Botany Buddy

The Christian Science Monitor had a good article on the state of the nursery industry this week titled, “The nursery industry is facing tough times.”  It paints a pretty bleak picture for the last year and predicts the same for next year.  It is actually an extension of an article posted by the Oregon Nurseryman’s Association.  I would link them both at the bottom but ONA still doesn’t post on line so CSM you get it.  The just of it is that last year commercial growers showed a 17% decline and they are predicting the same again next year.  The growers they interview hold their chins up and say the industry will rebound, but that they will be the last ones, because the plants are the last thing to go in when construction comes back.  For an industry that rarely operates on a profit margin over ten percent things will have to change.  They say that the industry is completely dependent on the housing industry, but that isn’t the complete truth.

I have been in this industry my entire life.  I am a Missouri Certified Nurseryman, and worked in some sort of retail or wholesale nursery my entire career until 2004 When I moved to North Carolina.  My growing design career had led me to a company that was entirely landscape and maintenance focused with no retail or wholesale operation.  The company I came to work for was the biggest in the area, the work was supposed to endless, every house I saw upon arrival seemed to be north of 1 million dollars.  Beautiful mountains, lakes, rivers, and golf courses (if you think they are beautiful) where everywhere I turned.  Being right outside of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, this is also on of the most biodiverse areas in the world.  For a designer and gardener, this was and still is paradise.  I toured about twenty jobs in three states during my interviews and coming from the inner city I saw how I could be creatively reborn, and I was.

When we decided to take the position and move here it wasn’t about work though.  We already had roots in the area from my wifes past, and we had a two year old daughter at the time.  We had reached the point where we had to leave our beloved Hyde Park, but couldn’t stand the thought of becoming suburbanites, or crossing the state line to Kansas.  This was about being the kind of people we wanted to be and raising our daughter in that light.  We made sacrifices and I contend they were worth it.  However, I have to admit some sacrifices I did not see coming.  I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mountain Laurels, Rhododendrons, and Azaleas at every turn.  I was probably intoxicated form the smell of the Galax as well.   I still am and always will be.

What I did not see was the storm that was coming.  In the Midwest you can see a storm coming from hours not miles away.  It’s flat there, so when you first see that front coming it is still in Nebraska.  You have time to secure your site and get out of the way.  Here things pop up from behind a mountain and your stuck.  Luckily I have never been one to look to the horizon.  I am always one to explore inside before I look out.  I am a bit introspective if you can’t tell.   As a designer I take after Frank Lloyd Wright.  I seek out the box and break it down creating as many different views inside until I lead the eye outside to the horizon and nature so we understand our role in it and reveal the greatness of it all.

Once here I had to do the same thing with my new work environment.  One of the first things that struck me was that with one of the largest landscape markets in the country there were relatively few nurseries.  Where did all these local earth loving gardeners shop?  Asheville is way too crunchy for them to shop at WalMart.  The next thing that struck me was that we didn’t do any work in town.  All of our clients were an hour, county, or state away?  I was a mid-towner.  I was used to driving by all my work on the way to and from the nursery.  I could schedule an appointment on every hour because all my customers were neighbors and new each other, not an hour apart.  It was an event for the entire block when I came around.

Finally after a few months it struck me that I had tons of work, but I had no customers.  I would meet these people get to “know” them and their space, but when it came time to see the plan they may not even show up.  We would send the plan to them or give it to the builder, and a signed contract and deposit would show-up for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Then it struck me that all of these beautiful houses, furnished to the hilt, were empty.  There was no one home…EVER.  Not only were the homes we were working on empty, but in someways our work had become empty too.  After knowing all of my clients closely suddenly I was lucky if I knew ten percent of them.

