This was a cracking good read. As a Kindle owner, I was fascinated by the premise – a world with a Kindle-like device which is so great it obliterates the printed book, and nobody’s disappointed about it, either.

Against this backdrop, Lewis and Emily inherit one of the last five bookstores in America from Lewis’ eccentric Uncle Sy, and they travel to sleepy Humboldt County, CA to check out this romantic relic of a bookstore.

Unfortunately, the bookstore isn’t actually selling books anymore, at least not in the way we’re used to. People come into the bookstore and request a book in a certain price range, rather than browsing the stacks for something interesting, and the real product being sold is the fine Humboldt strain of marijuana that’s slipped into the bag with the book.

In real life, Humboldt County is the country’s biggest producer of marijuana, so as a resident of the county, it wasn’t any surprise to me to learn how the bookstore was really staying alive! We have so many stores that are obviously a front for another type of business, so this wasn’t a stretch for my imagination.

The book itself was beautifully crafted – I loved the characters, the setting and details were so easy to imagine, and the writing was witty and full of personality. On the Kindle, you can highlight your favorite parts, and I found myself highlighting every other page through the entire book – there were so many gorgeous snippets of perfect writing throughout.

While you may find the premise of a world without books and with marijuana hard to believe, it wasn’t a stretch for me. I read this book on my Kindle in the county the book is set in, so the concept of nearly-legal pot and digital books replacing the dead-tree versions wasn’t hard to imagine.

In fact, as an environmentalist, I think the idea of paper books are kind of outdated, much as I personally love them. It seems like we’re moving forward into a world with clean and cheap energy, and in the future, it’s going to seem irresponsible to cut down trees to read when we could use a few cents’ worth of clean energy instead.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of Amy’s non-fiction about gardening and the outdoor world, you are going to love this book. There’s some of the best garden writing and imagery in this book that I have read anywhere, and the rest of the book was so full of liveliness and personality that you’re sure to love it as much as I did.  Go pick up your copy here or here.

And once you finish, join the discussion at Amy’s site by going to www.LastBookstoreInAmerica.com. Give feedback on the book and become part of the community by sharing what you think about digital media, legalization, and the demise of the paper book.

Thrips are a tiny sucking insect that pester Rhododendrons (particularly many older varieties) and Azaleas, some evergreen Viburnums, Photinia, and occasionally other plants in the coastal Pacific Northwest.

You can tell you have them because your ordinarily green leaves will develop a silvery sheen on them, while the undersides of the leaves will get little black spots from the thrips’ feces. Click here to see the silvery sheen caused by thrips.

While thrips can be a hard pest to get rid of, there are some very effective organic and biological controls you can use.

A note about thrip treatment:

You should know that the damage from thrips, that silvery sheen, won’t go away even after you kill the pest. All you can do is keep the thrips from damaging any other leaves.

So don’t judge the effectiveness of your treatment by whether the thrip damage goes away – rather pay attention to your undamaged leaves and make sure they are staying healthy.

Organic control for thrips:

Remove the infected plant:

Thrips are so tiny that once you can see the silvery leaf damage from them, you have enough of a problem that it can take some doing to get rid of them. If it’s a plant you don’t care for anyway, I’d take the excuse to get rid of it.

To keep them from icking up your next plant, take the cheap solution and put something there that isn’t susceptible to thrips.

Or, if you are-set on replanting the same darn thing, you could drop $30 on the biological control Hypoaspis miles, which works best in warm, moist soil, and will kill the pupal stages of thrips leftover in the soil. Then, follow the preventive care tips at the bottom of this article.

Take off infected leaves:

Thrips spend part of their lifecycle actually living inside of affected leaves, so if you see leaves that have severe damage, removing them can help control the population. The damage you see from thrips won’t heal – all you can do is keep new leaves from being hurt – so taking off the worst of the infected leaves is a good idea.

This won’t solve the problem on its own though, so do this in conjunction with another way of getting rid of thrips.

Pyrethrum spray from Chrysanthemums:

My local Rhododendron expert Don Wallace recommends using a Pyrethrum spray when the thrips are most active, in summer. He says the key to success with this kind of spray is doing three applications, three weeks apart: the first spray gets the adults, the second spray gets the recently hatched babies, and the third spray is the “cleanup” phase where you get anything you missed.

Now you should know that Pyrethrum sprays are indiscriminate in what they harm – they’ll harm thrips, they’ll harm the beneficial mites which might have otherwise eaten your thrips, and they’ll harm you in great enough quantity. But the advantage to them is that they stop being toxic very quickly after application, so beneficial bugs that wander in days later won’t be harmed.

Spinosad spray from soil microbes:

Spinosad (pronounced spin-OH-sid) is a somewhat new spray out on the market, brewed from, of all things, a soil bacteria found underneath an abandoned rum distillery in the Caribbean.

Spinosad is extremely effective, yet it’s only mildly toxic to humans and birds, and won’t kill the beneficial mites which are trying to eat your thrips for you.

Why isn’t it perfect? Well, in addition to stickin’ it to the thrips, it also kills caterpillars for about a month after spraying. I don’t know about you, but I like butterflies and I’ll happily tolerate some caterpillar damage to have butterflies in my garden later!

So if you have plants that are sheltering caterpillars nearby, consider using the Pyrethrum spray instead, since it’s only toxic for two days.

Spraying tips:

Whatever you spray, try to hit the thrips in summer while they’re most active, and be sure and coat the entire plant, starting with the undersides of the leaves at the center of the plant and moving outwards, then coating the tops of the leaves. Getting good coverage is with your spray is critical for it to work.

