Be a TreeKeeper!

What's that? TreeKeepers are volunteers trained by the urban forestry program at Openlands to care for trees in the "urban forest" -- parks, parkways, medians, schoolyards and back yards. It's like being a city Ent. A class starts Sept. 12, so if you are a Treebeard fan or a tree fan (and aren't we all) and are looking for a focus for your free time, call and ask for TreeKeeper Jim.

Tribune column: dry shade

Here's my latest Tribune column, leading with an item on dry shade.

Squirrels are a fact of life for a gardener

At any moment on any block in any neighborhood in North America, there is some gardener being driven nuts by squirrels.

Squirrels eat tender young plants and dig in pots and planting beds. They dig up crocus bulbs. They take one bite out of ripe tomatoes. They can figure out how to crack nearly any bird feeder and have all day to spend on the project. They gnaw into compost bins (mine). They are dexterous and ambitious and energetic, and it doesn't take many squirrels to make a gardener feel besieged.

Recently, in response to such a gardener, I was asked to find out if there are somehow more squirrels in Chicago this summer, because of the weather or something.

So I had a chat with the guy who would most likely know: Steve Sullivan, curator of urban ecology at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. He runs Project Squirrel, which enlists citizens to count squirrels so scientists can study squirrel populations. It's a cooperative effort between the museum and the University of Illinois at Chicago (where he is a graduate student).

Squirrels, of course, are native to this area and were here long before Chicago was settled. We have brought some interesting new food sources and changed the living conditions in ways that seem to have shifted the balance between gray and fox squirrel species, according to Project Squirrel. But squirrels don't know or care which parts of their habitat we consider to be our gardens.

Are there more squirrels this year? Maybe, in some places, Sullivan says. "It's possible that the mild winter weather allowed some populations to increase faster."

But squirrel populations vary enormously from place to place because the living conditions and the food supply vary. "You move from one zip code to the next and you see a completely different level of population," Sullivan says.

Summer can be a lush time for squirrels or it can be a tough time. In dense city neighborhoods, summer brings people outdoors into back yards and parks, and the edible trash they leave behind is a bonanza.

Out in tree-filled suburbs, though, summer can bring hard times. Squirrels have lived high in the fall on acorns, beechnuts and black walnuts, and they buried some just in case. In spring, they had tender young plants to eat. But in midsummer, those plants have gotten big and tough. Fruits and vegetables aren't ripe yet. And what squirrels are really looking for is high-fat food, like nuts. So some might get hungry enough to dig for those nuts they buried earlier.

Which might make you notice them more, if it's your pot or bed they're digging in, but doesn't necessarily mean there are more squirrels.

So how can you combat squirrels? There are many potions sold in garden centers, many suggestions on the internet and entire books written on the subject. Most of the potions are based on a nasty or scary smell, such as garlic, hot pepper, rotten eggs or urine from some predator.

"All of these things that are on the internet have some element of truth," Sullivan says. "Urine -- a squirrel is definitely going to smell that. It will confuse him for a couple of days."

But here's the important point: "If it doesn't increase the practical threat level, he will adapt to that almost instantly." As soon as the squirrel figures out the scary smell doesn't actually mean danger, he'll disregard it.

Nasty tastes, especially from hot pepper, may put a squirrel off too. But as soon as the potion is diluted by rain or time, it will lose its effectiveness.

So if you are going take up squirrel combat as a hobby, you're going to need a whole arsenal of potions. You'll have to get into the habit of switching them out frequently to keep the animals off-guard and re-applying them every time it rains. Not a hobby I choose to spend my time on.

Your best bet is a barrier: small-opening chicken wire over the surface of the soil to keep squirrels from digging, or wire cages over vegetables. A fence might stop rabbits or woodchucks, but agile squirrels will romp right over it.

Personally, I take a live-and-let-live attitude toward the local squirrels, mostly because I know from long experience and writing many stories on the subject that nothing I do is likely to slow them down. I lose a few plants and a few bulbs, but I still have plenty of garden to enjoy. My losses are simply the price of gardening in another species' back yard, and I don't get riled about them.

If, however, you are determined to struggle against squirrels, here are some suggestions for squirrel fighting collected by another blogger, Chicago Garden.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Taking to the airwaves Sunday at noon

I'm going to be on the radio tomorrow. On Mike Nowak's gardening-and-greening radio show, noon to 2 p.m., WCPT 820-AM. On the agenda: storm water management with water-around-the-house guru Marcus de la Fleur, rain barrels, etc.

So I have quit working on a long, important, complicated blog post that would take hours and am about to go out and fool around in the garden. I have to find something to do with water to talk about tomorrow. It rained like the dickens last night so there's probably something wet out there.

