YOUR GARDEN’S WAITING . . . HOW WILL YOU CELEBRATE?

by BRENDA BEUST SMITH

TUESDAY, JUNE 9, IS NATIONAL GARDENING EXERCISE DAY. To

celebrate, I wandered around the yard shooting random pictures of plants in bloom (aka have a flower on them). After all, blooming is hard work. They deserve the recognition.

Truth is, however, our front yard gardens are moving out-of-our-control these days, impacted by various powers — shrinking spaces, HOA/POAs, property prices, intimidating neighbors, etc. So, often, it’s really in our backyards that we can be ourselves, putting our own priorities and desires first.

Maybe yours is totally a “kid-place” — understandable and probably at least in our minds — a happy-but-usually-temporary part of life. What happens when it’s all yours to design and plant?

Not talking actual plants here, but a mental exercise. If you’re on in years, maybe you’ve already achieved this level of gardening. But even for those of us already putting backyard daydreams into action, constant adaptation is forced by irresistible new plant varieties, decreasing energy, neighbors’ visible monstrosities, etc.!

The good news is your backyard is usually the one place you mostly can design for yourself. Sometimes the simplest choices say so much. Lots of seating room and furniture? You welcome visitors. Few seats, you like your privacy. (Or maybe easily-put-away seats if you’re a wee bit mercurial?)

I hate labels, but these are kind of fun:Realtor.com thinks maybe you’re a social butterfly-type, a born entertainer, if your “planting space” is either equal to — or exceeded by — an excess of seating. Or . . .

QUIET SOUL: Simple plantings, few if any conversation-starting flora. CRAFTY SORT: Upcycled, clever homemade flower boxes, bird baths, etc.

BOHO CHIC: “Controlled chaos . . . flowerbeds usually put together with little thought as to color, height, or symmetry.”

Realtor.com doesn’t mention “Lazy Chic.” Guess I’m Lazy Boho Chic. Love it!

All this fits right in with a note fromLIAMARIE HARRIS, who’s curious to know (and brave enough to ask) what’s blooming in my garden? LiaMarie recently moved to the Cypress area from out of state. She wants things in bloom right now and I need to celebrate Gardening Exercise Day. Photography requires a bit of exercise. So here are a few of mine. . .

POTPOURRI . . .

A QUESTION FOR YOU: Why is my

normally fire engine red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) blooming this sickly pale pink?

Can’t find an answer! I want my red back!

PLANT SALES & GREAT GROWING ADVICE EVENTS ABOUND IN JUNE!

Check our calendar below John’s column for upcoming society/group sales on carnivorous plants and plumerias, plus garden problem solving and much more!

ABOVE ALL, MARK YOUR CALENDAR!

Tues.,, June 13, is National Weed Your Garden Day. (Who else would tell you these things?)

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LEST YOU FEEL I’M PROMOTING

LAZINESS (who, me?), celebrating National Gardening Exercise Day the right way is Lindsay Kelly, a sustainable living advocate, in preparing for M.O.M.’S PETTING ZOO‘s grand opening on in Port Bolivar on Bolivar Peninsula. She spotted these gorgeous zinnias at Walmart and bought them all.

They now welcoming visitors to this delightful new attraction on the Peninsula. Zinnias are “my absolute favorite,” she wrote, “I was shocked and thrilled to find them at the Walmart in Galveston!’ They were, she declared,”some of the prettiest I had seen.” Unfortunately the label just said “Zinnia Mix” so she has no idea what specific ones they are! (Ange Scheibel & Lindsey Kelly photos)

(PS. Used the Alabama song quote at top so could start and end with “sustainable living

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Brenda Beust Smith’s column is based on her 40+ years

as Houston Chronicle’s Lazy Gardener Email: lazygardenerbrenda@gmail.com

— Note: This column’s gardening advice focuses ONLY on

the Greater Houston area. Personal reports MUST include your area.

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NEWS FROM THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF SOIL AND PLANTS # 241

Back in January I joined several Facebook groups related to gardening. After reading numerous posts over the last few months, a very distinct pattern emerged. Most of the problems people were experiencing were self-inflicted.

Hence this article is on “Easy ways to have lots of problems in one’s garden” OR “How to turn valuable humus and nutrient rich topsoil into worthless dirt.”

The first step is to over water one’s soil in our gardens and lawns driving out the oxygen plants roots and beneficial microbes need to live. Many plant pathogens thrive in the low oxygen conditions. The toxic chemicals like chlorine, chloramine, and fluoride in public water systems are going to kill additional soil life, hence to kill as many of the good microbes as possible one needs to water frequently and never let the soil recover.

Healthy fertile soil has a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 30:1 hence we must use products that disrupt this healthy balance. One of the best ways to do this is use dyed mulches. These cheap low-quality mulches have a C:N ratio of over 500:1 and are almost guaranteed to cause microbes to pull nutrients away from your plants which stresses them. Stressed plants attract insects and disease which creates additional problems.

Have you ever put your hand on a black car in the afternoon during the summer? Black dyed mulches are very effective at absorbing sunlight and converting it into heat just like the black car. This extra heat cooks the plant adding additional stress. Now the plant requires more watering to keep itself cool, hence we kill more beneficial soil life.