Both organic sprays are harmful to honeybees while wet, so spray in the early morning or at dusk so the spray can dry before bees are active, and don’t hit plants that bees really like.

(And of course, even though the sprays are organic, please suit up in whatever fashion the bottle tells you to – long sleeves, goggles, etc – organics generally have less impact on the environment, but they aren’t non-toxic.)

Biological control of thrips:

Biological control is when you bring in some beneficial bugs which either eat or lay eggs in (ouch!) the bugs you don’t like (see a gross photo here). For thrips, there’s only one that will really have an impact in our cool coastal climate – a predatory mite called Hypoaspis miles.

Hypoaspis miles mites live in the soil, and eat thrips when they drop to the soil to pupate. Since they only get thrips in that particular stage of life, they can’t be counted on totally eradicate an existing thrips problem – but they can have a big impact on next year’s population because they’ll interrupt the lifecycle.

Hypoaspis miles often come in a packet that you hang from the plant, or a canister you shake into the garden, and they work best when the soil is warm and moist. If you have an irrigation system or water regularly, then go ahead and use these little mites in late summer when the soil’s nice and toasty.

Hypoaspis miles are about $30 (you get a LOT of mites for that), which seems pricy until you consider that a bottle of Bayer Advanced for Shrubs, the least harmful synthetic control, can cost you $24.

If you have thrips in a greenhouse situation, or if you live someplace where soil temperatures can be 65-80 degrees F, you might try Neoseiulus cucumeris mites along with your Hypoaspis miles mites.

Neoseiulus cucumeris (let’s call them “Neo” mites) eat thrips when they’re in their larval stage of live, so by using both types of mite, you’re really cutting down the chances that your thrips will make it to adulthood.

Best thing about Neo mites? They are dirt cheap, like a couple bucks. If you’re unsure if your soil temperature is hot enough, adding Neo mites to your Hypoaspis order is a cheap thing to try, and it might just help.

My recommendation for getting rid of thrips?

If your plants only have a mild problem, like only a small percentage of leaves are affected, you’ll probably do fine by just removing the leaves that have the pest problem, raking up leaf litter and weeding under the plant to reduce hiding places, and spraying using either organic option I mentioned.

If you have a moderate problem, remove the leaves that are most affected, rake and remove leaf litter/ weeds under the plant, and spray using Spinosad, which has a minimal impact on predatory mites. Wait two weeks (so Spinosad residue won’t harm mite reproduction), then release Hypoaspis miles mites into your garden if your soil is somewhat warm and moist.

If you have a severe problem to where your plant is covered and you look at it and go, “ick!”, then give it up and get a new plant (see above), then follow my guidelines below for preventing a new problem.

A note about non-organic control:

Most synthetic treatments for thrips are really quite nasty, which makes sense, as thrips can be hard to get rid of. I wouldn’t spray Orthene (acephate) or any other organophosphate pesticide in any place humans go. Seriously, chronic nerve damage is not cute.

There is one synthetic control that isn’t quite as bad as the others, called Bayer Insect Control for Trees and Shrubs. Its main ingredient is imidacloprid, and there’s a liquid concentrate you can water into the soil. The plant takes up the pesticide from its roots and holds it in its leaves so that any insect that eats your plant will die, but it won’t harm people that touch the leaves or pollinators and birds that fly onto the plant.

Two problems with it: one is that it kills earthworms and beneficial soil microbes, which are like your best friends when it comes to keeping plants healthy – they break down the organic and mineral matter in your soil into usable nutrients for your plants, and keep soil fluffy and aerated.

The other problem is the whole food chain thing. You get a couple of caterpillars eating your treated plant, a bird comes by and eats the caterpillars, and you’ve just exposed your friendly neighborhood bird to poison. I don’t know how many bugs a bird has to eat to get sick, but imidacloprid is very toxic to birds, so I wouldn’t imagine many.

Imidacloprid lasts for six weeks, as compared with Pyrethrum which kills pests then breaks down in a day or two, or Spinosad which is less toxic to birds.

Imidacloprid is probably the least harmful synthetic to use for thrips, but my preference would be to use the organic or biological controls available, because their impact is so much less profound on soil, wildlife, and beneficial bugs.

Preventing thrips in future:

Take care of your soil, water regularly, and apply mulch. As a rule of thumb, pests find it easiest to attack plants that are already sickly or unhealthy in some way, and I most often see thrips on plants that are in hard, dead soil, with no mulch or regular water, so if that’s your garden, a little preventive work can go a long way towards preventing future pests.

Rake up leaves and litter and remove spent blossoms on susceptible plants. Thrips do live some of their lifecycle actually inside of plants’ leaves, and they also shelter in weeds and leaf litter under plants, so if you rake up the leaf litter from affected plants and remove the spent flowers, it can go a long way towards keeping things free of pests.

(If you rake up litter that you suspect has pests in it, take it to your county’s green waste facility or burn it. Home composting setups usually don’t get hot enough to kill garden pests.)

Don’t shear plants that are susceptible to thrips. Shearing can encourage lots of soft leafy growth, which is very attractive to pests.

Don’t over-fertilize. Similar to above, if you fertilize more than is recommended, it encourages soft fleshy growth, and all kinds of sucking insects – aphids, thrips, etc, will love you for it.

I hope this gives you some options the next time you’re faced with a thrips problem in your garden. Thrips can be hard to get rid of, but these are the safest and most effective controls out there for tackling it.

What plants have you faced a thrips issue with? What worked and didn’t work for you? Let me know in the comments below.

