Hotels spend a sizeable sum maintaining their landscapes. Maintenance steps include: pre-emergent, post emergent, herbicides, mowing, trimming and a host of other “necessities” that grounds personnel consider to be part of a well maintained site. What if you could slash the budget for these items by making your own maintenance products? And, what if these products rid the site of fire ants, erosion, and even create some great benefits like birds and butterflies? What if these cost saving products also reduce the watering needs of the plants? Here are a few tips to help you benefit from items you thought were trash.
Did you know that everything except meat, metal, glass and plastic can be recycled in your landscape or compost pile? Items that I regularly put into my compost pile include: shredded newspaper and paper products, grass clippings, leaves, chopped up branches, weeds and cuttings from the landscape, coffee grounds, egg shells, old milk and even that rare “its been in the fridge so long, I can’t remember what it used to be.” Believe it or not, mold can be a good thing to encourage bacterial growth in your compost pile.
The common misconception is that you need a lot of room to compost. That depends on your site, but most places don’t need more than the space for a dumpster to adequately compost their landscape and food residual waste.
If you are new to composting, it only smells when the pile is anaerobic. One method to reduce odors is to use wood palates as a base. After laying the palates on the ground, cover them with a good cotton poly spun filter fabric and build your compost pile on top of that. The decaying materials should stay on top of the filter fabric but air and water can pass through, allowing for a faster breakdown of materials.
From a maintenance perspective, the grass clippings should always be left in the grass. As the grass clippings break down, they become thatch. This thatch is broken down by the bacteria in the soil and it becomes nitrogen for the plants. There is no need to bag and remove the grass clippings. They will degrade in a matter of hours or days depending on the amount of biology working in your soil.
Fertilizer’s Impact on Watering
Allowing the grass to become food for the plants also reduces the amount of fertilizer needed to feed the grass and the less synthetic fertilizer you use, the less water you will need. Why? Have you ever read the ingredients in a bag of fertilizer? Most of the ingredients are salts. Salted landscapes usually require more water than those that don’t have a lot of extra salt added.
Yes, even newspaper is a fantastic material for reducing weeds in your flower beds. There are several methods to compost newspaper. One method involves shredding the newspaper and adding it to the beds and then adding an inch or so of shredded hardwood mulch over the top of the newspaper. The newspaper will degrade and provides a good food source for the fungi that help reduce water needs for plants.
What about those pesky fire ants? In 2004, the United States Department of Agriculture did a study and found out that protozoa (tiny organisms in the soil) are the natural predators of fire ants. It is also interesting to note that protozoa don’t like soil that has a lot of salt or synthetic fertilizer applications. After years of studying soil samples under the microscope, it appears that protozoa do seem to like soils where the grass clippings are left on the grass to degrade by the bacteria.
Use Fungi to Slow Erosion
How can I help to stop erosion on a slope? The answer is to add fungi to your soil. We’ve been told to “kill the fungus” and that most fungi are bad. The truth is, however, that not all fungi are bad; some of these tiny soil organisms are very beneficial. Good fungi add bulk density to the soil by taking their long legs, called “hyphae,” and wrapping them around soil particles to make a structural web of microscopic proportions. This web is what allows soil to stay in place on a slope.
To add fungi to the soil, create an environment that they want to live in. If you have a lot of erosion, then allowing some form of vegetation to grow on the slope is a priority. Fungi prefer living plants above them. They also can be found in good quality compost tea and finished biological compost. Anyone may add fungi to their soil by adding two to four inches of finished biological compost to their slope and planting a flowering native groundcover in the compost.
Tilling? No. We have found that tilling is really on an as needed or case by case basis. Tilling generally slices and dices the biology that is in the soil. Think of it this way: if the fungus’ leg was just cut off by the tiller, he is probably more interested in stopping the bleeding and repairing his leg than creating more webs for holding the soil particles together. Save the money and time and just layer the compost on top of the soil and allow it to degrade into the existing ground.
Jennifer Appel is a registered landscape architect and a licensed irrigator. As a principal of Landsculpture & Design for 11 years, her design/build landscape architecture practice has been listed as one of the Houston Business Journal’s Top 25 Landscape Architecture firms. For more information about good composting procedures, go to www.landscapevitamins.com or write to jappel@landscapevitamins.com.
