Thursday 9 March 2017

Nature Strip Grasslands, Diversity for the Future

This article is the first in a two part series to impart the knowhow on establishing native Australian grasslands in a garden context, specifically for nature strips in the Melbourne area.


The prairie garden style, seen here at Frogmore Gardens, Lerderderg, Victoria

 Prairie and meadow styles of design have enjoyed a huge interest from gardeners in the last 20 years, and little wonder.  Who doesn’t love the delicate ballet between blocks of breeze-catching texture punctuated by drifts of subtle colour?  The most beguiling aspect of this burgeoning popularity in Australia for  me has been the almost complete absence of our native grasses, so many of which remain an untapped resource in the designer’s kit.    In Australia we have an ecotype that beautifully mimics a prairie-style sensibility - our own native grasslands - once biodiverse wonders that blanketed vast swathes of temperate regions throughout the southeast of our continent.


Our native grasslands provide a rival to the well-established prairie style, which is usually achieved with exclusively exotic species.
There are so few well-managed grasslands left that people can go and see themselves, which goes a long way to explaining their absence in our gardens.  In Victoria, where I live, less than 1% of grasslands exist compared to their previous range.  As gardeners we often ‘ooh and aah’ over rare plants we grow, the vast majority of them exotic, but there are a plethora of local, indigenous grassland plants that are just as deserving of the title.  A sound way of ensuring their existence into the future is to grow them yourself.

 I set out to create a native grassland, turning my naturestrip over to native grassland plants just on 18 months ago.  The results have been incredible, I’m very pleased with the way it’s shaping up.  Aesthetically I think it a very beautiful thing, though I’m sure lots of pedestrians probably walk past it and wonder when that skinny bloke is going to mow his bloody grass.  Far more stop and linger to take a closer look, some delight further still by asking questions.  
My nature strip grassland working up to peak aesthetic

You really need to want one in order to have one, they’re not easy things to establish and their maintenance requires more ecological than gardening-thinking.  They take effort and careful planning.  I worked in bushland management for several years, managing and monitoring some wonderful little (some tiny) patches of remnant grassland around Melbourne.  The experience was a steep learning curve, requiring a horticology approach rather than an ecological or horticultural one.  It was often tough graft, but the time spent was invaluable.  Getting to know patches of grassland around your area is a great start*.  
While native grasses such as ‘poa lab’ (Poa labillardieri) have entered the collective gardening conscience in Australia for a number of years, many other grasses have missed out.  Broadly speaking, there are several genera of garden merit that make great additions to grassland-style plantings.  These include, but are by no means limited to,  the wallaby grasses, Rytidosperma spp. (formerly Austrodanthonia spp.), the spear grasses, Austrostipa spp., kangaroo grass, Themeda sp., tussock grasses, Poa spp., and plumegrass, Dichelachne spp. - as a collection of genera they represent hundreds of species to choose from.  They make up the bulk of grassland biomass, though this list isn’t comprehensive by any means.  My advice is to learn about them, what they look like and how they grow.  They’re all different and provide a myriad of textures and colours at your disposal when designing with them.
Why Should You Want a Suburban Grassland?
Apart from there not being much of them left and their aesthetic beauty, once established (the hard bit), ongoing maintenance is relatively easy.  Once you get a good coverage of grasses they are highly effective at keeping undesirables out.  What weeds do grow are easily noticed and hand pulled.  Furthermore, native grasslands don’t require any supplementary irrigation at all.  The vast majority are ephemeral - they will often brown off, almost completely, which is a an ideal time to give them a mow.   They will readily reshoot when cooler, wetter weather returns.  Establishing them well is all about getting your timing right with planting/sowing.  Get this right and you’ll only have to water your plants in - they’ll never see the nozzle end of a hose again.  


