Water tames climate and fires

          

         It is August, and parts of California and Oregon are burning as has happened nearly every summer for the last 10 years, and in many parts of California last winter.  We are being told this is the new normal.  It was also the old normal, before we started watering with sprinklers, making it cooler, wetter and saving our cities from wildfire.

Water moderates climate and tames fire.  At 1%-4% of the atmosphere, water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, holding heat by its sheer thermal mass and the blanketing effect of clouds. Yet it also cools the air during the day, by cloud shading; rain; evaporation; and transpiration through plants, which can bring the air down to 40 degrees F, the temperature at which it starts evaporating.

Evaporation is the first step in the water cycle.  That evaporation doesn’t just come from large bodies of water.  In fact, water in a body doesn’t evaporate well, because of surface tension, unless it is warm or whipped into spray by the wind.  Being near a seashore with a prevailing breeze blowing off the ocean doesn’t guarantee any rain will come of it, if the air pressure is high and the ocean is cold.  It makes fog on the west side of the coast range. It takes either a lot of heat rising from the land to pull it in from a warm sea, monsoon style, making wet thunderstorms, or a low-pressure system with wind-whipped waves to bring cooler ocean moisture onto land and make rain.

Inland, on the east side of the coast range, ocean moisture doesn’t make it to Josephine county unless a strong low-pressure system brings it in.  It was known as the Agate Desert before we started watering with sprinklers.  Extreme heat, cold, fire and floods are characteristic of deserts and drought.

When absolute humidity is closer to 4% than 1%, it is harder for fires to start and burn.  When summer thunderstorms are given moisture from sprinklers on almost all the properties in cities and the surrounding country, they make rain, not dry lightning.  This is what happened in the ‘80s, a wet decade we are told, when practically everybody in cities and country watered because water was cheap, and they wanted their yards to be clean, green and safe.

That was also the decade when water alarmists started telling us that we have to save fresh water, no matter the locality or the conditions because only 2% of the water on Earth is fresh water, and telling us that evaporation is waste.  California, and later Oregon, started instituting rationing by price, oppressing the poor and middle class, many of whom stopped watering their yards.  Many other cities around the world have done the same, drying out their cities and the countryside around them, making the world as a whole drier, hotter and more dangerous, as we saw in Greece this summer.

Thousands of single family homes in a single subdivision in Santa Rosa, California burned in Santa Anna winds last winter, while thin strips of green grass and trees out front of those homes did not. Their top water rate is $6.50 per 1000 gallons.  600 homes burned in Redding this summer, while paying $1.425 for every 750 gallons.  When people can’t afford to water, many stop cutting their weeds, because no one likes to maintain ugly.   Those weeds grow, spread their seeds, dry out, and can easily burn down their homes.

          Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.  Like Garden Grants Pass on Facebook

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Litter is tagging, marking the territory of the disorderly.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener               541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

The Weekly Weeder: Natural Weed Control

Notice the old leaves under the rose, and the 4 x 8 sand paths.

            Weeds are taking over neglected portions of our cities and countryside, making them ugly, disorderly and unsafe.  Flowering weeds are often ugly, always disorderly, and once they dry out, they are a fire hazard.  If not killed before going to seed, they spread themselves around; they are a nuisance that multiplies.  Whole city subdivisions have burned in recent decades, and some small towns as well. When weed codes are well enforced and properties are watered, cities don’t burn. 

          The most dangerous weeds are annuals and biennials that seed and dry out in a season.  They make many seeds, some of which can last for years in soil before they sprout or rot.  But their roots don’t need to be pulled to kill them.  All their top growth comes from their crowns, the part of the plant between the roots and the stems.  Cut them under their crowns or pull them when they are flowering before they go to seed and they are gone, but it can take years to control the seeds already in the ground

          You can cut them under their crowns with scissors or a knife, which is great for going after individual weeds, but is relatively slow.  Still, this is the best way to handle seeded puncture vine, a noxious weed that pops bike tires as well as sticking shoes and bare feet.  Cutting under crowns or pulling are the only ways to take weeds out selectively in lawns, beds and borders.

