I hope the community park users enjoy our donation. It’s a picnic table we built out of some framing lumber we had, just sitting around asking to be made into something. The table top is a solid (joined) piece of wood. So are the bench seats. Gave me a chance to try out my new joining jig – a Dowelmax. This is one sweet piece of machined aluminum! Reminds me of the airplane parts I used to work on at Boeing. The key to this tool’s success is its extreme precision. No slop in placing the holes at all (as far as wood working tolerances are concerned). Check out their website to explore its versatility.
Also got to experiment with the finish too, using Super Glaze, an thick epoxy finish that will hopefully last a long time outdoors. Had trouble with it, applying in 90 degree heat, I rushed and didn’t mix one cup of it fully and a section didn’t cure. Nothing to be done but sand off the bad part and reapply. Unfortunately the patch didn’t get a super smooth finish as hoped. Ah well, it doesn’t affect the function. Hope it gets some good use!
I’m not just interested in how landscape design can improve our home lives. Our cities can do a LOT to improve our public landscapes to enhance our quality of life. The following are two examples, near and far, about how greatly our lives can be improved by simply making our urban environment more friendly to people sans automobiles.
The Isleta, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Here is an example of a committed project to revitalize the run down but culturally significant old-town section of the city of San Juan. It is titled, The Walkable City, which outlines just how important prioritizing pedestrian-friendly is to the success and livability of a city. It is literally the centerpiece of this plan.
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One thing interesting about this plan is the figure on page 7 (shown below).
Population Growth vs. Form of Transportation
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This figure charts Population Growth vs. Form of Transportation. Notice how the popularity of this section of the city drops with the dominance of the automobile. When cars took over the roads, people were banished to the sidewalk, kicked to the curb as it were. This essentially cut off the vitality and social interaction that pedestrian-friendly spaces bring to an urban environment. One side of the street is cut off from the other, the center space a no man’s land. The face of the passersby is that of the car they are driving. Their voice is the impatient rev of the engine and honk of the horn. Their fragrance is the stench of exhaust. The result is the death of the social interaction absolutely essential for a quality urban environment.
Greenwood Ave Artwalk, Seattle, WA
With that in mind, let’s return to our nefarious city and a recent local event. The Greenwood/Phinney Ridge Artwalk. During this particular artwalk, the city street was closed to automobile traffic. What happened next could only be described as a Utopian experience of social interaction. This is what humans would like to be doing on a sunny summer day but can’t, except only on a few special days a year.
Thanks to PhinneyWood.com for taking the great video above!
Click here for a picture of Greenwood Ave on a typical day.
This is what I endeavor to do in my profession – I observe and envision a better way, a better arrangement of the landscape that will improve quality of life greatly. It is only very frustrating that so little can be done to change the large scale landscape. And here I want to highlight just how much the citizens of our city are missing out on. There is a large chunk of our social heart that has been ripped out of our cities all for the sake of getting across town faster.
What are the priorities in your life? As we can see in this example of public landscape design, the choice to prioritize cars over pedestrians has had an enormous consequence of eliminating an important social space. Which then, truly, is the more practical choice? How important is the large and small scale landscape in your life?
Nice article in the Seattle Times (original source: Daily Press) about the healthy effects of chemical free gardening. In case you missed it, link here:
Ed Alexander Story – Seattle Times
- Photo by: Joe Fudge / McClatchy Newspapers
Ed Alexander is 84 years old and has lived longer than both his father and grandfather by 23 years. He attributes his health to gardening and eating healthy organic foods from his garden. Though this story is mostly anecdotal, there are many scientific studies supporting the idea that having your home surrounded by a garden improves your health both physically and mentally.
Here is a link to an interesting lab that studies the health effects that green landscaping has on adults and developing children:
University of Illinois: Landscape and Human Health Laboratory
One of the most astounding discoveries made by this lab is that green landscaping can reduce crime!
What’s the take-away from all this data?
I think that too often, people consider a beautiful landscape to be a want but not a need. The world would be a better place if people prioritized the landscape, the ecology, our natural surroundings, whatever you want to call it, as a major priority. After all, it is a necessity, really, in order to live a healthy rewarding life.
It is not a luxury to treat yourself to a beautiful garden, it is a practical necessity for a good long life!
Business Model for the Future
I was reading an article about Leslie Blodgett, a CEO of the cosmetics company, Bare Escentuals (of all things not landscaping). The article is summed up with her words: “I don’t want to be a business, I want to be a community”. This struck a cord with me. It is similar to why I went into landscaping as a business. Not for profits but to fulfill a need that our community has for a connection to our environment. To restore, in some way, the disappearing health of the world, to bring about more abundance and diversity, to add to the worth and quality of living, to design and arrange spaces that are fun, invigorating, useful, and interesting.