Watering seems like one of those bonehead tasks that everyone should get right on their first try, right? I wish! The truth is, I see more gardens that are sick and unhealthy due to water stress than any other single issue. Luckily, watering properly isn’t complicated once you know a few simple things.

First, if you’re under the impression that your plants don’t need any summer water because plants in nature do fine without it, read this. Unless you are growing plants that have a specific desire for dryness in summer, like many California natives (Ceanothus, Fremontodendron, etc), and you’ve adjusted your expectations of your plants to allow them to do whatever they do in nature (many wild flowers go dormant in summer!), you probably need to water regularly once the rains have stopped.

The exception to this is if you have a very mature garden of woody plants like trees and shrubs, with no flowering perennials (the soft, fleshy green plants that flower for a long season), then you may not need to water much at all. As a rule of thumb, the more you ask of your plants, the more you need to give in return. If you want them to grow bigger, bloom well for you, or have exceptionally healthy foliage, then you will want to water regularly so they can be at their best.

Here’s what you need to know:

The basics:

First, the goal is to water very deeply, so you need to water less often. That means you really want to soak your plants so their roots are encouraged to spread deeply into the soil to drink. Plants that just get a shallow sprinkle form root systems right near the surface of the soil, which makes them dependent on you to water them again very soon, since the soil surface dries out faster than deeper down.

Second, the goal is to water the “drip line” of the plant, not the trunk of the plant. If you imagine a shrub or tree getting rained on, the water usually falls to the outermost branches and leaf tips and drips downward from there. If you were to draw an invisible circle around the canopy of your tree or shrub, that area would be called the drip line, and you should focus most of your water in that zone, rather than watering right against the tree or shrub’s trunk.

Third, try not to spray the foliage of your plants if possible. It’s not the end of the world if you do, but try to focus on watering the soil around each plant, since water droplets on foliage can sometimes cause sunburn spots (where the water drop acts as a magnifying glass for the sun’s rays and sunburns the leaves), and moist foliage can contribute to fungus problems like black spot or mildew.

Lastly, the best time of day to water is in the morning before the dew dries. Plants take up most of their water while they’re actively photosynthesizing in the daytime, and while they will drink some at night, it’s a bit of a waste to water in the evening because plants are winding down and won’t get the most benefit from having ample water then.

How do I know if I’m watering deeply enough?

This is easy: water as usual (either by hand, using your drip irrigation system, or whatever you normally do) and when you are done, move your mulch aside and poke your fingers into the soil about two inches down. The soil should be well-soaked and actively wet two inches down.

If you’re watering by hand, you may be surprised to find that your usual watering routine is barely wetting the surface of your soil, even if you water for a long time! (That’s why I so strongly recommend using a drip irrigation system – see below.)

Around six hours after you water, check your soil again. Is it cool and moist all the way around the plant, and under all the areas where your plants have foliage? That’s the goal. If not, you may consider either watering more deeply next time, amending your soil with compost to help hold moisture, or adding a 3” layer of mulch to keep roots cool and moist.

How often should I water?

This is a tougher question because it varies depending on your soil, what plants you are growing, if you have mulch, and how hot and dry the weather’s been. I can tell you how to figure it out, though!

Begin checking your soil for moisture the day after you water. Poke your fingers two inches down into the soil and see if it’s moist. Do this every day until  the soil’s in that sweet spot where it is dry, but still crumbly and cool – that’s when you water. If the top two inches of your soil is dusty or powdery, or your plants are wilting, you’ve gone too long.

If you do this test in each of the seasons, you’ll get a general idea for how often you need to water in different types of weather. In the middle of summer, you may need to water almost daily, especially with fast-growing vegetables or flowers. In winter, you may not water for months since plants are growing less and don’t use up the natural rainfall.

Pay attention too if you have different kinds of planting areas. Lawn, veggies, container plants, flowering annuals or perennials, and newly-planted plants will all need more regular watering than mature shrubs and trees or sturdier perennials. You may like to water your veggies and lawn daily or every other day, and do your mature plantings twice a week, for example.

The main idea here is to get acquainted with what your soil’s doing in different areas of your garden so you have an intuitive sense of when it’s time to water.

How do I water with an irrigation system? Are they a good idea?

Yes, drip irrigation systems are totally awesome. Drip systems conserve water and save you money, because they provide just the right amount of water to the plant, exactly where the plant is using it. By contrast, when you water by hand, you’re wetting leaves, the sidewalk, etc – it’s rather inefficient.

Another great thing about automatic drip systems is how reliable they are. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I am rushing to work in the morning and don’t water, or I forget, or I am tired and do a sloppy job. You don’t get any such excuses out of your drip system.

With a drip system using 1 gph (gallon per hour) emitters, watering a mixed garden of perennials and shrubs, I usually set it for 3 days per week during the growing season, for 45 minutes each cycle.

If you have a garden with a lot of annual flowers or reseeding perennials, I often use drip irrigation sprayers – little sprayers which attach to your quarter-inch tubing and will water a larger area – that way you don’t have to set up individual drippers for plants that may not be there next season. They’re less efficient and less healthy for plants, but for gardens with lots of tiny plants they can be the best solution.

If you’re using drip irrigation sprayers, I usually run the system for only 25 minutes because the sprayers let loose a lot more water than do drippers.

Lawns, of course, will use larger sprinklers, not a drip system. I usually set an automatic lawn sprinkler system to run 4-5 days a week for 10 minutes per day, but again, that’s just a guideline and may be different for your garden.

As for how to install an irrigation system, it’s best to have a landscape contractor do this, but it’s possible and not too hard to do it yourself if you’re willing to take the time to research and learn.

Are there any weird bits of info about watering that are important to know but that I’d never think to ask?

