I haven’t done much of anything in the garden since getting back here except spraying a gray and white moldy/fungoid growth at the base of a red maple and mildewed pulmonaria. The spray is mostly sulfur which seems harmless enough for those without sulfur allergies.
Our lawn looks better than it has for years. Now understand, Dear Reader, that I am not talking about a monoculture of bluegrass, but a melange of short greenery that does include a variety of grasses as well as other things covering the ground that some would refer to as ‘weeds’. The list contains the usual suspects—dandelion, plantain, sorrel, gill-over-the-ground, wild strawberry, clover and twice that many more whose names I don’t know. Anyway, it looks good, if you don’t look too closely.
Now everything looks good this year, but the lawn has been looking a bit better each year since my decision to leave the leaves where they fall in the fall. No raking, blowing, or piling them in the street, just clear the terraces, walkways and driveways and leave them in the yard. The point is that the soil needs the organic matter generated by the crumbling of the old leaves.
We live on the side of a hill. Years ago it was forest with a stable soil column and trees to soak up the runoff from storms. Now it is suburban with roads, driveways, patios, houses and many less trees. The storm runoff, without an absorbent forest to sop it up, now erodes the organic, top layer of the soil leaving it less fertile. If you look at forest soil, the top is a thick layer of dark, loamy, rich growth media. The top of our yard’s soil column was brown clay, before we let the organic layer begin to re-constitute itself.
New blooms: clematis, privet, Siberian iris, elderberry, Asian holly.
2 comments:
Hmm its quite interesting that your lawn is a combination of grasses, wild flowers, and 'weeds'. I think it looks great.
-Tony Salmeron
Did the famous wisteria ever bloom??
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