It's not goofing off. It's research.

Glory-seeking bungalow gardeners, now's the time

"Best Landscape Design" is one of the categories in the annual Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Bungalow Awards, which can bring winners $750 and a brass plaque to permanently brag about it. They also will be featured on the Web site and at the annual expo of the Historic Chicago Bungalow Association. See details at the association's web site.

Unfortunately, the awards are just for Chicago bungalows, since the association, created to encourage the preservation of these distinctively indigenous brick homes, is a city-funded initiative. All the bungalow gardeners in places like Oak Park and Berwyn are out of luck.

But they still can get ideas, inspiration and connections to bungalow- and earth-friendly contractors and materials sources at the association's expo Oct. 17 at the Merchandise Mart. See web site for details. You'll also find a lot of sources listed there if you poke around.

Another perspective on the Smith & Hawken sale

Here's another perspective on the Smith & Hawken sale from one of the original owners, speaking in the Marin Independent Journal in California. The money quote from the story:
"When Scotts bought it and Smith & Hawken was owned by the largest pesticide seller in the U.S., I suggested people boycott it," he said. "It had completely lost its roots."

Oh dear, I'm harboring an invasive species

I wrote about it last year when it was being considered, but the city of Chicago has formally passed its ban on terrestrial invasive plants (there already was a ban on a number of aquatic invasive plants).

Many of us have at least some of these plants in our gardens, often without knowing it. For example, I had a patch of pretty yellow spring flowers that I always enjoyed until I was working on an invasive species story one time and realized they were in fact invasive lesser celandine. I promptly grubbed them out and replaced them with native wild ginger, which seems to be willing to thrive just about anywhere in my shady garden.

My bigger problem is privet. We have a hedge of it all along the front of our building, as do about half the homes in Oak Park, it seems. Many people don't realize that this dirt-common hedge plant has berries that can be eaten, carried away and, when nature calls, planted by birds, and can threaten natural areas by out-competing native plants. I'm only about a mile and a half from a forest preserve.

If we had the budget, I'd try to make a case to the condo board to remove the whole hedge and replace it. As it is, my best strategy is to keep the thing sheared so it doesn't flower and bear berries. Sheared hedges are not my thing, and shearing hedges is definitely not my thing. But it's what I can do to keep mt privet hedge from being an invasive threat.

Find the full list of plants banned in Chicago here.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Guerilla gardening is not necessarily on the side of the angels

Here's a Tribune story about Evanston neighbors upset because somebody mowed a vacant lot that they had "flower-bombed" with supposed "wildflower" seeds.

Personally, my sympathies are with the landowners, even though they didn't talk for the story. (They are some combination of developers and lenders whose condominium project went bust and who are being foreclosed upon.)

With hundreds of thousands of homes and other sites in foreclosure all over the country, municipalities all over the country are struggling to keep lots mowed so they don't drag down the appearance (and property values) of whole neighborhoods. Even the neighbors who did the flower bombing in Evanston say they don't want this lot to look untended.

So what did they do? They tossed their flower bombs (probably something like these Seed Ballz, which you can buy at many garden centers and mail-order outlets) over the fence onto somebody else's secured, fenced, posted property. And then they complained to the newspaper when someone (most likely the owners) mowed the lot.

The land owners can't win for losing. If they didn't mow, they would be the bad guys for letting the property look untended and dragging the appearance of the neighborhood down. When they do mow, they are the bad guys for cutting down flowers somebody else planted on their property without their permission.

It all points to the vital importance of an essential step in any kind of community gardening: Get permission, if not outright control of the land. Every vacant lot, no matter how neglected, has an owner somewhere. It may be hard to find them, but your local officials have an interest in keeping community appearances up and they should be able to help.

Chicago has an established mechanism for doing this. An organization called NeighborSpace helps communities get control of vacant lots and establish successful community gardens. The city, Cook County and the Cook County Forest Preserve are on board. If you don't know how to get started on greening a neglected space in your neighborhood, NeighborSpace can help you figure out how to proceed.

Much of the time, when I hear about "guerilla gardening," what it really comes down to is "couldn't be bothered to ask." It seems to me that common politeness requires you to ask permission before making free with somebody else's stuff, and property owners -- even slumlords -- are entitled to that courtesy. You should at least make an effort before you get all self-righteous about your community greening.

If you don't, you're running the risk that the property owner will act like he owns the property. I certainly don't want somebody coming into my yard and planting things I didn't ask for (although squirrels do it all the time). When I find plants I didn't plant, I reserve the right to remove them. That's called "weeding."

