First Things First

Last night, I was fortunate to hear Dr. Sara Via, a University of Maryland biologist, give her talk on "Ecology of the Soil" to my county's Master Gardeners. She recommended a 2016 paper from Nature entitled Climate-Smart Soils. One of the gems in this paper is the decision tree it offers for the coolest things to do with agricultural land, depending on its nature and condition. It says that marginal lands should be planted in perennials, and histosols (soils containing high organic matter, i.e. former bogs) should be restored to wetlands. Aside from those cases, the paper proffers a hierarchy of various measures that can be taken to improve soil health, such as cover cropping and no-till. The final measure in the hierarchy - adding soil amendments, such as biochar - is not based on the soil condition, but on the availability of the amendment - the more, the merrier (though 2" of compost per year may be a good upper bound).

This decision tree clarifies matters greatly for those who want to practice climate-smart horticulture at any level; from garden to farm-scale. Once I learned about biochar and began making it, my interest in gardening bloomed (along with many more flowers). Along the way, I have learned the importance of many of the other conditional steps in the decision tree that also help to sequester carbon and other greenhouse gases.

Early in my gardening avocation, I was taught that the first thing a landscaper needs to deal with is stormwater. That dictum makes good sense - all the more after getting trained as a Master Watershed Steward. The epiphany for me was that by learning and practicing key disciplines, e.g. stormwater management, composting, and biochar, I would be able to maximize my success in gardening. Similarly, if one wishes to maximize their contribution to improving the climate, there are key practices to follow, depending on the situation. The result, invariably, will be healthier soil - so the payoff and gauges of success are close at hand, though yield increases may not necessarily be as immediate as might be obtained by following ecologically harmful regimens. Dr. Via pointed out that monitoring your soil's health with a do-it-yourself tool called a soil health card is a good way to track progress.

When you take an approach, such as biochar, as the cornerstone of your efforts, it might lead you to wonder how it fits into the grander scheme of climate change mitigations. Project Drawdown's website makes schematics available to assist in that conception. The schematic in the area of Food solutions contains (among other land-use topics) high level categories that encapsulate the decision tree measures just discussed. The Conservation Agriculture / Regenerative Agriculture (CA - Reg Ag) category is particularly germane to croplands. With the guidance of the decision tree above, the soil health card, and the bigger picture of food solutions, my efforts at carbon sequestration through gardening should become even more efficacious.

Maps for Every Occasion

It wasn't too many years ago that everywhere we went, one of the first things we bought was a street map. Years before I needed those, I was always sending off in the mail for topographic maps, as a good Boy Scout, to plan and carry out hikes wherever I happened to be living. With our lives these days being so digitized, it's a relief that cartographic resources are so freely available to us through personal computers. The kind of maps that I am able to pull up through my county's geographic information system (GIS) portal may be the truest reflection of local geospatial reality in all of cyberspace.

The type of map that has recently been most beneficial to me is a combined street, topographic, and property map. I printed a collage of these showing every house in the area around Lake Lariat at a scale convenient to paste on a foldable piece of cardboard, which I can carry wherever needed. The resultant map allows me to plan my bike rides in search of dog walkers and to track where I have found allies in my quest to improve our poop scooping score.

My foldable map also helped me to locate and size up a particular private property that is a prospect for limiting runoff into the lake through work that I hope to do as part of my Watershed Stewards Academy capstone project. After contacting the owner, I found out that the area where I hope to work is also part of an easement, which my street/topo/property map does not show. There may be other links or layers available that could have shown me this, but I suspect that there are still significant datasets that are not yet loaded into the county's GIS.

In planning this capstone project, another GIS, the Web Soil Survey, will be helpful in knowing how to treat the soil for all the plants we will be putting in, though soil tests will be performed to corroborate and refine that information.

Once the project is complete, we can apply yet another map-based tool, the Stormwater Management and Restoration Tracker (SMART), to claim credit for how much this project will help the watershed. Anybody can use SMART to claim credit for particular stormwater practices that have been installed on their property. In my case, that includes four rain barrels, a rain garden, and conservation landscaping. A good way for a watershed steward to get to know how in-tune people are to stormwater management is to do a local survey in order to populate SMART for those households. This would also be a way for organizations such as the Lake Lariat Preservation Committee to track and map work done in the lake watershed to improve water quality and reduce runoff and to reach out to constituents in order to raise issues related to lake preservation.

Healing the Land

Restoring habitat is not limited to wilderness preservation. Significantly more biodiversity can also be had by improving landscapes around our built environments. Many private residences are prime opportunities for owners to boldly transform lawns and lots into small wonderlands teeming with beneficial and beautiful beings. Conservation landscaping is a discipline that encourages such transformations and offers tools and guidelines to empower practitioners.

