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Horticulture Outreach Coordinator
Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden
Each year I look forward to the burst of spring wildflowers in the planted strip along the sidewalk beside my house. I await the towering sunflowers that follow in the summer. The blues of the sages, ceanothus and penstemons calm me, while the bright orange and reds of the mallows and monkeyflowers bring excitement. The coolness of the woodland garden with its rich, deep greens is comforting.
The Compost Pile
But the compost heap is the wildness of my suburbia. It is teaming with life, with hunters, grazers, scavengers, and decomposers. They take the form of mammals, lizards, insects, snakes, spiders and unknowns. It is my favorite garden spot.
The rear corner of my backyard is where I put most of my yard waste. It is not a pretty sight. A black plastic bin contains household vegetable waste, hopefully keeping the rats from the sweet, succulent food they so enjoy. Leaves, twigs, branches, and grass clippings are piled high.
Beautifying The Compost Pile
Though it is my favorite place, I realize it is not much to look at, and so I planted a tree mallow (Lavatera assurgeniflora) to keep it from view. Within about six months the mallow grew from six inches to four feet tall and at least 6 feet wide, effectively screening the pile of debris.Easy Composting
I am a lazy composter. I throw the yard waste into a heap, spreading grass clippings over layers of twigs, branches and leaves. This ensures that the mound does not compress into an air-tight, anaerobic, rotting mess. I do not turn my compost, rather, I dig into it whenever the need arises.What to Layer Onto Your Compost Pile
On top are the least decomposed leaves and grass. Slightly below is the partially decomposed material, perfect for mulch in my woodland gardens. Digging in a bit further I come across deep brown, rich organic soil. Occasionally I sprinkle this over my turf instead of using fertilizer. It has seeds from weeds, but on balance my lawn is dense and healthy with a tolerable quantity of weeds. I add perlite (available at most garden shops) to this rich organic soil to make potting soil. Again, my pots have some weeds, but for the most part, my container plants do well. I incorporate extra perlite for succulents and other plants requiring excellent drainage. This mix has worked well for pots of dudleyas, sages, and even a woolly blue curls, now two years old.
Native Species Habitat In The Compost Pile
Whenever I climb the mound to add more greens, I see thousands of spiders scurry away. Digging into the pile I uncover large, juicy translucent grubs, and slender pink earthworms. Millipedes slither on. A startled lizard slides away as I turn over a log. Earwigs, sowbugs, snails and slugs join the mix. The compost heap is always warm as bacteria, in concert with all of these other critters, go about the everyday work of recycling organic debris into rich soil. It has a rich earthy smell.And if all of this activity were not enough, now when I go to the pile, I see a carefully excavated hole, with a neat pile of fine soil beside it. My imagination goes wild trying to visualize this meticulous excavator. I don’t have gophers. Maybe it is Mole from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.
About Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden
RSABG is the largest botanical garden dedicated exclusively to our state's native plants. Visitors are welcome to enjoy the meandering pathways of this 86 acre natural setting which offers panoramic mountain views throughout the year. Self guided interpretive brochures are available at the California Garden Shop and enable visitors to fully enjoy the three distinct areas of the Botanic Garden: Indian Hill Mesa, the East Alluvial Gardens, and the Plant Communities.The Botanic Garden is a private, non-profit organization, open to the public daily from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is free; a donation of $4.00/person and $8.00/family is suggested.
Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden
1500 North College Avenue
Claremont, CA 91711-3157
Telephone: (909) 625-8767
www.rsabg.org
Edible forest gardening is the art and science of putting plants
together in woodlandlike patterns that forge mutually beneficial
relationships, creating a garden ecosystem that is more than the sum of
its parts. You can grow fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, mushrooms,
other useful plants, and animals in a way that mimics natural
ecosystems. You can create a beautiful, diverse, high-yield garden. If
designed with care and deep understanding of ecosystem function, you
can also design a garden that is largely self-maintaining. In many of
the world's temperate-climate regions, your garden would soon start
reverting to forest if you were to stop managing it. We humans work
hard to hold back succession—mowing, weeding, plowing, and spraying. If
the successional process were the wind, we would be constantly motoring
against it. Why not put up a sail and glide along with the land's
natural tendency to grow trees? By mimicking the structure and function
of forest ecosystems we can gain a number of benefits.Why Grow an Edible Forest Garden?
