Principia, Inc.

Garden Principia

An approach to horticulture design that focuses key principles

• Plant suitability to site to mid-Atlantic region.
• Organic and environmentally sound gardening.
• Full season interest.
• Use of variety of plants to enhance manageability and sustainability.
• Dense planting to encourage soil stability and reduce maintenance and water needs.

My Favorite Links

• Best plants for Mid-Atlantic region:Gold Medal Plants. Plants are tested for suitability and sustainability in mid-Atlantic regionPennsylvania Horticultural Society, home of famous Philadelphia Flower Show, leaders in use of horticulture as urban renewal tool: Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.
• My favorite of Northern New Jersey’s Arboretums, Frelinghuysen Arboretum, a great place to visit to look at wide variety plants, shrubs and trees well suited to Northern New Jersey: Arboretum Friends.org.

One of the many talented journalists in my neighborhood, Theresa Burns, wrote this about my garden in South Orange for “The Local” NY Times: Garden State: Shaking Up Griselda

http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/garden-state-shaking-up-griselda/#more-11787

Part and parcel of sustainable lawns include tolerance of some level of weeds. Some weeds provide secondary benefits (nitrogen, attracts beneficial insects & animals). Some weeds are opportunistic, they colonize stressed areas only so good soil & lawn care puts grass at advantage, others are competitive, they will compete directly with a well managed lawn. 

Thoughts and comments on controls, and opinion on good vs. bad? 
It appears that non-natives more troublesome than natives. 

Bad: 
Creeping Charlie, Glechoma hederacea. Difficult to control perennial weed European native. Competitive. 

Buttercup, Ranunculus repens L. Competitive, deplete the land of potassium, may have negative impact on surrounding plants. European native. 

Digitaria ischaemum and D. sanguinalis. Colonizes dry stressed areas. European native. 

In Between Weeds 
Dandelion, Taraxacum. Colonizes stressed areas. Not as competitive as types noted under “Bad Weed”. 

Plantain, Plantago lanceolata; Plantago major), colonizes stressed areas, an occasional late season growth in well managed lawn. 

Good Weeds 
Wild Strawberry, Fragaria vesca. Colonizes wet/dry shade areas under trees. Attracts birds. 

Wild violet, Viola rostrata. Colonizes thought out lawn, competitive in stressed areas only. Blooms in April. American native.

Lawns - we love them, however…

Our Mid Atlantic region provides ideal water and temperature conditions to support for lawns. Lawns provide a neutral, usable surface that stands in contrast to herbaceous and shrubbery boarders. Lawns like all planted surfaces consume carbon, cool the environment and support good drainage.

The problem is not lawn per se, but rather they way we maintain them and aesthetic expectations that create environment problems and degrade soil.

Our recommendations are not only sound environment stewardship, they also improve soil, which in turn reduces maintenance requirements and will save you money. Over time your lawn will crowd out most weeds and become more tolerant of drought.

• Eliminate pesticides, herbicides and non-organic fertilizer.
• Replace chemical or synthetic fertilizers with organic. Apply early spring and around Labor Day.
• Use organically sanctioned pesticides sparingly.
• Water sparingly, and when you do, soak lawn at dawn with equivalent of no less than ½ inch or rain, prior to 8:00 AM.
• Replace synthetic weed control with organic corn based weed suppressant in early spring (doubles as Nitrogen fertilzer) and fall. See http://www.hort.iastate.edu/gluten/? for more details.
• Mow lawn with mulching lawn mower (most are these days) to leave grass clippings on lawn (free fertilizer). 
• Aerate lawn in the spring.
• Mow leaves into soil in the fall.
• Get your soil tested for mineral and PH levels. Correct with organic fertilizer and/or lime as needed.  Knowing soil conditions helps to avoid mineral and fertilizer over use. Rutgers Agriculture Extension provides testing service http://njaes.rutgers.edu/soiltestinglab/
• Tolerate a few weeds. Some of them are beneficial. Beneficial weeds include wild strawberries, violets, crocus and clover.

Garden catalogs are arriving, the days are getting longer. My gardening neurons are beginning to fire.

I have been spending a good deal of time reading about soil. My experience has shown me, that the better one cares for soil, the more it will reward you with plant and lawn performance and reduced need for maintenance, water and fertilizer.

Emerging information confirms what organic farmers have known for ages, that soil is a complex system, and that many common practices from tilling, chemical fertilizer to leaf blowing degrade the system. A degraded soil is weedy, needy and plants under perform.

I recommend a couple of very good books on this subject:

Up By Roots, by James Urban, (ISA Press 2008)

Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web, by James Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, (Timber Press 2006)

I started a discussion group to generate ideas, assess feasibility and approach to urban farm in South Orange on this site and on http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1252707

Inspiration come from both near and far.