Photo by Jayscratch

The suburban living experiment has left occupants with half-finished properties. Having met human needs for shelter and infrastructure, builders leave restoration of the remaining devastated environment largely to homeowners. Planting turf is but a temporary salve on a bare wound. The soil under turf will not be anywhere near as healthy as it once was or could be again if covered with deep-rooted plants.

Turf, as much trouble as it can be to maintain, can also be very comely. More often, unfortunately, lawns are a less attractive mixture of weeds and uneven patches of turfgrass. Conservation landscaping doesn't call for eradication of lawns, but discourages their dominance on a property. Over time, homeowners are encouraged to transform the less fecund areas of their property with plantings that can supply many functions such as insectary, water infiltration, and curb appeal.

For those living in the Chesapeake Bay region, some tools that are available to make garden design and plant selection fast and fun are the Conservation Landscape Design Tool of the Anne Arundel Watershed Stewards Academy, or for a more step-by-step design approach, try the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay's version (also available through the Chesapeake Native Plant Center). I did a design, and wanting a more comprehensive set of native plants to select from, alternated between the tool's suggestions and those plants that met my more precise specifications at the Ladybird Johnson Native Plant Database. If nothing else, the exercise has helped me recognize a few more native plants.

Making Ponds out of Parking Lots

In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, climate change will make cleanup efforts more challenging because, aside from the storm surges and shoreline damage from the rising sea level, runoff will increase with the greater amount of precipitation predicted in the cooler half of the year. Rain barrels can help only so much, due to their limited volume, but a pond could capture much more water, depending on how it is fed and drained.

Most garden ponds aren't designed with stormwater management in mind, but by allowing water to be partially drained in dry spells and filled up by storms, the pond would function much as a rain barrel does in supplying water to other parts of the landscape and saving on the water bill.

I hate to see all the extra free water from above wasted, so I am considering converting part of our overly large, increasingly obsolete driveway to a segmented pond that would provide a cool and sedate point of entry to our home.  It could be fed by rain barrel overflow, a shed roof, and the adjacent sidewalk. Since it is the high point on our property, it could also be used to water other garden areas. A nitrogen-fixing bacteria filter would be a good place to incorporate biochar, as would containerized submerged planting media. It could be integrated with an aquaponics system in the future.

Photo by Bernie Pallek

Char Your Lawn

Of the nutrients that pollute the Chesapeake Bay lately, phosphorus has been the worst. "Why, of course, with all those chicken factory farms on the eastern shore," might be one's reaction to this statement. In fact, the major phosphorus inputs are coming from tributaries on the western shore of the Chesapeake. The cause has not been identified, but it could well be leaching from residential yards. Maryland soils are generally high in phosphorus, so soil disturbances by developers could also play a role.

In 2012, Maryland passed a law that prohibits the use of phosphorus on lawns except for one-time applications in cases of repairing patches, establishing a new lawn, renovating an entire lawn, or if a soil test shows a deficiency. As the phosphorus gets used up over the years, lawns will then suffer, more soil testing will be needed, and more phosphorus. Biochar can help here. Along with its many other soil enhancing benefits, biochar is very good at adsorbing phosphorus and feeding it to plants, including turfgrass. Most biochars, e.g. those made from wood, also produce a temporary liming effect in the soil, raising high acid soils' pH to one more suitable for turf (6.0 to 6.8). By applying biochar to turf, you can avoid frequent repeat applications of phosphorus and help to reduce pollution of your watershed.

Photo by Mr Thinktank (CC BY 2.0)

The steps to take when renovating a lawn include dethatching with a thatch rake or machine, and then using an aerating machine to remove small plugs throughout. After aeration, apply fertilizer-charged biochar with particle sizes small enough to drop into the newly created holes. (If phosphorus is adequate per soil test results, fertilizing with biochar will still help preserve other nutrients added, as well as the extant soil phosphorus). Spray with water to wash the char into (but not off) the lawn, then seed and water again. The biochar will also help keep the lawn moist while the seed germinates. Check the pH semi-annually to see if lime is needed and don't mow it less than 3 inches.

Pretty, Hardy Weed

After considering problems in critical areas, the next logical runoff concern is that from slopes in general - the steeper the slope, the greater the concern. Slopes not only erode easily, but they also often carry water away too quickly for it to infiltrate the soil. A slope of sandy soil can wash out very quickly and sandy soils are the norm here in Calvert County.

