Last month I tilled a bed in our garden in southwestern Massachusetts to plant garlic. This was a bed I first dug this past spring, which required a heroic effort. My wife, Suzanne, jokes that creating any new garden space in this hilly Berkshire landscape involves “mining for soil,” that is, you prospect t until you find a vein of soil and then with shovel and digging bar you follow the vein down into the rocks.

Certainly the substrate in the area where I created this new bed was rocky—a significant part of the stone wall I built last summer was created with rocks I dug out of this bed. Several were so large that I had to pull them out with a “come along,” a simple, hand-cranked winch that can exert a startling level of force (4,000 pounds of pull in the case of the model I own). I’d hook the come along to a large tree, then hook its pulling cable to a chain I had wrapped around one of these mini boulders. Later, with the help of a muscular young college student, I was able to roll the boulders one by one up an impromptu ramp of 2-inch-by-8-inch planks and into a cart.

The soil revealed by this excavation last spring was wretched: a combination of grayish clay and sand. Yet when I tilled it up to plant last month it was brown and loose, moderately organic—a good garden loam.

How did I accomplish this transformation? In part with coffee grounds. Suzanne leaves a five-gallon bucket at a local cafe, and every Friday we pick this up to use as organic enrichment for our garden. She had prepared the bed for its initial digging by dumping grounds all winter long onto the 24-foot-by-24-foot area we had outlined with stakes and string the previous fall. (Coffee grounds are mostly just organic matter; my old Rodale The Complete Book of Composting says they are 1.84% nitrogen, .03% phosphorus, and .12% potassium, which means that you’d have to load on tremendous quantities to over-fertilize with coffee grounds. If I had to give a limit, I rather arbitrarily say not to apply more than a layer an inch deep at a time.)

After I’d removed the rocks, I added more organic material. There is an enormous pile of decomposing wood chips at one edge of our property. These are the remains of trees and branches that were removed to create a 16-foot-wide corridor for the power line we ran to our house five years ago. By now the chips are semi decomposed. I hauled in cartload after cartload to dig into the soil last spring, and used another dose to hill up the potatoes we planted at one side of the bed. We spread a thick blanket of straw along the other side of the bed to mulch around the pumpkins we planted there.

I made sure to feed the soil with several sprinklings of a balanced organic fertilizer over the course of the growing season. The wood chips weren’t fully decomposed when I dug them in, and I knew that the carbon-rich wood and bark fragments would draw nitrogen from the surrounding soil as they rotted (this nitrogen will be returned with interest as the chips complete the composting process). I’ll continue to add extra fertilizer next spring, but after that, I suspect, the wood chips will have fully decomposed.

This increased need for fertilization has been used in the past to discourage the use of wood chips as a soil additive. This is typical of the extravagance of conventional gardening practice: Instead of recommending the use of whatever organic waste is locally available, the gardening press has recommended relying on imported products such as sphagnum peat or bagged, dehydrated cow manure. These imported products come at an excessive environmental cost, however. Peat bogs are important as natural carbon sinks: they sequester huge quantities of carbon that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. Processing the manure and trucking it cross country to your garden requires an unnecessary use of fossil fuels.

No matter where I have gardened, I have always found abundant and inexpensive local sources of organic wastes. Wood chips are available from any arborist, and autumn leaves are free for the composting. When I lived in central Texas, it was only a short drive to a mushroom farm where I could buy the spent growing medium for $10 a pickup truck load. Spoiled hay—bales that have gotten wet and been invaded by mold—are another cheap source of organic material in many areas. Or manure from a riding stable (we used manure from the Bronx Zoo when I was a student at the Botanical Garden).

Often using such materials most successfully requires a bit of special handling. My wood chips temporarily boost the garden’s need for fertilization. Because the local water supply was slightly saline, the much irrigated mushroom compost contained elevated levels of salt; I made sure to water my garden with a drip irrigation system that minimized the amount of municipal water I needed to apply. My garden subsisted mainly on rain water which was salt-free; heavy storms would flush the salt out of my raised beds, leaving the soil sweet.

For advice on working with different organic materials, I suggest you contact your local cooperative extension office; you’ll find contacts for all the different state services here.

