Blog edition.  The whole newsletter is right here.

Sustainable Gardening on the Web

• Outstanding original reporting on school food by Slow Cook Ed Bruske in his Tales from a DC Kitchen.  That led to this interview on the Kojo Show.

• Urban gardeners – all gardeners – need to know about compost, right?  And Dr. Frank Gouin is The Man on the subject. Here's what he recently said about it.

• After Atlantic Magazine published an anti-school-garden screed, urban gardeners lined up to condemn it.  Here's Ed Bruske's response, and one from Michele Owens on GardenRant. Both totally on target!
   
• Why first-time veg-growers get discouraged (make that FAIL) by Robin Ripley.
   
• Citywide organic-waste composting coming to Montreal.  Again, Canadians are taking the lead.

 
Sustainable Gardening on the Web

• The latest Lawn Reform Update is packed with news about lawns and global warming, golf managers trying to go green, the Lawn Reform Coalition in the news, lawn-free make-overs, and more.
   

• Great article about pervious driveways on Sunset's blog.  Photos and info by Sustainable Gardening author/designer Owen Dell.
   
• Should drought-tolerant landscaping be mandated?  Great discussion in the comments.
   

• Garden Professor Linda Chalker-Scott's views on Natives and "Introductions" come with a warning – definitely not politically correct.
   
• Timber Editor Tom Fischer disses roses for being not just unsustainable but usually ugly.  Then Michele Owens takes issue.
   
• Major League Baseball signs pacts with Scotts to imprint unreal lawn expectations even more into our national psyche, and Paul Tukey freaks out.
   
• Garden Professor Jeff Gillman delivered another of his quarterly reports on Hort Research that Gardeners can Use.

• $5 DIY Compost Bin for Leaves from Southern Post Journal.

 
Winter Sanity-Savers

• I LOVE the world-champion Boogie-Woogie Dancers in that photo collage!  Just like I used to do it. (Okay, I lie).
   
• And even us more experienced (ahem) gardeners are dancing, especially in winter.  For me it's Hot Broadway Jazz?  Major fun.
   

  In the Garden      

• Winter's the perfect time to catch up on garden recordkeeping.

• That's all I've got – unless you count snow sagas, of which I have my share.

I trust these photos of before and after the Mid-Atlantic's "Snowmagedden" will tug at the hearts of gardeners in all climates and maybe provide a teachable moment for homeowners in wintery places.   In the "before" shot you see the now-ruined 'Little Gem' magnolia on the left and one of the now-ruined Foster hollies on the right. (In between are some acuba, damage unknown but they'll bounce back from anything.)  They're all technically my neighbors' but visually they're very much in my garden.  And another heavy snowfall predicted for mid-week?  NO COMMENT (at least none that's family-friendly).

Simone Fary lives just 3 blocks from the newly-bustling downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, with its shops, night life and subway station to greater DC.  So, a great location.  Plus plenty of sun, y'all!  But like every other front yard in the neighborhood, hers was devoted to the care and feeding of turfgrass and some foundation shrubs.  That bit of conformity ended when Simone got the urge to grow some food, dammit, but to grow it in a gorgeous, gardeny way.  No need to go whole-farm and get the neighbors all nervous about property values.   No need to deny herself a beautiful garden.  The gardener with sun can have everything!

There's no real plan or formula for mixing edibles with ornamentals, just lots of experimentation.  Lots of gardening.  (Get that?  It's not what you'd call low-maintenance, and it isn't intended to be.) Here are the plants that have done well for Simone in her sunny city lot.

Fruits and vegetables
Highbush blueberry, Egyptian walking onions, Calendula, Egyptian spinach (self-seeding), Peas, Purple bush and pole beans against the fence, Chard, 'Hard neck' garlic she plants in October, Collonade apple (of which the squirrels eat ALL), Red currents (very pretty in the spring),  Pepper, Pawpaws (which are fly-pollinated, so Simone does that by hand with a paintbrush, Asian persimmons.

Herbs
Rosemary, Thyme, Oregano, Pineapple sage, Chives (blossoms are great on salads), Bronze fennel, Sorrel, and Dill (gorgeous the day I visited in late summer).