There's another issue, too, with tossing wildflower bombs around. Often the "wildflower" mixes that are packed into seed balls or sold by the can or bag contain plants that are not wildflowers, in the sense of being native species. It's usually just some mystery mix of random seeds that might be native to some other part of the country, or some other continent, but that in our area may be invasive spreaders here that could endanger local ecosystems. The land owners may have done the local forest preserves a favor by mowing those "wildflowers" before they got a chance to set seed.

I don't like the idea of scattering seeds around unless you know what you are planting, understand its characteristics and are willing to take responsible for controlling it and making sure it doesn't have harmful ecological effects.

In short, I think before you decide to be an eco-warrior by planting your neighborhood, you should put some thought and effort into doing it in a responsible way. And if you fail to do that, don't come complaining to me.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Videos about animals you may or may not enjoy in your garden

Came across these while looking up something else:

A video from the Humane Society of the United States on ways to deter animals from eating young, tender plants.

And the Web site of Project Squirrel, which recruits citizens to help keep track of squirrel populations in the Chicago area, with informative explanatory video including many cute squirrels (if you don't have enough at your bird feeder).

A big shout-out to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the University of Illinois at Chicago, which jointly sponsor Project Squirrel, for captioning the squirrel video! I am hard of hearing and, though I can watch TV because it has captions, all the uncaptioned video on the internet is lost on me. So thanks, guys!

Lawns and water teleconference next week

I'm getting ready to be the moderator of a teleconference on water and lawns next Wednesday, co-sponsored by the Garden Writers Association, of which I'm a member; The Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. and the Alliance for the Great Lakes, the Chicago-based environmental organization that began as the Lake Michigan Federation. (Full disclosure: It was started in 1970 by my mother, Lee Botts, and I stuffed many of the first envelopes. My mother has always been a firm believer in child labor for good causes.)

The conference will be about how lawn care practices can be improved to protect waterways. The panelists are Terril Nell, professor and chairman of the environmental horticulture department at the University of Florida; Rich Shank, chief environmental officer of The Scotts Miracle-Gro Co.; Jonah Smith, director of sustainable business at the Alliance for the Great Lakes; and Gary Felton, associate professor of environmental science and technology at the University of Maryland.

The conference is aimed at garden writers. If you are a garden writer or a blogger and are interested in registering, e-mail Britt Svenson, public relations representative for Scott's, at britt.svendsen@edelman.com.

Scotts and the alliance have a partnership advocating thoughtful lawn care called Lawns and Lakes. Lawns are controversial in environmental circles. Fertilizer runoff is a pollution problem; a lot of water is wasted overwatering lawns; a lot of pesticides are applied to poison weeds and insects in lawns. But there is a lot that the alliance, Scotts and even I can agree on: common-sense lawn care wisdom that, if followed by homeowners, would reduce the impact of lawns on the Great Lakes by reducing fertilizer runoff and over-watering.

You can have a perfectly decent lawn, for example, while watering rarely if at all. Last year I spoke to Bruce Augustin, chief agronomist for Scotts, for a Chicago Tribune story. He told me that the lawn grasses typically grown around here need about 43 inches of rain a year and, on average, Chicago gets about 36. Meaning that, especially if you let your lawn go dormant in summer as nature intended, and especially if you use grass mixes with plenty of drought-tolerant fescues, you may never have to water except in severe drought years.

That 36-inch average also takes in years like this one, in which we have had, so far, 39 percent more than normal precipitation, according to the Illinois State Climatologist's Office. Anybody in the greater Chicago area who is not establishing new grass or sod and whose lawn sprinkler has left the garage is wasting water this year.

One simple thing that would make a lot of difference is if everyone would just mow high. Set your lawn mower as high as it will go and leave it there. Taller grass is far healthier, grows a better root system, out-competes weeds, shades weed seeds so they won't germinate and needs less watering. But people are conditioned to think taller grass looks untidy.

It's taken me years to persuade the neighbor who cuts our grass to mow high. He's tidy by temperment and and traditional in taste and 3-inch grass is hard for him. This spring, when it rained so much the grass grew practically before our eyes, he couldn't get it mowed often enough to avoid occasional shagginess. He told me he was embarrassed, compared to the neighbors up the street who scalp their turf. I told him we didn't need to let the neighbors dictate our lawn aesthetic.

About fertilizer: Surplus nitrogen and phosphorus are the big threats, because when they get into waterways they encourage runaway growth of algae and other organisms that throw aquatic and shoreline ecosystems out of whack. Phosphorus is banned in lawn fertilizer in some places, such as Minnesota and parts of Michigan.

