conuly

and there is no way I can get what I want/need to do what I want in the garden this year. So I'm going to settle for just improving the soil and every month until this time next year I'm going to stock up on soil amendments. Next spring, I'll be ready!

I'm buying all that shit!

Quite literally.

On a related note, street trees. For the past few years I've been diligently writing down addresses without trees as I walk the dogs, then coming home and requesting a few trees at a time via the 311 page. And the city has been putting them in, slowly but surely! This doesn't mean people take care of the trees, and for once, my own patch of ground is not the very worst. No, that honor most definitively goes to a particular street where the developers put in the trees themselves in the middle of the sidewalk rather than at the street, and put in these enormous pits for them too. Which get totally overrun with ragweed and dog poop. (Meanwhile, around the corner, where we need the trees because of the bus stop, nothing. And the address of that shopping center is on the other street, so I can't even request the trees because you need an exact address. I requested for the houses across the street and put "also across street" in the comment box and let's hope the city figures out what I mean.)

I am sick of walking the dogs there and looking at the ragweed and trash and poop. I know from example that if you just tend the trees a little, people don't leave their trash there and rarely any poop. (There's always somebody on the poop front.) And these aren't the only trees. I'm probably being a little too optimistic about what sort of things I'm willing to actually commit to, but let's assume I am willing, starting next year, to tend those trees. I've read the city's instructions for how much compost to put out yearly (less than you think) and how far away from the trunk to mulch (further than you think)... but what sort of inexpensive plants grow well under trees from seed (or bulb) without damaging the trees? We're zone 7.

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From:

movingfinger

Under street trees, very little thrives. That's a tough environment in the first place, and competing with the tree's roots for water (I assume these are not watered) and nutrients isn't great for either tree or underplanting. Not to mention the effects of dog pee.

Underplantings are more shallowly rooted and are generally going to suffer without supplemental water in drought.

That said, daffodils are fairly hardy and if planted when the tree is may go for a few years at least. Epimedium seems to be getting some traction, but I don't think plants will be cheap as it's a new introduction. Hosta sometimes shows up in cheap 6-packs as starts; it's drought-tolerant and not too fussy. Vinca is never inexpensive, but it is a classic bedding plant to put around trees and it often does well with utter neglect, once established. Daylilies are, like hosta, sometimes available inexpensively, and varieties like Stella de Oro are tough rebloomers. Mixing daffodils and daylilies is a classic trick for long color.

Algerian ivy is a fallback in these situations; nothing seems to kill it and it stays green. It will need to be kept from choking the tree.

Good luck!

From:

conuly

It doesn't really need to thrive, it just needs to survive and suggest "pick up your shit!"

From:

conuly

(And no, there's no way I'll be able to water them and I know the property nearest doesn't.)

From:

redbird

I occasionally saw vinca (periwinkle) offered for free on a local email list when I was in living in a more suburban area; listservs are somewhat old-fashioned, but if you do Freecycle or a local Facebook page, it might be worth looking/asking there.

From:

melannen

Yeah, I have no idea how expensive vinca is, because everyone I know who has vinca in their yard is like "oh god, come take some, please, before it eats everything".

It does make beautiful groundcover in shady places where we can't get anything else to grow, though, including under the walnut tree.

It's invasive, but if you're planting it someplace that's bordered on all sides by several feet of concrete, it should be pretty well held captive.

Edited Date: 2019-05-13 02:37 pm (UTC)

From:

movingfinger

Whenever I try to buy it even for padding out containers, it's at leaset $3 a 3" pot these days, and there is little to no price break on buying a flat of basically rooted cuttings.

I do think vinca or Algerian ivy are the solutions to the problem here, and if there is a way to get cheap vinca or even to get trimmings and root them, the flowering of it would be attractive as a tree basin filler. Probably best to plant in spring, to benefit from being rained in? I give the small patch in my yard under a camellia by a garage no summer water, and it thrives. Cutting back annually keeps it vigorous.

From:

marahmarie

OK, so I'm only up to the first paragraph: So I'm going to settle for just improving the soil and every month until this time next year I'm going to stock up on soil amendments.

Questions: 1) how much soil are you trying to amend? (Judging by the last post on this where you wanted to take like, all the compost/manure in NYC, I'd gather it's a lot.)

2) Have you tried gathering and saving household food waste to amend with?

