. The first nursery - Botanus - sent me a catalogue earlier in the summer and I just got around to ordering a few new bulbs to grace the garden. I didn’t order anything out of the ordinary but basic staple bulbs including the fragrant tulip ‘Angelique’, two short daffodils ‘Quail’ and N poeticus recurvus (both fragrant) and an Iris ‘Speeding Again’ a rebloomer. This is my first shot across the bows of starting to lay in new plants for this rather largish garden I have in my mind. It’s a tiny shot given the size of the garden but you gotta start somewhere. Ordering from Botanus was fast, easy and quick.

Ordering a few plants was a statement of faith that I’ll have the new tractor, garden soil, and some beds built by this fall rather than a need for new plants. It was a signal to myself that I had better keep my butt moving if I wanted to really get this garden underway.

I then turned to a competitor called Garden Import. This is another rather good mail order company and I hadn’t ordered from them before either. I’ve received their catalogues on and off over the years so this year I decided to correct that and make a small order to test them out. Three plants (about $50 bucks) produced three different shipping dates and three shipping charges. Neither the website nor the catalog that I could find told me which shipping system the plants were on. So I wandered around the site for 3/4 hour trying to find matches for the plants (fall blooming crocus) I really wanted that I could plant in the garden as it currently sits. Now I know there’s probably a very good reason for the different shipping dates and I know that companies need to recover their costs but adding an 8 dollar shipping charge to each of three plants pretty much added a third to a half to the bill. I backed out of the shopping cart and cleared the data - unpurchased. I’m going to source the crocus at another nursery (probably Botanus and simply have them add it to the order).

Have any of you guys ever done that? Gone through the online ordering process and then found the shipping charges made it difficult to justify only buying a few plants? Or had three different shipping charges added to your order?

Red Spider Hemerocallis Flower

Another of Barry Matthie’s 2008 introductions. What can I tell you? I love ‘em and will be building a garden simply to feature some of this kind of flower.

Spider Flowering Daylilies

I’m a big fan of spider flowering daylilies and I thought I’d share this one with you. I saw it at Barry Matthie’s Bonnie Brae Nursery in Prince Edward County, Ontario. Barry is a noted Canadian breeder of Hemerocallis and I interviewed him and will have the video uploaded sometime this fall when the summer dust settles and I get back to video editing.

Vegetable Gardening Tips

The vegetable garden is giving us more and more of a harvest and I thought I’d pass along a few tips that will help you increase the yield of your basic crops. Think of it as a advanced vegetable gardening tips.

When you harvest cabbages, cut them off. This gives you a nice clean head of cabbage and it leaves the roots intact and still growing and producing energy. If you rip it out of the ground or twist it off, then these roots are disturbed. We want those roots to keep growing because we’re going to go for a second crop of cabbage. Yes, you can easily get a few more cabbages from the same plant if you use a knife to harvest the main head. After the head is cut off, make two cuts across the remaining stump. The cuts will be in the shape of a cross and leave four equal quadrants of the stump. The cut should be approximately one to two cm deep (1/2 inch) but don’t obsess over this - close counts.

By making four equal quadrants, you’re going to find the cabbage will scab over the original cut pretty quickly and then if you keep watering the plants (not that we need to water a lot lately) you’re going to find four baby cabbages growing; one on each quadrant. They won’t get as large as the main cabbage was but with a bit of luck, a bit of fish emulsion to boost growth and plant energy, you’ll get another crop of small cabbages for yet another salad.

You’re going to be doing almost the same thing of course with your broccoli. After you harvest that main head with a knife to leave the roots intact, you’re going to find the side shoots (every place there’s a leaf up and down the stem) are going to develop into smaller heads. You’ll get as much or more broccoli from these smaller heads as you will from the larger central one. You still have to give the plant a boost in feed to get a ton of these and you still have to pick the green cabbage worms that abound at this time of year but you’ll get a lot of green stuff off one plant if you’re careful.

Closely associated with the vegetable garden is the herb garden and you really want to be cutting and trimming plants right now. I saw our parsley plants trying to bolt (go to seed) this week and immediately whacked them back. I don’t want herbs to go to seed because they’ll lose some of their flavour and start slowing down on leaf production. So get out there and trim that basil and parsley and other annual herbs because even if you don’t want to use them right away, you’ll need to maintain them for when you do want the leaves.

Finally, we come to the tomatoes. There are several things you can do to really push your tomatoes along in the production sense. The first is to keep feeding them. Give them a dose of fish emulsion or compost tea every two weeks and you’re going to see amazing differences in the yields of this plant. While it should not be a problem this year with all the water we’re having, it is good to remember that a tomato fruit is over 95% water and any restriction on the water is going to reduce the size of the harvest. So do make sure the soil water is even with no ups and downs - from soaking to dry - this year. This might be a problem if we get to August, the rains slow down and we get some high heat days. The fruit will start to expand in the heat and because the plant has all the water it requires, the plant will grow quickly, too quickly. With sudden turns in high heat, we’re going to see cracking.

As soon as you see plants cracking, harvest the fruit you can. It’s still useable. Immediate harvesting will reduce the tempting fruit from wasps and slugs because once they get a sniff of the sugars, you’re going to find them all over your plant eating away and reducing the insides of the individual tomatoes to their own advantage. This is why if we do go to high heat, it is going to be really necessary to maintain the water levels in the plant. We want to maintain the plant’s growing abilities as best we can but do expect cracking this year.

