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The Complete Guide to Landscape Design, Renovation,
and Maintenance
by Cass Turnbull
INSTALLATION: HOW-TO'S AND TRICKS
By now you have a map of how and where and what you want everything
to be. You also possess the three great unheeded pieces of gardening
advice. Now we can go on to plant everything.
The first tip is the work party. It's a great invention. You invite
all your friends and their wheelbarrows over and feed them beer
and pizza. It's especially important to tap th goodwill of your
friends if you intend to wheelbarrow in 15 yards of soil, mix it
with 8 yards of manure, and shape it into tastefully mounded beds.
Perhaps you have had macho Bob take out the tree one weekend, next
weekend the work party digs sod, pushes dirt, loads up branches,
and hauls out old shrubs with chain and truck. You may find that,
after you have removed the sod and unwanted plants and structures,
you can visualize more easily. This is because you have created
the blank canvas on which to paint the picture of your yard. If
new ideas or desires arise--don't be afraid to change your plan.
You shape your beds (the pro's come in before and after to put in
patio, fences, retaining walls, irrigation, and tasteful big rocks).
The approved order of events has you plant your plants, biggest
first. Then put in irrigation so that lawn is watered separately
from shrubs and heads are correctly placed, not blasting into the
trunk of a tree or something. Then put in the lawn (if you're doing
that). And then mulch your beds.
Small Construction
In your effort to fight gravity with terracing, or in order to build
up some tasteful mounded beds, it may be necessary to make walls.
If your wall is over three feet, have a professional do it. Be sure
he or she accounts for drainage so that water doesn't build up behind
it or the weight of dirt pull it over. An easy small wall or terrace
can be made out of the chunks of broken concrete left over from
where you took out the old paths. When you go to stack them, be
sure to stagger them and tilt them slightly toward the dirt filled
side. In this way the wall will catch water and let it down between
the stones. You will have made a "dry wall" suitable for
planting with wonderful plants like wallflowers and alpines. Or
you can plant groundcovers to flow over the wall from the bed above.
Avoid straight lines, your house has enough of those.
Other walls can be created from railroad ties or what are called
"landscape timbers." Stack them also in a stag- gered
pattern, like bricks. Attach them to each other and to the ground
with spikes. A spike can be made of 1/2" "rebar"
or with old pipe. Your plumbing shop or lumber store can cut the
pieces for you. Drill a hole through your timbers with a super long
drill bit (called a ship's auger) the same size as the spikes. Or,
to do it the hard way, you can try to pound pipe on either side
of your timbers. You use a sledge hammer for this exercise. And
believe me--it's exercise.
You can also use timbers to define areas. Bury them so that they
stick up only one inch, just a bit above the grass blades.
Between the shrub bed and the grass you should just leave an empty
space. People often edge their beds with bricks or wood strips called
bender board, or with plastic strips. These never seem to work well.
I do believe in hard borders elsewhere: for example, sunken timbers
between your shrubbery and your neighbor's grass, or between your
grass and your gravel driveway. They make things look tidier and
then the areas are easier to maintain. The tool to use for digging
your timber trench in clay, or for any hard digging, is the mattock
(madaxe). The sheer weight of it allows you to cut through hard
pan. The vertical blade on the other end is designed to slice through
roots, if you're cutting out a plant.
You can also use ties or timbers as steps. Make your outdoor steps
very long if you can, and wide, too. Use pipe or rebar to hold them.
Fill in with dirt or crushed rock behind. While working for the
Park Department we actually bolted two ties together (using all-thread
cut off with hacksaws, and countersunk) and stacked them on top
of each other.
Railroad ties used to be cheap. Not so any more. Creosote, that
black stuff, is what they use to treat the wood so that it won't
rot--at least not for a long time. But creosote is nasty stuff.
It's murder on the chainsaw blade. And it oozes sticky stuff in
the summer, which is not nice to sit on, and it gums up your thongs.
The alternative, landscape timbers, should be treated with different
preservatives to keep them from rotting out quickly (all wood in
dirt rots eventually). But be careful, a common lumber preservative--penta--is
death on plants.
