[ Lost in the Landscape ]

landscaping horror: where diy meets wtf

One of my friends recently turned me on to Regretsy, a blog that gath­ers together some of the more unfor­tu­nate objects that earnest DIY­ers have made and posted for sale at the Etsy craft site.

I really like Regretsy’s tag line, “where DIY meets WTF,” and I’ve bor­rowed it for the sub­ti­tle of this quick post on a new gar­den space that went up in my neigh­bor­hood, a bit of land­scap­ing hor­ri­ble­ness that seemed per­fect for Halloween.

I thank John for notic­ing it first and point­ing it out to me, know­ing how well I’d appre­ci­ate it. “It’s on the right as you head down the hill. You can’t miss it.”

Ah, what a won­der: plas­tic grass-colored indoor-outdoor car­pet­ing, one of my per­sonal favs…placed nat­u­ral­is­ti­cally between the side­walk and the side fence…

But it gets bet­ter! Ever six feet or so, next to the fence, the designer has planted big red silk roses. I’m sure they were meant to coor­di­nate with the red curb.

A gar­den made out of dead things emu­lat­ing live ones. Zom­bies. Plas­tic roses. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

One of the dan­gers of hav­ing lovely flow­ers next to a pub­lic walk­way is that some­one might want to pick them.

One of the roses planted in this plas­tic lawn. Note the price tag still attached.

Could this be the lat­est avant-garde gar­den designed by Martha Schwartz, who’s incor­po­rated plas­tic plants into her designs, as in her [ Splice Gar­den, at Cambridge’s White­head Insti­tute ]?

No, sadly, prob­a­bly not. But I will force myself to say some­thing nice about it: At least it doesn’t require water­ing, except maybe to hose off the dust.

October 31 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: astroturf • drought-tolerant landscaping • Martha Schwartz • plastic • plastic turf • water conservation | 15 Comments »

but they said to cut down on watering…

I read this in the week­end paper and had to share: It looks like the pop­u­la­tion of San Diego County is doing so well in cut­ting down our water use that the water dis­tricts that sup­ply us are sud­denly feel­ing the finan­cial pinch. Here’s a snip­pet from the San Diego Union-Tribune arti­cle:

“We don’t need to keep telling (cus­tomers) to do a bet­ter job,” said Bill Rucker, gen­eral man­ager for the Val­lecitos Water Dis­trict in San Marcos.

His agency’s sales fell 20 per­cent in the April-to-July period com­pared with the same period in 2008. To make up for the down­turn, the dis­trict will leave some posi­tions vacant and roll back con­ser­va­tion education.

Dur­ing a meet­ing of the region’s top water man­agers in late August, “every­one was con­cerned about the lost rev­enues,” said Den­nis Lamb of the Val­lecitos district.

He said the decision-makers expressed sup­port for allow­ing res­i­dents to con­tinue water­ing their lawns and other land­scap­ing a max­i­mum of three days a week dur­ing the win­ter and spring, even though cur­rent reg­u­la­tions call for irri­ga­tion only once a week from Novem­ber through May.

After read­ing reac­tions from the author­i­ties I’m left won­der­ing: Should it really be the water dis­tricts that are at the pub­lic fore­front of water con­ser­va­tion? On one hand they’re telling us to do the right thing. But at the same time it’s in their finan­cial inter­est if we don’t. Con­flict of inter­est, anyone?

September 15 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: water conservation • water use | 8 Comments »

the most recent water bill

We’ve taken a lot of mea­sures to try to con­serve water. Each water bill we receive gives us a chance to look at how well we’re doing. Com­pared to last year, this last bill showed a 40.1% drop for the two-month period of mid-May to mid-July.

To get to this point we’ve installed drip irri­ga­tion for most of the remain­ing thirsty plants, reduced the num­ber of times a week the out­door sprin­kler runs, recy­cled water from the shower, mulched many gar­den spaces, and replaced some water-intensive plants with low-water or no-water selec­tions. It’s helped that this has been a fairly cool spring and early summer.