We're currently running an eggshells/used tea bags/used coffee grounds expedition in the kitchen, but our fridge is rather small so it goes in the fridge and out the back door to the garden pretty quick - but by "garden" (as you've seen at least partially, in some of my photographs) I mean our little potted plant paradise, not some full-fledged-in-the-ground garden (though I wish. I could dig out the back yard, as I don't think the landlord has any flying leaps to give, but it'd be a lot of work).

Edited (typo) Date: 2019-05-13 06:11 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

1. Our backyard is ~1200 square feet, minus the ramp to the basement. We have a side yard that's maybe half that size, a small front yard, a small patch of greenery below the front yard at the sidewalk level where mostly we put our garbage cans but also a bramble bush, and a long strip of tree lawn (with actual tree! that's a newer feature). There is also a small strip on the outside of our fence which is dirt instead of just dirt on top of the back alley, and I want to sow wildflowers there or something. I'm amending the soil this year, because I have to, but next year I'm covering the whole damn thing with ten layers of wetted newsprint, putting in raised beds at a height of at least six inches, and smothering all the weeds.

I mean, that's the goal. The ambitious goal. It's gonna take a lot of compost. I want to try the mix advised by the promulgators of square foot gardening, so it's also gonna take a lot of manure, vermiculite (and/or rice hulls) and coco coir (and/or peat moss). And mulch. And a green compost in the winter. And then once I do that I can just keep up with that.

2. We have a slow compost bin. We really need a secondary one - we're not diligent enough to hot compost properly. It doesn't produce enough compost to do what I want.

From:

marahmarie

OK, yeah, that's a lot of soil (and a lot of square footage, which is awesome on the one hand, and a lot to turn around, on the other). The upside is it sounds like you could turn this into the sort of connected-gardens oasis one sees in magazines; downside is that could be a lot of work, at least to get it started.

As someone who's installed/used raised beds (but not in a good 20 years or so) I can say six inches is a good start and about as deep as we went. We dug out a top layer of mostly sand and fine, silty dirt to start but there was clay and rocks under that (I hope SI doesn't have clay, it's the worst, and gets muddy, sticky and unworkable so easily.)

We did the wetted newspaper thing, too (along with wetted scrap and construction paper and black plastic bags, the latter because it was the 90s so we weren't too environmentally conscious by then).

The weeds on LI were very resistant to smothering but luckily I'm very partial to wild daisies and clover so I just sort of let them grow in after a while, though I kept pulling/smothering everything else. (That was the only thing the rocks I dug out were good for, come to think of it; I'd recycle them into a sort of weed-suppressing mulch, though I'd have to watch how many I used because they'd sink if there was too much weight).

With my suggestions for 2) I don't actually compost those. I cold store them in the fridge, each in a separate can or storage container, then out the door they go into the soil (or OP boils all three into what he calls a "tea" and pours the result directly on the soil. I don't know this method.)

Edited (clarity, typo) Date: 2019-05-13 09:24 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

Our weeds are ragweed, burdock, and pokeberry. I actually like pokeberry, but it's still got to go.

From:

marahmarie

Pokeberry is beautiful. I'm also partial to ragweed, at least for its appearance (never could figure out if I'm allergic to it, either, but now that I'm allergic to all of LI, it doesn't much matter).

Edited (typo) Date: 2019-05-14 05:56 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

Ragweed gives me a contact rash and I suspect I'm also allergic to the pollen in a conventional sense.

From:

marahmarie

Quite possible. My LI allergies are to male trees, I believe, since before 2000 I only had light seasonal allergies. After, couldn't even live there. I don't know what changed in the time I was gone, but I suspect it was what the local nurseries were growing.

From:

conuly

And if I can't get this garden in order, I'm ordering ten free trees from the arbor society and screw it, we'll have endless shade.

From:

marahmarie

Nothing wrong with that! (I ought to do that myself, as it would remove my eternal guilt about not digging out the back yard, which wasn't possible in 2016 when it still had trees, and was less possible before this year, until it lost even more trees. Freaking hurricanes, ftw.)

Fwiw, you can still def do some shade gardening under those trees: impatiens (an annual) and hosta (a perennial) do especially well in the shade, and are beautiful to boot.

From:

conuly

I actually don't like hosta all that much!

