Ursula V

Very helpful, thank you! I'll suggest mowing a barrier, and if it's not feasible for space or zone, maybe she could sink a line of plastic edging to defeat the runners.

Brenda Groth wrote:
there is another opportunistic plant that i love ..but it can take over. It is Aegopodium. I will rake leaves and pine needles up into piles under neath my deep shade areas and put in a few roots of that, and wihtin a year it iwll grow into the entire mulch bed and completely cover the ground under the deep shade trees, and provide food and cover for wildlife. The flowers are similiar to queen annes lace and the leaves are variegated green and cream color and are very dnese..they grow like strawberries from runners..and they grow in that shady area nothing else will grow..you can even eat it..but don't let it loose in the woods..it will take over.

Out of curiosity, and not to derail the thread, but since you've got some experience with Aegopodium (goutweed is what I usually see it called) do you know any good way to STOP it spreading? One of my blog readers was bemoaning the fact that her neighbors had planted it awhile back and it had spread aggressively over both yards. Since it's seriously allelopathic--more so than black walnut, even!--it's pretty much killed anything else living in her yard. The only solution either of us could think of involved aggressive sheet mulching, which I've read will kill it...but she was worried that she'll put in all this backbreaking effort, and it'll just come right back in from the neighbors, and of course, the neighbor being the sort who believes that no pretty plant could do anything bad* there's no help from that quarter.

The whole situation has left her depressed and ready to just abandon the notion of gardening there, which is a terrible thought, but since I've never dealt with the stuff, I don't know anything to suggest--whether a barrier method would work, or how far down she'd have to sink it to stop the runners. (I hate to think of somebody giving up on their garden!) Have you got any experience with keeping it out of an area you don't want it in?



*If azaleas grew teeth and started eating people tomorrow, I swear there would still be people saying "But it's so pretty!" while theirs ate the neighbor's dog.

Brenda Groth wrote:
..so i figured if i draw more birds to that area then they'll take care of the excess earwigs..might work for any other bug problems??

Unfortunately while that'd be awesome for earwigs, I think Japanese beetles tend to be pretty unpalatable to North American bird-life--while I've heard that starlings will occasionally pick them off, they apparently taste sufficiently lousy that most of our natives don't want to eat the little buggers. (Even the starling thing is kinda questionable--I've seen on-line sources claim they eat 'em, but a number of my blog readers claim they've watched flocks of starlings bop around the yard without ever so much as touching a Japanese beetle, so I can't say one way or the other if this really works or not. For whatever reason of geography or dumb luck, I don't get starlings out here, so no firsthand experience either way.)

Now, assassin bugs are supposed to be the great equalizer, but they only go after the larvae. Still, there's always next year if you can find a way to encourage the assassins...apparently they're really fond of the daisy and wild carrot family (Queen Anne's Lace, fennel, rue) alfalfa and goldenrod, and they need either tall grass or low shrubs to lurk in.

I've got lots of local assassin bugs, and only minor annoyances with Japanese beetles, but I honestly can't say if the one is due to the other--haven't been gardening at this location long enough to tell.

I haven't tried it myself, but I b'lieve I've read that coffee grounds can be good for blueberries, which prefer acidic soil. However, you don't want to use very much--if you were a pot a day kind of coffee drinker, that'd be way too much acid. If it's only used when you've got guests over, though, probably can't hurt to toss the coffee grounds under the blueberries.

I will confess to occasionally dumping out the remains of my coffee or tea onto the blueberry bushes when I'm having breakfast out on the deck, and they haven't dropped dead yet.

With a lot of invasives, absolutely, they're a creature of disturbed land, and if we stopped disturbing land, we'd have a lot less problems. Unfortunately, there are also plants that get in and creates their own disturbance. If the stuff just hung out on sunny roadsides and along highway cuts--meh, that's life, absolutely we should just plug those holes with desirables and stop whining. But then you get something that spreads aggressively into undisturbed areas, like Russian/autumn olive (that being what makes it such a thug!)...and he recommends them no less than...checking... twenty times in the book, according to the index, and it's hard to find the upside to that.