          You can also beat the crowns out of the soil wholesale with a string trimmer.  This works best when the plants are young and not yet seeded, and the soil is relatively soft.  It has to be repeated to catch newly sprouted annuals and re-growing perennials.  Done often and long enough, it can kill out perennials as well.  It is rather messy.  A hula hoe (AKA scuffle hoe and stirrup hoe) doesn’t throw stuff around.

          You can mulch with leaves, compost, wood chips or bark to smother small plants and stop seeds from sprouting.  Most very small seeds need a touch of sunlight to sprout, and nearly every newly sprouted plant can be easily smothered with 2 inches or more of dense mulch.  Avoid fine bark and bagged bark with fines; bark’s natural preservatives leach downward and kill soil life, but not plants. Larger barks do not kill soil, but ¾” bark and walk-on fir are dense enough at 2” deep.  Walk-on fir bark is most effective at staying put; ¾” floats away on slopes.

          Leaves are the most effective mulch, though some tend to blow around.  Leaves that last for a year, like oak and red maple, are most effective.  They dry quickly on the surface and make a lousy seed bed for whatever falls on them.  Leaves and compost also feed soil life, which makes the soil soft for pulling weeds and provides habitat for good (predator) bugs.

          Perennial weeds like blackberries can also be fire hazards and nuisances.  Cutting under or pulling their crowns is effective, but birds drop seeds in their droppings.  When it comes to weeding, constant vigilance and watering is the key.

 

Revised 12/10/2024.  Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

           

          Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

The Natural Gardener: February Gardening

          February in Grants Pass is when the garden and the gardener really start to wake up.  January has its snowdrops, but we don’t really care; it is too cold and dreary to draw us outside.  In February, sunny days get warm enough to make cold weather gear too warm by afternoon, and coax crocuses and daffodils to bloom.

Daffodils in oak leaf mulch for weed control.

February is the time to kill annual springweeds like bitter cress, heron’s bill, groundsel, foxtail and cheat before they bloom and spread; it has been since October, when they started to grow and some started to bloom.  Cut any annual weed under the crown and it will be gone; you can clear a lot of them quickly with gardening scissors or a knife. 

Winter is also time to cut and dig rampant perennials like violets that are in stasis until this month, when they will start to bloom in earnest, set seed and make the matter more urgent.  Cut blackberries back and dig out their crowns.  Dig excess raspberries, transplant them, and prune out dead canes.  You still have time to transplant trees, shrubs and perennials while roots grow before spring top growth begins.  Winter is the best time to do heavy tree pruning with a saw, but lopper work is better done in midsummer.  "Crown" your roses when their buds start to grow, cutting them to the hard crown at the base to stop black spot until fall.

It is also time to start new gardening beds with compost, edging the beds with 6-12” boulders, choosing rocks with flat bottoms from the pile at Copeland.  Leaves can be used in the fall, several inches to a foot thick.  But new beds can be started at any time of year with compost.  One can build compost beds in the heat of summer for summer vegetables and fall perennials, or in the depths of winter for winter and spring planting.  Two inches is good for ornamentals, but six inches will give them a better start and grow great vegetables. 

Compost needs to be covered with coarse mulch like walk-on fir or nugget bark to protect it, roots and seedlings from rain, wind, and drying sun.  Avoid using fine bark, which kills soil with its natural preservatives. 

Blueberries and azaleas don’t even like to be planted into plain soil; they do better set on top of the ground and surrounded by compost covering their roots; their fine, spongy roots will sink into the soil as the compost is worked in by worms.  The more general rule is that #1 pots and larger need to be planted in soil, or they will be left high and dry as the compost is worked in and rots, while 4” and smaller pots will sink into soil with the compost.

          Paths need to be controlled too.  Two inches of wood chips, walk-on fir or ¾ inch nugget bark, will stop most weeds for a season, but need to be refreshed yearly.  4 x 8 sand, ¼-1/8 inch sifted river sand available at Copeland, laid one inch deep, covers mud and makes it easy to hula-hoe and rake young weeds as the sand brings them up.  (It also is good for starting a lawn and covering its mud.)  It is also easy to clean 4 x 8 sand by blowing and raking the tree trash into the beds for mulch.  Some trees, like mimosa, demand it, as they drop sticky flowers half the summer, leaves in the fall, and seed pods all winter, none of which are easy to clean off bark or chips.

