Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

as once or twice a year. The same goes for planting a prairie-style meadow instead of a lawn. You just mow it once at the end of the season and wait for it to come up again on its own in the springtime.

I’m really lucky to have found a gardener who understands this stuff. While I’d love to do all my own gardening, I’ve gotten so busy lately that I need help taking care of all my plants and trees and shrubs. Fortunately, my friend and gardener Chris Houchin owns a company called Quiet Garden Landscaping. I’ll let him explain how he has reduced wasted energy and water—as well as noise—in my garden.

Ed’s Green Friend: Quiet Garden Landscaping

I first met Ed at the local hardware store, where he was delivering a shipment of his Begley’s Best natural cleaning solution. He hired me on the spot to maintain his property after learning that I use only conventional manual, electric, and battery-powered gardening tools. These tools include a rake, a 24-volt cordless lawn mower, a rechargeable weed whacker, an electric weed whacker, and yes, two different kinds of noncombustion leaf blowers.

The Cordless Broom, which I use instead of a gasoline-powered leaf blower, can run 10 to 13 minutes on one fully charged 18-volt battery. It’s more than adequate for clearing walkways, porches, and similar surfaces of dust and debris. It creates zero emissions and creates about as much noise as your hair dryer.

The electric weed whacker requires an extension cord and a standard 110-volt outlet. It has quite a bit more power—and unfortunately makes more noise—than the cordless variety, but is still much quieter than any two-stroke engine. Yes, running an extension cord can be a bit of a “drag,” but once you get your system down, it’s not that big a deal. Besides, I mostly use it in the autumn when there is a tremendous amount of organic debris to collect.

I could go on and on about the ill effects of gas-powered leaf blowers on mothers, newborns, elderly people, people with asthma, and night workers—and the stress they cause to our friends in the animal world. On top of that, many communities now have city ordinances banning the two-cycle leaf blower, which gives off as much smog as seventeen cars. The bottom line: Blowers are bad!

Other tips: If one plant or one area needs some extra water, there’s no need to water everything around it. Just bring a hose to hand water that particular plant, or set up a drip line so water is concentrated directly on the root system.

New plants also need more water than plants that have become established. You’ll find that established drought-tolerant plants may need only one or two good soakings each summer.

—Chris Houchin

What Is Compost?

Every good gardener sings the praises of compost, but what exactly is it? At the most basic level, it’s an organic material that contains humus—dark brown or black material that looks like superrich soil and has a pleasant, earthy smell.

Creating compost really is mimicking what occurs in nature, where bio-logical decomposition happens all the time. As leaves fall off a tree and plants die, they slowly decay. That decomposed plant matter is full of nutrients and minerals, and it feeds the soil beneath it, helping to continue the cycle of life.

You can re-create the same process in your own backyard—and you can make it happen faster than it does in nature.

WHY COMPOST?

Composting is good on so many levels:

• Landfills. Composting keeps organic materials out of landfills, reducing the rate at which landfills reach their capacities. So it reduces the need for more landfills.

• Energy and pollution. Composting also reduces the amount of trash that needs to be picked up and transported to landfills, so it saves energy and reduces pollution from all those garbage trucks driving through our cities.

• Methane gas. Composting reduces the production of methane gas in landfills, so it also reduces pollution in that way. In other words, composting is a very good thing for the environment and for the world as a whole.

• Saving money. On a more personal level, in your own garden, composting is wonderful, too. Composting will save you money in a lot of ways. For one, you won’t need to go out and buy fertilizer—or at least not nearly as much.

• Weeds. You won’t need to worry as much about weeds and plant diseases, since applying compost to your beds is beneficial for your plants and your soil, and it suppresses the growth of weeds.

• Higher yields. You also will get more from your plants—more fruit, more vegetables—since composting adds nutrients to your soil.

• Saving water. Using compost helps to keep moisture in the ground, which means you can water less.

• Cleaning your soil. Composting has been used on a large scale to help remediate contamination at all kinds of cleanup sites. Studies have shown that compost will bind to contaminants (including heavy metals) in the soil, preventing them from running off into the water supply—and preventing them from being absorbed by your plants, and therefore the fruits and vegetables you’re going to eat. If a former resident did something nasty, like dump used motor oil out in the yard, compost can help make that area usable again.

How’s that for reaping a lot of benefits from stuff you were going to throw out anyway?

HOW TO START YOUR OWN COMPOST PILE

The first step in getting a compost heap going is accumulating material to be composted. I keep a 5-gallon pail with a lid on it just outside the back door. You can keep it in the kitchen if you want, but make sure the lid has a good seal; you don’t want to attract cockroaches or ants or other pests.

I use that pail to collect all my day-to-day kitchen scraps that are not animal based—that is, things that are not meat or dairy. I include things like

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