Paths
If you decide to make paths, you can use materials such as bark
or crushed rock. Crushed rock is not gravel. Gravel is in hunks.
Crushed rock is crushed, flatter; it packs down and is easier to
walk on. They measure the size of crushed rock by its biggest pieces--3/4"
minus means the biggest pieces are 3/4" long and "minus"
are the ones that are smaller. "Fines" means fine particles.
It's good to have a lot of fines to pack down. I avoid "pea
gravel," which is little round pea-sized rocks, because it
rolls into beds and smooshes down when you walk on it. I never use
it near concrete. It's like having a pile of marbles nearby--it
could cause a nasty fall. When you make a path, you use your square
point shovel, scooted flat to make it level. Not quite level, though.
You want the water to run off to the sides, so make a slight hump.
Rake your path a lot with the hard rake to get out big rocks, and
with the fan rake to make it smooth. When you put down your covering
material, rake it back and forth, back and forth with these rakes,
using them upside down. In fact, I find that I'm using my rakes
upside down to level material more often than I'm using them right
side up to rake out debris. Then fill up the rented roller with
water to make it heavy and flatten your path. We're having some
fun now.
Stepping Stones
If you're using stepping stones, lay them in a flat trench of sand
and fill in around them. Be sure to make the trench level high enough
so the grass blades will grow up three-quarters of an inch to meet
the top of the stones, not go over them.
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| A common error when laying stepping stones is placing them
level with the soil. Then the grass grows up and buries the
stones. Proper placement shown here allows for the turf to grow
up to meet the stones. |
Some Rotten Advice
When seeking advice on how to plant your trees and shrubs, you will
run across several great gardener's misconceptions still advanced
by professionals who should know better.
(1) Amend the backfill is a common admonition but a wrong one. It
means the adding of good soil or peat moss or something to the planting
hole which you just dug for your new plant. You wouldn't even be
tempted to do this if you had followed earlier good advice to amend
the entire yard with good soil and manure. But research has shown
that plants' roots like to stay in the nice soft dirt they grew
in, in their pots, so instead of reaching out and getting firmly
established in the cold cruel world of native soil in your yard,
they will just circle around in a tangled mess looking "pot
bound." An amended planting hole works the same way. And thus,
they never really take off. Still pot-bound trees fall over in winds,
and still pot-bound plants die easily. As a gardener, I often take
out dead plants in a landscape whose roots are in the characteristic
shape of the pot they came out of two years ago.
Do not amend the backfill because it causes uneven irrigation. It
is difficult for water to pass between layers of unlike soils, and
it makes no difference what order (clay over sand, sand over rocks)
they are in. Yes, I know this is hard to believe, but it's true.
To repeat this crucial information: even if you have a layer of
sand over a layer of pebbles--water poured on top will finish filling
up the sand area before it begins to drop down to the pebbles. The
pebbles do not enhance drainage. So when you amend your backfill
in the planting hole, you have created a second barrier or difficult
interface for both your plant roots and water to overcome. No matter
what you add to the soil in the hole, you will create uneven moisture
on either side of the interface and the roots won't like it.
It is quite desirable, on the other hand, to just break up the soil
to soften it for your new plant's roots. To loosen soil, you use
your shovel or bash the dirt clumps with it or your garden fork.
On very hard clay soil, you use the mattock.
The phenomenon of "roots staying in the pot" is the reason
for a good practice of cutting off already circling roots and of
scratching up the sides of a root ball. In the case of very, very
clay-like root balls, it is sometimes considered advantageous to
split the ball base, and spread the roots out in butterfly fashion.
(2). Along the same line as amend the backfill is the very common
notion that it's okay to leave things wrapped in burlap, and leave
trees in wire baskets. Mostly this idea is promoted by landscape
installers who know that otherwise it would add to their planting
time to unwrap everything. Burlap is just another barrier for your
plant to overcome, even if it does rot in time. And a root might
not be strangled by a wire basket until ten years later when it
becomes the same diameter as the wire hole. The mechanized digging
of plants has made life easier for nurserymen, but perhaps not for
the plants. The wire baskets that some of these nursery trees come
in will be impossible to get off. If you have them, use bolt or
wire cutters and at least cut the wire. On wrapped root balls, take
off the plastic ties around the trunk and also remove the burlap.
