It all happened so quickly.
I threw a potluck for my 60th birthday party. An invited guest who happened to be a master stonemason ribbingly insulted the “piles of rubble” that I have decoratively placed around a kidney-shaped pond under my deck. He rearranged said pile, much to my liking, while I was out of town. I ended up hiring him to apply his craft to all my other random garden borders.
And so it began. “Haphazard” was also a perfectly fitting adjective for what had unfolded within those walls, an untended jumble of perennials, self-seeding annuals, and weeds that I had neglected in the five years since my own fellow planter stole the coop. I wanted a new beginning, for everything it represented.
My friend Stacy, a herbalist with 3 hectares of gardens she somehow manages alone (when I can barely maintain my country lawn) she suggested her tried and true method to make new beds on the old growth.
At the end of autumn, we remove as much of the old plant material as we can manage (Stacy gives everything she could not bear relegating to my compost pile a new home in its place), remove the planting area with a mixture of soil and compost. (aged mushroom soil readily available in my part of Pennsylvania), carefully laid down a layer of corrugated cardboard (edges overlapping as little as possible), and covered it with more level soil/compost on top of the rock boundaries (about 3 to 4 inches). We waited for nature to take its course.
A Blank Slate
Remembering that I wrote a story last spring about a vegetable oasis in Port Murray, New Jersey, I reached out to Cyrus Hyde’s grandson.
Cyrus, with his wife, Louise, had transformed a small piece of property purchased in the mountains of Warren County in 1966 into the famous national. Well-swept grass farm.
Now in its 55th year and with nearly 2,000 varieties to choose from on 120 sprawling acres, it was a palette of plants worth seeking out.
I sent an email to the grandson of the founders Patrick McDuffee (Cyrus died in 2020 at the age of 90) with a proposal for him to help with my rehabilitation project and a list of goals, which were as follows:
• Mix of perennials and annuals (self-seeding a plus)
• Culinary and medicinal herbs
• Attraction of pollinators
• Relatively low maintenance
• Some color / shape of four seasons (something for the birds)
I also described the spaces and sent the accompanying photographs: An “A Bed” of 11 feet by 27 feet that offers the first glimpse of the living space that comes on the road, a “Bed” of 10 feet by 20 feet. B” running down the side of the house, and an 8-foot-diameter “Bed C” that sits in front of a modest backyard greenhouse.
“Sounds like a fun idea,” replied Patrick to my delight a few days later. “The next information I would need is to know the sunlight everywhere. The two beds that are against the walls of the building, I need to know in which direction they face: north, east, south- west, and the bed that will be from the greenhouse seems to be more open, but what kind of sun is there? I can see some shade from some trees, but I hope it’s not too much shade?
“Also, what would you estimate your hardiness zone is?”
“I’d love to help you put something together, stopping in May at some point sounds like a good goal.”
Man, was he excited. McDuffee has a degree in biology, he has the wisdom of his ancestors, and he knew how to participate. his workshop at the NOFA-NJ Winter Conference at Rutgers University in 2023 who is very passionate about his legacy work.
I drew McDuffee a rudimentary map illustrating the areas and their orientation to the four directions and shared my zone information (recently moved for 6b to 7a courtesy of climate change).
A few weeks later, he wrote back with a slightly less crude version of that map and some notes for a starting place, suggesting a meeting or phone call as next steps.
His comments and suggestions (which we later discussed over the phone):
Bed A: Visible from the street. Most of the sun. Go crazy pollinators. Color! Agastache, lavender, echinacea, Russian sage, iris, butterfly weed, butterfly bush, nepeta (catnip), heliopsis.
Bed B: Closest to the patio/kitchen. Full sun. Go to the Mediterranean herb garden! Figs (Chicago), rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, parsley, tarragon. Add annual veggies, dill, nasturtium – good companions.
Bed C: Surrounded by lawn. Go native. Echinacea, rudbeckia, coreopsis, achillea, aster, baptisia and medicinals. Good for birds. Low maintenance.
Our next phone call yielded new information. For one, Bed C is not currently a blank slate. Originally a mix of mint and cilantro/coriander, the former has taken over.
It will do so, McDuffee said.
“It will be difficult to get rid of them, but the natives should be able to live with them,” he advised.
By interplanting with what was already there, McDuffee advised, I wouldn’t be setting myself up for a constant battle.
“You just put some other aggressive natives in there, let them all become companions to each other and have a sort of wild but beautifully lush plot,” he said.
From the looks of the photographs I sent him, McDuffee said that the bed appeared to be already rich in organic matter with lots of compost and leaf material (he was correct) and that his suggestion would certainly meet the stated purpose of ” low maintenance.”
“It’s something you don’t have to worry about,” he said. “You put in a nice hardwood mulch, and you can just rake the leaves in that area every year and just build up the organic material in that plot.”
wood mulch?
Yes, he said, for aesthetic and practical reasons, especially on beds that are completely replanted.
“As far as the weed garden was and how you don’t want all those weeds to come back … you took steps to enrich the soil and try to kill the weeds,” McDuffee said. “The weeds are going to come back. The best thing you can do is get some wood mulch, and mulch all these beds as soon as everything is planted.
In fact, he advised, have the wood mulch on hand and ready to apply as soon as the first wave of new plants are installed.
“It has to be hardwood and not wood, because wood is acidic and so it’s going to change the pH of the soil,” McDuffee said.
Hardwood mulch helps with drainage, keeps things aerated and builds organic matter over time, he added.
“And you have to reapply that layer of mulch every year because the first year after it breaks down and you take out your annuals and refresh the soil, those wood chips will break down, and you have to build another layer. layer after layer every year of a new layer of hardwood.
“My grandfather always said, ‘You feed the worms, you feed the soil and then you feed your plants.’ So it’s almost like a slow-release fertilizer, in essence, just because it’s just natural decay.”
While stained wood mulches are an option, McDuffee said, “We really recommend that natural wood.”
It sure gave me a lot to think about between now and when I visit Well-Sweep Herb Farm for their annual Herb Day Festival on Saturday, May 4th, and come home with my first installation of plants.
The limits of my pocketbook and available space dictate that I have some difficult choices to make among his many recommendations.
Some feel like no-brainers, like the fig tree (Chicago), the rosemary (Arp or Hardy Hill) and the oregano suggested to have a good chance of overwintering in the microclimate of plot B, because it is oriented to the south, the house will act as a windbreaker, and the foundation of the building will function as a heat sink to help cool the ground. Or the sedum and the creeping thyme I can already imagine falling over the rock walls.
Others will require more research. But thanks to Patrick McDuffee, and his father and grandfathers before him, I had a great start.
“We don’t advertise ourselves as designers or anything like that, but every day people come in, showing us pictures of their yard and asking for input,” McDuffee said. “So that’s the process. You start by asking the same questions I asked myself. What direction is everything going in? What kind of soil are we planting in?”
And it’s on to the races, wheelbarrow races, that is.
