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.