An exception I've found is plants dug in the wild, with small, barely
held-together root balls, which might be endangered by removing
the burlap. So certainly it's okay to leave it on. Just untie the
top and peel it back a bit.
(3) Another common bit of rotten advice is to cut back the top growth
of your new tree to balance the lost roots from when your plant
was dug. Some nurserymen and landscapers still say you should cut
back all the tips. (Plants are either grown in pots, dug from dirt
and wrapped in burlap "B&B," or sold without dirt
at all--"bare root"). Recent research shows that plants
do better if the leaf area is left on; they use their leaves to
make the energy for new root growth. They need their branch tips
to send grow messages to the roots. If some branches die back next
year, cut them off then, not now. Let the plant be your guide. You
can, if you like, do some minor necessary pruning as described in
previous chapters, and to remove broken branches resulting from
the transplant move. After all, you have the perfect opportunity
as you are now handling the plant. But avoid pruning "to balance
with root loss," especially by using heading cuts.
You may also be interested to hear that plants bought small and
established early in their lives will later catch up to and out-strip
plants that were bought big. I didn't believe this one either--being
the immediate gratification type. But I've seen the waste of my
money as the inexpensive tiny trees I bought seven years ago presently
outstrip the expensive "specimen" trees on the other side
of the yard.
(4) Another common gardening mistake is heeding advice to stake
plants, especially trees, "very securely." Research has
shown that less is better. It may be necessary for some little saplings
to have help so as not to fall over in the wind until their roots
take hold. It has been proven, however, that plants grown to rely
on stakes will topple over in that big wind ten-twenty-fifty years
later, when the same plant, left on its own, won't. It is the waving
in the wind that sends the message to the plant to put on thicker
trunk and more roots. So, stake your plant gently about one-third
up, between two stakes, using two figure eight ties (don't use straight
wire); rubber straps are good, so that it may wobble in the wind
a bit. Big trees with big, heavy root balls that you would find
difficult to push over yourself don't generally need any staking
help. The practice of staking is left over from when most plants
were sold "bare root," that is, without any dirt on their
roots. They had to be staked.
You will remember to untie your tree as soon as possible, in one
year, we hope. Ties left on trees will strangle (girdle) them, causing
disfigurement and sometimes top death. You may leave the stakes
themselves in if you choose to protect the young tree from car bumpers
and they seem to have some deterrent effect, psychologically, on
vandals who like to snap saplings in half. Do remember to remove
the stakes, too, eventually. Arborists frequently find stakes embedded
in old trees they are cutting down. It is like finding the forceps
sewn up in a surgery patient.
The Nicest Thing To Do
The nicest thing you can do for your new plants is WATER, WATER,
WATER. Soak them as soon as you get them planted. Then water them
a lot for the first year. Remember not to work or compress wet soil.
Tamp the soil down before you soak it. If you dig or work water-soaked
soil, you will destroy its structure, making it something akin to
concrete once it dries out. (I like to put the hose on at a bare
trickle and prop it on the trunk for thirty minutes to an hour,
once every other day for a week.) Water deeply, gently. Then water
once a week for a month. And always water during a drought. It is
more important to water long and deep than frequently. Long and
deep watering encourages deep root development, which is good in
times of drought. Also there is a phenomenon called "surface
tension." Surface tension means that although the top layer
of soil seems wet, the soil just underneath is powder dry. It will
actually repel water sending it off trickling down the street while
the roots dry out. It's the same phenomenon that keeps a glop of
cocoa dry on the bottom of your cup, or floating on top. You must
put on A LOT of water to break "surface tension" in the
summer. Sometimes two hours or more is needed. Test it out by digging
down an inch or two to see if the soil is damp down past the mulch
layer. This is the only true way to determine whether or not your
plant is getting watered.
Remember when planting to take the time to turn your plant to show
off its good side. If it doesn't look right where you planted it
after you step back, dig it up and move it. It's like arranging
the furniture, but the plant will be in that spot a lot longer than
a chair, so take the time and trouble to do it right. Remember how
big they get, as you space them.