From:

marahmarie

Wow, you could cover the world in hosta and I'd think I woke up in a dream. (It does actually make me think of dreams, for some reason.) My favorite green plant of all time (and does flower once per year, I think).

Then again, I dislike vinca, so maybe I'm just not normal.

From:

marahmarie

Re: dog poop, does the city not have a plastic bag system in place? Wherein at set locations there are rolls of plastic bags on a fixed metal stand or column that people can pull off to pick up their dog's poop? We have that and this is like the Wild West compared to anything NYC so I'm just curious how (or even if) that's mandated or provided for over by you.

(~~I don't even know if~~ we mandate picking up poop here~~, but I should look that up~~ (we do mandate leashes, all thanks to the thankable). Our neighborhood's heavily dog owners and I'd say, to judge by the roads I walk, most people do scoop, but certainly not all.)

ETA: Yeah, totally against the law to not pick up your dog's poop here. TMYK

Edited (typo, ETA) Date: 2019-05-13 06:23 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

It's sometimes available on an ad hoc basis in parks. Better to bring your own, though, rather than relying on that.

It's illegal not to scoop your dog's poop, but it's also illegal to get on the bus without paying and to fail to stop at the stop sign. I mean.

From:

marahmarie

Well, that's a city for you. This place I live in calls itself a city but runs (and even looks) a bit more like an orderly town, I guess, minus better traffic (everyone speeds and runs reds and drives like their cars are on fire around here. Our high pedestrian fatalities are not because pedestrians are reckless, but because you have to practice defensive walking. I spend more time either scooting onto people's lawns or else wondering if I should* then I do simply enjoying my walks).

*I've even mentally practiced how to roll into sumps and gutters and downhill onto people's private property without killing myself, should some vehicle come around some corner too close to me, fast enough.

From:

redbird

How about clover? I found a company that sells clover seed in bulk, where "bulk" starts at 1/4 pound, plus shipping. They recommend Miniclover(tm) for lawns, and also have white Dutch clover fairly cheap, and a number of other kinds that seem less appropriate for this.

When I lived in Arlington, I bought small bags of (I think) the Dutch clover and purple prairie clover to mix into the garden soil; the purple is very nice, but seems more suited to your own garden than for putting under trees.

Those are both perennial, a definite advantage here. (As you may remember, clover is a nitrogen-fixing perennial, so good for the soil.)

From:

elainegrey

Outside Pride has a poor reputation on Dave's Garden's watchdog list, for what it's worth.

If i was in your shoes, i would pick out a "weed" or two that is thriving locally, fairly short, and create little monocultures of that weed around the street trees. I am trying to eradicate non-native Persicaria, personally, but it might rock as a ground cover around a street tree.

If the room you have around the trees is what i imagine, there's not that much room to have multiple plants and have an impression of it being cared for without lots of work.

One plant family that might be a good match are native sedges. Generally look like grasses or even more like liriope. I've sedges in shade and sun, so you might find some that work

https://www.prairiemoon.com/seeds/native-grasses/#/filter:search_spring_ht:0.25:2.25/filter:ss_usda_zones_facet:Zone$25207/filter:soil_moisture:Dry

If you want to do something soon, and are considering annuals, marigolds are amazing plants. Just because they are common it's easy to turn up one's nose. But they are tough, take drought, bloom like the dickens. I've had odd luck here starting them from seed: much better luck in my roof top garden in Philly and in my deck garden in California. Here i've gotten the sale plants at the big box store, planted them, and they've responded wonderfully. Next to the street i might want to get plants in good shape because the street is stressful enough. https://www.swallowtailgardenseeds.com/annuals/marigold.html

From:

conuly

Outside Pride has a poor reputation on Dave's Garden's watchdog list, for what it's worth.

???

If i was in your shoes, i would pick out a "weed" or two that is thriving locally, fairly short, and create little monocultures of that weed around the street trees.

That would mostly be the aforementioned ragweed. It's really taken over lately.

From:

elainegrey

Outside Pride was the source of the clover seed mentioned in the prior post; https://davesgarden.com/products/gwd/ .

At least here, ragweed gets over three feet tall. I'm not sure precisely where you are, but looking at plants growing around Long Island, the first one is a Pescaria https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/25095141 . Pineapple weed doesn't look terrible either -- https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/25093624

I'll admit, i'm thinking back to when i was in Philadelphia in its years of having no money (and i didn't have any either).