The largest source of fertilizer pollution is from agriculture, not lawns. But lawn fertilizers still contribute -- especially the water-soluble kinds beloved of homeowners who want "fast green-up" and grass that grows on hyperdrive all summer.

To thrive, lawn grass does need more nitrogen than most of the rest of our plants. But grass naturally gets nitrogen from soil microorganisms breaking down plant matter, not from a pure chemical rush. You can avoid overdosing your lawn and harming your soil organisms by using a slow-release fertilizer rather than a five-times-a-year regimen of water-soluble fertilizer.

The Scotts/Alliance Lawn and Lakes Web site says lawns rarely need phosphorus after they are established. Phosphorus helps seed or sod develop roots, but once the root system gets going, there's no need to apply it unless a soil test reveals a deficiency. I've seen soil tests from around the Chicago area and I've never seen one that showed a phosphorus deficiency.

And you can avoid contributing to phosphorus pollution by looking for a fertilizer that has little or none. Look at the three-number ratio found on every fertilizer package. The first number is nitrogen; look for a number below 10, indicating it's the slow-release kind. The second number is phosphorus; look for 0, and settle for 2 if you have to. The third number is potassium; look for 0 to 2.

If I'm going to moderate a panel on lawns and water, it's reasonable to ask: What about your lawn? Well, probably the most important thing I've done about my lawn is to shrink it as much as possible. I've chipped away, installing perennials and ground covers at the shady edges, until grass occupies just about 800 square feet of our yard. There is grass only in the sunniest places where it can thrive. It's enough lawn for a lawn chair or for a toddler to play on. Everybody's happy, and I'm not wasting water or labor on more grass than absolutely necessary.

In drier years, I do water occasionally. I root up the occasional dandelion and delicately pull up a few creeping Charlie stems now and then. I welcome clover, which adds nitrogen. The lawn is small enough that weeding is never a burden and pesticides are not needed.

I keep an eye on that lawn mower to make sure it's set high. The mower is electric, with a cord, so it doesn't directly pollute the air. On the few occasions when I have to mow myself, I use a people-powered reel mower. It's not as neat but it gets the job done, and it's easier to haul up from the basement.

I feed the grass by raking in homemade compost a couple of times a year -- or rather, I feed compost to the soil microorganisms that release nutrients to be taken up by the roots of the grass. For a little extra nitrogen, once or twice a year I scatter Milorganite -- pelletized sewage sludge from the Milwaukee water treatment system. It provides a nice little bit of slow-release nitrogen in a microbe-friendly form. And I kind of like the idea that I'm fertilizing my lawn with sludge that was filtered from sewage to avoid polluting Lake Michigan.

I do use some Scott's products. I overseed every spring, often with Scott's seed. If I weren't satisfied with Milorganite, I might buy a slow-release, low-phosphorus lawn fertilizer from Scott's. But I think my lawn is doing just fine.

Scott's argues that they are in business to satisfy their customers, and different customers have different tastes in lawns. They offer five-times-a-year weed-and-feed products for those who want lawns like golf courses, and they offer all-organic slow-release low-phosphorus fertilizers for tree-huggers like me who are happy with shaggy lawns full of clover.

I'll be interested to see how the more contentious issues are addressed in this web conference. But there isn't anything in the Lawns and Lakes Web site that I can't endorse as a reasonable common ground.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

The satisfactions of creeping Charlie

One benefit of working at home is that when you get frustrated or bored you can go outside and pull creeping Charlie instead of fretfully wandering down the hall to the candy machine in the office lunchroom and eating M&Ms you didn't really want.

There is always creeping Charlie to pull. With its bright green scalloped leaves it is very easy to spot, even among other shade-loving ground covers, and you don't need a weeder. You can just feel down with your fingertips for the long stem (four-sided, because it's a mint relative) that lies along the ground between the other plants, stealthily rooting from its leaf nodes. If you pull gently, quite a length of stem often will slide out from between the grass blades or English ivy. Delicacy is essential: If you yank roughly, you'll just break off a small bit.

Sometimes you can follow the stem and find the crown of the plant, where there's a larger clump of roots and several stems slinking away in various directions. Very gratifying to pull up. With proper technique, you can amass quite a satisfying wad of creeping Charlie in a 10-minute break.

I like weeding. It makes me feel like I'm in control -- at least of a small patch of my garden, where I get to decide which plants are authorized and which are not. In fact, a garden could almost be defined as a place where someone weeds.

Of course, this control is fleeting; next week there will be more creeping Charlie (and other unauthorized plants). There is always more creeping Charlie. In fact, there is always more creeping Charlie six feet away, which is why, when weeding, I like to assign myself a defined area or a limited period beyond which I must stop.