Planting Trees and Carrying Things
What about that big tree you picked out at the nursery that is being
delivered tomorrow? Well, have truck access to where you want the
tree to go (you remembered to do this), dig a big hole where you
want to plant ahead of time, and invite your brother-in-law over
to help. Dig the hole deeper and larger than you think you'll need.
You can always raise the big tree by rocking it and shoveling in
more dirt. It's difficult, maybe impossible, to get it back out
to dig the hole deeper. Have the driver back over to the hole and
plop it in, or slide it down on a board. If a truck can't get there,
use a long pole to lever it over. If it's a smaller plant, you can
use a dolly or drag it on a tarp. Take your time. A smart thing
to do is to take a moment to spin your tree so that a main branch
is not headed into the pathway or a window.
An interesting Japanese practice is to plant a young sapling at
an angle; I know it looks funny at first. But the top will right
itself naturally, after which you will be left with an interesting,
curvaceous trunk that your kid can climb.
Don't break your back carrying heavy plants and pots around. Use
a wheelbarrow; or the dolly is sometimes easier because you don't
have to lift up; or a tarp on a wheel- barrow; or use your little
pickup truck; go ahead drive on the grass, it's okay. It's easy
to fix a lawn; hard to repair your back. If your wheelbarrow sinks,
lay down boards to where you want to go. Professionals will sometimes
carry heavy pots of plants on a piece of flat fire hose held between
two people. It's useful to tie your gates open for the day, too.
Planting Tips
When you go to plant, be sure to wear your holster with a pair of
hand pruners in it and have a root scratcher--a claw-like hand tool,
too. Use the pruner to cut off circling roots and burlap ties on
root balls. Use the scratcher to scratch up roots along the root
ball so they will interface readily with the new soil. Don't ever
PULL your plant out of the pot by its trunk. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.
You will rip off all the most important rootlets from the root ball.
Turn the pot over, even big ones, and let gravity pull it out. If
you have to, cut off the plastic pot or metal can (use rented tin
snips). Root-bound plants can also be helped out of their pots by
using a long knife, to slice roots from the side of the pot. For
small (4") pots, a vigorous whack of the bottom of the upturned
plant with your trowel will pop it out. A surefire way to get a
plant out of its pot, is to turn the pot over and tap its rim on
anything hard, a nearby rock or window ledge will do. That tough
clinging plant will fall out as if by magic. If it's very big, be
sure you have a friend ready to catch it.
As you fill in the planting hole, stomp or compress it firmly with
your hand or foot, or tamp it down by pushing your shovel handle
repeatedly down into soft soil. Use water to settle the fluffy dirt
at the end. Remember to wait until the water is totally drained
out, before adding more soil. Make a dirt rim or "saucer"
around your plant, so that when you water it fills up and will soak
your new plant and not run off. This level saucer is especially
important on slopes so water doesn't just run off down the hill.
Be sure to remove this saucer in a year, though. If you wish you
may add a light (low-numbers) fertilizer in the planting hole or
on top. My husband always admonishes the new plant to "grow
and do well" before he moves on.
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| Before planting, use a story stick to measure the size of
the rootball. |
Story Stick
When you are digging a hole for a shrub or tree, measure the depth
of its root ball with your shovel handle--walk over to your hole
and see if it's deep enough. Sometimes you need a cross-pole to
get a fix on how deep your hole is. Using your handle or anything
like this is called using a "story stick." It tells the
story of how deep to go.
Do not be surprised to find that even though you put something big
in the hole, you do not have enough dirt to fill it back up. Where
did the extra dirt go? Nobody knows. It's a gardening mystery. You
can make things go better and cleaner if you take the time to put
a tarp on the ground under your dirt pile from the hole. Better
yet, one for each side. Then when you backfill and you get down
to the bottom of the dirt, you can just burrito it back into the
hole and your grass looks fresh as a lawn daisy. Here again, you
can check the level of your plant against the soil level by running
a board or tool handle across the hole. Be sure the cross stick
is on the real ground and not on the dirt piles. Don't plant too
low or too high, okay? Bury it at the same level it was before.