While each forest gardener will have unique design goals, forest gardening in general has three primary practical intentions:
- High yields of diverse products such as food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, 'farmaceuticals' and fun;
- A largely self-maintaining garden and;
- A healthy ecosystem.
As Masanobu Fukuoka once said, "The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings."
SOURCE: www.edibleforestgardens.com
PIVOT's interactive graphics, maps and photos are designed to help users better understand the issues and visually track progress toward achieving habitat restoration goals in the 28 National Estuary Programs.
An interactive graphic shows how everyday human activities along the coast increase pressures on natural habitat and can impact the health of our estuaries in other ways as well.
Links are provided to information about watersheds, maps, and performance measures useful for reporting progress toward improving the health of coastal watersheds.
The National Estuary Program works with local communities to improve the health of our nation's estuaries. Community support and involvement is fundamental to the success of these efforts. Through an extensive stakeholder planning process, NEP communities develop comprehensive conservation and management plans, or CCMPs. These plans serve as documentation of the communities' environmental goals for their estuaries and watersheds as well as blueprints for achieving those goals. As this is a long-term process, keeping the community well informed and connected with plan activities and progress is critical to keeping the plan a vital, living process for the community.
Performance reporting is not only essential for garnering and maintaining community support, it is often mandated. Enabling legislation or other laws—federal or local—may require responsible agencies to report on what progress they are making toward established goals. For the National Estuary Program, several pieces of federal legislation weigh in on performance reporting.
28 National Estuary Programs
Each of the 28 National Estuary Programs was charged with developing and implementing a Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) which establishes priorities for activities, research, and funding for the estuary. The CCMP serves as a blueprint to guide future decisions and actions and addresses a wide range of environmental protection issues including water quality, habitat, fish and wildlife, pathogens, land use, and introduced species to name a few. The CCMP is based on a scientific characterization of the estuary and is developed and approved by a broad-based coalition of stakeholders.
This interview by Golf Digest with Robert Wood, the deputy director of the Wetlands Division, the EPA's representative in the Golf & the Environment Initiative, and an 18-handicap golfer.
Why do wetlands matter on golf courses?
Why shouldn't I be able to fill in the wetland on my golf-course project?
Wetlands are a vital part of any aquatic ecosystem. They provide habitat to a wide range of wildlife from fish, shellfish, all the way down to insect communities. Wetlands are the unique habitat for something like 30 percent of all endangered species, and 50 percent of endangered species spend at least part of their life cycle in wetlands. They're very ecologically rich.
To most people, endangered species are things like snow leopards and elephants, but there are more than 1,000 endangered species in the U.S. alone.
That's right. People are not thinking about salamanders or vegetation in a wetland. They're critically important as a habitat. And they're critically important as a filter: We build all this infrastructure to keep water clean, and wetlands provide very much that same kind of cleansing capacity in a natural way. And they provide a buffering capacity for storm events. We saw this very much with the Katrina and Rita storms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Is there a figure for the size of America's wetlands? A lot of the wetlands have disappeared.
The first statistical wetlands status-and-trends report in 1983
estimated the rate of wetland loss from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s
at 458,000 acres per year. Wetlands then were largely thought of as a
hindrance to development. In the 1991 report, which covered the
mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, we were still losing wetlands, but the rate
had declined to 290,000 acres a year. The third report, from '86 to
'97, indicated that the rate of loss was down to 58,500 acres per year.
Now the 2006 report, which covers 1998 to 2004, shows that the wetland
area actually increased by an average of 32,000 acres per year. This
was the first report to show that we were in a period of increasing
wetlands. There was, however, some issue with this report over how
wetlands were defined.
