I am enjoying a book called “The American Meadow Garden” by John Grennlee and wanted to share a paragraph from his chapter on site preparation.
”Many ecologists would say traditional garden ‘soil preparation’ is a myth and actually harmful to the environment. If you harvest peat moss from a peat bog in Canada and ship it thousands of miles to clay soil in California and then root till it into the top 6 inches of your site, are you really improving the soil? Might it not be a better strategy to plant plants that thrive in whatever soil you have, where their roots will penetrate deep into the existing soil on site? Damaging one ecology to ‘improve’ another with a temporary boost is silly and hard on the planet” (p 242).
The principle applies to all aspects of landscaping: do our efforts to improve one site destroy or weaken another site? I’m not a purist, but I welcome the challenge. Clearly, the stone quarries that we buy flagstone and stones from are destructive by nature. And there is more shipping and trucking than I like to think about whenever we purchase building materials and plants. Within reason though, I aim to be thoughtful about the processes that I am participating in, and there are definitely some easy ones to avoid - like shipping in “soil” or “amendments”.
Some will say they have terrible soil and can’t grow anything in it. Same applies to shady parts of the property - “nothing grows there”. There are plants adapted to all sorts of “poor” soils, and plants that thrive in shade, whether it is wet or dry.
… A couple other helpful tips from John Greenlee: tilling to prepare a meadow sounds appealing, but often propagates the more bothersome perennial grasses and weeds that we don’t want. Often, mulching is a better approach than weeding or tilling. And lastly, his advice for establishing meadows is to start with only planting the grass plants (the base plants) and to add perennials later (the accent plants). His reasoning is that this allows you to eliminate weed problems in the first year or two.