Why thank you, hypothetical person, you asked this just to make me happy, didn’t you? Indeed there is some miscellaneous information about watering I’d like to share with you! <clears throat>

If you don’t have mulch, please be particularly careful with how you water by hand. Don’t direct a jet of water at the ground, since it can compact the soil and cause a crust to form. Instead, use a gentle showering head on your hose to allow water to fall lightly on the soil.

In winter, don’t forget to water plants that are under eaves or overhangs and won’t get any rainfall. I’ve seen plants that are halfway under an overhang, and in winter, the back half that was not getting any water died out, while the front half that was getting rained on thrived.

If you are planting a new garden with an overhang and installing a drip system, you might consider setting up a second drip line just to water under the overhang in winter. Then when the rains begin, you can turn off all the automatic drip lines except for the one under the eaves, and you’ll know your plants will stay happy and healthy all winter.

One last thing to consider with drip systems is that as the plants grow, you’ll want to move the drip emitters to water where plants’ roots are. Since most plants start in a container, you need to start with the emitter over the root ball, but as plants grow, they take up water further and further out from their main trunk or stems, at their drip line (see above).

So every two years or so, brush your mulch aside and move the emitters outwards away from the main stem and closer to the drip line, so that you’re watering your plants in the area of their roots where they can actually soak it in.

I hope that answers some of your basic questions about watering and gives you a good foundation of information to go from. Watering seems like such a simple task, and yet so many gardeners have avoidable pest problems because of watering issues – either pest problems due to plants being stressed from lack of water, or fungus from the wet atmosphere caused by deliberately watering plants’ foliage. I hope this watering tutorial helps your plants be healthy and happy!

I don’t know about ya’ll, but for a long time there, I was risking life and limb getting my dratted wheelbarrow up into my truck to take to clients’ homes on days when we were mulching.  Wheelbarrows are heavy!

Maybe you are a pro like me, or maybe you just want to store your wheelbarrow on a table or shelf. Here’s how to lift your wheelbarrow safely, without using any real strength.

If you feel any strain at all in your back, put the barrow down gently and try again. You should be using your hips as a levering point, and just your arms to lift, not your back.

Ready to mulch: When I'm done, I'll need to lift the wheelbarrow into my truck

Grab the wheelbarrow by the handles

Tip it upwards

When you hold the wheelbarrow like this, you can spin it around on its wheel like so

Gently lower the wheelbarrow so it rests on the ground like this. Grasp the barrow as shown and set the edge of the barrow in the crease in your hip joint where your legs bend

Now you can easily use your hip joint as a levering position to lift the barrow using only minimal strength from your arms

I'm lifting my leg here only for added stability and balance - I'm using only my arms to lift

Now I can easily direct the barrow into my truck using the handles to guide it gently in

Cleaned up and ready to go

If you have a wheelbarrow,  go outside and try this! It’s amazing how setting the barrow in the crease where your hip joint is and using that spot to lever the wheelbarrow up with minimal muscle from your arms makes this a simple way of lifting a heavy object without strain.

I got this tip from a fellow at the green waste recycling place a couple years ago. Hope it can serve you as well as it’s served me!

Today we’ll talk specifically about mulch: what it is, what type to use, how to apply it, and why mulching is the single most important thing you can do to improve the health of your plants and reduce maintenance time:

Mini fir bark chips used as mulch

Mulching is when you add a layer of wood chips, chipped bark, shredded leaves, or other material to the top of your soil without mixing it in, so that it will hold down weeds, hold moisture in the soil, and contribute positively to your soil over time.

Why mulching is so over-the-top awesome for your garden:

• A 3” thick layer of mulch will reduce the weeds that come up by 75% or more overnight – it is the single best organic weed control out there. Clients who don’t have mulch are shocked at the difference after we put down a good layer of wood mulch – it smothers the weed seeds that try to sprout from the soil below.
• It helps your soil hold onto moisture so that you needn’t water so often.
• It also keeps your soil from getting so compacted when you step on it to maintain your garden, and keeps hard rains and hot sun from forming a crust on your soil’s surface.
• It keeps plants’ roots cool in summer and warm in winter.
• It helps support the beneficial micro-organisms and worm populations that keep your soil aerated and help change the existing nutrients in your soil into a form your plants can use.
• It can help keep some soil-borne bacterial diseases from harming delicate, over-bred plants like many roses.
• In some cases, mulch can help with erosion control.

For all these reasons, if you want a low-maintenance garden with happy, healthy plants, mulching is the number-one thing you can do to have an immediate, dramatic impact on the time you spend weeding, and the overall happiness of your plants.

Use mulch after you amend the soil, though, because otherwise you may hesitate to disturb your pretty layer of mulch by moving it aside to add compost underneath.

What to use as mulch?

Small fir bark chips used as mulch

Wood chips, either an actual wood chip or a bark chip, help the most in keeping weed seeds from sprouting, and chips are easy to rake and keep neat. Smaller chips look prettiest and work best to reduce weeds and hold moisture in your soil, but the smaller chips do break down faster and need you to reapply every 2-3 years.

Bark chips usually comes in mini/ micro size, small, medium, and large. I use micro in most home gardens; small in gardens with really strong seacoast winds or rambunctious pets.

Shredded redwood bark used as mulch - it's good for slopes

Shredded bark mulches are one of the few things that stay put on slopes. They are hard to weed in, unpleasant to apply, impossible to rake, and make your pants and gloves all splintery, but if you have a steep slope, it’s probably your best option – everything else will slide down the hill at the first rain.