One of the reasons I always liked working in a nursery was that my customers could find me, but now I couldn’t find them.  I knew my customers and as part of their home I became part of their family.  Suddenly I had tons of work, but had no customers, and even the greatest of designs somehow lacked soul.  I have done a lot of market research this year and from 2002 to 2007 the amount of landscape services performed in this country jumped from 24.5-44.7 Billion dollars.  It almost doubled.  The number of people didn’t double, and we know that what everyone spent didn’t double because the nation saw wages shrink.  What did double (in some cases more than double) was property values.  The over inflation in the real estate market that fueled new construction was what was fueling this growth.  Almost the entire landscape industry shifted it’s focus to service this new market with deep pockets, and best of all (in some people’s minds) there were no customers to deal with.  It was supposed to be easy money, and all you had to do was grow your company to do the work.

It’s confession time now.  A little over two years into my new position here, I went to work for the other side.  I started a consulting company that designed and managed properties for a few of the most elite resort developments in the Southeast.  I got a unique inside look at what was feeding the growth on the other side.  One of my roles was to create management and financial plans to manage these properties down the road.  It was part of the collateral needed to get  the construction loans.  A big change coincided with this growth at the beginning of the decade that greatly effected how this all worked.

For the first time in our nations history, the banks that made the loans that drove this country ceased to hold them and the responsibility to guarantee them.  As a result a fundamental change in underwriting occurred.  Property values were no longer calculated for what they were worth, but for what they could be worth.  If you had the land, a landscape architect, and a good marketing package you could set the price, get the appraisal and get the loan.  The banks didn’t care, because they were only writing a five year balloon that they were going to collect the fees on and sell the loan in six months.  Even worse the government was giving out HUD agreements protecting the developers from the buyers if for some reason they didn’t deliver what they were selling.  Even at the lot buyer level, the eventual homeowner could get their lot home package for no money down and no payments for two years if they had the personal credit the developers could use to build a house.

When it came to building the developments it worked the same way.  It was on the backs of the contractors to go out and buy the equipment for these multi year-commitments, and if it meant they could get part of the windfall and not have to deal with all those pesky customers they were all for it.  In the end, everyone involved was living off the over inflated land, and as long as the cash kept coming to feed the machine they were all fine with it.  Something happened on the way to the bank though.  Suddenly there were way more million dollars houses than there were people that could afford them, and all those little investors who financed those home to make a fortune on in two years suddenly couldn’t pay the bank when there was no one to buy the house.  When the banks came to collect, they realized there was still no asphalt on the roads to get to the house, the pool the developer promised wasn’t there yet, and that golf course was still five years out.   There line of credit would expire and be dry before the golf course it was for was even built.  Foreclosures on the spec homes started to mount, the banks couldn’t sell the loans and property values plummeted.

Suddenly the same was true for the developers and bankers.  All of these over inflated construction loans were due on a five year turn around, and before the construction could be completed the properties were already worth less than the loans.  The lines of credit came to a halt, property sales stopped completely and developers that sold hundreds of lots the year before were lucky to sell three.  With the banks cutting off the credit, and the buyers nowhere to be found, it was over.

The house of cards was collapsing, but to make that house of cards look strong people kept spending.  The contractors kept going even thought the developers couldn’t pay.  As payables mounted to 90, 120 days or more, the companies would finance them to service the debt on that equipment.  If they could just keep going and make the developers look strong someone would finance it,  or they could slap liens on teh properties and when the bank sorted it out they would get paid.   The problem was, the banks held the first mortgage, and since the properties weren’t worth the note, the liens didn’t get paid because the banks were in line first.

In all of this,  the only one left holding the bill is the contractors and the few homeowners that didn’t buy their homes in an LLC.  so they could walk away.  Oddly enough the ones stuck with the bill are the only ones that could have walked away, but chose to stay.  In the next three years 1.5 Trillion dollars in commercial loans are coming due on properties that aren’t worth what those notes are for, and this isn’t over yet.