It is not as common as it used to be, but some suppliers still use coal ash with its extremely high alkalinity and toxic chemicals to chemically burn mulch black especially with pine bark products (these are known as ashen mulches).

Most of us live on the Gulf Coast where many of our soils often have high salt levels. Most gardeners know that salt kills plants. Salt was even advertised and used as an herbicide at one time.

Hence using high salt products (cow manure, poultry manure, spent mushroom substate, etc.) is a great way to put our soil into salt toxicity which stresses our plants. It also causes plants to require more watering to dilute the salt ensuring more of the good microbes are killed.

Speaking of salt, one of the biggest sources of chemical salts is artificial fertilizers. Using these products several times per year ensures that the good bacteria that prevents soils diseases like “Brown Patch, Take-All, St Augustine decline, etc.) are killed so we have lots of disease. We now need to treat our soil with fungicides to kill off the good fungi that break down thatch. The thatch layer makes a good home for chinch bugs and those little flies we all love so much.

Another benefit of using artificial fertilizers, since they are often water soluble, they will leach into our storm sewers where they trigger a bloom of organisms that use up all the oxygen in the water, hence the minnows, cray fish, etc. that eat mosquito eggs and larva die. This guarantees we will have more mosquito issues as a bonus to annoy us and spread diseases.

Of course we do not want to forget the added benefit of these nutrients washing downstream into the ocean creating dead zones and killing millions of fish each year.

Also, these salts kill earthworms and other soil life that aerate the soil. This ensure that hardpan and other forms of compaction will occur. This prevents rainwater from entering the soil assuring we will need to water more.

We do not want to forget, that thanks to the above, it is now time to have an expensive core aeration done.

Lastly, to increase the amount of problems in our landscape we should never apply trace and micronutrients (re-mineralization). Trace elements are kind of like vitamins to animals and humans. We do not need much but without them we are not as healthy.

For example, if we do not have lithium (Li) in the soil, it does not get into our food supply. Without lithium our minds so not function properly and it leads to irrational violent behavior.

If you want to have lots of gardening problems and waste lots of money follow the above rules.

God tells us that we are to be stewards and take care of his creation, the above guidelines prevent that from happening.

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ABOUT US

BRENDA BEUST SMITH WE KNOW HER BEST AS THE LAZY GARDENER . . . but Brenda Beust Smith is also:  

• a national award-winning writer & editor  
• a nationally-published writer & photographer   
• a national horticultural speaker 
• a former Houston Chronicle reporter   

When the Chronicle discontinued Brenda’s 45-year-old Lazy Gardener” print column — started in the early ’70s as a fun side-project to reporting, it then ranked as the longestrunning, continuously-published local newspaper column in the Greater Houston area. The name, she says, is not just fun, it’s true. Brenda’s gradual sideways step from reporter into gardening writing led first to an 18-year series of when-to-do-what Lazy Gardener Calendars, then to her Lazy Gardener’s Guide book which morphed into her Lazy Gardener’s Guide on CD, which she now emails free upon request. Brenda became a Harris County Master Gardener and, over the years, served on theboards of many Greater Houston area horticulture organizations. She hosted local radio and TV shows, most notably a 10+-year Lazy Gardener specialty shows on HoustonPBS (Ch. 8) and her call-in “EcoGardening” show on KPFT-FM. For over three decades, Brenda served as Assistant Production Manager of the GARDEN CLUB OF AMERICA’S “BULLETIN” magazine. Although still an active broad-based freelance writer, Brenda’s main focus now is THE LAZY GARDENER & FRIENDS HOUSTON GARDEN NEWSLETTER with John Ferguson and Pablo Hernandez of Nature’s Way Resources. A native of New Orleans and graduate of St. Agnes Academy and the University of Houston,  Brenda lives in Humble, TX, and is married to the retired Aldine High School Coach Bill Smith. They have one son, Blake. Regarding this newsletter, Brenda is the lead writer, originator of it and the daily inspiration for it. We so appreciate the way she has made gardening such a fun way to celebrate life together for such a long time.  

JOHN FERGUSON John is a native Houstonian and has over 27 years of business experience. He owns Nature’s Way Resources, a composting company that specializes in high quality compost, mulch, and soil mixes. He holds a MS degree in Physics and Geology and is a licensed Soil Scientist in Texas.  John has won many awards in horticulture and environmental issues. He represents the composting industry on the Houston-Galveston Area Council for solid waste. His personal garden has been featured in several horticultural books and “Better Homes and Gardens” magazine. His business has been recognized in the Wall Street Journal for the quality and value of their products. He is a member of the Physics Honor Society and many other professional societies. John is is the co-author of the book Organic Management for the Professional.  For this newsletter, John contributes articles regularly and is responsible for publishing it.  

PABLO HERNANDEZ Pablo Hernandez is the special projects coordinator for Nature’s Way Resources. His realm of responsibilities include: serving as a webmaster, IT support, technical problem solving/troubleshooting, metrics management and quality control. Pablo helps this newsletter happen from a technical support standpoint. 

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