Shredded Eucalyptus bark can slow weed growth because of Eucalyptus’s natural growth-inhibiting qualities, but it could also slow growth of your desirable plants, so only use Euc. in places where you aren’t growing much.

Some people use straw on their veggie beds, but it isn’t terrifically attractive and it tends to blow about, so I’d only use it where you won’t be looking at it. Straw is fantastic for softening a hard soil, though, so if you want to put a layer of straw down over the winter and then mix it into the bed in spring, that could be a good option. It’s also one of the cheapest mulches at about six bucks a bale. Rice straw is supposed to be weed-free.

Cocoa hulls used as mulch in Amy Stewart's Wicked Plants poison garden, since it's poisonous to dogs

Cocoa hulls are from the cocoa bean and make an attractive mulch in the sunshine, and oh-my-gosh they smell divinely of chocolate, at least for the first few months. Two problems, though – they are strongly poisonous to dogs who may munch them (I wouldn’t use it around cats or chickens either), and they mold in the shade. Pricy, too.

Fallen pine needles can make a great free mulch. I’ve found many perennials don’t appreciate the impenetrable coverage pine needles provide, but most shrubs and trees are fine with it. It will acidify your soil somewhat over time, so use it around blueberries and huckleberries, Rhododendrons, Azaleas, Pieris, and ferns, which are all acid-loving plants.

Shredded leaves can make a simple mulch, but the fluffy texture can harbor snails and slugs, so if I have leaves in the fall, I tend to just compost them and mix them into the soil once they’ve broken down.

Grass clippings and sawdust are other candidates for the compost pile, not for mulching. When they are in the process of breaking down, they use up nitrogen in the soil in their decomposition process (and lots of it), which means that your plants are temporarily going without the nutrient they need to put out green growth.

Using a layer of compost as mulch doesn’t reduce weeds, since any new weeds that blow in will find it a hospitable place to set new roots.

Some people “mulch” with rocks, gravel, or rubber mulch, but since they don’t enrich the soil and indeed should not be allowed to mix into the soil (you need to use these with landscape fabric underneath to keep them from getting mixed in), using inorganic materials to mulch is akin to using landscape fabric – not a great long-term solution for growing plants.

Many people have reported success with using newspapers (the non-glossy kind) or cardboard underneath their mulch for added weed control. The paper and cardboard break down slowly and provide an actual barrier to the weeds coming from below, while still allowing moisture to penetrate.

I have one adventurous client who tried this, and she ended up with newspaper bits scattered over her lawn and mixed into her pretty mulch after raccoons discovered that worms liked to hang out just under the newspaper. She later got a hungry mole tunneling under the paper, which made for more paper mache around the garden.

Take my advice and only try this in ornamental beds if you’re pretty laid-back about how your garden looks, or have no wildlife around who might like to tunnel under your paper for bugs. This is an awesome technique for vegetable beds during a dormant season, though. Cover it with a nice layer of straw, and mix the whole thing into the soil months later when you’re ready to plant.

How to mulch:

It’s simple – just smooth out your soil, and make sure the level of your soil at the edge of the planting bed is 3-4” below the level of your landscape edging/ bender board, concrete path, or whatever else your planting bed is next to. You want to make sure that when you put 3” of mulch on top of your soil, it doesn’t slide right off your bed into your pathways or lawn at the first sniff of rain.

Clear the soil away from the edges of the bed so when you apply mulch, it won't spill outside your borders

Then spread a 3” layer of mulch on your beds, spreading it thinner near the bases of your plants than everywhere else. A 1” layer of mulch against a tree trunk or shrub’s base is OK, but try to keep the mulch from completely covering the base of woody plants, particularly trees, as it can cause your plants to rot.

I use an iron bow rake or the ergonomically-designed Groundhog Rake to spread my mulch.

Once you’ve spread the mulch, water it in well to help it settle and keep it from sapping moisture from the soil – mulch often starts out rather dry, but once you’ve given it that initial drink, it will help conserve your soil’s moisture.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the final key to a healthy garden: how to water properly. Sounds simple, but it’s a big barrier to success for a lot of people, so we’ll go over the basics of how, how often, and what tools can help.

What’s worked for you? What kinds of mulch do you prefer in your garden? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Today we’ll talk about how to know whether you need to add compost to your soil, how much to add, and how to mix it in:

Most people have some idea of whether their soil leans towards sand, clay or loam. You can find out what soil type you have here, but for our purposes, it really isn’t important.

The main thing to know is that adding compost will help any kind of soil.

Got clay? Compost will help the tiny clay particles bind together in larger crumbs that allow for better drainage and less of that sticky clumping. Got sand? Compost will help it hold moisture. If you’re lucky enough to have that in-between loam, then compost will do a bit of both and help your plants stay happy and balanced in their soil home.

In a new garden bed, I usually add 3-6” of compost to the entire surface of the garden bed and mix it in well to a depth of 6-8” – that is, go down about 6-8” into your existing soil. Mix it up until it’s well blended, so you don’t have large areas that are only compost or only soil.

In an existing garden bed, I’ll often just add an inch or two if it looks like it needs help, mixing it in just a couple inches down. The earthworms will continue your amending work for you! (If you have mulch on the bed currently, I just gently move the mulch aside and amend, then gently rake the mulch back into place. It only takes a few minutes.)

I like to use a spading fork to mix compost with existing soil, or my hori-hori in tight corners where I want to be careful of plants’ roots. Shovels are fine, but they are meant more for scooping soil than mixing it, so you have to work extra hard to end up with an even blend of compost and soil.