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| With the story stick, check to see if the planting hole is
deep enough. |
Mulch
Now that all your plants are in and they look too small and too
far apart, and you are broke, I want you to spend more money. Yes,
I do. It's very important to mulch your beds. This may be the fourth
most ignored bit of essential gardening advice. You need two to
three inches of mulch over all your shrub beds, now, not next year.
A manure based, weed free compost is good. Mulching will cut your
weeding time in half. This time is not such a big dent in your life
this year, but weeds increase exponentially; next year, I promise,
you will break down and mulch if you don't take this advice now.
So, save 50% of the weeding you would have to do next year, and
mulch now. Think of it this way. Next spring you can either spend
a morning weeding on Saturday, or you can spend Saturday morning
and afternoon and Sunday morning. Got the picture? Mulch now.
Later I will explain some of these tricky verb-nouns gardening terms
like "mulch," "compost," and "amendments."
Shrub Bed Creation
When you have decided where your new beds are going to be, you may
wish to kill the grass by spraying it with glyphosate (trade name
Roundup). Just spray the grass inside the rope boundary on a sunny
day and wait for it to brown out in two or three weeks. Then you
can easily dig it up or rototill it into the existing soil or just
bury it with six inches to a foot of topsoil. Roundup will not leave
a toxic soil residue. Dead turf isn't nearly the bear to work with
that live turf is. If you hate chemicals, even Roundup, you can
rent a tool called a sod cutter. It will cut your sod out like a
roll of carpet. Be sure to put it on the deep setting, so as not
to leave roots which would come up in your new beds, I promise.
To rent sodcutters, rototillers, stump grinders, and the like, you
need to borrow (1) a pickup truck; (2) a strong back or two; (3)
some long boards to ramp them in and out with. Don't be scared.
The nice man at the rent-it shop will show you how to operate these
machines and give you a can of mixed gas to go with them. He will
load and unload it for you. These machines are really not so difficult,
just new to you, and noisy. Ear protection helps make them seem
less intimidating.
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| Use a half-moon edger and garden fork to edge the shrub beds.
The edge should be 1-1/2 to 2 inches deep and 2 to 3 inches
wide. |
As you prepare your dead grass area to become a shrub bed, you
will want to use the half-moon edger. Use it to cut the border between
the grass and the bed. Or perhaps you prefer a power edger. Getting
a nice curved or even a straight shrub bed line is not as easy as
you might think. People run string between two stakes or screw drivers
to indicate a straight edge. For curved lines, use loose rope or
just eyeball it. If you've previously sprayed with Roundup, you
simply follow the brown-green border. A half-moon edger slices more
easily into semi-moist ground. So, if it's summer, it is wise to
soak the lawn thoroughly a day before. When you slice along the
line, try to use just one foot and scoot the blade along without
ever lifting it up totally from the ground. Slice along the entire
line first, then go back to cut the turf into bite-sized pieces.
Then pry the pieces out with your spading fork. Make a big trench
between the grass and the bed--as much as two to four inches deep
and wide. This will help keep the grass from encroaching into your
beds. Do this before the store-bought soil arrives, even though
you may have to fill some spots back in to give yourself wheelbarrow
access.
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Avoid building
slopes steeper than two to one. They will be difficult to mow,
if the area is lawn. If it is a bed area, it will be probe to
erosion problems. |
Ordering Soil and Other Landscape Materials
It can be very traumatic, also very exciting, putting in a real
landscape, especially if you do your hardscape all at once. The
work party has removed all the structures and plants designated
for destruction or as gifts to friends. And perhaps you have dug
up shrubs that you intend to replant once the grade has been changed.
(They should be "heeled in," that is, temporarily planted,
in some soil or sawdust in a shady area. Don't forget to keep them
moist.) You have the outline of your beds dug. Now comes the soil
and composted manure, perhaps, if you've decided to amend your soil
or build up mounded beds. There is nothing quite as thrilling as
the sound of the big truck when the soil arrives. But first you
will need to know how much to order. You order dirt and bark from
nurseries or places that carry these things. In my phone book it's
under "bark," and some under "landscape materials."
These materials are measured in "yards," which is shorthand
for cubic yards or three feet by three feet by three feet. My 3/4-ton
pickup holds three yards of mulch with my side boards on. It's pretty
light stuff, though. My truck couldn't hold three yards of soil.
