Starting From Scratch
by Eric Eric Larusson
The key to gardening bliss is paying attention to the basics.
I am steeped in gardening. I enjoy its difficulties and uncertainties but I also remember how it feels to know nothing and to be starting from scratch. New gardeners hear contradictory advice about bugs, chemicals, timing and watering from many sources, with the vocabulary a muddle of technical terms and scientific names. No one likes to fail—especially when the results can be so spectacularly obvious to all the neighbors—but there are often small failures in gardening. We learn from them and keep going.
The key to gardening bliss is paying attention to the basics: a well-conceived landscaping plan, plant selection, soil preparation and irrigation. Gardening in these mountains brings its own unique challenges, whether you are experienced at lower elevations or not. Here are some of the basics that will give you an edge toward success in mountain gardening.
Landscape Building Blocks
The purpose of your home landscaping should be very clear to you before you start. Is it to enhance "curb appeal" for eventual resale, to improve the living spaces attached to your home, to screen out the neighbors, to repair the mess left after construction, or do you simply love to dabble in the dirt?
If you are building a house, make sure you discuss landscaping with your architect when locating the house on the site. Connect the interior spaces to the gardens, whether they are natural or enhanced. During construction, put up temporary fencing and protect as much of the native soil and plants as you possibly can. This practice is vigorously enforced in many new subdivisions around The Lake.
Whether you're going to be your own landscaper or hire a professional, start by drawing up a simple "bubble diagram." Site the house on the page and show existing trees, shrubs, rocks and landforms. Then sketch in loose bubbles for the areas of the yard that you want landscaped. Leave space for notes about their use(s) and possible plant names, flowers or fall colors. These first plans shouldn't be a recipe, but a menu of possibilities.
Common landscaping goals include: screening, shade for a deck, showy flowers at an entrance, a flowering tree at a window, or a patch of lawn to play on. Leave natural vegetation whenever possible, but also plan to clean up for "defensible space" from wildfires. Consider the eventual heights of trees and what will be ideal to suit your needs. Save some sunny areas and try to keep at least one open vista from the living room or dining room.
More elaborate landscaping projects often include boulders and earthwork. Earthen mounds provide privacy and give plantings a head start on height. For mounding, sandy topsoil is best, when available, as long as it is not salty road sand (and you might want to ask). We use screened (=3-inch) earth and then amend the soil with each plant.
It might be tempting to over-plant trees and shrubs to achieve more instant results. But if you want the plants to live long, you need to leave room for them to grow and fill in. The more frugal your planting budget, the longer it will be before your landscaping vision is realized; however, with smart selection and care, the smaller plants will eventually grow faster, live longer and be more self-sufficient than the larger alternatives.
Plants That Thrive
The next stage is one that I particularly love: hunting for plants. Garden books, magazines and the staff at your local nursery are all useful sources. I love when people bring leaves, flowers and twigs from plants near their homes into our nursery to ask what they are. Another rewarding way to learn what grows well around your home is to ask your gardening neighbors. Generally, gardeners are eager to share their acquired knowledge and experiences (you could call it missionary zeal).
As long as man has been planting, nature has been our teacher. Is there a shady northern side of your house where the roof dumps snow that doesn't melt until July? What should you plant there? Nature's answers can be found at the base of a north-facing cliff in an avalanche run-out path where giant red-twig dogwood, alder, mountain maple, monkshood and mountain pink currants grow. Maybe you have a neighbor or roadway a little too close and rapid screening is desirable. I have been hiking off-trail and come upon impenetrable thickets of Scouler's willow, Lodgepole pines and wild rose. These and many other native plants require less water and little or no pesticides or fertilizers.
If the native plant palette is too limiting, look to historic plants—the trees, shrubs and perennials planted around Tahoe and Truckee in the 1800s that are still thriving. Spruce, apple, lilac, shrub rose, peony and Oriental poppy are some of the plants that have proven their ability to persist easily with little or no care.
Trees and shrubs are the skeletal structure of the garden and can often be your largest landscaping investment. In return, these plants can give you shade, flowers, fruit, dense screening, and cool, moist air. They trap dust and pollution, provide the natural "white noise" of rustling leaves, create color and fascinating shapes and keep the soil from eroding.
Perennials (herbaceous perennials) are long-living plants that ad bulk to the skeletal structure of a garden. There are hundreds of hardy perennials that live here in all shapes and colors. It is important to remember when planting perennials that most only flower for a few weeks. The fun and challenge of perennials is to plant interesting foliage and complimentary colors that bloom at various times throughout the season. Spring- and summer-blooming bulbs fall into the perennial category and are absolutely the easiest plants you can grow. Biennials live for two years (often much longer in our short summers) and are used much like perennials.
Annuals include violas, calibrachoas, bacopa and hundreds of others. Annuals have no need to store energy in their roots for winter survival as perennials do and so can expend their energy blooming continuously throughout the season. It is important to select annuals that are both cold-hardy and tolerant of high-elevation sun. Many tender annuals will die with the first summer frost and others will fade too quickly in Tahoe sun.