The crucial thing about creeping Charlie (Glechoma hederacea) is that it is unwise, if not downright irresponsible, to put it in the compost heap. The merest little scrap that escapes the composting bugs can take root from those leaf nodes. That's why it is such a nasty invasive plant.

So put creeping Charlie (and any weeds that have set seed, or that might be poisonous, such as deadly nightshade) in the landscape waste. They will be taken away, combined with a lot of other landscape waste and composted in a vast, constantly turned, scientifically tended complex of piles that will reach much higher and more lethal temperatures than you could hope to sustain in a home bin. That way your creeping Charlie won't come back to haunt you.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

A community grows by creating together

Communities grow in lots of ways. Growing things is part of it -- making community gardens, creating green spaces and sharing the enjoyment of them, swapping seeds and perennial divisions, learning from the neighborhood's great gardeners. But communities also grow by getting things done together and solving problems. And they grow when the people in them come together to learn about each other and from each other and create things they all have a part in.

The other day I watched that happening in the Foster Avenue underpass through which people from the Edgewater neighborhood reach the lakefront under Lake Shore Drive. Those underpasses are a problem for the whole city. We have this wonderful lakefront, a longer and more splendid public waterfront than any city in the world, and for most of its length a six-lane highway keeps us from it. Here and there are bridges; elsewhere there are dank, scary, graffiti-ridden, smelly underpasses.

Up in Edgewater, though, the underpasses are coming to life. Last summer I had a chance of an evening to admire the one at Bryn Mawr Avenue, covered with a mosaic of tile and mirrors that sparkled in car headlights and brightened the passage at night.

Now there is another being installed in the Foster Avenue underpass. Last Saturday I was swept over to see it by 48th Ward Ald. Mary Ann Smith (at left), whom I've known forever. She is immensely proud of the murals.

The mosaic is the work of many weeks by artists Tracy Van Duinen and Todd Osborne of the Chicago Public Art Group (that's Todd in the pony tail in the top picture) and summer interns from Alternatives Inc., a family services center in Uptown. But this was a day for people from the community to help. All along the tunnel people of all ages were breaking up tiles, buttering them with mortar and carefully installing them within the lines drawn by the artists. The littlest of kids were helping. Passersby on foot and on bicycles, with beach towels and strollers, bound to or from the lakefront, stopped to find out what was going on.

The theme of this mural comes from its site: According to Mary Ann, before settlement there was a Potawatomi village at about that site. (Of course Lake Shore Drive and everything east of it is landfill; the original lake shore, netted with ancient trails, was further inland.)

Today, Edgewater has a relatively high concentration of Native American residents; the American Indian Center is nearby on Wilson Avenue. So the artists worked with the Indian center to come up with a design that evokes their rich symbolic heritage (such as the thunderbird motif in the top photo), the accomplishments of Indians in the modern world (there's a Maria Tallchief patch and an ironworker patch), and the environment that the Potawatomi inhabited (such as these cattails; the natural lakefront was marshy, not beachy.)



The mosaic is made up of pieces of mirror and tile mortared to the concrete. Once it's done (August, they say) the pieces will be grouted. In some places there are small round tiles that were designed and made by people from the community. (I was partial to this salamander).


In other places, tiles have been made from historic and modern photos of Indian culture and Indians in American life.

There are inscriptions and details to stop and examine amid the color and glitter as you walk by; the larger motifs reveal themselves from across the street.

I love the mosaic and I love the fact that so many people from the neighborhood are helping to make it. So here's a proposition:

Now let's tunnel under Lake Shore Drive by Buckingham Fountain, where one of the greatest planning crimes of Chicago occurs: Six lanes of traffic are allowed to block Chicagoans and tourists from the glorious lake they can see just across the highway. They are expected to walk a block north or south to cross Lake Shore Drive. Of course many don't; they dart across traffic instead, inviting tragedy.

So we should make an underpass. And then we should have all Chicago help fill that tunnel with a mosaic of color and sparkle and history and life.



Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Why does it matter what time of day is hottest?

Tom Skilling answered a question Sunday from a gardener wondering what time of day is hottest. I thought, "Oh, that's a good question." And then I thought, "But why? What difference does it make?"

I guess it might make a difference if your garden is out under the open sky. Then it might be useful to know that the most intense sunlight is at about 1 p.m. and the highest temperatures are usually about 4 p.m.

But my garden is surrounded with obstructions that affect the way light and heat arrive at it. My main garden is bounded on the north by a 2-story building and a 6-foot-tall board fence and on the south by a 4-story building, with a row of trees overhead and, to the east, another 4-story building across the alley.