[Note: The report states that the total area of wetlands in the
U.S. in 2004 was 107.7 million acres. Wood goes on to explain that the
claim of wetlands growth has been contested. A New York Times story,
for instance, explains that over the study period, 523,500 acres of
true wetlands, swamps and tidal marshes were lost, but this was offset
in the report by gains of 715,300 acres of ponds, including man-made
ornamental ponds -- hardly a fair trade.]
To some golfers, wetlands and wild areas are just a nuisance, places
where you're going to lose your ball. They'd rather see the golf course
mowed from fence line to fence line. What do you say to them?
When you provide a bit of education, you can get a very different
answer. You can say, for example, that not mowing certain areas is
better for wildlife, better for water quality and allows native
vegetation to thrive and maybe prevents an invasive species from moving
in. It might change the look of the course a little bit and the way it
plays a little bit, maybe not. I'm a golfer, and to me what's
intrinsically attractive about the game is that you are essentially in
a natural setting. And it's the restrictions and unique features of
that natural setting that make a particular course challenging, one
that you like and remember and want to go back to. That's been a design
principle of golf courses from the beginning. It's part of the game.
One of the influential landscape architects of the last century was Ian
McHarg, who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He came
out with a book in 1969 called Design with Nature. The
audience was really urban planners and landscape architects, but it
applies to golf courses, too. It's the tradition of the game, and we're
rediscovering that tradition.
The ecological and societal benefits of river corridor and wetlands restoration are substantial:
Rivers transport water, sediment, and nutrients from the land to the sea, play an important role in building deltas and beaches, and regulate the salinity and fertility of estuaries and coastal zones. Rivers serve as corridors for migratory birds and fish, and provide habitat to many unique species of plants and animals, including federally endangered and threatened aquatic species. According to the 1985 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife -Associated Recreation (U.S. DOI, Fish and Wildlife Service, 1988), 38.4 million fishermen spent $17.8 billion for non-Great Lakes freshwater fishing in 1985, with 45 percent of reported anglers fishing in rivers and streams.
Wetlands provide food, protection from predators, and other vital habitat factors for many of the nation's fish and wildlife species, including endangered and threatened species. In addition, wetland ecotypes have economic value associated with recreational, commercial, and subsistence use of fish and wildlife resources and they remove pollutants from overland flows before they reach our lakes, rivers and bays.
Wetlands intercept storm runoff and release floodwaters gradually to downstream systems. When wetlands are converted to systems without water retention capacity, downstream flooding problems increase.
Learn more about restoration of wetlands:
EPA Wetlands, oceans & Watersheds
Learn! Explore! Take Action!
Celebrate the vital importance of wetlands to the Nation's
ecological, economic, and social health. May, American Wetlands Month is also a great opportunity to discover and teach others about the important role that wetlands play in our environment and the significant benefits they provide - improved water quality, increased water storage and supply, reduced flood and storm surge risk, and critical habitat for plants, fish, and wildlife.
In organizing its activities this year, EPA is placing special emphasis on encouraging Americans to:
- Learn about wetlands. This is a great time to better understand what a wetland is, where wetlands can be found, and the importance of wetlands. Activities may include reading and studying about wetland areas, drawing maps or illustrations of wetlands, and identifying native species found in wetlands. Information on wetlands and the important benefits they provide is available on this website, through EPA's wetland fact sheet series, or by visiting the websites of our partners.
- Explore a wetland near you. Unless you live in the most extreme climate zones, there is a good chance a scenic wetland exists nearby for you to visit and explore during American Wetlands Month and throughout the year. To find a wetland near you, consult your local parks department, state natural resource agency, or the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (http://www.fws.gov/refuges). If you live in the Washington, DC area, a guide has been created to highlight wetlands and wildlife sanctuaries.
- Take action to protect and restore wetlands. Support and promote wetlands informing community members about wetlands' vital roles, "adopting" a wetland, joining a local watershed group, or participating in a wetland monitoring, restoration, or cleanup project. There are many other actions Americans can take to help conserve wetlands.To learn more about what you can do to help protect and restore these valuable natural resources in your state or local area, visit http://www.epa.gov/owow/wetlands/awm/#you.
