Author: Veronica Shukla
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Stop Wasting Time and Money on Replacing Broken Ecosystem Functions
As I walk dogs through urban/suburban neighborhoods, I notice a lot of things that come down to one theme: disrupting ecosystem functions and then spending a lot of time and money to replace them artificially. Here are some examples (not an exhaustive list): The list goes on and on. I am continually seeing people disturbing…
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Can an edible plant be too aggressive? A thought experiment.
The Thought Experiment Imagine you are currently unemployed and seeking yet another job. You live with your parents and they help you out financially, but it doesn’t feel great. You’ve cycled through a lot of jobs in the past, trying to find something worth the effort. They pay a barely livable wage, but they are…
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Plants That Want to Grow: Your Key to Low-Maintenance Gardening
If you want to have a low-maintenance, restorative landscape, it is key to choose plants that want to grow on your landscape. Every geographic area hosts its own special kinds of ecosystems. Each of these areas is home to plants that have evolved over millions of years to thrive in their ecosystems. We can take…
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Ecosystem Mimicking: The Key to Easy Gardening
If you want low-maintenance, sustainable landscaping, your ultimate goal should be to try to create an ecosystem. Nature is the ultimate low-maintenance gardener. In natural ecosystems, humans are not needed to keep things alive (regardless of what some humans think). Nature knows everything, and all we need to do to learn is observe. ABO —…
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Rock Mulch: Why You Shouldn’t Choose It and What to Do Instead
A newly married house-shopping couple, my husband and I chose our current home in large part because everything was already done for us. It was not a fixer-upper, the paint colors were chosen and done, the curtains were left for us, and the landscaping was already done. We are not handy people and I, at…
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Guilds: Plant Communities That Do the Work For You
To increase productivity the natural way, permaculturists often create guilds. A guild is a group of plants that perform many different functions and work together to help out not only each other but also usually a central performer (normally fruit trees). Three sisters guild A popular very simple guild is the Native American three sisters…
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Shifting Perceptions of Beauty in Your Neighborhood
Low-maintenance edible landscaping typically comes in the form of guilds, food forests, wildflower gardens, and other wild gardens that function more like ecosystems. This type of landscaping is not as meticulous, organized, or controlled as the gardens your neighbors might maintain. That’s what makes it low-maintenance (and usually more eco-friendly). You might think your property…
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For the Love of Mint in All Its Spreading Glory
Mint, in all of its spreading, growing, thriving glory, is an excellent plant to add to a low-maintenance edible landscape. Tons of resources on growing mint are already widely available, so I’m not going to do that here. No, my job here is to rescue mint (and many plants like it) from its stigmatic prison….
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Sharing Your Bounty
When we bought our house the landscaping was pristine. The lawn had been regularly watered and sprayed. It was a lush carpet of green in September. The rock garden landscaping was dutifully sprayed with roundup and planted sparsely with landscaping plants. It was just the way people like it around here. But we did not…
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Dynamic Nutrient Accumulators
What they are Dynamic nutrient accumulators are plants that are considered to be very good at grabbing lots of nutrients from the subsoil and bringing those nutrients back into their plant parts. Then when the plant dies or dies back, those nutrients are distributed to the topsoil as the plant matter decomposes. The science? There…
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Chop-and-Drop Mulching: What, Why, and How
What is it Chop-and-drop mulching is just what it sounds like. When you prune or cut back a plant, you just let your cuttings fall to the ground and leave them there or spread them around. This dropped plant matter will act as mulch. Why do it Mulch is important for many reasons. If you…
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Queen Anne’s Lace: The Easy Carrot
Many people know that Queen Anne’s Lace is a weed, but fewer people know its secret identity. Queen Anne’s Lace, Daucus carota, is actually wild carrot. The carrot we all know and accept into our gardens is a cultivated strain of the same plant (sativa). In fact, if you don’t harvest your garden carrots the…
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Less Raspberry Thinning: When Less Maintenance Results in Even Less Maintenance
Earlier this summer while I was in my raspberry patch, doing some gymnastics to get to the fruits in the back, I started wondering if maybe I had let my patch get a little too out of control. We haven’t done much to control it, and it has indeed taken over some of the other…
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Common Milkweed and Its Many Uses
Milkweed is one of my favorite plants! I love milkweed so much that a friend posted this meme on my timeline. Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) is a plant native to southern Canada and much of the US east of the Rockies. It is both hated by farmers and pristine lawn keepers and loved by ecologists…
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Nitrogen Fixing Plants and Their Roles in Guilds
When I write a post about a plant, I include a chart with many of the plant’s properties. One property I include is whether the plant fixes nitrogen. So what does that mean, and why does it matter? For a fully scientific discussion on this process, read this article on nature.com. It’s very in-depth, but…
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Is a Lawn Right For You? How to Choose the Best Low-Maintenance Landscaping
Are you looking for landscaping that requires the least amount of time and resources? Today we’re going to determine if a lawn is right for you, especially if you are looking for something low-maintenance and eco-friendly. The lawn investment Lawns require mowing about once a week. Depending on your lawn and your mower, that can…
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6 Reasons to Avoid a Clover Lawn
A lot of people tell me they’re interested in switching their traditional grass lawn over to a clover lawn. Now, a clover lawn could mean you are intentionally adding clover to your lawn, or it could mean you are planting only clover. Usually the people I encounter are considering a lawn made up entirely of…
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Invasive vs. Aggressive: Plants That Don’t Want to Die
One day I was outside picking some chives, when a neighbor walked by my yard and told me, “You can’t grow those dandelions and milkweed, they’re invasive!” Of course, I knew they weren’t. Not only is milkweed native, neither of the plants are listed as invasive or noxious in our city or state. But how…