Still, 112 gal­lons a day aver­age total for a house­hold of two people–one of us work­ing 40 hours a week, the other mainly work­ing out of the house–still seems a lit­tle on the high side. That’s enough water to flush a 1.6 gal­lon low-flow toi­let 70 times per day. But com­pared to an Amer­i­can per capita aver­age of some­thing around 60–70 gal­lons for just indoor usage, I guess that’s not too awful for both indoor and out­door use.

Hmmm, I won­der if we can get the usage down to less than 100 total gal­lons a day for the two of us. It might be a lit­tle tricky over the sum­mer. But it should be totally doable once the weather cools.

July 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: water conservation • water use | 5 Comments »

two reasons to mulch

One of the week­end gar­den projects was to put down some mulch around a cou­ple of the fruit trees. I’d resisted doing it ear­lier because I’d been using the bare ground at the edge of the lit­tle orchard as a place to sow var­i­ous annual wild­flower seeds–clarkia, baby blue eyes, pop­pies, fun things like that. Mulch would have pre­vented the seed from germinating.

A lit­tle gar­den of annual wild­flow­ers sounds really cool, but it’s a lot of work to keep going. Bare ground dur­ing the wet win­ter and spring weather is an open invi­ta­tion for all the dor­mant weed seeds to set up house, and keep­ing the bed weeded was a several-day-a-week chore.

Add to that that we’re re try­ing to do more to con­serve water. Mulching around the trees to con­serve water was mak­ing too much sense to not do. Come win­ter I’ll be glad for the reduced weeding.

The raised bed with the fruit trees still con­tains some orna­men­tals near the edges, and I mulched up to near the edges of most of them. This is the local Dud­leya edulis, com­bined with blue chalk fin­gers, Senecio man­dralis­cae, from South Africa.

Some of the other plants in the bed were so low-growing that mulching would have cov­ered them entirely. I left a cou­ple lit­tle patches of the native Dichon­dra occi­den­talis with mulch only at the edges. Hope­fully the plant will be able to grow up through the mulch a bit.

This lit­tle San Miguel Island buck­wheat seedling was large enough to not bury, but a cou­ple seedlings nearby were specks in the dirt that would have never seen the light of day.

For these tini­est seedlings, I left the ground bare. In addi­tion I erected a cou­ple lit­tle goal­posts to mark the loca­tion so I wouldn’t stomped on when I walk through or pull them out think­ing they’re a weed. It’s a tech­nique I use when­ever I plant some seeds in the open ground. The lit­tle upright twigs usu­ally stay around long enough for the seeds to ger­mi­nate and get to a safe size.

I’ll miss the lit­tle meadow in the spring months, but not the weed­ing. And I feel bet­ter that the fig and plum will be able to get by with a lit­tle less water. Come fall, if I decide I’d still like some annu­als to liven up a gar­den spot with the bare branches of the trees over­head, there really wouldn’t be any­thing stop­ping me from clear­ing lit­tle patches of dirt through the mulch, sow­ing some wild­flow­ers, and erect­ing lit­tle goal­posts to pro­tect the plants from maraud­ing gardeners.

Hmm. I’m not sure why it took me so long to do this…

July 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: mulch • seedlings • water conservation | 5 Comments »

pleasures of hand-watering

It’s not a proper gray­wa­ter sys­tem, but we’ve got­ten used to show­er­ing with a bucket below us, both to catch the water before it gets warm enough to use and to catch what­ever water splashes into the bucket. We still lose usable water down the drain, but we’re putting what we save to good use in the garden.

With only a small part of the yard on auto­matic water­ing, I’ve always done a lot of water­ing by hand. Now I’ve been doing it a lot more using reclaimed water.

Most of it’s been spot-watering. Not every­thing in the gar­den needs the same amount of water, so why not water only the things that need water? This is a tiny buck­wheat seedling I’ve been encour­ag­ing to get established.

It’s a great way to get to know your plants bet­ter. At the same time you learn a lot about the soil they’re grow­ing in, with some areas of the yard accept­ing a lot of water, while oth­ers just pool up and drain slowly.