There is talk among many forward thinking businesses of the ‘Triple Bottom Line’. PCC Natural Markets comes to mind as a local example that uses this business model. This concept says that a business’s goal should be threefold: People, Planet, Profits.
A business needs to consider the people it affects not just the people who own stock. There is a lesson here as the interconnectedness of such sites as Facebook and Twitter make it more apparent how important social standing is when people choose who to do business with. The planet’s health must be considered for any long term business longevity. After all, economies thrive in a stable healthy environment, not in unpredictable chaos. For example, oil spilled in the Gulf helps neither BP or the thousands of business associated with the Gulf economy. And finally, there’s profit. A business can’t survive without feeding itself after all.
But in my opinion, Leslie’s quote says it better. We are here to serve each other’s needs and we exchange money so that we may go on living as members of the community who in turn feed other members of our community with our needs; a continuous cycle of mutual assistance.
Small and local businesses naturally feed this need better than large, remote corporations. They are part of the community, more invested, and don’t siphon wealth away from the community. Small businesses also create the most new jobs. Luckily, landscaping businesses naturally fit into this category.
So , I’ll say it too, “I don’t want to be a business, I want to be a community”.
What a Great Idea for Using Compost
I’ve been following a blog by Rob Frost called: One Straw. It’s about an individual making a real contribution toward a truly sustainable future.
Who is One Straw? YOU are the One Straw, everyone is the One Straw that can make a breakthrough.
I had to add this link to one of Rob’s projects that is really exciting.
Everyone in gardening has seen piles of compost steaming away. At the local landscape yard, the huge piles of compost there get so hot they have to cool them off by spraying water on them or mixing the pile so it doesn’t catch on fire.
What if you could harness that heat? Use it to heat your house? That is the great idea being investigated here. In addition, the heat can be used to brew methane gas which also uses “waste” material from plant matter!
One Straw’s Methane Midden Project
One of my pet peeve’s is the waste of waste. Let me explain: In this case, the typical reaction is to treat all the yard cuttings we produce as if it were “waste” when it is actually a valuable resource. We put it in a curbside can, just like garbage, and pay to have it trucked away, burning fuel all the way, when it could be used right at home. In a final turn of irony, many people (including me) turn around and buy the stuff right back and have it trucked, yet again, back to our houses to use it in the form of finished compost, mulch, or fertilizer. All these steps could’ve been bypassed and instead done on site with proper design and planning!
Many gardeners already know this and use compost bins at home. What makes this project exciting is the additional benefit of extracting heat and/or making fuel in the process. Even more benefit from our so called ‘waste’.
If Rob’s experiment is successful, it would contribute a huge chunk toward making our homes more sustainable! I can easily imagine taking all the plant material cuttings, all the trimmed and chopped trees, all the leaf matter and grass cuttings, all the food waste that are produced and, in combination with passive solar heating and good insulation, heating our homes with compost instead of fossil fuel. Then, when the compost is finished, it becomes a fertilizer for our vegetable gardens and provides the food we eat, only to start the cycle once again.
One of the things that is especially exciting is… at our house we burn wood to supplement our gas heat. In some ways, wood burning heat is sustainable, as wood, theoretically, is being renewed. There are side effects however, not the least of which is pollution. Even though we have an EPA certified stove, it still produces an appreciable amount of particulate pollution. Others in our neighborhood don’t even have certified stoves and on a stagnant winter day, it becomes very apparent! (cough, weeze, gag!)
In this method however,
A) You can use the same wood to heat, albeit you have to chop it into little chunks.
B) You can build up a huge pile that, reportedly, can provide heat throughout the winter (Jean Pain’s original designs) without “touching” it. When I burn wood in a stove, I have to feed the darn thing continuously.
C) With a wood stove, typically you only use the larger stumps and branches to burn. Small twigs and leaves are just a hassle. In this method, the whole plant is used. You can also use other typical compost ingredients such as food waste.
D) After the fuel is spent, instead of a pile of marginally useful ashes you have to clean out of your wood stove, you have delicious (to plants) compost to fertilize the garden and grow delicious (to humans) food!
We haven’t even gotten into the use of Humanure for the compost heap! Rob Frost needs to get together with Joe Jenkins on that one!
What can you do to help? Donate to his project on kickstarter. Minimum pledge is $1 but, here in the Seattle area, I would say at least pledge the amount of a latte and pastry plus tip. Anyone can do that right?