If your tomatoes are staked, then let me suggest you do a fews simple things to increase your harvest. I know you’re taking off the suckers to concentrate the growth along the main growing stem. But as the fruit sets, you’re going to do an extra stage of pruning. A tomato ripens its fruit from the bottom upwards. So the lowest fruit ripens first. As soon as that lower fruit truss is ripe and harvested, you can remove the leaves on that main stem all the way to the second truss of fruit but not above it. This increases air circulation and sunlight onto the next fruit truss. You’ll find the plants will ripen the fruits a little faster if you do this pruning. Finally with staked tomatoes, you want to cut the top off the growing point sometime in the first week of September and prevent any sideshoots from developing as they will want to do. This increases the energy going into the fruit development giving you a chance to ripen those last few tomatoes before the killing frosts arrive.

So do those few things and you’ll see increased vegetables and herbs coming out of your garden from here to frost.

Can I talk to you?

I have a project underway where I want to interview some bloggers. I have an assistant working on setting up the interviews but we’re having a heck of a time.

Most of the folks I want to interview don’t have contact pages on their blogs.

I can’t believe it. I want to interview you - give you publicity and promote the heck out of what you’re doing and you don’t want to talk to me because I can’t get to you.

Oh sure - I can leave a comment on your blog saying “I want to interview you - contact me on my contact page on my blog”. How cool is that? For either one of us? I guess we’ll wind up doing that and then asking you to delete it.

So - if you’re reading this and are an Alltop blogger without a readily available contact page - please contact me on my contact page. It will save us both a bit of a hassle.

Garden Centers Shouldn’t Blog

You run a small retail greenhouse or nursery and you want to know if you should blog.

Blogging has to be seen in the context of marketing and sales. So there are two aspects you have to consider.

1)Your costs.

Take the time you spend writing and uploading a post (conservatively 20 minutes if it’s a decent post but if you aren’t a speed typist and a fast writer - you can easily hit 45 minutes). Understand you have to post regularly to make a blog worthwhile. And the main blogging time is spring when your target market is looking for information. Let’s say an hour/week.

Multiply your wage rate times 52 hours (one hour week). Let’s say that you make $20/hour for the purposes of this. That means your upfront cost is $1040 to produce this blog. But that’s not the way I used to budget my time in the nursery. You want me in November - I come for $20/hour. You want me in May - my time was over $200/hour and I’d still say no. I just didn’t have the time in May to do anything but eat, sleep, and run the nursery. So do figure out your real cost.

2) The Response.

Then take a look at subscription rates. If you get 200 subscribers to a commercial retail garden blog you’re doing well (and that’s assuming you’re a good writer so that folks will read you). Assume that at least half of those are non-local. Now you’re down to 100. Then evaluate response rates by posting a coupon. Typically, response rates approaching 5% are considered downright miraculous on the Net but let’s say you get 10%.

Bottom Line

Congratulations! You’ve just spent at least $1040 to get 10 customers into your garden business and your sales are discounted.

Your cost of acquisition is about $100 per customer and this isn’t likely a good deal when compared to something as simple as direct mail or other advertising options.

Blogging Garden Centers

But I know garden centers that blog! Sure you do - but they aren’t making money at it. They’re doing it for the heck of it - because somebody told them it was “cool” to blog. Or because that individual wants to create a national role within the trade for some other reason.

They surely haven’t thought out the consequences of spending an entire week of the year (one hour a week for 52 weeks=52 hours) on an advertising activity that’s going to create a customer acquisition cost of over $100.

In short, nobody at that garden center has run the numbers.

Does the same thing apply to websites?

No!

You need a website and you need it optimized for local searches. You need to have something up there that that speaks to local folks so when they search for a garden center in “anytown” - you’re going to pop up. Clear directions to your place (include coordinates for gps units) telephone contact points (not email - you don’t have time to answer email in your busy season) - the stuff you need to get these people into your store where you can make money.

You can write a few articles about gardening in your region - dealing with the specific problems of your climate and soils - to establish yourself as an expert resource. Write a new one every month or two to keep the site fresh. But don’t go overboard on it - you’re in the nursery business - not the information-business.

Does this apply to nationally known nurseries?

Short answer - it depends. The same kinds of numbers hold true - same kinds of costs, same kinds of response rates BUT the target audience is different. You’re not writing for consumers, you’re writing for the media. The garden media writes and reads blogs and those are the folks you want to have for your pull marketing efforts.

But you have to do it in a way that answers the classic copywriting question from the reader’s point of view “What’s in it for me?” If your commercial blog is about you - the media won’t read it and there’s quite a few out there that treat their commercial blog as a personal one. If your commercial nursery blog is about your reader - helping them in a some way, then you’re going to have readers in the trade. Tim Wood does a great job of this. He provides useful plant information, new plant info, and ties it all up in a story that just, ever so casually, happens to mention his company every now and then.

But to return to my main point - there are other, far more cost-effective ways to publicize and make use of resources than blogging. It’s a long way down the list of marketing and sales efforts for local garden centers with no national objectives.

photo credit: CarbonNYC

I’m moving online

It’s a long story but the bottom line is that I had to totally rebuild my operating system on my Mac this weekend. Read more