Student meeting

I will be hosting the first official ASH gardening meeting on Wednesday the 28th. I'll post the results here.

All about weed barrier

Dupont makes a high quality landscape fabric / weed barrier. We've used the cheap stuff-- and it disintegrates in a few months. Not UV or foot-traffic resistant.

Anyhow, this page:
http://www.greenvista.dupont.com/pro_landscape.shtml
tells you how to install it correctly to get 25 years of use.

Now to check froogle to see if we can get it cheaper than at Lowe's Or Home Depot....

On working smarter, not harder

Jim emailed me Sunday night that he had done a lot of work in the garden this weekend ("as you probably noticed"). Unfortunately, I was in Indianapolis and Yellow Springs until Monday afternoon and noticed no such thing. So it was a serious shock when I saw the results about twenty minutes ago. A happy shock, to be sure, but a pretty big one.

If we can get the vinegar herbicide down and put both herb and flower plots to bed until March that would give me several months to potentially co-ordinate something with student involvement to create a new look for the gardens. Failing any sizable interest from others, we can plan something on our own. The rain yesterday and this morning puts me out of work until at least this afternoon, maybe tomorrow, but I will rake out the debris in the gardens and sweep up all the weeds on the pavement when it dries out a bit more.

I agree that the area is too large for us to maintain, but I wanted to point out a couple of things regarding relocating the boxwoods and replacing the invaded bush (which, you know, if you think about it in a political sense, is sort of ironic). First, while Tom has stated that we can use some funds from the program for the redesign, that money could be better spent than on a shrub. Apart from that, I'd like to be as economically thrifty as possible when buying things ourselves considering my current financial sitch. Having said that, if we do any edging, we need to buy a new edger, as the one we have has a loose head and tends to fall apart.

Second, and more importantly: the work involved. As we've learned through the years, whenever we take control of an aspect of the landscaping, the Horticulture dept. tends to take it as a sign that they don't need to maintain that part of the gardens anymore. If we do anything with the shrub or the boxwoods, I worry that we would be stuck with working that border forever, and therefore negating the point of trying to work with less space. Though it's obvious that they've already chocked up those areas to us anyway, but still.

More to the point, anything that was not planted by us (including the boxwoods and the shrub) are still currently the responsibility of the grounds keepers. We should use that to our advantage and contact them to ask about moving the border in, if we choose to do that, or to replace the bush that has been overtaken by invasive species. My personal opinion is that we should not move the border. The main reason is that since we have the space, out efforts would be better spent making a permament garden with the dimensions as they exist. I'd like to talk to Jim for a while about other ideas before we commit to a complete reconstruction of the area. I've been lately visualizing a space that incorporates one of the wooden benches for a sitting area, and 100% indigenous wildflowers (I've already started the research on the possibilities there). As long as the work going into it ensures that upkeep will be minimal (and the herbicide that Jim found will help immensely with that), it's better to have more space within which to design something aesthetically appealing than to put that same energy into moving a bunch of hedges we may end up killing in the process.

I'd also like to reintroduce the strawberry patch next spring, if everything else goes well. Oh, and I just got word from Tom that Andy will most likely be doing the garden class again next summer.

thoughts on re-sizing

In my opinion, the areas for the class garden and butterfly garden are for too large for us to care for. We have very limited time these days.

So I propose that we shrink the border towards the house by ten feet-- thus shrinking the area by 33% to 50%. This would entail some labor-- namely, moving the rock border back, or else creating a border using the edger. Then we'd need to plant some grass.

The four boxwood bushes would need to be relocated. I realized the giant shrub (next to where we kept the compost bin) could be removed-- it has been overtaken by a few invasives-- japanese honeysuckle being one of them. We could buy a bush for that area or eliminate the feature altogether.

...Just some thoughts...

Decimation, Round One

On saturday I worked in the garden for 5 hours. Aaorn and I agreed that we just wanted to start over from scratch-- not much in the Class Bed and the old Butterfly garden is worth saving as it had been overrun with six-foot tall weeds.

So, I brought down a lawnmower. I had a little trouble getting it started-- I think a clogged air filter and sooty sparkplug were the culprits. But once I cleaned those, the lawnmower ran the whole time.

It took me about 4 hours. I cut the weeds down to four inches. The results were stark and impressive.

The most interesting part was the smell. The wide assortment of vegetation didn't smell like a typical lawn when mowed. As I cut down the mint, the menthol was so overpowering that at moments I was nauseated.

The next step will be to rake up the debris.

Then, Round Two: applying the vinegar or vinegar mixture. I believe one application now, and another application after first frost should sufficiently kill everything in those areas.

Round three would be to till it up in the spring.

I bought a gallon sprayer at Lowe's in anticipation...

organic herbicide

I read two university studies which compared the effectiveness of Vinegar vs. Roundup as a broad spectrum herbicide. Both confirm that Vinegar is as effective:
http://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/agcomm/aganswers/story.asp?storyID=3998

One studied straight vinegar. The other studied a commerical product called Alldown. Alldown is About 95% Vinegar, 5% Citric Acid, and a fraction of Garlic extract.

The application rate of Alldown is 20 gal / acre which equals spraying about 0.6 ounces per square foot.

I guess a couple of gallons an a pump sprayer should do the trick for the garden? So we could just go wild and take care of all the weeds for about $10 of cheap vinegar. If I can find citric acid, I'll add it, otherwise i'll juice a lemon and some garlic and that will be fine enough, I suppose.