Our industry sold it’s soul, or so it seems.  The thing is, our soul never left us, we just left it and we have to find it again.  There are those that didn’t get sucked in.  They stayed craftsman before contractor and realized to be a craftsman you have to have someone to craft a piece of art for.  We have seen down turns before in the 80’s and early 90’s, again after September 11, and this industry grew out of the great depression.  In those times though, the industry didn’t invest in what collapsed.  We didn’t finance the stock market, the dot com boom, or Osama Bin Laden. The difference this time is we bought in and got left holding the tab.   In times like this people find their homes and gardeners are born.  The jobs will be smaller, but there will be more of them.  The customers will not have as much money, but they will value our work more.  This industry was built on relationships, and going back to that is the only way it will come back.  We have to find what made us who we are in our souls.

Landscape companies will have to change, some will go, and many new ones will emerge.  The work is still there and is not going away.  The yards need mowed, the trees need trimmed, the house needs shade, and in more and more cases landscapes have become a structural part of construction.  Most importantly, more people are finding their homes and garden as something more than where they park at night.  In some way the industry got what they wanted which was less customers.  However I have to think that everyone is really like me and what they love about what they do is the customer.  If this is true the industry will be fine, but we have to be honest with ourselves that we are not victims of the housing industry, because we are in the home industry.  We just forgot where our home was.

More from the CSM:  http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Gardening/2010/0219/The-nursery-industry-is-facing-tough-times

Since I started Botany Buddy and have been writing content for all of our upcoming applications, I have become somewhat addicted to reading all the old print trade magazines as well as blogs.  It seems like one of the hottest topics is and always has been lawns and the use of turf grass in design.  I have seen those that despise turf of any kind, those that don’t mind it as long as it is 100% organic, and those that think declaring your manifest destiny with acres of perfectly manicured turf is a symbol of the American way.  I hate to say it but you all my just be right, because what is actually the right thing to do may be dependent upon the situation you are in.

I always like to take nature as my guide.  Having spent the last five years designing and creating covenants for “sustainable” conservation properties, I have struggled with this dilemma myself and have come of with somewhat of a guide for decision making.  Like with everything else, I use nature as my guide.  If there was no place for grasses in our environment I seriously doubt we would have had the prairies, savannas, and wetlands to begin with.  All three of these situations are nature’s home to grasses, and they have very specific roles in the habitat of our wildlife and ecosystem as a whole.  Other than grazing,  The main roles of grass in all of these situation are erosion control, water filtration, and play.

Erosion control is pretty easy to understand, and there is a reason all best management practices in construction require very stringent seeding or sodding processes.  Once we killed the prairies, the winds blowing across the prairies would create the dust bowl and we learned this lesson the hard way.  Once grasses secure and protect disturbed soil the roots and thatch of the grass naturally convert the exposed subsoil into nutrient rich topsoil.  If you have ever lived in a brand new subdivision you see the emulation of this natural condition for the first ten to twenty years of its existence.  If you have lived and gardened in a 100 year old neighborhood you have enjoyed the benefits of the nice rich soil this process leaves behind.  Even in the woods, the herbaceous layer of perennials and in some cases grasses serve this same function.  The process of growing, dying back, and returning to the soil is emulated in our own lawn as long as we leave the thatch in place.

The other place grasses are most prevalent are in wetlands and river bottoms.  besides holding up the blooms of the beautiful wildflowers flowers for us to see better, grasses also are a vital filtration device for the water that flows through them.  This can be the same in our yards.  Running your storm water across a lawn is far better for the environment than channeling it in river rock or piping it to a storm water inlet.  Running water across 30 feet of healthy turf can remove 90% of the sediment and pollutants the water carries.  However this only works of you aren’t using even more pollutants to take care of the grass.  If managed responsibly, turf is actually one of the most ecologically friendly ways to manage surface water and drainage.  In the end the damage done poor drainage can be far worse than anything you can do with a lawn.