Eating locally is as important for your garden as it is for you.

Last month I took a week-long visit to Portland, Oregon, a community that’s a real pioneer in developing more sustainable urban landscapes. During the trip I met with Mike Faha, a partner at Greenworks, a leading local landscape architecture firm. Mike suggested that Portland’s drive for sustainable green space derives in large part from two factors.

In 1973, Oregon’s legislature established a series of land-use planning regulations that, among other things, discouraged sprawl by encircling cities with urban growth boundaries that made it more difficult to subdivide for development rural properties outside such boundaries.

This has been controversial, Faha acknowledged. He added that supporters of the plan long ago realized that to make it work, they had to make high-density living within the cities appealing. As a result, there has been a deliberate creative focus on redeveloping and enriching the urban landscapes. A large part of this has been a focus on the urban ecology, with the creation of pocket meadows and wetlands along sides of streets, around schools, and in formerly vacant lots.

The second impetus for Portland’s pursuit of sustainable landscapes was a lawsuit filed in 1987 that sought to make city sewer and water managers comply more fully with the federal Water Quality Act of 1987. Aimed (in part) at controlling nonpoint source water pollution (pollution that cannot be traced back to a single source such as an industrial outflow), this piece of legislation required municipalities to address the pollutants carried into waterways by the storm water draining off their streets and other paved and impervious surfaces. In Portland, stormwater runoff was channeled into the sewer system and, theoretically, treated before it was released into the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. In fact, any large storm created a surge of water that overwhelmed the treatment system and washed raw sewage into the rivers.

The key to taming this problem was reducing the storm surges. To accomplish this, city engineers and landscape architects began looking for opportunities to create rain gardens that would collect storm runoff before it entered the sewer system. Properly designed, such gardens rapidly infiltrate such water into the soil, where it is cleansed naturally by soil microorganisms and the roots of plants.

As a result of the rain garden program, Portland is full of what city managers call “green streets,” shallow depressions fed by cuts in the curb and planted with native wetland species. These help to make Portland’s urban neighborhoods some of the most inviting I have ever seen. People do respond: Portland’s streets are full of strollers and bicyclists. And, according to Mike Faha of Greenworks, while the current recession has hammered the value of suburban homes around Portland, housing within the city limits has, for the most part, not suffered any decline in value.

In the course of recent talks with turf grass breeders I’ve learned about all sorts of new and superior grass cultivars. But when I go to the garden center, what I find is mostly seed of the conventional lawn types: perennial rye grasses and Kentucky bluegrass that produce handsome, emerald-green turf but at an unsupportable cost in resources such as water and fertilizer, and which turn mowing into a weekly (or even twice-weekly) chore.

So where, I asked Dr. Leah Brilman of Seed Research of Oregon, do I buy these alternative turf grasses you are producing? She recommended an online source: Seed Super Store. She also suggested I consult the National Turgrass Evaluation Program for data about individual turfgrass cultivars. Finally, she offered two tips that I should keep in mind when shopping for any low-maintenance grass seed mixture. First, avoid any mix that includes ‘Boreal’ red fescue; this is an inferior, older cultivar that is still used by less-than-scrupulous marketers because the seed is cheap.

Brilman’s second tip was that I should consider including a colonial bentgrass in any low maintenance lawn mix. As the name suggests, colonial bentgrass came into the northeastern states with the early European colonists, and Brilman says it is one of the grasses she has commonly found during her exploration of low-maintenance sites such as old cemetery lawns. It grows well on nutrient-poor, unirrigated soils, and it is more tolerant of heavy foot traffic than the fine fescues.

Brilman says that colonial bentgrass has proved an exceptionally self-reliant element of the low-maintenance lawn she maintains around her home. It does require mowing, but relatively infrequently—a half dozen mowings is all Brilman had given her lawn this year as of early October. One of the improved types such as SR 7150 (available from OutsidePride.com) would be a useful element in low-input lawns that experience heavy foot traffic, since colonial bentgrass is more wear-tolerant than the fine fescues.