It gets the most light in the springtime, before the trees leaf out and when the afternoon sun is shining from a relatively low angle. In summer, there are shafts of light that reach through the tree canopy; I place plants practically to the inch to eke out a few photons from those laserlike beams.

At the far west end, with fewer trees, there's an area with enough sun to support a little patch of lawn and some part-shade plants, but everywhere else is full shade. The world at large may be hottest at 4 p.m., but when you step into our garden it's always going to be 10 or 15 degrees cooler than out in the alley.

Even in the back, the skinny patch of ground by the garbage dumpster that I like to think of as my "full sun garden" is not really in full sun. To the west and north there's that 4-story building, and there's another 2-story building to the south. That bed gets more sun than the front, but as I have come to comprehend this year, the light is limited. By 4 p.m., the sun is behind a building.

On the other hand, that bed is flanked by a parking pad, a sidewalk and a brick wall, so all the heat that was stored in those masses of brick and concrete all through the sunny day is being radiated back at my plants until late at night. It's a much more brutal environment than if the bed were flanked by lawns.

So what's the bottom line? Well, don't water in the middle of day, when the sun is most intense and much of the water will evaporate. That's true anywhere.

But apart from that, generalizations are not very helpful. Observation is all. To make smart choices of plants and design, you need to get out there and experience your garden at various times of day and various times of year. Don't just look at it; feel it. Imagine you are a platycodon in my blast-furnace rear bed. Then you'll be able to imagine why it died.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Tribune column: Filling holes in the garden

A column I wrote for the Chicago Tribune: Filling midsummer holes in the garden; also, big water gardening event in the western suburbs.

The nation's first rooftop organic farm, in Edgewater

The woman: Helen Cameron. The tomato: 'Oregon Spring.' The news: The garden -- pardon me, farm -- atop Helen's restaurant, Uncommon Ground in Edgewater, is officially the first certified organic farm on a rooftop in the United States. Mayor Richard M. Daley came to cut the ribbon (that's Helen's husband Mike holding it on the right).

Yup, it's true: Though many tomatoes are being grown in pots, whiskey barrels, Earth Boxes, wading pools,

custom-built planter boxes or five-gallon buckets on Chicago rooftops, this is the first rooftop in the entire nation that has been certified as meeting the USDA's strict standards for organic farm production.

Daley, who loves this stuff, was there to say, "We really believe that this is the future of the city." He sees opportunity in every flat roof to grow food that is known to be safe and doesn't have to be transported far to market at a cost of energy and emissions. "There is nothing more local than climbing your fire escape to harvest tomatoes," said Natalie Pfister, who manages the Uncommon Ground farm along with seven young interns.

Which brings up another point: Green jobs in the city. Daley says he's hoping that agriculture can really become a significant source of urban employment. There is an increasing number of job-training programs centered around agriculture in Chicago. Among my favorites is Growing Home, which has two farms on formerly vacant lots in the city and another in downstate Marseilles where farmer/teacher/social workers help homeless people climb out of desperation by raising organic produce. I was much moved a few weeks ago, at Growing Home's annual dinner at the Cultural center, to hear from a proud graduate who had gone from homelessness to a job and college with the organization's help.

The reasons for growing food in the city -- whether for your own use or commercially -- are many. The big problem is scarce growing space (although Daley pointed out that a city agency, NeighborSpace, helps community gardeners secure vacant lots for gardens; see Greennetchicago.org for all kinds of useful links). But there's plenty of flat, full-sun territory over your head.

Helen says she's hoping that the Uncommon Ground garden -- pardon me, farm -- can be a model and a source of knowledge for future rooftop farmers. Pfister and crew are still experimenting, she says, but as they learn more about what works and what doesn't they are eager to share their knowledge. The farm at 1401 W. Devon Ave. is open to visitors every Friday from 4 to 8 p.m. during its weekly farmer's market. Tours can be arranged (see the Web site for contacts) to share knowledge with those seeking to start their own rooftop farms. (Wear shades: the solar panels are dazzling.)

So here's the nitty-gritty: The Uncommon Ground rooftop farm (.015 acres) consists largely of deep planter planter boxes, set up on legs about waist high, with netting trellises for the scarlet runner beans and other vining crops. The main crop is tomatoes of various heirloom varieties. Most of the plants I saw were pretty small, but I hope with the full sun and assiduous care they soon will catch up. The restaurant is going to need to sell a lot of tomatoes to pay for this.

There are a lot of Earth Boxes around too, and some crops in the ground around the restaurant's street-level patio.