The first photo give a glimpse of before and after planting and establishment. The second is a great snapshot of colour, form and texture contrast local species can provide - all of this is without any supplementary watering. This nature strip, as all nature strips, survives on rainfall alone!
Native grasslands have huge biodiversity values, not just for the plants they contain.  Myriad insect species call grasslands home, many exist only to visit specific plants, which is remarkable.  One of many examples, I have a couple of species of native bee that visit mine which are known to feed exclusively on wahlenbergia flowers.  Many other similar relationships exist in my grassland and for every insect I identify there are probably a dozen more I don’t even see.  A diversity of insects means a large population of potential garden helpers that will often help keep the populations of other problem insects in check.  Toward the end of winter for last three years I had massive problems with aphids on a Veronica perfoliata in my front garden.  I haven’t seen any at all this year and I suspect the new grassland and its residents are probably responsible.  These unseen helpers make pest management in the rest of my garden easier.  Where they come from and how they find their way to a 2.5m x 8.5m patch of land in the middle of the northern suburbs of Melbourne is a great mystery to me, one I would like to solve, but I’ll also be content with the romanticism of wondering in the meantime.
Prepping Your Strip
Before you do anything check your local council’s rules around naturestrip gardening.  They vary considerably between municipalities, most require a permit and others may even slog you a fee for the privilege.  For Melbourne specifically, site prepping is best done in late summer/autumn/early winter, whilst aiming to plant in late autumn to winter (when rainfall is reliable and plentiful here) so get your permissions in order well beforehand.
It’s now autumn and you’re looking at your nature strip - what do you see?  There’s probably grass and likely a few different species of it.  Kikuyu is common in Melbourne’s nature strips, as is Ehrharta erecta (panic veldt grass), couch, and winter grass (Poa annua) waiting to pop up once the weather cools off.  There are likely broadleaf weeds too, such as dandelion species, flick weed, oxalis, chickweed and pimpernell, among many, many others.  The critical thing to understand at this stage is that all these plants have been dropping seeds into your little strip far longer than you’ve been eying it off as a potential grassland garden.  There is a sleeping army of thousands (millions?) of seeds just waiting to germinate and cause you grief.  The rise of grief bears an inverse relationship to enthusiasm - a parlous state that will put your grassland at risk in the future.  Avoid it as best you can.
  • Taking a close look at this stage may also reveal some surprises - on the other side of my street there’s a naturestrip with a remnant patch of wallaby grass (Rytidosperma sp.).  I find this astounding considering our suburb was developed in the 1920s.  The site in question has a large brush box growing in hard, impenetrable soil from which nothing much else grows, so it’s seldom mowed or weeded.  Local parks are also a good place to go looking for remnant patches of local grasses, especially if your park is a wee bit neglected (we have a large patch of weeping grass, Microlaena stipoides, holding its own against kikuyu in our local park).
To make the establishment of your grassland as least stress-filled as possible, your existing nature strip grass needs to be cleared and this weedy seed load dealt with somehow.  You’ve three main options on this front:
  1. Scalping the soil, taking at least the first 3 inches off, seed load with it, and getting rid of it (expensive and not very sustainable, but highly effective in controlling weed seeds).  A turf cutter does this job brilliantly well.
  2. Solarising the whole area by placing black plastic over it for several weeks in late summer - this will cook a large mount of the seeds, though not all, as well as kill grasses and broadleaves (effective on some weeds, but not all, and it looks atrocious).  Steaming might also work but I can’t vouch for its effectiveness.
  3. Herbicide is another option (judgment on the ethics of their use should be suspended for the purposes of this article).  It will clear grass and kill the weeds that are growing, but it won’t deal with the weed seed load at all.  This option requires intensive hand pulling as weeds come up, mainly during winter.
Deciding which you use will depend on your budget and the amount of effort you are prepared to put in.  The bushland manager in me saw me using the last - killing off my kikuyu with herbicide and hand weeding.  I spent a lot of time weeding, time that would make well-hardened gardeners shriek in horror.  But there are two reasons why I went down this path.
Firstly, I rather enjoy weeding, especially with a beer in hand.  The second is that hand weeding means you are down there on your hands and knees regularly, right at the coalface of your changing ecology, watching it and making observations of the little differences that emerge week-by-week.  You constantly learn about the plants and the way they grow together, often without realising it.  If you hand weed you will soon be able to tell the difference between goodies and baddies, like a weedy Poa annua seedling and a local wallaby grass seedling.  The phrase ‘getting your eye in’ applies here in a big way.  If you get your eye down to this level and pick up those differences you’re well on your way to a successful suburban grassland of your very own.
If you’ve gotten this far, well done!  Questions and discussion below - I’m happy to field any inquiries on the topic of site prep.
The next installment will cover selecting species, planting and a controversial question: to mulch or not to mulch?
Until next time, happy gardening.

A bit of spring bling in my nature strip grassland is native flax, Linum marginale, it's a stout, wirey short lived perennial. Don't be fooled by the 'short lived'. It seeds prolifically and recruits just as readily. It will form drifts in abundance if planted in the right conditions.










*Local grasslands around Melbourne.  The following list are those good for exploring and observing throughout the year, hitting their aesthetic peaks in late spring through to mid-summer, they include:
  • The northeast corner of Proclamation Park, Sylvia Grove, Ringwood, Victoria.
  • Craigieburn Grassland Nature Reserve
  • Melton Botanic Gardens, extensive areas of revegetated grasslands.
  • Geelong Botanic Gardens also has an extensive planting of native grasslands along its main driveway entrance, a really beautiful sight in mid-late spring.

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Monday 6 March 2017

TARDIS

When you start growing your own plants at home you soon run into a small dilemma.  To pull it off with any degree of success and consistency you need a hothouse, or at least something that emulates hothouse-like conditions.  For years I’ve made-do with plastic storage boxes, the ones you can pick up for cheap at the local two dollar shop (our local is called ‘Hot Bargains’, and their range of plastic boxes has to be seen to be believed).  Those wee plastic boxes make highly effective hothouses.  Whack a layer of sand in the bottom and an upside down soft drink bottle filled with H20 and it will even water itself.  I wrote up a story on them when working for Gardening Australia a couple of years back and the internet hits went through the roof.  They’re genius and just enough space to grow seasonal seedlings and few cuttings for your average suburban backyard throughout the year.  They do well but they’re really only a stopgap solution.  Try as I might I couldn’t find one made of UV-stabilised plastic.  Within 12-15 months the plastic becomes brittle and shatters and you have throw the whole lot out and start again.  It’s wasteful and plastic boxes don’t look particularly visually appealing, both of which led me to look for a more permanent alternative.