I’ve planted two small no-mow lawns this fall. One I planted for a Connecticut neighbor who had removed several overgrown Norway spruces and had been left with 1,600 square feet of bare earth as a result. The other lawn occupies an area around my Berkshire cottage that had previously been left to weeds. To keep the weeds in check, I mowed them once a month or so with a brush cutter, and I was anxious to end this activity.

It’s common to think of spring as planting season for all sorts of seed, but in fact early fall is a better time of year to plant cool-season grasses such as fine fescues. The cool, moist weather of this season favors the germination of the grass seed and the growth of the seedlings. Fall-planted lawns also require less irrigation. For the first month after sowing the seed in late September, I had to water whenever the surface soil dried out, but now the seedlings are getting all the moisture they need from natural rainfall. Spring-planted lawns are still rooting in when summer arrives with hot, droughty weather, so they must be watered regularly the first season if they are to survive. A fall-planted lawn has had several more months to send down roots and can be left to fend for itself by the arrival of its first summer.

I used the no-mow lawn seed mixture from Prairie Nursery, and so far I’m pleased with the results: germination and initial growth has been vigorous. Like any gardener, however, I can’t resist experimenting with recipes for my own seed mix—I’ll write more about that in my next post.

A dinner invitation from the Eisners, our neighbors in Middletown, Conn., sets my mouth to watering, but also provokes the itch of envy. Both Marc and Patty are great cooks as well as great conversationalists: Marc is an inspired raconteur, and Patty has perfected a dry style of contrapuntal commentary that takes me back to vintage George Burns and Gracie Allen routines. And if the weather is good, a visit to the Eisners always includes an inspection of Patty’s garden.

Which makes me feel inadequate. Patty’s gardening is as impeccable as her cooking, and the result is a breathtaking contrast to my own somewhat chaotic yard. Moreover, the secret to Patty’s success, aside from her energy and organization, is simple and well within anyone’s reach. Every autumn, she rakes all the leaves that fall on her lawn into the dormant perennial beds. Then Marc runs the lawn mower back and forth across the piles several times.

That’s all the feeding Patty provides, at least to plants. Several years of such mulching have transformed her soil from a poor clay into a deep, rich loam, and her plantings thrive. Check out the photographs of her garden that accompany this post. If it doesn’t infect you with envy, too, well, you don’t deserve a dinner at the Eisners.

I love the fall. The return of cooler weather drives the mosquitoes and deer flies out of the New England woods so I can hike the old logging roads without suffering the barrage of bites that make summertime walks miserable. I love the clear, slanting sunlight of autumn afternoons, whose rays seem pitched at the perfect angle to backlight the trees’ vivid foliage.

One autumn scene that depresses me, however, is the sight of my neighbors (some of them, anyway) raking leaves out to the curb so that the town truck can vacuum them up and haul them away. By doing so, my neighbors are short-circuiting a natural cycle and gradually impoverishing the soil in their yards.

Why is this? Arguably, the single most important constituent of the soil—from a gardener’s perspective, anyway—is the organic matter. This consists of both composting plant material and the products of that process, the dark, decay-resistant material horticulturists call humus. The composting material releases plant nutrients as it decays and acts like a sponge to absorb and retain moisture. The humus, meanwhile, acts as a glue to stick the soil’s mineral particles (sand, silt, and clay) together into crumbs. This, in turn, makes the soil loose and crumbly so that air, rainwater, and plant roots penetrate it more easily.

The point to remember is that both the raw organic matter and the humus do decay (although the humus decays more slowly), and both must be replenished on a regular basis if the soil is to remain healthy and productive. The rates of decay vary with the climate: Here in New England, humus can persist for decades, but in places where the climate is hot and humid, the need for replenishment is more constant.

When I lived and gardened in central Texas, for example, I used to dig a couple of inches of spent mushroom compost into my vegetable beds every spring, and by the end of the growing season (late fall), the soil would have returned to a dusty, mineral silt, seemingly completely deficient in any organic content.

In nature, as the humus in a soil decays, it is replaced by the decomposition of debris—leaves, stems, dead roots—deposited by the plants growing on the soil. This creates a self-regulating cycle: The more nutrients the plants take from the decaying humus, the faster they grow and the more debris they deposit (to create humus at a greater rate).