Such was the case at my church where a pocket pond filled up with sand that eroded from its banks before vegetation could stabilize the slopes. The county inspectors finally caught up to us and put us on notice to fix it. The repair plan involves filling up woven bags with the sandy deposits and stacking them on the eroded banks. In short order, we need to also establish better vegetation cover to avoid future problems. Here might be a good place to show how biochar and compost can allow things to grow in difficult conditions.

Not many plants want to grow on sandy slopes, but cypress spurge is one that I found recommended for that situation. I will be on the lookout for it on the roadside as I go about in the next few weeks. If it's as invasive as it's reputed to be, the plant should be pretty easy to find. In fact, I believe I noticed some recently, but wasn't in the market for it at the time. Though normally considered invasive, cypress spurge is the only plant for poor soil among ten recommended by the University of Maryland extension for stabilizing slopes.

Clueless Commissioners

Hugelkultur may not be in the Maryland Stormwater Design Manual, but it doesn't matter for the majority of properties. If a development activity doesn't disturb more than 5,000 square feet of land, the Manual isn't applicable. Most developed properties under private ownership are not going to build more large surfaces or structures, they just get landscaped, so we can do lots of things not discussed in the Manual that will contribute to cleaning up the watershed.

Some locations are still subject to local restrictions; critical areas, for instance. There are many homes in Southern Maryland located in critical areas, i.e. within 1,000 feet of a tidal waterbody. They are critical for the obvious reason that their proximity to the water makes them, by far, the major potential contributors to water pollution. Critical area buffers are therefore, the primary element of watershed protection that should be enforced everywhere.

Violators of critical area rules are sometimes fined when they are reported by neighbors or passersby, but there could be reinforcement of the rules by a more systematic monitoring effort to identify those who bypass the permitting process or don't follow requirements when they develop their waterfront properties. One such effort was proposed by our local Watershed Restoration Specialist that would have entailed making observations of properties via boat and reporting concerns to homeowners and authorities, if necessary. The knee-jerk rejection of said proposal by a St. Mary's County commissioner elicited the rejoinder,"Why Mr. Commissioner? What are you doing illegal on your property?"

Clueless in Tarcoles by Carol Blyberg  (CC BY-NC 2.0)

I hope someone does finger that particular politician and that he ends up paying in full for whatever he is trying to hide. Meanwhile, in Calvert County, Evan Slaughenhoupt, has raised the ire of environmentally conscious citizens by his favoring of Dominion with their white elephant LNG plant construction. He also seems to favor opening the gates wider in the county to land development, with all of the lovely environmental consequences, one of which is the failing D grade given to the Patuxent River on the latest Chesapeake Bay Report Card.

Charcoalkultur

Infiltration berms belong at the public works level, but a comparable practice for us masses is hugelkultur. I attended a talk last year at the Mother Earth News fair comparing biochar to hugelkultur and discovered that hugelkultur is generally easier and less chancy than making and applying biochar. Yet, a hugelkultur bed will not be as long-lived as one with a load of biochar.

Hugelkultur is the practice of piling soil and organic material on top of a bunch of logs and sticks to form a mound (mainly on contour) which can capture runoff in order to grow plants like a super high raised bed. +paul wheaton published a DVD about it and  +Sepp Holzer put some good instructions on Paul's richsoil website.

I've been using hugelkultur to augment swales in order to reduce erosion on the back slope of my property. My previous post about infiltration berms brought me to consider hugelkultur not as an alternative to biochar, but as another opportunity to put biochar to good use. Filling the gaps with biochar (or some percentage thereof) while building a hugelkultur bed is one way. Biochar could also be applied in areas where there is a need for extra moisture.

Such was the case with my wife's hydrangea which she wanted planted in a sloped area that normally would not stay moist enough for this plant. Yet, there is a roof downspout nearby which spills out onto the slope (via a splash plate) once the rain barrel fills up. I built a quasi-hugelkultur bed to direct the overflow to the hydrangea and loaded the outlet with unground biochar in order to slow the flow of water and hold it close to the plant.

There is enough of a dam behind the biochar to keep it from being washed away. Over time the biochar will break down into small particles and leach into the soil where it can do even more good.

I can see using biochar in a similar fashion on the uphill toe of a hugelkultur bed in order to reduce the tendency of the toe to erode where runoff sheetflow meets the mound. For highly steep slopes (> 25%), a deep swale on the uphill side of the hugelkultur mound containing some percentage of biochar could serve the same purpose.

Swales are an approved ESD practice in the Maryland Stormwater Manual. Hugelkultur beds aren't, but there may be enough latitude in the specs and descriptions that it would fit without requesting special approval. Beyond these practices, terracing is the next step for reducing runoff on steep slopes. For that, heavy equipment is needed, so it's better in most cases to think in terms of swales and mounds.

