Striving to be clean and green isn’t some sweetly vague principle for today’s all-natural gardeners.
Real, immediate concerns about health and safety — not just for people but also for pets — drive their organic gardening practices, according to several who participated July 23 in the annual Natural Garden Tour, sponsored by Clark County Public Health.
The self-guided tour of 15 open gardens used to be sponsored by the county’s Environmental Services Department — back when there was one — but putting it under the auspices of Public Health makes serious sense, coordinator Sally Fisher said.
“We believe it’s incredibly important to reduce the use of chemicals on people’s yards,” Fisher said.
Just ask Sara Mae Egli, whose tight organic landscape in Orchards is motivated by memories of Baby, a beloved dog who suffered from Evans syndrome, a rare autoimmune condition. Just ask Pam and Marty Almandinger, whose two Scottish Terriers both died of cancer.
“They would get onto people’s lawns” in the local homeowners association, which is tightly governed to ensure that everything looks as orderly and perfect as can be, Marty Almandinger said. But orderly and perfect usually requires heavy-duty herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, and science is always catching up with the long-term effects such chemicals may have on environmental and animal health. (In recent months the popular herbicide Roundup, long marketed as safe for people, was classified as a known carcinogen by the state of California — joining several other jurisdictions and foreign nations.)
“There’s nothing green about the homeowners association,” Marty said.
But fertilizer is fine when you whomp it up yourself out of natural ingredients, said Pam Almandinger — who does exactly that with banana peels, coffee grounds and eggshells. She uses her kitchen blender to reduce that stuff into “a real ugly brown slurry,” she said. “Our tomatoes love it.”
Fisher, who also masterminded Clark County’s annual Recycled Arts Festival, said the Natural Garden Tour is even closer to her heart.
“This is my favorite outreach of the year, because neighbors can learn from each other how they are growing beautiful gardens without chemicals,” she said. Around 800 people participated this year, she said.
Another reason why the Almandingers got into organic gardening, they said, is because they’re bird lovers. They erected many bird feeders and shelters when they moved onto their L-shaped spread; they also installed a flowing water feature full of koi and goldfish. The resulting bird population loved to feast on those, Pam said, so these days the flowing pond is fish-free.
Lesson learned, Pam said, laughing. “Trial and error is a big part of this,” she said.
But so are fact- and idea-finding missions, Marty added. “We’ve been to so many garden shows and nurseries over the years. The yard was nothing fancy” when the couple arrived in 2005.
The same goes for Susan Sanders’ downtown Vancouver landscape, which was just another anonymous lawn when she took over in 2008. Today, Sanders’ spread is teeming with complex greenery at every level, from ground cover below to shrubs and blooms at eye level to flourishing trees overhead.
Sanders loves texture, she said, so she’s always encouraging plants with complimentary looks to cohabitate closely. That’s a technique shared by organic gardeners across the board: rather than poisoning weeds, you crowd them out.
“Mother Nature doesn’t like a vacuum,” Sanders said. “There’s not an inch I haven’t claimed here. This way, there’s no room for weeds.”
Hands and footies
Sanders “edits” her garden occasionally, she said, but here’s her real confession: She never tries too hard. She claims to spend just a handful of hours per month getting her hands dirty in her busy, densely packed downtown landscape; mostly, she just lets native species “naturalize,” she said.
“That means letting things spread and grow the way they want to,” she said, and only occasionally stepping in to move or manage the results. Fighting nature by insisting on the wrong plant in the wrong place is pointless, she said. “You’ll just struggle, and in the end, it’ll just break your heart,” she said.
Mostly, Sanders said, she just sips coffee in the morning and wine in the evening while gazing with satisfaction at her greenery.
“I’m a lazy gardener,” she said. “Let Mother Nature do the work.”
Actually, the one place where Sanders puts in some real labor is outside her back fence in the alley, where south-facing raised beds are sprouting a profusion of fruits and vegetables — including lemon cucumbers, which Sanders likes because they’re smaller than regular cucumbers and just the right size for a single woman’s salad.
She’s also growing Granny Smith apples on an “espaliered” tree — which means it’s been carefully pruned and guided into a long, flat shape along that back fence. Sanders has protected each little apple from insects by wrapping it in a tiny, individual nylon.
“I have to give the back-alley neighbors something to talk about,” she said, laughing. ” ‘There’s that woo-woo lady tying footies on her apples again!’ ”
Flowers like family
When Egli moved into her home in Orchards, she said, the front yard was nothing but overwatered grass and mud. “It was a swamp,” she said. She spent a month trying to figure out how to save it.
Channeling the water, much of which runs down from an elevated adjoining yard, turned out to be key. Egli showed off the ingenious system she developed for sending that runoff through feet of concealed pea gravel and using it to water a thriving thicket of shrubbery and flowers.
Minimizing water waste and containing urban runoff is important to Egli, she said. “There’s only so much drinkable water in the world, and we don’t treat it right,” she said.
Egli hails from a family of gardeners, and she can tell you the provenance of many of the plants and flowers in her garden: a hardy poppy that used to belong to her grandmother, a bee balm that came from her mother-in-law, a 50-plus-year-old iris that her own father plucked from some railroad tracks and presented to his mommy when he was 6 years old.
Legends like that choke Egli up. “It’s not important to anybody else, but it’s everything to me,” she said.