If you’re not sure if you have added enough or if your soil even needs compost, try this test:

Run your fingers through the soil and imagine being a plant and trying to send little baby roots out into it. Is it cool, does it both drain well and hold moisture, and is it crumbly and rich? Can you dig in it with your hands and not need a tool? If not, try adding a bit more compost and see how it improves things.

Now a quick what not to do: Don’t add compost to the hole when you plant. It can cause a situation where the plants’ roots circle around in the cushy compost and never venture outside of the planting hole into the great world beyond. A surface tension barrier can also keep water from draining out of your composty planting hole in winter, causing your new plant to drown.

Instead, apply the compost in an even layer to the entire surface of your garden bed, so your plants are invited to spread their roots.

You can use a bagged compost amendment or buy it in bulk from many landscape suppliers if you have a truck, or you can make your own from garden clippings and non-noxious weeds. (Check out some excellent real-life examples here.) Manure works great as an amendment as well, so long as it’s been composted long enough that it looks and smells more like soil than anything else!

Don’t use potting soil in place of compost since it contains sand (not helpful), and if you do buy bagged compost, try to find one that contains more than just composted wood (it should say on the bag).

Once you’ve enriched your soil with compost, the next step is to add some mulch! We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

What’s worked for you? Do you have any tips for improving soil? Let me know in the comments below!

As a professional landscaper, I get to see and diagnose a lot of garden issues. I find many people at wits’ end, spraying for pest problems and dealing with unhappy plants. Most of the time, the pest problem or grumpy plant shouldn’t be looked at as the problem itself – more accurately, they are symptoms of a bigger issue in the garden.

Think of it this way – if you only ate junk food and never drank any water, you’d expect some health problems to start showing up. But treating just those health problems, the symptoms of that lifestyle, wouldn’t solve the real problem. When gardening organically, we look to prevent problems rather than treat them once they arrive.

The Holy Trinity of Plant Care: Soil, Water, and Mulch

A healthy soil is going to provide the nutrients plants need to do their best, while regular, deep watering keeps them hydrated and healthy. A good thick layer of mulch supports both your soil and watering habits by contributing nutrients, holding moisture in, and keeping the structure of the soil soft so that the plants can actually reach the nutrition that is there.

Is all this stuff really necessary?

You might be thinking that plants in the wild don’t need all this extra care– they do just fine on their own. That’s true in one respect, but then, you have different conditions and expectations of plants in your home garden than you do in the wild.

Think about it: plants in the wild are allowed to fall and decompose, adding organic matter to the soil. It isn’t a big deal if their leaves are chewed as long as they are successful at reproducing and outcompeting other plants. And many have a short period of bloom that’s structured more for pollinators’ pleasure than our own, and then they go dormant.

In a home garden on the other hand, we want plants to look good year-round. We have a weakness for large flowers and tasty fruit, and those plants have usually been bred more for those attributes than for surviving without our care.

Even if you plant natives, the conditions usually aren’t the same as in the wild – perhaps your soil has been compacted by construction, or you haven’t allowed centuries of plant matter to break down in your soil. Maybe your natives rely on being in a forested understory or having great drainage, while you’re in the suburbs or have clay soil.

Ready to learn the basics? Click on these articles to read more:

Organic Gardening 101: How to Amend Soil

Organic Gardening 101: How to Apply Mulch

Organic Gardening 101: Watering How-To

One of the biggest barriers to organic gardening success, and I mean that literally, is landscape fabric. Any kind of fabric or plastic that keeps weeds down will also keep fallen leaves or mulch from adding organic matter to your soil, leaving behind a hardened, dead zone where plants struggle to survive.

Now, that’s not to say landscape fabric is never the answer, because it can be very helpful in certain situations, but using it shouldn’t be the default, because it interrupts a number of natural cycles which would usually allow your plants to grow healthy and strong with less help from you.

What’s the tradeoff in using landscape fabric?

Aside from the impact on your soil, you ought to know that even professional-grade landscape fabric (I use Dewitt brand professional landscape fabric with their anchoring pins to hold it in place) only lasts ten years, and after that point, two things happen which make it stop working:

• The wood chips you have used as mulch and to hide the fabric have broken down to where you have a layer of soil on top of the landscape fabric for weeds to grow in.
• The fabric itself has degraded to where it’s letting weeds come up from below and take hold from above.

If you are going to use landscape fabric well, you’re essentially making the commitment to remove or replace the fabric in ten years. Otherwise the fabric will still be keeping your soil from thriving, while not actually working to keep the weeds down. It’s a time tradeoff – you have less weeding to do for ten years, then a big project to remove or replace the stuff.

So, when is landscape fabric a good idea?

If you have a brand new garden which is mostly made up of woody shrubs, ornamental grasses, heathers, and very tough perennials, and you’ve amended the soil well with plenty of organic matter, then landscape fabric can be a good choice for the first ten years.

By the end of ten years, your shrubs and plants will be large enough to shade out most weeds, and you can remove the fabric (a bigger task than it sounds, as your plants will have rooted above and below it) and just add a fresh, thick layer of wood chip mulch to keep down weeds in future.

If you are planning on retiring in ten years and will have more time to care for your garden then, landscape fabric can help keep weeds down until you have more time to devote to your garden.

If you have dogs who like to dig, and you’re afraid they’ll dig up your freshly-planted garden, then landscape fabric will often deter them from digging. Once your plants have gotten large and established, you can remove the fabric since the occasional dig won’t uproot most mature plants.

