DryStoneGarden

Indigofera heterantha, Indigo Bush

As part of the projects we’re doing in our garden, this weekend we took out our Indigofera heterantha. (The common name is Indigo Bush because one of the related species, I. tinctoria, is the historic source for indigo dye.) I’ve shown it in bloom day posts a few times. Kind of sad to see it go. Anita bought it on a whim five years ago to try it out, and we’ve liked it, though not quite so much that we’ve ever planted one for a client. It’s a good plant, with nice pea-family foliage and flowers, and it’s pretty much the best thing blooming in our garden this time of year. But it’s also the last plant to wake up in our garden in the spring and it gets a lot of dried-out twiggy stuff on the ends of its branches; people ask us if it’s dead unless we cut it back. I think people usually shear them to maintain a rounded form, but ours is shaded by our bamboo for part of the year so it has grown upright and leggy and we limbed it up to the shape of a very small tree. We liked it and would have kept it longer, but we needed to clear space to move our old garden shed. It was a choice between removing the Indigofera or the Dr. Hurd Manzanita, which isn’t much of choice at all. Sorry, Indigofera. Farewell.

Indigofera heterantha, Indigo Bush

There&#'s a shed in there

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see our old garden shed, hidden amongst the bamboo. We cut down the bamboo and then rolled the shed out of there. The poor Indigofera was blocking where we needed to move the shed, but it was the only casualty of the project so far, along with the bamboo which our garden can well afford. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully conveyed how much bamboo our garden has, but it’s a lot, like ‘open a restaurant for panda bears’ lot. It’s the defining feature of the garden, twenty foot high golden bamboo on all sides completely screening our yard from the neighbors. We did two loads like you see in the photo below, and that only scratched the surface.

Just part of what we took out

Town Mouse and Country Mouse have started posting photos of their gardens on the first of every month. Below is the dominant view of our garden at the moment, the site of our old shed waiting for the next phase of bamboo removal, the not-so-fun digging phase. I’m not sure if we’ll have a new garden shed in this view by the start of next month, but we should be pretty far along.

Where the shed used to be

— I’m doing website chores. Bear with me if the blog acts funky for a little while. —

Lawn Converted to Low Water Plants

Just in time to stay with the topic of lawn coversions, a friend of ours in Los Angeles sent us photos of a project we helped with. He’s a former roommate of Anita’s from the years when she was in grad school; he is now married and living in Los Angeles, and he recently bought a home with one of those terrible Southern California front yard lawns. He sent us some photos, asking for a planting plan to replace it. He and his wife wanted to keep the existing citrus tree and Brugmansia, they liked lavenders and succulents, and they wanted to do the work themselves. We sent him a drawing with some big caveats about how we had never gardened in Los Angeles so he would need to double check the plant suggestions with the local nurseries.

Before

That was last winter. This week he emailed us photos of the project, now completed. We had argued for taking out the red walkway heading straight to the door. We suggested replacing it with a DG path, figuring it would be easy to install and easy to upgrade to tile or flagstone in the future. They went ahead and installed the upgraded path right away, hiring a contractor for that part of the project and doing the rest of the work themselves. Most of the plants vary from the ones we suggested (probably a good thing), but they follow the basic layout of the drawing.

The Layout We Suggested

When we named our lawn-conversion/sheet-mulch class Lawn Begone, we were joking about how sheet-mulching can have a certain magic to it, that it’s the closest thing you get to just pointing a wand at the lawn and casting some kind of goofy Harry Potter spell. This project — before and after photos appearing in our inbox, the not-quite-real quality it has because we never physically saw or visited the site, I never saw any of the work happen — takes the magic even a bit further. I’m about as skeptical of designing over the internet as I am of Harry Potter, but in this case it feels a little like we cast a spell and it worked.

Lawn-o Begone-o!!!

