Garden Angel

This is another unique sculpture carved by the wonderfully-eccentric Marcia Donahue in Berekely, CA. See also the blog entitled "Rot". The arms can be moved to suit your mood. There are two sculptures, one acts as a shadow of the other one.

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Indicating Past Fires

I’m chopping firewood and remembering all the old native Pacific madron trees (Arbutus menziesii) that used to grace pockets of the forest around my house. The trees rarely occur in pure stands. Some had trunks three feet or more in diameter at breast height (DBH). (I don't know who's breast.) Over the past 22 years all but a handful have died a natural death and were resurrected as firewood.

At only 80-100 years, these are so short-lived trees compared to the mixed coastal oak (Quercus agrifolia), Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), tanoak (Lithocarpus densiflorus), the California coast redwood (Sequoia semperviren) – with a DBH of 8-25 feet - and California bay trees (Umbellularia californica) in “my” forest. This is because the madrone, while drought resistant, is a colonizer of fire-scorched earth. They are among some of the first trees to sprout after a fire. It is said the seeds need fire to germinate. (However, most germination in nurseries is done by freezing the seed before planting in flats or tree tubes.) These trees at first grow more rapidly than the Douglas fir trees associated with a more mature forest. They help to stabilize the soil. Eventually the Douglas fir trees grow above the madrones and shade them to death.

To maintain madrone in a mixed Douglas fir, oak, and redwood forest, the tree needs fire. Not a firestorm in the tops of mature trees, but frequent fires about every five to 50 years. Pacific madrone depends, on these periodic fires to eliminate or greatly reduce the beginning of a Douglas fir overstory.

However, the forest here hasn’t burned in over 100 years. (A 1/2-acre fire last week a mere two miles from my house was quickly extinguished. What a close call and a relief!) The amount of “kindling” (dead trees and shrubs as well as the invasion of foreigners along parts of the forest’s edge like Scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius), which act like little balls of standing gasoline because they burn so easily and hot) on the ground is tremendous. When the next fire comes the burning grasses or Scotch broom will leap up the trunks of the trees to form a crown, or canopy, firestorm. Nothing, except the noble redwoods, will be left. Including my house.

This photo is of one of the few Pacific madrone trees left on the property as it snakes toward sunlight from beneath the maturing Douglas fir trees.

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NOTE: The comments section at the bottom of the post has disappeared. Click on the "___ Comments" button or the title under the "Blog Archives". Thanks, Robert

Winterize Your Drip

It got down to 36F here last night. So, it's almost that time of the year when light frosts begin to glaze the flowers. Soon many parts the country will be having hard freezes.

I've outlined how to get your drip system as described my book Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape & All Climates. Here's an excerpt.

A proper drip irrigation system is too valuable to leave neglected like an abandoned garden hose at each winter’s nippy return. Shut off your system’s water supply at a point inside the house where the water supply is protected from freezing. Loosen all unions at each main assembly to drain all water out of the pipes, filters, pressure regulators, and check valves. Make sure you don’t loose the O-ring which seals each union. Be sure to open the flush ball valve on the Y-filter so the filter chamber doesn’t crack. Better yet, bring the filter or the entire main assembly indoors. Also bring inside any battery-powered controllers which you have attached to faucets.

The drip irrigation hose can stay in place in the landscape, but as much water as possible should be drained out. The photo on the left shows draining a system with a figure eight closer device. Open the end-closures on all lines, let all water drain out, and close. Start at the highest elevation and work downhill. I prefer to use threaded end caps because the Figure-8 end closures (The photo on the left. Not my finger nails.) will quickly wear out the kinked end of the hose. I prefer the threaded end cap for its strength. (The photo on the right.) It’s essential that the water is drained from every low point of the system.

A deep mulch will help protect in cold winter climates. You don’t want anyone stepping on cold plastic tubing, but since many drip systems are primarily located in perennial plantings, the risk of trampling the tubing is low. Some compulsive people do lift out the entire assembly of header and lateral lines, roll up the tubing and store it in the garage for the winter. Porous pipe and in-line emitter tubing make this a lot easier than hose with emitters punched in or hose with, God forbid, spaghetti tubing with emitters.

If possible, lay out your drip irrigation lines so they can all be drained from the low ends. Otherwise, install your drip lines so they naturally drain to various low spots, install an access box at the lowest spot in each line of the system for the winter. Install a manual drain-down valve a simple ball valve. Each fall, the metal drip irrigation ball valve should be opened to fully drain the line.

Lonnie Zamora, a former rooftop-gardener and irrigation designer in New York City, used drip irrigation for over four years on most of his jobs, even in the flower boxes for a penthouse on the 27th floor of a Manhattan apartment building. To winterize his client’s drip irrigation systems each fall, he would:

l Drain the pressure regulator.

l Close the faucet at the home’s wall.

l Attach a 110VAC air compressor with the necessary fittings to the female hose thread at the beginning of the drip system.

l Set the timer to run each line or zone for five to seven minutes.

l Run the air compressor pumps at 25 psi or less to blow out all the lines.

l Manually drain all lines on multilevel, terraced gardens.

l Open the Y-filter’s ball valve to drain the filter cartridge chamber.

Finito!

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Visit my web site to learn about my new book on drip irrigation and other gardening books.

NOTE: The comments section at the bottom of the post has disappeared. Click on the "___ Comments" button or the title under the "Blog Archives". Thanks, Robert

Lavender Butcher?

I’m trying another bold experiment. Radical pruning of aging lavenders. I tried this two years ago and it worked. However, this plant (Lavandula angustifolia ‘Munstead’) is much bigger.

I was consumed by finishing my drip irrigation book (Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape and All Climates, revised 2009.) and traveling back-and-forth to St. Louis to help my Dad and greatly neglected my lavender plantings. They got heavy with bloom on long stems. They sort of flopped open a bit. This allowed the sun to cause tiny buds to grow far down into the plant. On stems many might call “dead” wood. (See the photo on the left after removing most of the foliage.) But far down the stems the unpruned plant sprouted many very tiny buds, as seen on the other two photos.

These tiny buds grew on a small plant I pruned this way two years ago and nobody suspects it use to look like the photo on the left.

So, the guy who wrote the lavender book (The Lavender Garden, Chronicle Books, 1998) is disobeying his own guidelines about leaving three to five healthy buds just above the mature leaves. Ha. It’s never too late to experiment.

We had a week of 90-100F days after this pruning experiment. So, I don’t know how the lavender will react. But it does look well right now. I’ll keep you posted on another blog.

(PLEASE, don’t do this in cold-weather climates. It’ll probably kill the poor plant. Just for us west-coast gardeners near the ocean to try.)

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.

Visit my web site to learn about my new book on drip irrigation and other gardening books.

NOTE: The comments section at the bottom of the post has disappeared. Click on the "___ Comments" button or the title under the "Blog Archives". Thanks, Robert