Filling the Niches

While our structural practices have barriers to innovation inherited from earlier versions of the Maryland Stormwater Design Manual that would impede adoption of Stockholm's approach to planting trees, the newer Environmental Site Design (ESD) practices appear to be more flexible. In Calvert County, additional flexibility is written into the stormwater ordinance that allows alternative treatment methods to be approved and used, as long as they meet the performance criteria of the Manual.

Photo by Donghee Bae (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Among the ESD practices that lend themselves to inclusion of biochar in their construction are green roofs, reinforced turf, micro-bioretention, rain gardens, landscape infiltration and infiltration berms. The specifications for these practices not only offer biochar niches, but call for the added  performance that biochar so uniquely provides. 

• Green Roofs: the planting media spec calls for "a soil-like mixture," the base gravel layer could also be mixed with biochar, allowing longer roots and even more drought tolerance.
• Reinforced Turf: the spec requires that the turfgrass inside the permeable interlocking concrete pavers be grown on sand or sandy loam, which doesn't exclude the use of biochar to make the grass more resilient against drought and vehicle traffic.
• Micro-bioretention, rain gardens, landscape infiltration and infiltration berms: the spec allows for amendments to the loamy sand or sandy loam to bring pH to within 5.5 to 7.0. Acidic soils in the Coastal Plain could use biochar to raise the pH. The spec also discusses breaking up compaction from construction at the bottom of the bioretention basin. This refracturing step would be a good time to mix biochar into that 12" zone.

These aren't the only ESD practices that offer niche opportunities for biochar. One that might use great quantities of char in gravel niches is Submerged Gravel Wetlands. We just need to identify and quantify the costs and benefits of using that much char. 

At my first U.S. Biochar Initiative symposium, +Chuck Hegberg confided to me that the sector that offered biochar its best shot was not agriculture, but water. That sounded right at the time, but even more so now.

Breakthrough!

Fragipan is one thing, but what about soils that are highly compacted from the top down? This is a problem common in urban landscaping, and not uncommon in parts of suburbia as well. Compaction makes it hard to start and grow plants, including trees, which serve many important functions, especially in cities. The solution is excavation and replacement of the compacted soil with a suitable growing medium.

Photo of urban landscaping by thanh.ha.dang (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In Stockholm, Sweden, one enlightened leader grasped the choice of replacement growing medium as an opportunity to introduce biochar into the mix whenever trees are being planted in civic landscaping projects. Biochar brings many advantages over commonly used peat moss, including its resistance to compaction. The biochar techniques used by Bjorn Embrén, head of landscaping for the city, were developed over decades and have shown stupendous results in the growth rate and survival of trees. The mixes they use include relatively little soil, but massive amounts of various grades of gravel and biochar. Tree roots find the open structure very accommodating.

Embrén's advice to cities who are interested in these techniques is "Dare to try it and you will be convinced!"  What we, in Maryland, must do first is make a few changes to the specifications for growing media in the Stormwater Design Manual, which dictates a loam/sand mix for infiltration devices. Adopting these techniques would make it possible to select from a wider range of vegetation in bioretention and filter devices, as biochar-based filters drain more quickly than those that rely primarily on soil.

At any rate, we shouldn't have to take the full development and test approach to begin adopting these designs - that part has already been done. All we need is a few delegations visiting Stockholm to see how to make them successfully. They can start by reading this manual. It is a bit old and doesn't use the term "biochar." The term they use instead, "structural soil," could have been key to adoption of the changes since it sounds so common sense and familiar.

The Grass is Always Greener when You Can Sell It

3-inch deep hardwood mulch extends 3-feet
beyond the dripline of our cherry tree

When my Watershed Stewards Academy instructor blithely offered that we should stop cutting our lawn grass for the sake of better nutrient and water retention I wasn't sure if she meant stop entirely or just let it grow longer than normal. I suspect the latter, which would also support the outside-the-box idea proposed by Gene Logsdon to grow fodder crops in lieu of turf. In my case, there is only a small area remaining on my property that would lend itself to grass. I went the conservation landscaping route a year ago and my mowing duties have been minimal since.

I've been thinking of planting grass on the strip remaining in front of my Kentucky fence. I've also been trying to come up with a good guerilla gardening idea for the right-of-way that fronts the forested lot under the power lines running on the far side of my street. Aside from the black raspberry plant I stuck there last week, this just might be the best way to go.

Growing long grass will push the limit on the HOA's rules, but if I'm going to use that grass for fodder, so would keeping a barnyard animal. Until I get to that level, I'm sure there will be someone in my circles who would appreciate the extra feed. It would also serve well as a compost activator.