To estimate the amount of soil or mulch you want to order, pace
off your beds to find out how big they are. I know they are not
square, so just rearrange them in your mind's eye until they are.
Then pace it off. My pace is three feet. Then multiply the width,
the length and the height to find out how many cubic feet to get.
Divide by 27 (3 x 3 x 3) to get how many yards. An average mounded
bed is a foot high (or sometimes six to eight inches), depending
on how wide it is. Try to avoid slopes of more than two to one.
They erode and/or are hard to mow.
For mulch I use these figures: One yard will cover 160 square feet
to a depth of two inches, or one yard of material will cover about
110 square feet three inches deep. One yard only covers 80 square
feet at four inches. If you order soil for making beds, you can
figure that one yard of soil will cover 27 square feet 12 inches
deep.
Delivered Dirt
As for your store-bought soil, have the truck driver get as close
as possible to where it's going. It's okay to drive over grass as
long as it's not so soggy that the truck will get stuck. Even if
the driver leaves some ruts, these are quicker and easier to fill
in and overseed than it is to wheelbarrow yards and yards and yards
of soil. A good driver can raise the truck bed and zoom off leaving
the dirt spread out, or he or she can leave it in a big pile if
you prefer. Your driver can also "split" the load, leaving
half in front of the house and half in back. It's sort of a challenge
to dump just the right amount. Be sure to ask sweetly. If you can't
get the soil exactly where it's meant to go, just put it as close
as you can. If you put a big tarp under a pile of soil, it will
be a help toward the end of the job. Simply lift up the tarp ends
to force the scattered bits into a nice, big, easy-to-shovel pile
in the center.
To move soil and other material, you use wheelbarrows. If the ground
is muddy, or if you need to go down stairs or up curbs, use boards
to wheel over. If you can't get a wheelbarrow into the site, carry
soil in plastic buckets, the kind spackle or paint come in. Second
best for toting is the use of tarps slung over your back. On a big
bucket hauling job it helps to hum the theme of the "Sorcerer's
Apprentice" and sometimes the work song of the flying monkeys
from the Wizard of Oz. Local teenagers are a good resource for dirt
hauling projects. They have been allocated an unfair amount of the
world's human energy resources. Use them to your advantage.
Where I live, the big sawdust company will send out a machine with
a long, long tube to "blow" on bark mulch. It takes two
people. It's fast. It's easy. It's not cheaper, though. It won't
blow sawdust, however, because the particles are too fine. It's
great for hills and rockeries.
When you spread your soil, start at the back and move forward, just
like painting a floor. Finish up using your hard rake to make things
smooth and even. You may wish to do what I call "the Bristol
stomp," stepping repeatedly to pack down places that are too
high and to compact the soft edges of your beds. Or you can just
let the rain settle the dirt for you.
To mix soil and manure or soil and other organic amendments, you
can use a rototiller or, to go deep, dig with a shovel or a spading
fork. There is also a method called double digging that the British
invented. It starts with a trench. Next to it you dig out another
row of dirt and mix it with "amendments" like manure,
leaves, or compost, and fill in the first trench. This leaves empty
the area you just excavated. You repeat with the next bit of land.
When you're through, you have an empty trench to be filled with
a pile of dirt clear back where you started. Sounds like hard work?
It is.
I just thought you'd want to know the depths to which some people
will stoop to ensure a beautiful garden. I just build mounded beds
on top.
SUMMARY
Throw a work party to clean out your old yard and spread new soil
in a short time.
You can make small walls, paths, and steps yourself.
When planting:
DO NOT amend the backfill of your planting hole.
DO NOT cut the tops off your new trees when planting them to compensate
for root loss.
When staking trees--less is better.
DO take off all ties and burlap.
DO WATER, WATER, WATER
DO make sure your plants will not stay "pot-bound" in
the ground--ruffle the roots.
DO mulch the soil surface.
DO amend the soil (not just the hole) with manure or compost.
DO break up tough clay soils with shovel and mattock, but DO NOT
attempt to work such soils when they are wet.
Forward to Taking Care of Your Yard
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