         

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

The Weekly Weeder--Oxalis corniculata: the weedy oxalis

        I once thought that I would grow Oxalis corniculata, creeping wood sorrel, as a lawn cover, as it stayed green and growing in a drought year in the mid-‘80s when we stopped watering to fish in the river.  Dad was very upset to come back from working in Nevada for two years to find his grass dead and common oxalis dominating his lawn. 

Thirty years later, it still dominates his lawn, though the grass helps hide it.  But I don’t think it would ever have grown thick and even enough to make a good lawn, and its seed pods, held up erect on top, are not pretty, ½-3/4 inch long and turning dull yellow as they ripen and tan after opening.  

Ornamental Oxalis

There are other oxalis that are big, pretty, clump rather than spread, don’t show off their deadheads, and just show up here and there by seed, bulbs, or root buds.  They come in various colors, patterns and growth habits. Oxalis all have the same kind of leaves with three heart-shaped leaflets, and ½-inch five-petaled, funnel-shaped flowers, usually white or pink in the ornamentals.  The big ornamentals are also deciduous, dying down in the fall and sprouting in late spring.  Creeping wood sorrel stays green all winter and sprouts any time of year, blooming mainly in the summer.

Young clover and oxalis in 4 x 8 sand path.  Clover has larger, round leaflets, sometimes with a chevron mark.

These are also known as shamrocks, named such by florists, who know how to sell a plant.  The “true” shamrocks of Ireland are just white clover.  Clover leaflets are not heart-shaped, but they often have a white or red chevron within their leaflets.  Clover leaf veins lie in parallel lines radiating up and out from the center vein, forming chevrons opposite the colored chevrons; oxalis leaves have serpentine veins radiating from the base of the leaflets.

Red oxalis blooming and seeding in small sedum.  There are some dark seed pods to the upper left

O. corniculata has small leaves rising from on trailing stems and grows green or burgundy red, with slightly smaller yellow flowers than the larger oxalis.  Getting rid of it is not easy.  It not only spreads by seed but by crawling on the ground, though it does not root from stems unless it is broken off the main root, in my experience.  It has a tap root that can be pulled after being loosened with a knife or scissors.  It produces a lot of seed that probably stick around for many years. 

Creeping Wood Sorrel seed pods

At least it takes a few weeks for its seed pods to ripen and pop, and they don’t throw them in your face when disturbed, like bitter cress, but they do throw them up to 10 feet when they pop.  If you don’t heed the blooming of the flowers, you have the pods to catch your attention.  But I have never been so in control of my parents’ yard that I could spend the time it takes to kill it in the lawn.  Actually, I’ve never cleared it completely from any property, it is so persistent.

Like most weeds, the only reason to kill it is that it messes up the view if it is allowed to take over, and it easily takes over.  It stays low for the most part, but is quite capable of climbing a foot on other plants.  What makes a garden look good is repeating masses of colors and textures of different plants, and plants that invade those masses makes it look messy.

Gardening is keeping order in the landscape, eliminating disorderly plants and keeping even desirable plants in their places:  for freedom of movement; beauty; and sometimes growing food and medicine.  One can garden by weeding alone; one cannot garden without it.  You get to decide what is and isn’t a weed, and many of them will eventually show you that they are.

                                                                                                                          

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

The Weekly Weeder -- Mare’s tails are pretty, invasive

          Mare’s tails are starting to wave their pretty tall plumes along our roadsides and sometimes in gardens.  Years ago, I let them grow to see what they would do, was disappointed that they were not more showy, and started pulling them as I saw them.  As they came to dominate our roadsides, I realized that they spread on the wind as badly as any wild lettuce.

          They grow up to about 6 feet tall, and for a few years they dominated our roadsides in many places.  But they seem to have been replaced in most places by prickly lettuce, which is not an improvement. 

Small mare's tail starting to "bolt" (putting up its flower stalk)

          Weeds come and go depending on each particular year’s weather.  Weather in any one year tends to bring up particular plants; I call them “the weed of the season.”  For a few years, a plant may suddenly appear everywhere because of such good sprouting conditions for it; the same conditions don’t repeat themselves, and that plant slowly disappears. 