Landscape fabric can help with erosion control on hillsides, until your groundcover or shrubs fill in and hold the soil on their own. I’ve seen people lay the fabric fuzzy side up (you usually lay it fuzzy side down) and then put shredded bark mulch on top to cover it – the fuzzy side of the fabric helps the mulch adhere and not slide down the hill. (I don’t recommend shredded bark mulch except on hillsides, where it’s the only mulch that stays put.)

The caveat with using landscape fabric is that it becomes even more important to keep up with removing any weeds that come up. If the weed gets large enough to root through the fabric, you’ve just shortened the length of time that your fabric is effective for you. A diamond hoe can help you kill weeds before they become a problem.

When NOT to use landscape fabric:

If you want to grow flowering perennials or plants that need a lot of nutrients, like roses or many edibles. Most plants that flower heavily through a long season need rich, composty soil to thrive, and if you have landscape fabric, your organic matter will be used up within a few years, leaving your perennials to lose vigor.

If you like an English Cottage-style garden with re-seeding flowers and plants that travel and intermingle. Weed barrier/ landscape fabric is going to keep spreading and re-seeding flowers from taking hold.

If you like to move things around and tuck in new plants fairly often. Not only is it a pain to dig up plants or plant new ones with landscape fabric, but if you change your mind and decide you want one large plant instead of three small ones, you then have extra holes to patch, and patched fabric isn’t very effective.

What’s the alternative?

If you can pull your weeds when they’re tiny for the first year, then after that point a good 3” thick layer of wood chip mulch is going to be every bit as effective as landscape fabric, while allowing your soil to enjoy the benefits of the mulch slowly breaking down and adding organic matter to your soil.

The philosophy behind organic gardening is that we try to provide the conditions so our plants and soil can find a healthy balance, and need as little help from us as possible.

If your plants are growing in soil that is constantly enriched by wood chip mulch or shredded leaves breaking down, it begins a natural cycle:

• The worms are attracted by the organic matter, and they aerate your soil and leave behind worm castings, which hold moisture. Less watering for you, and soil stays fluffy.
• The microorganisms in your soil will thrive, allowing them to break down the mineral matter in your soil into nutrients your plants can use.
• The organic matter breaking down also provides nutrients, so if you forget to add fertilizer one season, your plants will be fine.
• The mulch keeps soil from forming a water-repelling crust or becoming compacted by heavy rains or baking in the sun, so water’s easily absorbed and the soil both holds moisture and drains well.

I hope this gives you some info to consider when choosing whether landscape fabric is right for your garden. There are disadvantages to using it,  but there are a number of situations where it is the right choice, and knowing exactly what you’re giving up when you use it can help you make the best decision for your garden.

Snails and slugs are one of the most common pests in the garden, and the traditional pesticide treatment for them is particularly nasty. If you are transitioning to an organic garden, treating snails and slugs differently is an easy (and still highly effective) change that will have a great impact on your family’s health and safety.

Why the usual snail bait is so bad:

You may be thinking that traditional snail bait can’t be that scary, because everyone uses it. Not true.

In California, snail bait/ metaldehyde is the most common cause of poisoning in dogs. It will affect any animal that ingests enough of it (yes, humans too), and “enough of it” is a very small amount – only a teaspoon per ten pounds of body weight. Fido can lap up enough to kill him in one or two licks, and since many of the baits are combined with wheat or molasses to attract snails, it even smells good to him.

Liquid bait, like Deadline, is no better – a cat can be poisoned easily through stepping on it and then grooming his paws later.

If the harm to your own or neighboring pets and children (and wild birds) isn’t enough to convince you, consider this: traditional metaldehyde snail bait is most toxic through inhalation. Most people use a form that looks like sawdust and blows around easily. Do you really want to be applying something toxic in the manner most likely to cause you poisoning?

A safe and simple organic alternative to kill snails:

Fear not. Banning metaldehyde-based/ traditional snail and slug bait from your garden needn’t relegate you to a life of setting out beer and retrieving drunken snails every morning.

Iron phosphate bait, also sold under the names Sluggo, Worry-Free, and Escar-Go, is an extremely effective organic bait which has ingredients that are generally regarded as safe for food use by the EPA (not that you’d want to eat it – you can overdose on iron, you know!).

The stuff works great! Many people think that it isn’t effective because they don’t see the piles of dead snails right where they put the bait, but that’s because iron phosphate works differently. After the snail or slug eats the bait, they crawl away and die a few days later, but they stop eating your plants immediately.

Organic snail bait is actually more effective in our rainy, damp climate than the traditional bait is, because it doesn’t dissolve in the rain as fast as traditional baits do.

Iron phosphate is non-toxic to pets and wildlife. One caveat, of course, is that you should sprinkle the bait out and never set it in piles that would be easily ingested. Just like your kids shouldn’t down a bottle of iron-containing vitamins, pets shouldn’t eat a pile of iron phosphate.  But sprinkling is the proper method for using it anyway, since when it’s placed in piles it can mold.

I’ve tested this in the gardens I maintain for years, and it’s proven every bit as effective as the nasty stuff and it is even easier to use. You can pick it up at Amazon.

Some tips to help you control snails and slugs using any kind of bait, organic or traditional:

First, try to keep areas clear of hiding places for snails and their eggs. Leaf litter and debris, large weeds popping up in between your other plants, and old overturned pots can provide shady, moist shelter to snails and slugs.

Next, try to anticipate problems and put out bait before they are eating your plants. In veggie beds for example, if you set out bait before your seedlings germinate or before you put out delicate starts, the snails and slugs will be more likely to eat the bait. If you wait until your larger plants are covered in baby snails, they may not come off their food source long enough to eat the bait. This is true for organic or traditional bait.

If you remember, set out bait after a rainshower, as they’re more likely to be active and eating then.