Short-circuiting this process by removing all the debris means that you must either resort to synthetic fertilizers and extra irrigation, or replenish the humus with materials such as sphagnum peat or manure brought in from off site. Both come at an environmental cost. Trucking in manure consumes fossil fuels. The importation of peat from northern bogs requires energy for harvesting and drying the material as well as for hauling it down to market. The damage done to the bogs adversely affects one of Nature’s greatest carbon sinks, resulting in a release of huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, accelerating the process of global climate change.

The easiest way to reduce this portion of your carbon footprint is to let your garden return to the natural cycle of organic matter replenishment. Keep your leaves on-site and use them either as a source of compost or as a mulch. In my next post, I’ll describe a garden that makes particularly good use of this material.

The season of the leaf rake and blower is upon us once again—or maybe not, if you garden sustainably.

Rather than removing the leaves from your lawn, you can grind them up in place; a mulching lawn mower will do this if you attack the blanket of leaves before it becomes too thick. Then let the brown confetti filter down through the leaves of grass to serve as what the old-timers used to call a “top-dressing.”

Before the days of chemical fertilizers, top-dressing—spreading a thin layer of organic matter, usually compost or manure, over the turf—was the standard way to feed a lawn. It still works: As the fragments of ground-up leaves decompose, they create a layer of humus around and over the roots of the grass, adding fertility to the soil.

If you maintain your lawn without pesticides and fungicides, the leaf fragments will also provide food for earthworms, which will drag the litter down into the soil, helping to aerate the soil and increase its ability to absorb and retain water.

I spent this morning (August 28, 2009) with Dr. Karl Guillard, a professor at the University of Connecticut who, among other things, is researching types of lawn grasses that require smaller inputs of water, fertilizer, and pesticides. He has been a key figure in the University’s “Fescue to the Rescue” program.

One of the primary goals of this program is to protect the quality of water in local waterways, aquifers, and Long Island Sound by reducing the amount of fertilizer spread on lawns: When washed into drains by storm runoff, turf fertilizers serve as a major source of water pollution.

Fine and tall fescues both flourish with a fraction of the fertilizer required by bluegrass. If you use a mulching mower and leave the clippings in place when you mow, the standard recommendation for a fine fescue lawn is to apply no more than a pound of nitrates per 1,000 square feet of lawn annually (the recommendation for bluegrass treated this way is two to three pounds annually). However, my own experience matches that of Neil Diboll of Prairie Nursery, a longtime promoter of fine fescue lawns who has found that except on the sandiest soils, these grasses need no fertilization at all. In sum, by minimizing the need for irrigation and fertilization, fine fescues protect water resources in two ways.

Dr. Guillard alerted me to another threat to the environment posed by lawn fertilizers. As the nitrates in fertilizers break down, some go to feed the grasses, but much escape into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. According to a study published in Science, a leading scientific journal, nitrous oxide is emerging as the leading threat to the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere.

The ozone layer plays a critical role in protecting living creatures from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. I have not been able to obtain any explicit figure concerning the amount of nitrates applied annually to turf in the United States, but a moderate estimate would put it in the neighborhood of 750,000 to a million tons (more, incidentally, than the farmers in India apply to all their food crops). The environmental cost of this is all the more painful when one considers that most of this fertilizer would be unnecessary if we simply converted our lawns to grasses better adapted to the local climate and soils.

Todd Forrest, NYBG’s Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections, points out that fine fescues offer a couple of other potential benefits. They are more shade tolerant (the Botanical Garden’s shade mix is more than 90 percent fine fescue), and they are disease resistant.

He has also reminded me that for the home gardener, there is another, simpler option, which is what is popularly known as the “freedom lawn.” This is a lawn in which the gardener doesn’t discriminate, tolerating the presence of any low-growing green plant that can be cut by a mower blade. This survival-of-the-fittest philosophy typically results in a greensward that does fine without fertilizers or irrigation, and generally shrugs off pests and diseases.

This isn’t a bad option if you don’t mind a patchy look. However, a freedom lawn does require far more frequent mowing than a fine fescue lawn to keep it under control. I haven’t mowed my patch of fine fescues in six weeks, and next year I plan to mow it only once, just to remove the seed spikes when they appear in June.