Mare's tail rosette--Joseph M. DiTomaso, UC-Davis, Bugwood.org

          Mare’s tail is also known as horseweed and has the Latin names Conyza Canadensis, or Erigeron Canadensis; they are the same plant.  It is an annual flowering weed that is easily killed with hand tools or hand pulling, not so easily with herbicides.  It starts with a rosette of lance-shaped leaves, some with coarse teeth that point outward from the center of the plant, some smooth-edged and slimmer.  It grows a hard stem as it bolts and flowers with little white composite flowers lacking petals that form a 2-6 foot tall, fluffy white plume, and makes fuzzy seeds that fly on the wind.

"Naked" horsetails popping up on a newly landscaped tree strip outside the landscape cloth

Its common name is easily confused with horsetails, also called mare’s tails, Equisetum species, which are a perennial fern that has round, jointed hollow stalks with round, thin, short branches in whorls up the stem, forming a bushy tail shape up to 2 feet tall.  Another variety of horsetail has only bare stalks without branching.  Both come up from a deep, rhizome root and take great patience and persistence to eliminate by pulling.  After 15 years of working my parents’ yard, I am only now starting to make real progress against it, as I only started consistently working their yard in the last 3 years.

Branched Equisetum, Wikipedia

          Mare’s tail, on the other hand, I have not had trouble eliminating from any property, so long as it is not growing nearby.  It pulls fairly easily from damp ground.  In dry ground, cutting it under the crown, or to the ground when blooming, will kill it.  In lawns, its hard stem keeps growing flowers and seed, just like prickly lettuce if one doesn’t cut it to the ground.  Its seeds do not seem to be persistent.

It was the first weed to develop glyphosate resistance, according to Wikipedia, from its use in no-till farming, and it is now resistant to several herbicides.  At least one farmer in our area was doing no-till for about 20 years, but stopped a few years ago when Josephine County was campaigning to pass a GMO growing ban, which has since been overturned.  Nonetheless, they will not resume using Roundup-ready corn and glyphosate to grow animal feed, as the news that they were growing it hurt their sweet corn sales.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

The Weekly Weeder -- Wild lettuce: Ugliest Weed Ever

          Prickly lettuce is one of the ugliest weeds ever when blooming, and it has started to bloom all over town.  As it bolts, its leaves stick out at unnatural angles, edges vertical, showing off its sharp points.  It grows 3-7 feet tall and spreads out at the top into wide, branching panicle of tiny yellow flowers that soon turn to small, fluffy seeds that fly on the wind to other properties.  It grows all over town, particularly on the neglected edges outside fences, and in cracks in the pavements.  It gets its name from the prickles on the base of its stem which pierce the bare hand that tries to pull it.  It screams seediness and neglect.

Young prickly lettuce

This looks like a domestic-wild hybrid of prickly lettuce

          There are many varieties of wild lettuce.  They all have a few traits in common, starting with being a composite flower (many tiny flowers in a each bloom, often with yellow strap petal flowers around the edges of the bloom, but some have all strap petal flowers and others have no petals) with seeds that fly on the wind, much like their short perennial relative, dandelion.  Unlike dandelion, the flowers grow on branching stems that can vary from a few inches to 18” tall in the case of groundsel in the spring, to 6 feet or more in summer with prickly lettuce and cow thistle, which looks much like a thistle with lettuce flowers but is not as spiny as true thistles.  Some wild lettuce mixes with domestic lettuce, creating interesting red shades.

"Soft" wild lettuce

False dandelion, which has been blooming knee-high in yards with dandelion-size flowers, is a wild lettuce.  This year, we have a new tiny, fine variety, half the regular size with half-inch yellow flowers, which has spread widely in the area and pulls rather easily.  We also have a soft, tall-growing variety with very dandelion-like leaves, with long, vertical branches on the stems that easily bend and buckle because the stems are soft and hollow.  Look up wild lettuce varieties on the internet, and you’ll see several more that grow in our woods, at least one of which is actually pretty, but still spreads like a weed.

          Unlike dandelion, they have tap roots usually only a few inches long that do not grow if cut an inch below the top of the root crown, being mostly annual weeds, though false dandelion is perennial and still dies.  They often pull out of the ground easily, but can be cut out if they break off above the crown. 

          If you weed them out of your yard and they keep appearing, there is an infestation within a half-block.  Wind-blown seeds don’t usually fly very far in a city full of trees.