We cannot grow as many plants as they can in San Francisco nor even as many as in Duluth. The severity of our winters is the primary reason, although summer frosts also limit our selection. Our "Sierra Cement" snowpack has wrecked many plants, native or not. Tip die-back on trees and shrubs can occur when heavy snowfall arrives abruptly in the fall, before the plants have had time to lose their leaves, as happened last October. Buds of some plants marginally appropriate for our climate will simply freeze and die when it gets cold. Trunks and branches exposed to our glorious winter sun may thaw and swell with water during the day, then freeze and rupture when night temperatures drop rapidly.
When perusing for plants, look to a couple of my favorite gardening books: Lewis Hill's Cold Climate Gardening and Sunset's Northeastern Garden Book. Hill's book is largely about vegetable gardening but has loads of advice for dealing with summer frosts and snow. My recommendation of Sunset's Northeastern guide always confuses people, since the publishing company came up with unique climate maps specific to the West and its Western Garden Book is truly the Bible of California gardening. Unfortunately, with 21 climate zones from the foothills to the coast and just three zones for the Sierra, Rockies and Great Basin, the Western Garden Book does not help mountain gardeners select suitable plants, especially for the Truckee area. The Tahoe Basin has the benefit of an enormous thermal mass (The Lake) that moderates temperatures, allowing a wider variety of plants to survive than in many of the colder valleys to north or south. The Sunset Northeastern Garden Book includes climate zones for the plains of eastern Canada and mountains of New England (zones 45 and 44) which work well for choosing plants suited to our location.
The most frequently used climate zone map nationwide is from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA map puts Truckee and Tahoe in zone six. If you plant species suited to zone six, many will die; however, if you choose plants for zones three to four for Truckee and perhaps five for Tahoe, most will thrive. No rules of gardening are absolute, of course! There is always room for experimentation.
My suggestion: begin gardening with easy-to-grow plants. With time and experience you can begin to push the limits of your location and learn to appreciate the lessons of your occasional failures.
Dirt First!
In the wild, the one-in-a-thousand seed that becomes a seedling may, by the time it is only a few inches tall, have a root system that is hundreds of times larger than its top. Nursery-grown plants will almost never develop that kind of root-to-foliage ratio. Your number one job as a gardener, therefore, is to promote and protect developing root systems. You do that largely with compost and mulch.
Soil should anchor the roots of plants, hold moisture and nutrients, and allow some air to get in and out. Organic fertilizers facilitate nutrient production. Healthy soil is teeming with life. Soil flora and fauna provide long lasting nutrients, prevent disease and promote vigorous growth in the plants. (A teaspoon of healthy soil may contain 100 million bacteria, 400-800 feet of fungal hyphae and millions of other microbes.)
I wear a shirt with the words: "Dirt First" and chant the old saying: "Put a two dollar tree in a ten dollar hole." Don't put a ten dollar tree in a two dollar hole! Composted organic matter is the "miracle panacea" for the problems of our mountain soils. If you take the time to prepare a hole by amending with ample mature compost, your plants will require less watering, less fertilization and suffer less salt damage. Make sure you use mature compost rather than less composted organic matter, which actually creates a negative environment for plant growth. Wood chips or sawdust should only be used on the soil's surface.
When you are finished planting or if you are saving areas for a later project, do not forget to mulch. There is no simpler part of gardening in our area that has a greater impact on success than mulching. Plants gather most of their water and nutrients near the soil surface. A loose layer of raw fresh organic material provides insulation from the extremes of our daily temperatures and protects shallow roots. A twoinch layer of mulch around your plants also suppresses competing weeds and lessens watering and fertilizing requirements.
In the four seasonal issues of Tahoe Quarterly, refer to the checklist in the Mountain Garden department for specific suggestions on planting and care.
Managing the Flow
Irrigation is essential in our Mediterranean climate; we get plenty of water but virtually all of it arrives in winter. During our dry summers, a minimum of deep, infrequent watering is recommended. Deep watering replenishes reserves and infrequency promotes growth of plants' deepest roots. While many native plants survive with a minimum of watering, the exceptions include aspen, some willows and other riparian (stream-zone) plants.
Automatic controllers and valves not only free your hands for other pastimes but also help insure your landscape's survival and reduce water consumption. Trees and shrubs can be easily irrigated with a low-volume drip system after they are planted, but even small lawns are best irrigated using a hard pipe and pop-up sprinklers.
Depending on your handiness, you may (or may not) want to take on the job of constructing a pipe and sprinkler system. If you do, make sure the pipes can be easily drained in winter and that the valves are protected in a vault underground.
My final thoughts: Don't expect to get it right every time. A garden is a process. Learn from your mistakes and relish in your successes. Most of all, appreciate this beautiful area we live in and treat it with respect.
Eric Larusson is co-owner of Villager Nursery in Truckee, which has handouts on many gardening topics and conducts classes. For more information, visit www.villagernursery. com or call (530) 587-0771.