Strictly ornamental or for wildlife
Sunflower, Purple sage (or its looks, not for cooking),  Creeping phlox, Sedum, Asters, Dayliles (though you can eat daylily flowers), Mums, Lamb's ear, Ajuga, Liatris, Monarda (though flower petals can be used in salads), Hydrangea, Sunberries (for foliage only – because the bugs eat the fruit).

What she does not recommend

• Passionflower or purple coneflower because they seed too freely.
• Strawberry also reseeded too freely, and they're great in jellies and syrup.  So, maybe in hanging baskets.
• Nanking bush cherry – little red lines, tart.  Simone says it takes up too much space for what it yields.  

Next up in our on-going exploration of garden furniture – what's long-lasting and affordable – I have to show you my teak bench.  Sure it's more expensive -  I paid $320 for it about 20 years ago, fully assembled and retail – but then I did absolutely nothing to it and it still looks perfect to this day!  Up close you'd see that it's smooth, with no splinters – truly amazing.  It’ll certainly outlast me.

Ah, but is teak sustainably harvested?  Planet Green sums it up nicely for us – " Two out of the three species of teak are endangered, and all have been subjected to unsustainable forestry practices for decades", so mostly, no.  If you have your heart set on it there IS a certification for sustainable harvesting of teak and one company that's attained it is East Teak.

Garden writer Julie Shapiro, whose 1/4-acre garden is in Hull, MA along the Boston Harbor, sent me these photos of her "eco-lawn", and the story behind it. That interesting tale includes far more than lawn, though.  Her 1885 house has a colorful history that includes lobster boats being stored alongside it, so Julie's first job on the site was to get rid of some asphalt and lots of soil filled with metal lobster trap shards, glass and other sharp dangerous things. But because her land is in a A1 flood plain – meaning an area of special flood hazard – "care had to be given to the plant material and lawn, if there was to be any."

That official status meant that Julie had to go before the town's Conservation Committee with copious amounts of documentation from all sorts of agencies about her plans for the yard, including exactly how many times her new peastones had been washed.  New surfaces needed to be permeable.  Even her new 200-square-foot lawn-type area had to be spec'ed and approved – and that's where we pick up the story of her eco-lawn.

My research on what to do with the "lawn" brought me to the developing of an ecolawn or biolawn, an ecologicaly-based area (consisting of plants suitable for the region we live in, and are both drought and shade tolerant, don’t thatch, as grass does, and is attractive to look at, doing away with constant “mowing, spraying , fertilizing and watering, thereby conserving water and energy, protecting the soils surface, and  having a lovely and safe alternative to “a patch of green”.

This is what we proposed to the Conservation Committee, and after receiving our positive declaration proceeded to hand sow a mix of Colonial Bentgrass (Agrostis tenuis), Strawberry clover (Trifolium fragiferum) and Dutch White Clover (T. repens), Wild English Daisies (Bellis perennis), Roman Chamomile (Anthemus nobilis), Yarrow (Achillea millifolium), and Baby Blue Eyes (Nemophila menziesii), low-growing thyme, and small spring ephemeral bulbs.

These photos are of our lawn. We are proud of it, have to mow it with our reel mower very rarely, and it blooms, feeds itself, and has become a comfort for our feet and a comfort to us.  We did this right and we are happy with all the work and effort we put in to doing it right.

At the 11-year mark, the annual clover, leaving bare patches, has me on the move to decide what to reseed in its place. I do reseed with clover and chamomile every other year, but I would like more thyme. It seems the thyme grows well and lives happily in these reclaimed spots, as a hermit crab would in retaking another's space.

That is our story and we're sticking to it.

Thanks, Julie!

Toby Riley in Northeastern Florida wrote to the Lawn Reform Coalition to tell us:

In 1998 I replaced  my St Augustine grass with stone and mulch and crape myrtles etc  – best move I ever made and it has paid for  it'self  many times over.  Please sign me up as a supporter.  Toby Riley. 

So asked what was there before and he answered:

There was only a strip of grass along the front of the lot, about 30' by 210'.  We saved most of the original trees.  The grass was replaced in 1998 with native shrubs, ground cover, crushed stone and the crape myrtles.  This year I am adding a vegetable garden since the front yard gets the most sun. 