One Straw’s Pledge Page here:
Tale Told by a Dead Daphne
We pulled a dead Daphne from the ground this spring, planted a year and a half prior. Like detectives on the trail of a mysterious plant killer, we pulled the plant from the crime scene and sent it off to the lab. The lab was a couple feet away where the garden hose was. We washed off the dirt expecting to convict some sort of root rot as the perpetrator. They like to knock off Daphnes now and again, everyone knows this. Presumably for sport or maybe just to feed themselves, whatever their depraved urges may be. But, instead what we found was a far more intriguing.
Let the photo evidence show that this Daphne was doomed before it was even purchased! The perpetrator wasn’t a dirty rotten ground dweller of a fungus but indeed was a human! This Daphne was planted as a 2 gallon container plant, but as this photo shows, it’s fate was cast much earlier in a 3 inch liner. When the perp, probably an anonymous nursery worker, potted up this Daphne from that 3 inch liner, the Daphne undoubtedly was root bound in that liner. Its roots were much smaller and younger then, and they were in trouble. The perp did not follow proper horticultural procedures and untangle the root ball before stuffing the vic in the next bigger pot size. Thus sealing the vic’s fate.
Never have we seen such a gross case of circling, kinked, knotted, and girdling roots. The photo doesn’t do justice to the utter entanglement going on here. What might have happened is the worker was taught not to break too many roots since it is a Daphne and they are susceptible to root rot. Or maybe it was just plain laziness. Plantslaughter or 2nd degree plant murder? We may never know…
As a landscape company, we’re using this example to revise how we transplant. I’m now advocating an even more thorough investigation of the root ball before planting. This one we didn’t catch as the root ball we dealt with was a 2 gallon size much bigger than the tangled part you see here. I will follow up with another post on the latest techniques in transplanting.
We had the opportunity to order plants from Digging Dog Nursery from Albion, CA. Which to be honest, I don’t know exactly where that is. I mean I can look up on a map and see it is about 40% of the way between San Francisco and the Oregon border and on the ocean. So it seems like their climate isn’t hellishly different than our mild weather we get here in the Seattle area. I’ve driven down good old highway 101 thru CA, so I must have passed thru there at some point. It seems a little strange to buy plants from so far away to plop in our gardens. Do the plants know they’ve been so abruptly, so rudely extradited from their hometown?
http://www.diggingdog.com/
Usually we pick up plants at a local wholesale nursery. It’s a fun experience to play among the acres of plants. Sometimes we’ll see a plant we’ve never seen before or ‘ooh and ahh’ over a particularly fine specimen we’ve seen many times before, and everything in between. But going to the big nurseries is often a slog thru the mud. They are so big that instead of pushing a cart around, like at a retail nursery, you’re driving your truck over dirt roads. Stop and start driving to pick up plants seems so anti-gardeny, so burn the fuel-y, so against our mission of doing our best to restore the balance of nature. On the other hand, going local we get to see and touch the plants. And we know that, for the most part, they have had some time to acclimate to our weather, even if they too have arrived from Albion, CA.
It appears I've ordered a box of fluff!
Mail order on the other hand is a completely different animal. In this method, you place your trust completely in the nursery owner’s hands as far as selection and shipping goes. You never see the plant until it arrives at your doorstep and you unpack it. Special considerations must be made for the small shipping containers typical in door to door (UPS, FedEx) delivery. The plants must be small enough to fit the box but big enough withstand the trip in warehouses and semi-trucks. I can appreciate the difficult balance that must be struck.
So how did they do with our order?
I think overall they did pretty swell. The order time was a bit long because they only ship out on Tuesdays. I placed an online order, late on a Friday and missed the next ship date, so had to wait another week. As far as the quality of plants and shipping, I’ve taken pictures and I’ll let you decide. We’ll follow up too, after we’ve planted and grown the plants in the ground a while.
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Removing a layer of fluff reveals some perfectly sized Tricyrtis 'Samurai' (Que Cisco Morris: " Hiyaku! ")
And another layer reveals some Veronicastrum with the tops clipped to fit the box, another Tricyrtis and a Ballota.
Here's the lot of them. 3 Veronicastrums, 3 Tricyrtis, and 1 Ballota. All fresh and green, grown in 3" deep-box liners, and carefully wrapped in plastic bags to keep in the well moistened soil.
Pulling out one of the Tricyrtis 'Samurai's' (HiYA!) you can see the root system. Just right in my opinion - grown to the edges but not too the point where they circle or where you can't easily untangle them as you transplant them.
These plants should grow in well. So far I’m very happy with my order from Digging Dog. Stay tuned for an update in a few weeks.