• Glass houses of Amsterdam.
• City Brick Urban Farm in our neighbor city of Newark, NJ, http://brickcityurbanfarms.org/
• Union, NJ Whole Foods herb green house
• Growing Power, Milwaukee’s Only Urban Farm http://www.cgin.coop/node/5869
• Vertical Green House: http://www.verticalfarm.com/

High level objectives:

• Should not cost tax payers anything.
• Service community, local retail and restaurants.
• Provide a learning experience.
• Fit well in suburban setting. Let’s face it, neatness is part of suburban ethos. Good management is critical.
• Service community 365 days per year.
• Be living example of sound environmental practice.

Garden Principia

Genetically modified food has caused so much concern. Much of that concern is justified.

Organic producers have responded to this and gone out of their way to avoid it.

However in order to address an emerging and apparently urgent need to produce adequate food in environment of constrained resources such as water and arable and, and the significant environmental impact all agriculture, perhaps a middle ground is needed.
Our organic producers have functioned in volunteer agriculture R&D role for 30 years. The contributions of organic farming to soil science, understanding of natural systems and application of this knowledge can not be over estimated. Conventional farming science has not made significant contributions since the 70s. For more about history of fertilizer, see
Fertilizer Technology Used Worldwide, But Few New Products Since 1970s .

This is where genetic engineering comes in. I predict there will be a convergence out of necessity between current organic practices and genetic engineering due to the power both of these technologies have to produce adequate food supply, while minimizing environmental and resource impact.

Perhaps a little perspective is needed. Humans have been modifying genes for 11,000+ years. The practice began at the dawn of agriculture. Techniques have included cross breeding and hybridizing, and radiation to force mutations. The key difference is that we now can modify at the specific gene level and transfer genes from species to species. We now have a tweezer to replace a history of hammers.

Concerns raised about genetically modified foods are justified. The big players in this business have a very poor and well deserved reputation. These companies introduced and broadly deployed genetically engineering foods with minimal regard for risk. Genetic modification applied to solve problems that are better solved other ways. My pet example of this is glyphosate resistant plants. Glyphosate is a powerful and useful herbicide that minimize environmental impact by dissipating quickly. We now have a population of food plants that are resistant to glyphosate. This approach strikes me as being as potentially dangerous as intentionally creating antibiotic resistant bacteria.

An Alternative to Genetic Engineering — Marker Assisted Selection (MAS)

A Kansas State University professor is challenging the assumption that genetically engineered plants are the  only way to produce food to address a growing population by proposing with alternative technique using Marker Assisted Selection (MAS).

Kansas State University — Feeding the World Without Genetic Engineering

The convergence of genetic modification and organic farming will require transparency (let the buyer decide), extensive testing and and management of risk combined with the understanding of natural systems and soil.

Garden Principia

South Orange is a wonderful town. Our trees are are part of our identity. Our trees provide many benefits, however there is one considerable downside; the annual leaf clean up.

South Orange spends a whopping 480K collecting and disposing of leaves. New environmental regulations are expected to cause costs to triple starting in 2010.

Leaves are really an asset. Our current leaf management practices have turned an asset into a serious liability.
Leaves and other organic material including grass clippings increase soil quality and reduce water needs. South Orange’s notoriously tough soils are largely result of lack of organic material.

What we have been doing for the past decade at our home at 174 West Montrose Avenue:

1. Mow the leaves into the lawn.
2. Collect leaves from non-lawn services and save them for our summer composting. They are an important source of carbon, which is needed to balance the nitrogen heavy summer food and garden based compost material.
3. Leave leaves in shrub and perennial beds. Leaves are free mulch. Leave will be mostly rotted by Spring.  Leaves are an excellent and free early summer weed control.

For more, please see this very good material from http://www.southorange.org/Environment/LeafSolutionsFrameBottom.html

Garden Principia

Can heat waste computers and data centers be used to heat and provide energy to the next generation of green house?

This link contains information about something done at Notre Dame: http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/greenhouse-and.html

I also recommend this editorial from Dickson D. Despommier, Professor of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences and Microbiology at Columbia University about vertical green houses http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/sph/ehs/4.html

I have been thinking about this for years. I predict the use of green houses to grow crops will increase significantly, due to the controlled, year round environment and emerging constraints on availability of arable land.

This Notre Dame thing is very interesting, however I suspect to be viable, the computers and plants can not be co-housed, so the challenge will be to harvest the heat from data center and provide it to green houses in a controlled manner.

Garden Principia