Reusing & reducing in a Salmon Creek garden

SALMON CREEK — Discarded glass, a broken rake, old hose: Diane Stevens tries to integrate what used or discarded items she can into her garden, which spills onto the Bonneville Power Administration easement next to her home in shrubs and bright flowers.

When she planted some lilacs in a new bed she built next to her house, it didn’t look very good. So she came up with the idea to line the bed with empty, upturned wine bottles.

In turn, she used wine bottle corks, which are suitably porous, as a kind of mulch, helping the soil retain moisture and keep out weeds.

“The neighbors come by and they put their corks in there. Kind of like a wishing well,” she said. “They’re just kind of a whimsical thing. Plus I had a whole bunch of them and I didn’t know what to do with them.”

Through another part of the garden, she took old, ruptured hoses and rolled them into stepping stones.

When she grew more vegetables, she used broken hockey sticks to make a stand for her peas to grow.

Other reused items are more decorative, like glassware turned into a small bird feeder, painted rocks for accents or, in one corner, an old bowling ball covered in glued-on pennies and set in a “decorative tube.”

“I like to be able to reuse stuff instead of throwing things out,” she said. “I’m just, you know, concerned about the environment, ecology and all of that, and the more stuff I can reuse and recycle the better.”

She also plants a fair share of regional plants. With the season for gardening and landscaping fully engaged, gardening experts and local officials encourage all weekend warriors to reduce, as well as reuse, when building their gardens.

Native plants, again, can be a big part of doing that.

“We’re focusing on native plants, where possible, because once established they require a lot less water and a lot less maintenance,” said Jeff Wittler, environmental resources manager at Clark Public Utilities.

The utility, he said, is always keeping an eye on water use.

From the gardener’s perspective, native plants can be much lower-maintenance.

Lawns are another water hog.

The EPA estimated landscaping irrigation accounts for nearly one-third of all residential water usage in the United States, totaling nearly 9 billion gallons daily, much of it going to lawns.

Once more, regionally appropriate grasses can reduce that amount, as can a new sprinkler system controller, labeled as meeting the EPA’s WaterSense criteria.

Most lawns in the Pacific Northwest usually need about an inch of water per week, according to the county.

“If we encourage people to use less water, that’s going to cost everybody less in the long run,” Wittler said.

Eschewing a lawn all together can save a lot of water and labor, but Wittler conceded many people like their lawns, noting he has kids and a lawn for them himself.

Still, he said, another thing gardeners ought to be aware of is having a lawn means keeping a monoculture crop right next to all your other plants.

That’s akin to having a farm, and all the problems with pests and weeds that come with it.

A way to deal with that, at least outside of the lawn, is planting a diverse batch of plants, and trying to layer them based on height.

“Not just having an isolated tree, but having a tall shrub or whatever underneath it, and correspondingly smaller and smaller plants,” he said. “From a wildlife perspective, different species use different layers at different times in their life cycles.”

That diversity helps provide protective cover for local wildlife, food for squirrels, nectar for hummingbirds and butterflies, larval host plants for butterfly caterpillars and a bulwark against invasive plants.

Wittler added the “Sunset Western Garden Book” remains a strong influence, but gardeners can relax in knowing more sustainable, greener gardening practices aren’t an either-or proposition.

“Even if it’s just one corner of your yard that you do … you can still have a pretty good-sized impact.”