          Also unlike dandelion, these weeds need no summer water to sprout and grow and tend to invade dry lawns, vacant lots, and cracks in pavements.  But they will sprout throughout the year with water as well.  What they need is bare soil or fine-textured mulch to get a touch of sun and hold the water needed to germinate their seeds. 

Whole-leaf mulch dries out on top quickly.  It deprives lettuce seeds in the soil of that touch of sun and those that fall on top of the leaves of the fine-textured seed bed that holds the moisture needed to sprout and grow.  A few layers of soft leaves will stop spring weeds like groundsel before they are eaten by soil life.  A couple inches of harder leaves will stop most weed seeds, and soften the soil to pull the ones that grow, while encouraging big-seeded perennial grasses to take over.  Bigger-seeded annual grasses will also grow through the leaves and need to be weeded out.  They are a softer, lighter green than the perennial grasses; see “cheat” and “foxtails.”

                               

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

The Weekly Weeder -- Fox tail and Cheat: Stickery fire hazards

Ripening fox tails

          Cheat and foxtails are drying out and dropping seed, but you can still reduce the number of seeds of these annual grasses infesting your landscape with quick action.  Both of these grasses have seeds that stick into socks and animal fur with barbs that make them hard to pull out the way they went in.  If nothing else, you should cut them and rake up as many seeds as you can, because they are a great fire hazard.

Fox tails dropping seeds into permeable pavement 

        Foxtails are well-known as a hazard to animals with fur, standing up straight up to about 12-15 inches with their tight brush of seeds at the top that fall off the stalk in joined pairs.  They not only stick into fur and socks; they get tracked into the house from the lawn, sticking in carpet. 

Mowed fox tails in Bermuda grass

Mowed foxtails keep growing until they seed out under the mower blades, with at least a dozen seeds per head, about half the size of unmowed foxtail seeds, an unsightly nuisance as they turn blond against the green lawn.  They stick hard into the ground with tough roots even after they dry, but can more easily be pulled out of damp ground, another good reason to water your yard.

Dry "nodding" cheat, a fire hazard next to the sidewalk

Cheat is less obvious, and many people don’t realize the source of the inch-long stickers in their socks or their pet: a tall grass, with a very loose seed head.  There are two varieties of cheat: a tall blond one with the thick stalk that stands a good three feet tall, very straight, that leaves empty shells hanging on the stalk after dropping its seeds, and a shorter, brown “nodding” variety on thin stalks that bend nearly to the ground under the weight of its very sharp seeds, hard to see against the background of other plants, and not leaving any hanging shells when the seeds fall off. 

Mass of tall dry cheat, Westholm Park

The former is the bigger fire hazard; the latter is most likely to grow in forest and to end up in your socks.  Cheat pulls relatively easily once it has begun to bloom, its one saving grace.   When mowed or in very poor soil, it can set as little as a single seed per stalk, keeping its numbers steady.

Green nodding cheat, in dry bitter cress

Foxtails and cheat start growing in fall.  The seeds are large enough to grow through several inches of mulch, but once they sprout, they can be smothered with 2” or more of compost or leaves.  They can also be easily pulled when very young.  Their color is lighter than perennial grasses.  They start blooming in April, showing which kind of grass they are, and should be pulled at that point, before they set seed and dry out.  They pull more easily when blooming than just before it.

A single dry nodding cheat

Weed control is seed control, and our city nuisance code tells up exactly when a weed becomes a nuisance: it forbids allowing weeds to mature or set seed.  Cutting these weeds before they ripen seed can reduce their seed numbers, a lot in the case of cheat; less so with foxtails, but you have to cut them repeatedly until they dry out.  Pulling plants before they drop seed is the better seed control.  It can be done more quickly than you might think. 

But if you have a lot of fox tail or cheat, your best bet may be to cut them; rake up as much as you can, and mulch them over in the fall after they sprout with 2” or more of leaves or compost, pulling any that come up through the mulch later, and plant good perennial grass in the spring, reseeding again in the fall.  It is easy to tell the annual grass from perennial by the light color and wider leaves of the annuals. Be sure to pull them young and later any that show their seed heads.