Another water-conserving thing I’ve been doing is to let the facial fuzz go a few more days than I used to–Good thing facial hair is in these days. More fuzz = less water needed to take it off. (Don’t let the color of the hair get you off-subject. Remem­ber that I’m talk­ing about graywater, not gray hair…)

But back to gray­wa­ter: One con­cern I have with using water from the shower is what hap­pens when bath prod­ucts get dumped in the gar­den. I’m work­ing on find­ing out more, but in the mean­time I’m only water­ing the orna­men­tals with the gray­wa­ter. A local blog Linda turned me on to, Angel with Dirty Fin­ger Nails, did an intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject. The post made some rec­om­men­da­tions for laun­dry deter­gents and linked to a list of a few things to avoid.

Sure, water­ing by hand is more labor-intensive than turn­ing on the sprin­klers. But I think I’ve men­tioned it before that I count myself among the gar­den­ers who enjoy gar­den­ing, not just gar­dens. Water­ing by hand is one of those great plea­sures that only gar­den­ers like us will understand.

June 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: graywater • water conservation | 9 Comments »

how the neighbors are coping

Water restric­tions went into effect here in San Diego on June 1. So far there’s a short list of thou-shalt-nots, and the water dis­trict has pri­mar­ily tar­geted land­scape irri­ga­tion, the low-hanging fruit, with direc­tives like: no water­ing between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., water­ing only on spec­i­fied days based on your address, sprinkler-watering lim­ited to no more than 10 min­utes, three times a week.

Walk­ing around my neigh­bor­hood I can see a lot of peo­ple who’ve responded to the call. Some are just begin­ning to make changes, while oth­ers made changes years ago.

I was down a cou­ple streets from my house when I saw this front yard makeover. Sim­ple. Just a few big plants cho­sen for their coun­tours. This is a house where the mod­ern lines of the house echo the style of the plant­i­ngs. The sago palm requires some water, but the other plants would do well going dry.

Walk­ing around I saw a num­ber of houses where more drought-tolerant plant­i­ngs were mak­ing their way into the land­scape. Each house seemed to have their own take on what a drought-tolerant front yard could look like.

Some relied on hard­scape to replace a lawn…

…some went in for lots of mulch instead of a lawn, but not many plants…

…some for mulch with some plants, drought-tolerant or not…

…many of the yards that were reimag­ined as dry land­scapes many years ago seemed to rely on gravel and some plants…

…sev­eral used gravel with just a few plants to image a desert theme…

…this one mixed gravel, junipers, and edi­ble landscaping–a fig–right out front…

…many used what I’d con­sider a con­tem­po­rary look, employ­ing widely-spaced drought tol­er­ant com­bin­ing natives or exotics set in mulch or DG…

…here’s another of the style where a few plants are set in the mid­dle of space they’ll never grow into. It’s def­i­nitely a look, as well as land­scap­ing that embraces the fact that things don’t need to be densely planted to look good…

…many yards fea­ture some more water-intensive plants mixed in with ones that require a lot of water, a kind of plant­ing that a drip irri­ga­tion sys­tem can make pos­si­ble. These peo­ple used some roses along with plants that’ll look good with less water.

Look­ing around you sense that this is a neigh­bor­hood in tran­si­tion. Some peo­ple are just let­ting their lawns go brown. Some may be plan­ning on redo­ing their plant­i­ngs. Oth­ers are prob­a­bly just wait­ing out the water restric­tions to go back to their old ways.

Some houses are still attached to their old ways that fea­ture con­spic­u­ous water con­sump­tion. Maybe at some point its was a sta­tus thing, show­ing every­one that you could spend resources on some­thing that can’t be used. But these days it’s hard not to feel a lit­tle hot under the col­lar when these are resources that are being taken from the rest of us.

Still, before I get overly tough on the neigh­bors, I want to give peo­ple the ben­e­fit of the doubt for a while. These are tough eco­nomic times. Redo­ing your land­scap­ing can be an expen­sive propo­si­tion. And there are peo­ple for whom deal­ing with a sprin­kler timer would be like ask­ing them to pilot the Space Shut­tle. (My father could never fig­ure out his timer.) And there’s a chance that peo­ple haven’t heard about the new restrictions.