No yard maintenance costs, no fertilizer and very little water used.  I have been repaid several times over.  Please send it all over the country and we are glad to offer tours to anyone passing by in NE Florida.

Great transformation there, Toby, and thanks for sharing it.

Yesterday I took these shots – of a modest group of plants that nevertheless look stunning in mid-January – as I was walking through my back yard and into the woods.   First you see the boulder stairs that lead from my basement door down into my garden.

Then the two mosses above (names, anyone?) adorn the path through the woods.  I've written before about this wonderful woodland that my property sits on the edge of, but continue to marvel over it – even after 25 years of walking through it.  Yep, after living in eight different places around metro D.C., I found my spot and decided to stay put.

Winter's a lot more beautiful with the right architecture and some river birches, don't ya think?  Like this view of the Mall side of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.  (Still, I believe, our hottest tourist attraction.)  I was passing by the other day on my way to the Iranian Film Festival going on at the Sackler Museum.  To complete the Southwest Asian experience, I took in the Falmana: Book of Omens tour while I was there.  All free, of course – like almost all museums in D.C.

I've posted a different view over on GardenRant.

I've instituted a new feature over on my blogging gig that pays the mortgage, and the cool thing is that plant profiles there include the wisdom of actual experts working at the garden center.   In this case, the beloved gardening educator Gene Sumi weighed in on just how sustainable – or not – winterberry holly really is.  For you fans of Latin, we're talking about Ilex verticillata.

Blog edition.  The whole newsletter is here.

Urban Gardening on the Web

• The Fight for School Gardens and Healthier School Foods highlights crazy anti-food rules in one county and a big legislative push in D.C.
   
• A Manhattan designer explores the native/exotic dilemma in "Designing the Politically Correct Garden".  Great comments and absolutely NO consensus.
   
• Great discussion ensued over street trees, especially "When Greens go NIMBY" over them. And more about street trees here.

• Chicago's Mayor Daley pushes green roofs, as reported on The Growing Edge.
   
• Does this count as urban gardening?  It's  How to Love thy Neighbor, Post-Blizzard.

• Corporate Urban Greening, no Greenwashing Allowed highlights great projects in Baltimore and D.C.

Sustainable Gardening on the Web

• Martha Stewart gets Fact-Checked by Hort Professor – and I'm so glad they're helping us non-academics figure it all out.

• Are Natives the Answer? asks Garden Prof Bert Cregg.  His own answer is: "Not necessarily." Provocative stuff!
   
• The White House Grounds ARE Greening – and it looks like ALL federal landscapes will soon be greened up, too.
   
• Good news from EPA – plus good news about the overturning of a bad EPA move.

• I reviewed "The World According to Monsanto" and found it really important, but dull watching.

• Are your spring bulbs coming up already?  Not to worry, says gardening educator Gene Sumi.

My So-Called Second Career

I'm pretty excited about the garden-related trips I'll be taking this year.  First to Long Island to visit Suzy Bales with a day trip to the NY Botanic Garden in the spring. And I wouldn't miss the super-fun Blogger Meet-up in Buffalo. Then the GardenRanters are talking to garden centers at their shinding in Chicago.  I'm also pondering a trip to the Boston area, and still undecided on going to Dallas for the Garden Writers conference.

 Round-ups are Fun

• The Hottest Garden Rants of '09 were hotter than ever.
   
• Here's my review of the Renegade Gardener's Black Spot/High Spot Awards for '09.
   
• Also on GardenRant, Elizabeth's Year in Gardening.
   
• Top Sustainable Food Stories of 2009 include the White House Kitchen Garden, and lots about urban farming.  Food stories are increasingly food-growing stories.

In the Garden

Before/after clearing snow from an 'Ogon' spirea.

• Berries for Bloom Day- coz what else are you going to show off in mid-December? 
   
• And in my neighborhood, the low-maintenance, New-American-Garden-style Priscilla's garden. For locals, it's the garden of Priscilla Labovitz and Joe Cirincione, experts in immigration law and nuclear arms control respectively.