Weekly Weeder: Stop Crab Grass in your lawn

Baby crab grass in bare dirt

          Summer is here, and crab grass is sprouting in lawns, very thick in some.  It’s past time to mulch your lawn, but not too late to smother a lot of it.

Last year, I started mulching crab grass in Dad’s lawn when it started sprouting, which was a bit late for the amount of mulch I was using, an inch of compost.  Sprouting crab grass is very small, and can be hard to see before it gets big enough to grow out of the mulch.  Not that the effort was wasted; the compost still stopped a lot of crab grass, and the lawn is looking much healthier and greener than last spring, without moss under the tree.

Young crab grass, spreading from its crown

Lawn grasses can readily grow through an inch or more of compost and will be much happier for it.  If your grass is perennial rye, a clumping grass, it’s a good time to seed more rye into the compost where it is patchy.  Mulching leaves into the lawn over the fall and winter with the lawn mower will help smother small-seeded grasses like crab grass and Bermuda.

            Crab grass is a clumping relative of Bermuda grass that also roots along its stems, but it’s tender, and dies with the first frost.  It is a tender perennial, as it does not die from making seed, but only spreads and makes more seed until it freezes.  It roots deeply where it is well watered, and hardly roots at all where it is not watered well, living on dust and dew collected on its hairy leaves. 

This young, mature crab grass appears to be growing in well-mowed Bermuda.

Bermuda grows rhizomes that can travel under sidewalks and go 18” deep and goes dormant about 6 months of the year in Oregon, making it a lawn weed in this area, not good grass.   Bermuda and crab grass show their family relationship in the shape of their seed stalks, and the size of their seed, which is, thankfully, small and easily smothered with mulch.  So the same mulching that stops crab grass can also prevent Bermuda from germinating.

Ironically, in Arizona, where they use Bermuda as lawn grass, they mulch their lawns with steer manure every spring, which keeps them thick and green in the summer heat, and crab grass is rare.  Here in southern Oregon, I don’t recall seeing anyone else using steer manure or other compost on their lawns, and crab grass has spread all over town and down our country roads in the last 20 years.  Chemical fertilizers don’t smother weed seeds, and crab grass has no problem with dryness or low fertility.

Green crab grass with dry foxtails and cheat

Even if you mulch, it is unlikely that you will stop all the crab grass in your lawn, since the seed is everywhere.  Unlike annual grasses, the roots of crab grass are tough and wiry, and where they go deep, it is nearly impossible to pull after it flowers.  But it can be cut off its roots with garden scissors or a knife, and it won’t grow back, as it has no food in those wiry roots.

It doesn't pay to spray crab grass with Roundup (glyphosate salts), even in gravel and bare dirt.  It kills the plant, but fertilizes the seed in the soil; it comes back greener every time.

Revised June 2016, online at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com with photos. Follow Rycke or subscribe.

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Like Garden Grants Pass on Facebook.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener        541-955-9040      rycke@gardener.com

Water Wisely and Well

A round, yellow Pound O' Rain.  They come in dark green and square as well.  

The square does not water as evenly.

          Proper watering has become controversial, as many people think that sprinkler watering is optional and wasteful of water that someone somewhere else can use.  You cannot waste water in Grants Pass by irrigating properly, which means all over the ground and plants.  The water either evaporates from plants and soil, is sucked up by plants and transpires into the air, or sinks into the water table and recharges wells and the river.  That which evaporates or transpires humidifies the air, cools it, and makes rain.  This is the only practical way for ordinary people to share water with other places.  Sprinkler irrigation is loving your neighbor, near and far.  Our river has plenty.

Results the following spring from not watering for a few years.  And perhaps using Roundup to kill weeds.

Some think that if they don’t water, they won’t have to mow or weed.  But weeds don’t care about watering, even thrive on dryness, and once they have taken over a lawn, one must mow more often to keep their flowers from seeding the neighborhood and making the yard uglier yet.  But no one likes to maintain ugly and people tend to ignore it, so such yards often go unmowed.