But there’s one water-user that I’ll call out on the car­pet. This is our local shop­ping cen­ter, which pre­sum­ably is main­tained by peo­ple who know what they’re doing. But water­ing the side­walk and the asphalt…

…and then let­ting all the water run off into the storm drains, well, that does get my goat. But it’s not like I’m only grous­ing on a blog they’ll prob­a­bly never read. They’ve heard from me already, and I hope they’ll get in step with the neigh­bor­hood they serve.

But over­all I’m pleased. Peo­ple are get­ting the mes­sage and they’re doing some­thing about it. I think they get a sense that we’re all in this together, and we’ll find ways to deal with this water cri­sis. Not liv­ing in a neigh­bor­hood ruled by a homeowner’s asso­ci­a­tion, you can see that we’re all find­ing dif­fer­ent solutions.

Some choices will be bet­ter than oth­ers from the stand­point of water use, habi­tat, urban runoff or reduc­ing the heat island effect. Still, it’s encour­ag­ing to see peo­ple peo­ple wak­ing up from this fan­tasy of a lush, green, sub­trop­i­cal Cal­i­for­nia of end­less water resources.

June 26 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought • drought-tolerant landscaping • water conservation | 8 Comments »

from shower to flower

Earth Day is com­ing up on Wednes­day. What environment-friendly changes will you be try­ing to make?

Last year we installed a tan­k­less water heater, a move that has saved us at least 30% on our gas bill. But it still takes a while for the heated water to make it to the bath­room. In the past, we let the cold water in the pipes go down the drain until the water got to a proper shower tem­per­a­ture. But now the water is going into a bucket that we’ll use to water the gar­den. (A prettier–or at least cleaner–bucket not for­merly used for pulling weeds and mix­ing pot­ting soil is next on the agenda…)

The next log­i­cal step for water con­ser­va­tion would be to install a gray water sys­tem to reuse wash­wa­ter. Reg­u­la­tions in Cal­i­for­nia have been com­plex enough so that only 41 house­holds have done it legally in San Diego County, and only 200 state-wide. State sen­a­tor Alan Lowen­thal from Long Beach has intro­duced a new bill, SB 1258, that would man­date a review of exist­ing codes to make it eas­ier to design and install legal gray water sys­tems, a piece of leg­is­la­tion that is being called the “shower to flower” bill.

It’s a good start, and one worth supporting.

Related read­ing:
San Diego Union Tribue: New water­ing source is sur­fac­ing (March 23, 2009 arti­cle)
Los Ange­les Times: A solu­tion to California’s water short­age goes down the drain (April 19, 2009 opin­ion piece)
The text of SB 1258, marked up with com­ments and sug­ges­tions for fur­ther improve­ments by Oasis Design.

April 19 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Earth Day • gray water • recycling • water conservation | 7 Comments »

the rain might not belong to you

At first I thought it was a good idea. I never imag­ined that in some com­mu­ni­ties it would be prohibited.

Dur­ing some of the recent rains I put some lit­tle buck­ets to catch rain­wa­ter that had drained off the roof. In this part of the state you can hardly ever have too much water, and good-quality water is extra-valuable.

One of my water-use indul­gences is an exper­i­men­tal lit­tle bog gar­den with car­niv­o­rous plants. Tap water here has four times the dis­solved solids usu­ally rec­om­mended for these swamp-dwellers, so in warmer weather they get five gal­lons a week of reverse osmo­sis water from the local water store. Col­lect­ing fresh rain­wa­ter seemed like a much more sus­tain­able alternative.

Left: Drosera Marston Dragon.
Right: Drosera capen­sis, red form, with deer­fly snack.

Yesterday’s LA Times had an arti­cle on res­i­dents in some of the dry­land Four Cor­ners states who were find­ing out that col­lect­ing rain­wa­ter was actu­ally ille­gal in their com­mu­ni­ties. Because of a com­plex patch­work of water rights agree­ments, many home­own­ers actu­ally don’t own the rain­wa­ter that falls on their houses.