This weekend, I went to a talk at Annie’s Annuals by Bart O’Brien, co-author with Carol Bornstein and David Fross of Reimagining the California Lawn. I bought a copy when it first came out, as their previous book California Native Plants for the Garden is pretty much the gold-standard book about California natives and one which I use all the time. I haven’t really read the new one yet. I looked through it enough to look make sure that I wanted to keep it, but that’s it so far. I’m teaching our Lawn Begone class at Heather Farms again this year, October 22, so I’ll go through it more carefully when I’m prepping for the class.

In the meantime I was interested to hear one of the authors give a talk on the subject, and I was also just generally interested in what he had to say as he’s one of the prominent figures in the native plant movement and a director at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, which I’ve been wanting to see for a long time now. I haven’t been to any of the other talks at Annie’s, but it was pleasant sitting there in their demo garden, listening.

He started with some info about California’s mediterranean climate and then talked about the Garden/Garden project in Santa Monica, pretty much the best comparison of a traditional front yard and a sustainable one. Basically, the city of Santa Monica had two side by side properties and decided to install a lawn/mow-and-blow yard for one and a native garden for the other. They’ve been tracking the results for 6 years now, and it’s of course unfavorable to the mow and blow yard. The native garden uses one fifth of the water, generates less than half as much green waste, and requires much less time and money to maintain. Plus the traditional garden looks like a relic from the 1970’s. I linked to a Sustainable Sites Initiative report on it back in the early months of this blog, but he said the city’s website was really good, and he’s right, it gives a lot more details, including plant lists and construction photos. Worth checking out if you haven’t seen this project before.

He listed 7 design possibilities for replacing a lawn:

Greensward — His term for a no-mow lawn. He liked Carex praegracilis as a no-mow lawn substitute. He said Carex pansa and Carex divulsa were fine, too, he just happened to have the most experience with C. praegracilis. Interestingly, he said that high-elevation carex varieties tend to rarely bloom at lower elevations.

Meadow — An open expanses of grasses, sedges, annual and perennial wildflowers, and bulbs

Rock Garden — Traditionally made of alpine plants but in California just a planting with rocks and low plants

Succulent Garden — Self-explanatory

Carpet and Tapestry Garden — A broad category meant to include most plantings of mixed perennials, grasses, succulents, and shrubs

Kitchen Gardens –Edibles! More relevant for backyard lawns around here.

Green Roof — He joked that this got included because his co-author David Fross is a green roof expert.

He listed 4 ways of eliminating the lawn:

Sod cutter — A lot of work and it doesn’t get rid of the problem weeds of the Bay Area: Bermuda Grass, Oxalis, and Bindweed

Sheet-mulch/Lasagna method — He was rather neutral about it. Not skeptical or dismissive, but not as enthusiastic as I am. (I think it’s far and away the easiest and best way to remove a lawn.) The book says to cover the layer of newspaper with at least 12 to 24 inches of organic matter, which is excessive. The general consensus is that 4-6 inches of organic matter is the right amount, and I’ve done it successfully with just two or three inches of mulch when it wasn’t practical to mound any higher because of grading issues. He didn’t discuss the process in depth during his talk.

Solarization — He says it takes three months to solarize the soil for the wildflower meadow at Rancho Santa Ana. It’s most effective at combatting annual grasses, actually increases germination with some things like lupines, and is not likely to work well in cooler parts of the Bay Area.

Judiciously applied chemicals — He removed his own lawn years ago by letting it go brown, then watering it to stimulate growth of the Bermuda grass, and then spot-spraying the growth. He repeated this cycle for three years to completely eradicate his deeply-rooted Bermuda grass. Personally, I don’t have that kind of patience, but I admire someone who does.

He said that he let his garden go completely dormant once, as an experiment, one year when Southern California had only 2.7 inches of rain all winter. Almost all of his plants survived but they looked dead and he was cited by the city for having such a brown unattractive landscape. The city backed off when he told them about his credentials and what he was doing.

He finished by talking about individual plants that he liked and he gave out a list of recommendations which was rather varied, ranging from Dudleyas to Sedums to Buckwheats to Wild Grapes. His focus was on native plants, though I like that the new book gives info on a lot of non-natives too. There were a lot of questions from the audience and he said other things I’m not remembering at this moment and by the end everyone seemed gung ho to go right ahead and remove their lawns. Good stuff.