“Stoop-ed?” the old Yankee farmer is supposed to have said. “Yuh think I’m stoop-ed? Yuh should see my old lady—she’s re-e-ally bent ovah.”

After a summer of lifting and moving stones to build a dry-stack wall, I too sometimes feel distinctly “stoop-ed.” Fortunately, though, I’ve discovered a few simple, non-polluting devices that have taken the worst stress out of this process.

The most important among these is a block and tackle hoist I bought for $25 from Jabetc. This has the effect of multiplying my strength seven times when lifting stones, which means that a boulder that weighs 350 pounds feels to me like it weighs just 50.

To suspend that block and tackle over the stones so that it could lift them, I made a “shears.” This is a type of hoisting rig sailors used to make to lift masts in and out of position. At its most basic (the level at which I work), this is just a pair of poles lashed together at one end and then, with the help of a guy line, stood up like a pair of straddling legs. The block and tackle is slung from the point at the top of the shear where the two poles meet. I found the knots and lashings I needed to construct this device in The Ashley Book of Knots, a wonderful compendium of rope craft dating back to the last days of the windjammers.

This definitely is a case of showing being more effective than telling, so please see the accompanying photographs of my shears in use.

I love the look and durability of stone and the fact that once installed it requires virtually no maintenance. From the perspective of sustainability, however, it gets a more mixed report card.

When I decided to build a wall in the Berkshires (see photo), I found an abundant supply of stone on the property. Few home gardeners are so lucky; most must acquire their stone off site. The easiest option is to buy freshly quarried stone from a building supply company. This, however, is also the least sustainable source. The stone blocks sold by the pallet-load at such establishments are either stolen from old stone walls or else strip-mined from a quarry with all the environmental costs that implies.

The cost of transporting stone is also high, and greater than it used to be. Once upon a time, stone was generally quarried close to the place of its intended use— hauling this heavy material over land for any distance with horse and wagon was just too difficult. Today, however, stone products are more often quarried where labor is cheap and environmental regulations lax. For example, the rough, rectangular granite pavers used to pave early American streets and still popular for edging driveways and paths are now produced mainly in India. The carbon footprint of such weighty objects imported from the other side of the globe isn’t pretty to contemplate.

You can, however, avoid many of the environmental costs of using stone in your landscape by using material salvaged from demolished buildings. Usually, such recycled material isn’t hard to find: Many stoneyards deal in salvaged stone as a sideline.

By recycling stone you avoid the environmental damage caused by mining new blocks or pavers from the earth. Salvaged stone often supplies aesthetic advantages as well: Its weather-softened edges and patina can lend your project an instant aura of age. Because it commonly dates to a time when quarrying was still a local business, recycled stone frequently offers local authenticity as well.

When I wanted to build retaining walls in my backyard in Middletown, Connecticut, I decided to make them out of brownstone. Our house lies just across the Connecticut River from the site of a quarry that supplied much of the brownstone for New York City. The off-cuts, the pieces that weren’t saleable to the big-city builders, were widely used as material for foundations and walls in Middletown. When I checked at the nearest stone yard, I found that I could buy enough salvaged brownstone to make my walls for $1,200.

That’s a modest price, but I did much better. An old building was being demolished half a mile from our house, and I introduced myself to the man who was clearing the site for new construction by hauling away the debris. For $150 he was happy to dump a truckload of brownstone from the building’s foundation in my yard.

Another source of inexpensive, local stones for building a dry-stack wall can be sand and gravel companies. Many of these still dig their materials locally, mining the sand beds of old glacial deposits. Mixed with the sand are, commonly, rocks of varying sizes. The miners usually run these through a stone crusher and sell the result as aggregate for making road beds and the base for parking lots. Call the local sand and gravel supplier, take a trip to their quarry, and if you like what you see, negotiate a price for diverting a truckload from the crusher to your yard. The result could be a wall that is not only inexpensive and durable but also genuinely local.

My own retaining walls look like outcroppings of the local bedrock. You cannot root a garden into the landscape better than that.