The city provided substantial subsidies, including green roof grants and some tax increment financing, because the project required foundation work and roof reinforcement to support the weight of 4 tons of soil. Aldermen Patrick J. O'Connor (40th) and Mary Ann Smith (48th) were highly supportive, Helen says, as

were the neighbors who helped carry those 4 tons of soil up the fire escape stairs.

The roof did a fine job Saturday of supporting a thundering herd of journalists, bloggers and TV camera crews to the well-publicized ribbon-cutting. Mr. Brown Thumb was there too. So was Gina of My Skinny Garden, apparently, although somehow I totally missed her.

The farm is in its first full year after its installation last year. Organic certification, with the help of the Midwest Organic Services Association in Baroka, Wis., was a snap: Since the farm and soil were all new and untainted by pesticides or built-up fertilizers, there was no 3-year transition period like that required for in-ground farms shifting to organic production.

Mary Ann Smith, who is a longtime friend and lives down the street from Uncommon Ground, promptly showed her support for the restaurant (and me) by taking me to lunch there, and I can testify that the salad with grilled trout and banana bread are lovely. Therefore I can wholeheartedly recommend a visit (on Friday afternoon so you can check out the roof).

Now, about that tomato: 'Oregon Spring' is a cultivar bred to fruit early in Oregon, where the kind of cold, rainy spring we've had is normal, Helen says, and she was able to pick a couple of fragrant 1 1/2-inch fruits already on Saturday. She thinks it's a keeper.

"We're having a lot of fun with 'Oregon Spring,' she said. She and her crew seem to be having a lot of fun in general.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

So long, Smith & Hawken

Smith&Hawken, whose aged-copper-and-teak aesthetic once seemed the epitome of popular garden taste, is going out of business. Clearance sales are underway, including at the Chicago-area stores in Highland Park, Deerfield and Chicago (the Web site has shut down for orders, but the store locator still works, if your pockets are a-jingle).

Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., the big Ohio-based garden products company that bought Smith&Hawken from its California founders for $79 million in 2004, says it couldn't make a go of it and couldn't find a buyer. Closing 56 stores nationwide will put about 700 people out of work.

I have spent many an imaginary dollar browsing through the Smith&Hawken catalog, and more than a handful of real ones in the stores. I used to fill my imaginary garden--the one with my imaginary house and the imaginary gardener who comes in twice a week to do the stoop labor--with artful wrought-iron trellises, hand-hammered copper hose pots, wisteria-covered pergolas and massive but well-cushioned furniture made of plantation-grown teak. Didn't we all?

The Smith&Hawken style, part villa in Tuscany by way of California and part English great house by way of the Hamptons, seemed to rule the pages of garden magazines in about 2002. That catalog was a major route by which high-end garden design rolled down to us in the masses (especially after Scotts tried out a lower-priced version of the line at Target).

All that seems now like part of the fever dream we lived in the last decade, the dream in which costly objects seemed more important than lives. We spent so much money on things we didn't need, in the garden as everywhere else.

I'm sorry for all those who are losing their jobs. But I can let Smith&Hawken go because I didn't need any of those things anyway. All those years while I was pining over the teak furniture, I was accumulating something far more valuable.

I never got the pergola (or the house to go with it), and our patio furniture is secondhand.
But I still have the things that live in my garden: the flowers, the green-on-green pattern of leaves, the seeds and shoots, the blooms, the bees and butterflies, the shifting shadows and cooling shady trees, the daily changes, the possums and cardinals. And there's me: my life, my time spent in the garden, all I have learned about plants and animals and soil and how they work, all I feel, my aches and my triumphs and my solace. I will have that, in some way, anywhere I ever live, no matter how broke I am. I'll always be able to surround myself with growing things. Can't buy that from a catalog.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

If you plant now, be prepared to water

Yes, the current weather makes it feel like May. But anything you plant in early July (it really is early July) you will have to water assiduously, because sooner or later it really will become a sweaty, parching Chicago summer.

All plants--even those labeled "drought-tolerant"--need watering until they grow enough roots to seek out water for themselves. A "low-maintenance" landscape will take at least a season or two to arrive at that condition.

My mother, who has spent five or six years trying to get a native prairie plant landscape established in her front yard, is only now trying to unload her surplus garden hoses. It has taken years of watering to get those plants established. And despite loads of leaves for mulch every year, she's still weeding like the Spartans holding the pass at Thermopylae.

I'm all for native plants, but I worry that their "low-maintenance" aspect gets oversold. A lot of people seem to think that "low-maintenance" means "no-maintenance," starting immediately. They spend a mess of money planting a garden or paying somebody to plant it and then think they can ignore it like they ignore the new fence. Doesn't work that way. Plants have needs, especially when young.