Salt Pond Montage by Cris Benton, click to see it larger

I meant to post this with my photos of the Salt Ponds, but I got caught up in a bunch of projects and didn’t quite find the time. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it. The true master of Bay Area salt pond photography — putting my efforts with a camera merely held in my hand to shame — is UC Berkeley architecture professor Cris Benton who has taken thousands of photos of the salt ponds using kites. Really good stuff, both the images and the fact that he is sending his camera up on a kite. He has slideshows all over the web. There’s a long one here, another one here, a shorter one here, and an interview at ConservationMaven that includes a video about how he uses the kites. He has a blog, Hidden Ecologies, specifically devoted to his salt pond project. Kite photos of salt ponds seems like something that would do well in a contest for the ‘most obscure but interesting’ blog topic on the internet.

Fort Cronkhite, Marin Headlands

I spent this past weekend out at Fort Cronkhite in the Marin Headlands renewing my Wilderness First Responder (first aid) certification. I needed the certification while I was leading trail crews. I probably don’t need to stay certified now, but I’m afraid to let it expire. It’s not the most enjoyable class. It tends to make me relive every past illness, injury, and other bodily misfortune, but it’s good stuff to know and it was great doing it out at the Headlands. Classic foggy California landscape goodness.

Last week I went to Eden Landing Ecological Reserve, a new reserve in the former salt ponds you see as you get on the San Mateo Bridge heading west. It’s part of the larger South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, the biggest wetlands project in California. Strange place, and very different from my mental images of the bay area. I still can’t quite wrap my brain around the idea of the Bay Area as one of the world’s major salt producers. Actually, though, it’s a natural result of the topography (south of Hayward, the bay averages only 1-3 feet in depth) and the dry-summer climate. Salt forms naturally in the shallow areas of the bay and has been harvested since the times of the Ohlone. The first salt ponds were built in the 1850’s and were developed like other forms of agriculture, small plots consolidating into larger and larger ones. Nowadays, Cargill, the giant corporation that’s currently recalling ground up turkey, is the last one still producing salt, 650,000 tons per year according to their website. In 2003, they consolidated their production and sold/donated-for-tax-write-offs over 15,000 acres (25 square miles) which are slowly being turned into nature reserves.

NASA aerial photo of the salt ponds, Eden Landing is towards the upper left

Eden Landing is only recently opened to the public and is still a work in progress. There are levee roads to walk on, former ponds in various stages of restoration, lots of birdlife, weedy pioneer plants with a few new native plantings at the margins, and the ruins of one of the salt production facilities. It’s the kind of landscape that is rather bleak in full sunlight, but beautiful in the first and last hours of the day.

The main focus of the restoration project has been to open the dikes and return the landscape to tidal wetlands and create habit for endangered wildlife such as snowy plover, clapper rail, black rail, and salt marsh harvest mouse. I only saw the more common species of wetland birds, but lots of those. The ruins of the salt works and about 10% of the salt ponds are going to be kept as a remnant of the site’s history and as photographer bait.

The ponds are most striking when you look down on them from the sky and see the colors of the micro-organisms living in the water. Different colors form depending on the salinity of the water: green, rust brown, orange, milky pink, and at the highest salinity a shocking purple. I could see rust in one pool and pink in another when I leaned out over them and looked downward. The NASA aerial photo below is completely untouched; those are the natural colors of the ponds.

NASA Aerial View of the Cargill ponds

QUEST did a segment on the project, focusing on the southernmost of the three sites, Alviso:

One of the areas that I saw on my visit (but didn’t photograph) was opened to Alameda Creek this week and will soon be opened to the bay.

— Addendum 1/7/12 — Chuck B. at My Back 40 Feet has a collection of posts on the Bay Area salt ponds and photos from a visit to Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge a little bit further south, worth a look.