Which is a shame, because damn, I loved this book!

I think what I'm trying to get at is that with some of these plants, it may not actually possible to grow them and BE sustainable? We're talking about plants that aren't in balance with other flora and fauna, and honestly, I'm not sure if a single grower can KEEP it in balance.

Okay, take bamboo. Bamboo spreads like crazy wildfire, but I believe there are ways to plant it where you accept its rampant growth habit and contain it--and I think it would be irresponsible NOT to grow it in that manner, and certainly the neighbors won't thank you!--but you accept that it's gonna throw crazy runners, you take responsibility for what you planted, you sink baffles, the bamboo stays contained, that's great, I got no problem with that, shine on, you crazy bamboo-lovin' diamond.

But then you get something like, oh, silk tree, which seeds by wind, or Russian olive which seeds by birds. You can't control those seeds, unless you choose to deadhead the tree obsessively and make sure it never sets seeds, or that you get every single berry before the birds do. So you--you, yourself, the grower--are directly and personally responsible for creating several hundred seedlings a year, not on your property but widely broadcast, and quite possibly not desired by whoever gets them. And these things often have amazing germination rates, and the end result is that your silk tree means I'm out in the yard weeding and cursing or chopping and cursing, or, in some cases, spraying and cursing...and so is everybody else in the block and the DNR in the woodlot a mile away. (Oh, the silk trees I've weeded...) You the grower have, in a measurable and detectable fashion, made all our lives a little tiny bit worse. (And for anything directly under the glyphosate, probably quite a lot worse.)

And that's just unkind.

So I guess I don't know if those plants CAN be grown sustainably. Perhaps with obsessive deadheading, perhaps in a greenhouse...but otherwise can it really be considered sustainable to plant things that you know A) are almost guaranteed to spread outside your control and B) will have a definite negative impact on somebody/somewhere else?

I'm of two minds on the book, myself.

First of all, I loved it. It got me really excited about the notion of permaculture, which in turn led me to seeking out as much information about it as I could find (which indirectly led me here!) For firing up the enthusiasm, it was fantastic.

But.

I have to admit, I cringed a little at some of his plant choices. Probably it's because I live in a totally different climate, and we've had to deal with totally different plant problems, but...Russian olive? Really? In this day and age, someone is still advocating planting Russian olive? Both Russian and autumn olive are on pretty much every "worst invasive plants" list in the United States, up there with tree-of-heaven and purple-loosestrife--planting them for berries is kinda like planting kudzu for a privacy screen. It's not just a plant that fills holes in sunny roadsides, either--it's one of those unfortunate thugs that rapidly invades undisturbed areas and forms monocultural stands, and since it's spread by birds, it's not something you can be sure of containing on your own property, either.

A friend who took one of his seminars said that he also advocated garlic mustard as a compost crop, which is...um....novel, anyway, since practically everything written about garlic mustard includes warnings in all caps not to compost it, since unless your compost heap is on the surface of the sun, the seeds won't cook. Can't speak to the truth of that either way, but...yeah.

And this just isn't something you can fix with a positive attitude towards weeds. I'm all for respecting Nature trying to plug holes,  but some of these plants make their own holes--and when you plant a seriously invasive plant, somebody ELSE is going to spend a lot of time killing it when it spreads to their area, and they're probably gonna use all kinds of nasty poisons to do it.

So honestly, as much as I love the book--and I've wedged bookmarks into it and am building a hugulkultur in the backyard as we speak--a lot of his plant choices did bother me. Sure, maybe it's a matter of attitude towards these plants, but it still seems kind of disingenuous to go to so much effort to reduce one's footprint, and then to plant things that mean a lot of other people are drenching the world with herbicides trying to kill it.