We've been able to get away with a lot of neglect this spring and early summer because of all the rain and cool weather. That can lull us out of the habit of checking for dry soil and watering when needed. And when a dry spell hits--one of those Chicago dry spells, when the humans can't breathe for all the humidity in the air but the soil is bone-dry--complacency could cost us some plants.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Sale season in full swing

I've received notices of big sales at Grand Street Gardens, City Escape and Sid's. (I'm on their e-mail newsletter lists, which is a great way to get the early scoop on sales at your favorite garden center. If they've got one, sign up.) A quick foray round the Web indicates that a lot of local garden centers are putting stuff on sale already. Summer sales are standard practice, but it seems early to me, perhaps because the weather has made it feel like spring so long.

The good news is that the cool temperatures and rain (65 degrees as I write this with a big thunderstorm front headed our way) mean it's not too late to plant perennials and even trees and shrubs, although normally, headed into the hot July weather, I'd call it awful risky. You will have to water quite a bit. But if you still have any pennies in your Great Recession gardening budget, seize the day.

The worrisome news is that I'm afraid these early sales might be a sign these folks have had a hard time selling their stock this spring. The cool weather, the rainy weekends, the broke or scared-of-being-broke customers--it could be bad news in the garden retail business. And that's bad news for gardeners, who need good garden centers.

I've done what I can to support some this year, although others didn't get my business because they failed to do the recession-era math. I turned right around and walked out of one place as soon as I saw a $17.95 price tag on an ordinary one-gallon pot of 'May Night' salvia. That garden center had way too many plants left for late June, and I know why.

I stopped by a farmer's market out in Indiana Saturday that was selling off its spring stock and got three nice 4-inch pots of Heuchera americana (which I split in half to get six small but healthy plants) and six 4-inch annuals for filler for $10.

Yesterday I did a lot of dividing and transplanting, filling some bare spots. In a fairly sunny bed I replanted some amber- and chartreuse-leaved heucheras that hadn't done well in a shadier spot, and moved the 4-inch native green heucheras into that space. I filled in some other bare spots with houseplant cuttings rooted on the kitchen windowsill. I'm going to take a friend up on the offer of a couple of Knock Out roses. I replanted my porch pots with lettuce seed that had been kicking around my house for a year or so.

Basically, I'm in garden-with-what-you-have-or-what-you-can-get-for-free-or-really-cheap mode, which makes me part of the garden centers' problem.

But if I had money to spend I'd be all over these sales.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Column about planting fall vegetables

My latest Tribune column, about planting fall vegetables. Also about Aquascape's big water garden and water conservation events out in the western suburbs in a week or so.

I would write a blog post but instead I'm going outside to transplant heuchera. It's a lovely day and you don't know how many more of those you're going to get in a Chicago summer.

One nursery saved from development

Picked this up from the e-mail newsletter of Chicagoland Gardening magazine: Beeson McHenry County Nursery is one that won't be gobbled by development, thanks to a conservation easement, according to a story in the Northwest Herald.

Once upon a time, the Chicago area was studded with little family owned nurseries; you can still drive down main drags in the farther-flung neighborhoods or inner-ring suburbs and spot the often tumbledown remains of small greenhouses. You may wonder, "How did that get there? Why would anybody build a greenhouse in the middle of the city?"

Well, the greenhouses were there first. Nursery businesses grew up on the edge of the city in the 19th century and then were overtaken by new subdivisions as the city's edge moved outward. For example, I learned from Cathy Maloney's book "Chicago Gardens: The Early History" that Peterson Avenue on the North Side is named after the owner of a big 19th Century nursery business that was far outside the city then.

As the suburbs sprawled, nurseries moved farther out, but they never can seem to move far enough. The Ball Horticultural Co. world headquarters out in West Chicago was way out in the country once, but now there's a subdivision right across the street. A few years ago, a nursery owner in near Philadelphia who had just sold the bulk of his growing land for a Home Depot (and has now sold his garden center to a chain) told me, "the main thing you need in the nursery business is a real estate license."

Who can blame a nurseryman whose land has come to be worth far more for development than he could make in his life selling plants at retail? But it's still tough to see venerable plantsman's names, such as Vaughan's in Western Springs, disappear under shopping centers. The truly dedicated nursery people, such as the Beesons, try to fight it off, or try to find a place far enough out to be safe for a couple opf decades but still close enough to sell their plants to metropolitan gardeners. But it's tough.

Maybe the real estate recession will slow the process down some, but it won't stop. But as long as there have been cities, they have been growing, and farms and nursries have been either pushed further away or simply subsumed by sprawl. London's parks were farms once.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.