Some say to use plastic mulch and drip irrigation.  Plastic mulch is ugly.  Drip is unreliable and incomplete.  You can’t really tell how well drip is working if it is covered, and it’s delicate.  You can have a leak or blockage and not know it; voles chew holes in it; shovels break it; growing tree roots and rocks pinch it.   You lose the benefit of evaporation from wet plants and soil and don’t wash off the dust, which grows fungus on leaves.  Some think that it is bad to water paths, but trees, shrubs, and even large annuals like tomatoes send their roots under paths and suffer when they are not watered.  And it’s not cheap or easy to build or maintain a drip system. 

The best watering is also cheapest and easiest: sprinklers.  Automatic sprinklers are the most expensive system to build, though the most reliable.  But one can get by with hoses, sprinklers, and cheap mechanical faucet timers.   Watering by hand sprayer rarely works well; one must hold a hose too long.

 The best sprinklers are also cheap: Pound O Rain, a pound of metal with a big hole in the middle, which blows out a nice, even circle of water.  Twin-circle aluminum “owl eyes” work much the same, but not as evenly, and the lighter sprinkler flips easily.  No moving parts means a longer life, though Pound O Rain can rust out so much that it no longer holds onto a hose.

Water an inch per week for lawns, edibles and most ornamentals.  Use a tuna can to estimate the proper timing. It’s best to water any one spot only once a week, twice at most to promote deep  rooting.  You can move a sprinkler or two around a yard to hit everything once a week. 

For even watering, set the sprinkler on the edge of the previous wet spot, as no sprinkler sprays evenly.  Automatic sprinklers are set up to water to the next sprinkler to cover an area completely.  Even watering is double watering, so you only need ½ inch at a time on each spot.

To sprout seeds, water lightly every evening until they sprout, allowing the water to soak the seeds all night.  Using a hand sprayer works well here.

Last, but not least, do not skip watering because it is going to rain.  When it rains half an inch or more, skip watering for a day.   It may sound superstitious, but if you don’t water, it won’t rain enough to matter.  Call it insurance.

                   

April 2016, online at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.  Like Garden Grants Pass on Facebook.

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Litter is tagging, marking the territory of the disorderly.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

Leave leaves on your lawn

Just enough leaves on a lawn to stop weeds but not good grass

People are way too afraid of leaves on lawns.  Perennial grass is stronger than you might think.  A pile of leaves will leave a hole in a lawn.  Two inches or more will allow grass to grow through only here and there.  But a few layers will not stop perennial grasses from jumping right up in the spring.  They have enough food in their roots to push through light layers of leaves.  Leaves keep the soil warmer than no leaves and make it more fertile as the worms eat them through the winter, so grasses grow stronger in the spring.

Leaves not only feed soil and keep it warmer to grow grass better, but they stop small seeds like crabgrass; annual rye; Bermuda grass, nut sedge; dandelions; wild lettuce; and groundsel, the first of the wind-blown weeds to bloom in the spring, by keeping sun off the soil.  They also stop mosses, which like these weeds, need sun on bare soil to germinate.  Large annual grass seeds, like cheat and foxtails, can push through a few layers of leaves and need to be pulled.  You can tell them from perennial grass sprouts by their color, which is a lighter green with wider blades than perennial grass, or by their seed stalks later in the spring.  Crab grass, which sprouts in late spring, are very fat even when very short, and are best pulled small.

The weakest perennial grass is probably perennial rye sod, which most lawns on new construction are built with.  It is not a true sod grass; it is a clumping grass held together by plastic net.  Its roots are short for cutting off its clay soil base and transplanting, so it only lasts about 5 years before being invaded by stronger grasses.  Clumping grasses don’t spread by rhizomes, underground stems, but depend on reseeding to refill bare spots that form when clumps die, so it pays to reseed it in the fall before allowing leaves to cover, or rake it into the leaves in spring.  Its seeds are large enough to push through a few layers of leaves when they are ready to grow.  Perennial rye seed grows deeper roots than rye sod, and can create a stronger lawn as the sod grass dies out if it is reseeded yearly. 

Perennial grasses prefer to grow longer north of California, as the sun is lower and they need to be taller to catch the sunlight.  Two inches tall is good in summer, but 3-4 inches is better in winter.  Not cutting grass too short in summer or winter also helps keep sun off soil to prevent weeds and moss. 

A mulching mower can break up the leaves and help them to lie heavy enough between the grasses to keep small weed seeds from sprouting, but whole leaves will not stop the good grass from growing from roots or seed if they are not too thick.