Here’s a quick snip­pet from the article:

“If you try to col­lect rain­wa­ter, well, that water really belongs to some­one else,” said Doug Kem­per, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Col­orado Water Con­gress… Frank Jaeger of the Parker Water and San­i­ta­tion Dis­trict, on the arid foothills south of Den­ver, sees water har­vest­ing as an insid­i­ous attempt to take water from enti­ties that have paid dearly for the resource. “Every drop of water that comes down keeps the ground wet and helps the flow of the river,” Jaeger said. He scoffs at argu­ments that har­vesters like Hol­strom only take a few drops from rivers. “Every­thing always starts with one lit­tle bite at a time.”

I have a healthy respect for the rule of rea­son­able laws, but these seemed way beyond the pale. Like, are they wor­ried these peo­ple are going to bot­tle the rain­wa­ter and sell it to us in South­ern California?

Here within view of the Pacific Ocean, any water not retained in the ground would just wash down the storm drains and slide out into the bay. I doubt we have the same sorts of rules. But for many folks in Utah or Col­orado who are try­ing to grow their own veg­gies, doing what they can to reduce become more self-sustaining and reduce their foot­print on the earth, things aren’t so easy.

What do you think? Should the rain­wa­ter belong to all of us?

March 19 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: politics • water • water conservation | 10 Comments »

“drought emergency”">“drought emergency”

Our Gov­er­nor has declared a drought emer­gency for Cal­i­for­nia. The state rain­fall and snow­pack has been lower than aver­age for most of the recent years, and reser­voir reserves are dwin­dling. My county has been slightly over aver­age in its rain­fall this sea­son but most of our water comes from the Sierra snows and the Col­orado River. So this cri­sis is very real for us down here as well.

At this point we’re on call for a vol­un­tary water reduc­tion, but if the rains fail us peo­ple will be required to reduce their water use 20%, and then–if things get worse–by 40% or more. Since land­scapes con­sumes the major­ity of the water, our county water author­ity has started an adver­tis­ing cam­paign to deliver these water-overuse door­knob hang­ers with the Sun­day paper. It’s also avail­able online: here.

There are check­boxes for “Your sprin­klers are water­ing the pave­ment,” “Your sprin­klers were on dur­ing the rain,” “You have a bro­ken sprin­kler, and/or your irri­ga­tion sys­tem is leak­ing,” “Your sprin­klers are on every day” and “Your sprin­klers are on dur­ing the day.” My local shop­ping cen­ter is a huge offender in the first cat­e­gory and will be get­ting a hang tag from me.

But this pro­gram is mostly about sprin­klers and water­ing habits and doesn’t really address the under­ly­ing causes. There really need to be big boxes say­ing, “Your huge expanse of grass and water-thirsty plants are attrac­tive, but I’d like to show you how you can have a terrific-looking yard that requires almost no addi­tional water,” or “This extremely well-watered golf course has no place in the desert that is San Diego County.”

The very green golf course in the local canyon bot­tom would get a vio­la­tion tag if that were the case. At least, to their credit, they let the dri­ving range go brown with the end of the rains. Maybe in Cal­i­for­nia golf could morph into a sea­sonal win­ter sport, like ski­ing? Maybe I’m delusional?

March 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought • water conservation • water use | 5 Comments »

drip irrigation not a water conserving thing?

“Poli­cies aimed at reduc­ing water appli­ca­tions can actu­ally increase water deple­tions… Con­ser­va­tion pro­grams that tar­get reduced water diver­sions or appli­ca­tions pro­vide no guar­an­tee of sav­ing water.”

These con­tro­ver­sial state­ments are part of the abstract of an arti­cle by Frank A. Warda and Manuel Pulido-Velazquez that was recently pub­lished in the cur­rent Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences of the United States of Amer­ica. The study mainly looks at agri­cul­tural water use in the Rio Grande Val­ley, but some of its ideas and find­ings have rel­e­vance for our lit­tle back­yard farm­steads. This is an open-access arti­cle, so you don’t have to have some mag­i­cal lev­els of access to be able to read it online for free.

November 29 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: water conservation • water use | No Comments »