Crappy plastic storage boxes make a functional, handy mini hothouse!
My backyard isn’t large by Reservoir’s standards.  Reservoir is the name of our suburb (beguilingly pronounced ‘Rezza-vore’ by those raised here).  We have a mere couple of hundred square meters to play in, but the amount I’ve squeezed in over the years has lent it a TARDIS-like quality.  Like a bolt of solar wind-generated lightening, the solution hit me - what about an old phone box?  The footprint is slightly larger than the plastic boxes I’d been using all these years, but with the added bonus of installing layered shelving I would more than triple my propagation space without taking up more horizontal room than I’d ever used before.  
Great idea, but a quick bit of internet research soon saw me crestfallen.  The crappiest, worst condition old phone box I could find would set me back three grand.  From plastic box to pricey box?  No fucking way was I forking out that much.  I can’t remember where the idea to use old doors as a replacement come from.  I claim it as my own but we had two others living with us at the time so the idea might have equally been either of theirs’.  It was settled that we’d use old doors, preferably French doors with glass panes from floor to ceiling in keeping with the original idea of a phone box as closely as possible.  No sooner had I settled on the idea than despondency set in yet again.  French doors are not only expensive but finding matching doors at the local tip shop, it soon became apparent, was going to take a while.
A while quickly turned into three years.  Some months I’d look every week, sometimes a month would go by when I hadn’t looked at all.  But I kept hearing my Scottish mother, whose love of the value of a dollar knew no temper, and faith in thrift led to the rise of a now rusted-on family saying, “Everything comes into Vinnies eventually.”  The new hothouse was going to be an exercise in patience as much as anything.  Then, like a bolt from the TARDIS-blue, there were five matching French doors at the tip shop in late January this year, twenty five bucks-a-pop.  And I only needed three.  ‘Bewdy.  

The bargain French doors, after searching for them for years they were finally, greedily snaffled and awaiting their metamorphosis into the hothouse of my dreams.
Once they were offloaded on the front verandah my enthusiasm waned yet again.  I realised I now had to build it.  I hadn’t tinkered with wood in any meaningful way since I was in year 10, going on 20 years ago now.  I kept telling myself I had experience with woodwork throughout the whole planning process, but now I had to prove it.  Confronting as it was, the simple solutions are often the best.  I decided to use 100mm pine posts, into which I’d cut sashes for the doors to slot into, just like a window sash.  That way, it would all just click into place after a few carefully measured cuts and a bit of chiseling.  
Cut sashes into simple wooden frames.  The doors just slot in, easy peasy.  Recess your sashes to the depth of the door frames you buy and you can't go wrong.  I did all this with a circular saw set to the depth of the doors and a chisel to clean up the frayed bits.  Did I mention I have limited woodworking experience?  You can do it too!
It makes the build sound relatively easy, and in retrospect it really was.  I was surprised at how well it all came together, miraculously, without incident.  I did the whole thing with no more that a circular saw, drill and chisel.  No glass cracked, all measurements lining up.  You know that saying, when it sounds too good to be true it probably is?  That should apply to this story, but I’m glad, even surprised to say it doesn’t.  It all unfolded like well-measured clockwork.  Cut sashes into your posts and just screw it all together - what could be simpler?

I built the basic construction in the driveway before assembling the lot in its new home out back

Nearing completion, the pine posts I cut the sashes into were concreted in using metal 100mm post footings at 450mm deep. Once the roof was on the whole thing was sturdy as sturdy can be.
The roof took me a good week of  thinking and a great deal of YouTubing to even attempt it. Cutting a bird's mouth at first seemed beyond my skill level.  But it, too, was remarkably easy.  Watch a few videos on building rafters and all of a sudden you’re a dab hand at it.  All I did was use hardwood two-by-fours to make a box for the top of the frame, which I then screwed into place to make the whole structure ridgid.  I then screwed the two rafters onto the box and topped it all off with a couple of bits of polycarbonate roofing and aluminum flashing to make it water tight.

Rafters were by far the most challenging part of the build. But YouTube (and a well-remembered high school trigonometry class) is your friend. Take your time and you'll get there.
The shelving is going in as we speak, after which it will be the fully functioning, propagation powerhouse of my dreams.  In the end I even had to paint it TARDIS blue.  The colour was an apt metaphor, not only because the seedlings I will grow in it will be the start of much larger, flourishing productive plants once their roots get into the ground, but despite my creeping crestfallen moments, small ideas often grow into the most grand of projects, ending up in something beautiful, often without you even realising it.  And, in the end, isn't that what gardening is all about?

 The hothouse of my dreams.  The original idea was a phone box, but this mash of matching French doors looks just as good, to my eyes, at least....
She's all done and looking grand.


Until next time, dream big and tinker!

 Jimmy
xox
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