What does an experienced organic gardener read to learn the nuts and bolts...rather, the soil and plants... of starting their gardening avocation?
Lorra, an ardent fan of Doug Green's blog, left the following comment on a very thought provoking blog essay about how Doug takes "the high road" in providing information and a positive approach to gardening for his readers.
In the early 1970s when Life presented me, a farmer’s daughter, with the opportunity to have a large garden I was delighted. With my Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening by Rodale Press, and Ruth Stout’s The No Work Garden Book away I went. My husband had grown up in one of the largest greenhouse gardening areas in the USA Midwest. There was no end to our disagreements on how to do it. Or rather, how I should do it.It's possible to learn bits and pieces about biodynamic gardening, organic farming and permaculture from blogs, but there is nothing like a comprehensive encyclopedic approach if you want to implement a whole SYSTEM such as gardening or landscaping as an avocation / or vocation.I scrounge leaves from the whole neighborhood (already bagged). Use them for mulch at home and in the park garden I am building – even tho, by some standards, “they look dirty”. Put no chemicals on Mother Earth, have bird houses, talk to Earl the Squirrel, and even allow the local opossum and/or raccoon to reside under the deck – as long as it doesn’t trod on my lemon lily. (Douggreensgarden.com)
What is your favorite sourcebook or system for putting all the participants in your little bit of Eden together?
Your comments are very welcome and they will help develop this resource center into a positive source of information about landscaping solutions that are practical, environmentally nurturing and FUN!
More than 6,500 nonindigenous species are now established in the United States, posing risks to native species, valued ecosystems, and human and wildlife health.
USGS provides the tools, technology, and information supporting efforts to prevent, contain, control, and manage invasive species nationwide.The current annual environmental, economic, and health-related costs of invasive species exceed those of all other natural disasters combined.
USGS plays an important role in Federal efforts to combat invasive species in natural and semi-natural areas through early detection and assessment of newly established invaders, monitoring of invading populations; improving understanding of the ecology of invaders and factors in the resistance of habitats to invasion; and development and testing of prevention, management, and control methods. USGS invasive species research encompasses all significant groups of invasive organisms in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in all regions of the United States.
Research components of the USGS Invasive Species Program include:
- Prevention
- Early Detection and Rapid Assessment of New Invaders
- Monitoring and Forecasting of Invasive Species
- Effects of Invasive Species
- Control and Management of Invasive Species
- Information Management
INVASIVE SPECIES MANAGEMENT RESOURCES
For a list of the most current Invasives program research projects, visit the USGS Invasive program's Highlighted Projects page.
The Invasive Species Information Node (ISIN) is a data management portal for invasive plants, animals, and pathogens in the United States and a thematic node of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). I
The Global Invasive Species Database,
now easier to use, grants access to quadruple the number of invasive
species than when the database began.
The Earthbound Farm Farm Stand in Carmel Valley, California, offers more than unique organic produce and flowers fresh from our fields — there's delicious food from our certified Organic Kitchen, gourmet groceries, and engaging events for the whole family. Come visit us!
Our Farm Stand: The hub of our 30-acre organic R&D farm offers unique fresh produce and flowers, gourmet groceries, plus a Cut-Your-Own Herb Garden and more.
Organic Kitchen: Hungry? Every day our certified Organic Kitchen in the Farm Stand creates organic treats for every taste — from beverages, baked goodies, and entrees to a tempting all-organic salad bar.
What's Happening at the Farm Stand: From April through October, a wide range of engaging events take place each Saturday.
Ask Farmer Mark: What makes organic farming so special? Ask someone with more than 26 years of organic farming experience: "Farmer Mark" Marino, our Carmel Valley farm manager — we sell his premium organic produce at our Farm Stand.
Our Farm Stand is Open Year-RoundHours: Mon-Sat 8-6:30, Sun 9-6
7250 Carmel Valley Road (just 3.5 miles east of Highway 1), Carmel, CA
831-625-6219