The final natural use of grassy areas I like to call “Play”.  If you have ever had the chance to see Elk emerge from the forest after an afternoon rain to engage in their courting rituals and graze you know exactly what I am talking about.  The same can be said for buffalo or deer, and it is not unlike watching  my daughter play games in the front lawn with a bunch of her friends.  The need for wide open spaces and battle our sense of claustrophobia is not only natural to us but most other species as well.  No matter how unnatural some can make a lawn look, wide open grassy spaces are very much a vital part of our natural landscape.  Unless a landscape is completely wooded they can look very unnatural without some form of lawn.  I have seen plenty of gardens planted to the gills.   Without a hint of negative space in the form of a meadow or lawn and they can look just as unnatural as a lawn.  Ground covers can provide this effect too, but if they grow lower than weeds it is impossible to keep them healthy and if they are aggressive enough to keep them out they are usually an invasive species.

In short the challenge to designing with lawns isn’t whether or not to do it.  The amount of sunlight and ability of the environment to support grass will determine that.  The challenge is finding the methods of installation and management that get it established quickly, and do more to benefit nature than we do to harm it in the process.  To guide you through these decisions I have put together this summary.  This in not a “How To”.  There will be an app for that.  Think of it as a “why to”…or to not.  I think you will find your answers come naturally and they will do more to help you succeed than any four-step program you buy and your local retailer.

Turf Grass Installation:

If you are looking for a traditional lawn, the two most common methods for installation are sodding and seeding. With soil preparation sodding typically costs from $1.00-$1.25 per square foot.  Seeding Usually Costs $.15 to $.25 per square foot.  However, this is very deceiving when you consider what it takes to achieve establishment.  To get seed to establish into a lawn in a landscape takes an average of 3-4 applications of herbicides, preemergents, and fertilizers per year.  It also usually requires at least one major aeration and renovation if not more, extensive watering, and frequent overseeding.  It also takes more water to establish the seed, and to maintain it in the hottest times of the year because it has less of a root system to support the blades.  This is just for one year, and it actually takes two full years of diligent, chemical ladent maintenance to beat the lifecycle of the weeds.   That is only if your timing is prefect and you don’t miss a beat.  Otherwise it can take longer.

There is no doubt that sod farms water incessantly, and pump tons of chemicals into the soil.  But the space that they pollute is limited.  They will typically get twenty or more harvests out of the same piece of ground.  They also tend to harvest and recylce their water and as a result are becoming more and more conscious of the the nitrogen levels and especially herbicides in it.  Due to the intense methods and irrigation, sod farms also produce a harvest ready turf in six to twelve months vs. two to three years.  This means it takes at the most 1/3 the chemical usage to achieve the desired thickness as it does to seed a lawn.  They are also strictly strictly regulated when it comes to run-off whereas homeowners are some of the biggest polluters with with their fertilizers running off right to the street and into the storm water system with no riparian buffer at all.  Numerous sources can be found to cite that homeowners use 10 times the number of pollutants on their lawns per acre than agriculture does.  This should make us think twice about how responsible we are.

Turf Grass Maintenance:

Mowing: The most environmental damage that results from lawns isn’t from having them, but rather how we take care of them. There are three main things to look at in the care of the lawn, mowing, fertilizing, pest/disease and weed control, and watering.  While treating pests, diseases and weeds directly contributes the most toxins to the soil and water, how you mow and water contributes to most to how much treating you need to do.  There is now greater deterrent to all of these other problems than having a healthy lawn in the first place.  Remember all of these other problems occur when what you trying to grow in the first place is weakened by not being allowed to do what it wants to do naturally.

Almost all turf grasses are bred from naturally occurring varieties that grow between six and twenty-four inches in height.  Now most of them have been bread to have thinner blades and can no longer hold themselves up naturally, but the closer we can allow them to get to that six inches the more they can do to take care of themselves and their space for us.  Other than specialty turfs like zoysia (which set you up for failure anyway), most common turf grasses shouldn’t be mowed shorter than three inches and should be allowed to grow at least two before mowing.  Not only will this make the grass perform better, but it will get tall enough to keep most weeds out, or at least hide them.  Your mower also pollutes, but that is a topic for another blog, hopefully the price of gas is starting to make you aware of that.