Fall is also a great time to set out bait, since you can kill them before they lay eggs. Bait in early fall to prevent egg-laying, then late fall to try to kill any that have just hatched.

Non-bait solutions to slugs and snails:

There are other alternatives to using either organic or traditional bait. They aren’t perfect, but they deserve a mention:

Get yourself some backyard chickens or ducks! My ladies eat all my snails with great crunching vigor. They’re less keen on slugs, but they’ll eat them, too.

Of course, chickens present other issues – I’ve had to fence off my veggie patch so they don’t eat my chard and lettuce down to nubs – but any mollusk who dares step outside the veggie beds gets chomped quickly.

(I have read that the organic snail bait doesn’t hurt chickens who have eaten it as far as the chicken owners could tell, but to be on the safe side, I’d only use it where the chickens don’t roam – you won’t need bait in the areas they go!)

Plant things that the snails don’t care for. This eliminates leafy green veggies, Dahlias, Hostas, Artichokes, and a number of small flowering annuals and perennials.

But that still leaves a wide variety of ornamentals and edibles that they rarely go after – most woody shrubs, heathers, ornamental grasses, conifers, larger tomato and squash starts, blueberries, potatoes, culinary herbs, etc (the picture at left is a snail avoiding eating Chives).

If you live in certain areas of (mostly southern) California or Texas, you may release predatory decollate snails which will eat your regular garden snails. This doesn’t work for me here in Humboldt County, but this link will tell you which counties are legal to ship them to.

Copper tape is another option, and it’s only occasionally effective. I’ve seen some snails just walk over it like it’s nothing, though some people do find it effective.

If you want to try it, it’s best used around veggie beds or around pots. You need to form a complete barrier all the way around the plants you are protecting, and keep leaves from draping or trailing on top of the tape, as that can form a bridge for the snails and slugs to go over.

Keep the copper tape clean by wiping it down periodically.

There are other controls for snails and slugs, but I’d classify them in the “doesn’t work well enough for all the dashed trouble you take doing it”, or “has other side effects that aren’t fantastic” categories:

Wood ashes, diatomaceous earth, and pine needles can act as an uncomfortable surface for them to walk on, cutting their undersides.

Diatomaceous earth needs to be reapplied often and can cut the inside of your lungs in the same way it cuts the snails, so I veer away from that. Wood ashes make your soil alkaline, so you probably don’t want to use that control often, and pine needles make your soil more acid, which again isn’t great long-term unless you’re protecting acid-loving plants.

You can set out rolled-up newspapers or small pots tipped sideways to provide shade to the snails during the day, and then come out and dispose of the snails each day. I don’t have that strong of a stomach or that much time, do you?

Setting out beer in bowls is the college student’s choice since they can always find the flat dregs of a beer to dump out, but this ignores the fact that most college students are busy enough that they won’t go out and smash any snails they catch this way. At best, you catch a few snails and have a stinky bowl in the garden, at worst, you feed the snails and beef them up for their next round against your plants.

And in the really disgusting category of control, you have salting. The under-10 crowd will love this – you’ve probably seen how dramatically snails and slugs foam up when salted. But plants don’t love growing in salty soil, so I’d be wary of letting the little ones loose with a salt shaker on my garden. It’d keep them busy, though, wouldn’t it?

What’s worked, or not worked, for you?

Are there any plants you think of as snail candy or snail hotels? How do you control snails in your garden? Click below to leave a comment and tell me what you think!

I’ve been asked a lot lately about organics in the garden. “How do I kill snails around my vegetable starts?” is a common question. “Does anything organic really work on roses?”

I even spoke with one gardener who felt chained to her Miracle-Gro routine – having to laboriously water it in every two weeks. It was heartbreaking to me that Miracle-Gro had done such a marketing number on this sweet person that she was going far out of her way to use something that I consider actively bad for her plants and soil!

If you want to move more towards using organics, I can assure you it’s fun, it’s easy, and while a few organic controls are more expensive or time-consuming than their traditional counterparts, in the end, I truly believe you save time and money through supporting your garden’s natural cycles.

After all, the organic philosophy is about establishing a balance in your garden so that your garden is more able to take care of itself. It may take time and money initially to put down a 3” layer of woodchip mulch, but if you imagine that an hour of weeding a week turns into a half hour a month after mulching, you can see that the benefits catch up fast.

In the coming weeks I want to talk about some of the steps you can take to help your garden be healthy without using chemicals that are harmful to you, your children and pets, and our groundwater.

We’ll talk about:

How to fix most pest problems: soil, water, mulch, and organic fertilizers.

Whether weed barrier/ landscape fabric is a good choice for your garden.

Replacing over-bred Frankenplants with sturdy, gorgeous bloomers that will glow with health without being sprayed.

Organic and biological replacements for the most commonly-used pesticides/ herbicides, and the reason why many traditional pesticides make your garden addicted to using them.

How to adjust your vision of beauty to allow and appreciate imperfection, and how to know when a pest problem actually requires treatment.

That all being said, there’s certainly no negative judgment from me if you prefer to use some traditional methods of control. I personally just feel a responsibility to use the least harmful methods of control that I can, because as a landscaper, I have an opportunity to have a greater impact than most people do in just their home gardens.

But I do think that in these tough times, many of us are finding solace in growing our own food, spending time outdoors, and connecting with our garden in a deeper way, and this often leads us to question whether that blue fertilizer or box of snail-killing sawdust is really the safest and most effective choice.

If you’re like me and wanting to move towards using healthier alternatives in your garden, come on back in the coming weeks for discussion of how to deal with pests and problems organically.