Chemical Treatments

Fertilizing: The two most common chemicals applied to lawns are fertilizers and herbicides.  Even organic chemicals, especially fertilizers, can create runoff if over used and pollute our streams.  Chicken manure is organic, and a great fertilizer, but you don’t want you well head next to the chicken house.  The best deterrent is to only use them when absolutely necessary.  Too often people throw down nitrogen every time their lawn looks a little yellow or brown.  Some times it just needs a simple trace mineral like lime or iron, or it just plain needs a break because it is too hot or cold out.  The only times that the need for nitrogen can be very obvious are in spring and fall when the grass is in prime growing season and it is still having problems.  Keeping grass growing in 100 degree temperatures is just as brutal as trying to keep yourself going and sometime we both just need a break.

Herbicides: Weed control is the second biggest polluter in lawn care.  It is also probably the easiest battle to lose.  That is why I recommend not even trying if you don’t have too.  My personal lawn is a mix of fescue, bluegrass and rye, but it also has some oxallis, nutgrass, and clover.  These weeds don’t get large enough to kill out the turf grass, and they provide fodder for the rabbits that keeps them out of my veggie patch.  When they go dormant in the fall, their thatch also creates a nice medium for overseeding the fescue that is slowly choking them out.   If you do have to treat something, only spot treat it, and only bother with things that can actually get big enough to kill out your grass or is a seriously invasive species like honeysuckle or crown vetch.

Pesticides and Fungicides: Aren’t used as often as other chemicals but can be just as dangerous to the water supply and wildlife even in smaller quantities.  Once again the question here is why bother.  Yes grubs will bring moles that tear up your yard, but grubs prefer clay and the moles help aerate and break it down.  Grubs also provide food for wildlife like wild turkeys and robins.  Treating fungus can slow down the organic processes needed to actually let your lawn and soil improve by itself, and the pesticides can kill the worms that provide the best fungicide and aeration of all.  Most of the problems you would treat for in the first place you can’t spot until the damage is done.  It is easily repaired with over seeding in the fall, and most disease and insect problems will usually run a natural course and disappear within a year.  In the end preventative treatments can do far more damage to your soil than the actual problems you are treating for, so think twice before applying or don’t apply at all.

Watering: I recently did a post on watering titled:  Plants Are Like People: Water With Love Even If It’s Tough. All of the same rules I go over there apply to turf.  A healthy turf can’t use more than an inch of precipitation a week, and should never be manually watered more often than once per week.  If you follow the instructions on the previous post you can get away with hardly watering at all.  We just came off of one of the worst droughts in the history of the Southeast, and in those years I never had to water my lawn more than once a month during the summer because I used the deep fall and winter  watering described in the previous post.  Also the taller you let your grass get the deeper the roots will grow.  If the roots are three inches deep, and you have watered deep enough to reach all the roots, you should be able to go three weeks without watering.  There are some common sense things you should do to prevent runoff like not watering the street or your driveway, but nothing is better for the environment than eliminating the need to water at all.

To wrap things up, lawns represent a vital part of our natural ecosystem.  They serve functions that are vital to wildlife and nature as well as our nature as human beings.  As long as we take nature’s cues on when to use them and don’t try to grow them where they don’t belong or want to be there is nothing unnatural about them at all.  What is unnatural is what we have been doing to them.

There is a dirty little secret in the gardening business that there are three things someone will spend 500 times what they spent on the plant on the supplies to grow them:  tomatoes, roses, and grass.  Next time you are in a garden center or big box store, look around and see what they have dedicated their space to.  Successful gardening is about getting plants to grow for us so we can focus on finding, growing and new plants.  If a lawn doesn’t do more to take care of the space it occupies either you are doing too much for it, or it shouldn’t be there in the first place.  There are natural uses and needs for lawns, we just have to take nature’s cues and think naturally about what we do with them.