Marianne Rzepka

The sky was full of fast-moving clouds – disappearing remnants of a morning’s rain – and temperatures were falling from a week of 90-degree weather into the 70s.

A breeze was the final touch to the perfect weather at Kirk Jones’ Good Scents Gardens in Ypsilanti Township.

“Being out here,” said Jones. “I like this.”

Good thing, because the flowers he grows there are his business. Jones uses the yarrow, zinnias, butterfly weed and agastache for bouquets he puts together and personally delivers to regular subscribers.

Jones explains it as a twist on the idea of community supported agriculture, or CSA, in which subscribers pay a set amount for one season of produce from a local farm. Instead of picking up a carton of vegetables once a week, Good Scents’ customers get a floral bouquet delivered to their home or business once a week.

Like a CSA, in which a subscriber’s take depends on what and how much the farmer raises over a season, Good Scents’ customers get what Jones chooses to plant and what comes up each year. No matter what, he said, they will get a bouquet of flowers each week over the 26-week season.

“If I have to buy commercial flowers, I’ll do it,” he said. “You’ll get your flowers.”

Jones, 52, was working on computer software in 2003 when he started Good Scents, selling bouquets through Downtown Home and Garden in Ann Arbor. (He has a B.A. in biology and another in computer science.)

He soon added deliveries to his Good Scents business, but worked both jobs for five years, dropping out of the computer world in 2008 to work and manage the bouquet business full time.

Now Jones has about 70 customers. About 40 of them get their bouquets delivered to their homes, and the rest at their workplaces.

Kirk Jones of Good Scents Gardens arranges bouquets of flowers in his garage, before delivering them to customers at their homes or offices. (Photos by the writer.)

Jones will pick the flowers a day or two before the bouquets are delivered, going out with buckets and wide-mouthed jars to gather whatever is ready. “If there’s anything blooming, I cut it,” he said.

At home – about four miles and two stop signs from the garden – Jones arranges the flowers in his garage, assembling the bouquets among the tools, the lawn mower and a bright yellow kayak hanging from the rafters.

Each of the bouquets is different, depending on which flowers are available. However, he thinks about what each customer has gotten in the past when he decides which bouquet goes to which customer.

So don’t expect the same thing every week, and don’t expect any of the dozens of bouquets he puts together every week to be identical.

Then, in the early hours of each Monday morning, he begins delivery to homes, then goes out again during business hours bringing bouquets to offices. For customers who prefer bouquets for the weekend, Jones also makes deliveries on Friday. Each week he also retrieves the empty glass jars that contained the previous week’s bouquet, which customers set out for him much like people used to leave their empty milk bottles for the milkman.

“He must do it in the middle of the night,” said Nancy Slezak, one of Jones’ customers who always finds a bouquet in the breezeway of her Ypsilanti home on Fridays from May to mid-October. And, she said, Jones has never missed a week.

Slezak started getting the flowers as a prize in a raffle several years ago. Now, it’s an extravagance she allows herself even though she just recently retired from her teaching job in the Ann Arbor schools.

But the bouquets are beautiful, she said. Sometimes they are pink, purple and cream. Sometimes they come in bright yellows and oranges.

She especially likes the yellow sunflowers and the orange lilies, and she likes how the bouquets are arranged. “He puts thought into it,” Slezak said. “He doesn’t just stick things in a jar.”

Sometimes she breaks up the big bouquets up into smaller sprays to spread around the house or give them away. Sometimes a bouquet will become a birthday gift to give a friend.

Slezak knows the flowers are an extravagance, but “as long as I can afford it, I will get it,” she said.

Jones charges $14 per bouquet, a total of $364 if you get a whole seasons’ worth of blooms – though Jones said he’ll consider something shorter.

Kirk Jones at the large plot he rents from Dawn Farm, where he grows flowers for his business, Good Scents Gardens.

Jones was always growing flowers. He had a plot with the community gardening group Project Grow, and over time the flowers pushed out the vegetables.

He’s still on the Project Grow board, but finds he doesn’t really have time to tend another garden.

Though his interest in flowers turned into his job, Jones said it’s still fun to grow and arrange the bouquets. He doesn’t even mind the early morning deliveries, though he admits that the least likable part of his business is dealing with traffic when he delivers during the day.

During his delivery season, Jones spends more of his time tending the business than the flowers.

He figures he spends about 15 hours a week out at the land he rents from Dawn Farm on Stony Creek Road. His plot is out behind the parking lot, within sight of the donkeys and llamas, just next to the turkeys waiting for Thanksgiving. If the wind is right, you’ll get the full smelly effect of life on a farm.

On the day I stopped by, the gusty wind was easily outmaneuvered, and it was a treat to watch the bees, the butterflies and even the giant orb spider while morning clouds cleared out of a blue, blue sky. A wall of goldenrod barricaded the rows of beds on the far side.

Jones has about 100 beds in the garden, each about 100 square feet with either flowers in bloom, flowers waiting to bloom or flowers finished blooming.

The daffodils, of course, have already disappeared for the year, and the short lilac bushes are nothing but puckered leaves. But there are beds busy with colorful zinnia and dahlias, along with pale pink lisianthus, a light green nicotiana and Frosty Morn sedum.

Jones also grows greenery for his bouquets, including boxwood and red cedar, but not firs, which make every bouquet look like Christmas, he said.

The mix means the color and life of the garden changes as the summer moves on. This can make for a less-than-neat plot, but Jones doesn’t care. It’s the difference between gardening for a business and gardening for yourself.

“I have to remember this is not my yard, and it’s not my garden,” he said. “It’s never going to be perfect.”

For information about Good Scents Gardens, including a gallery of bouquets, is on the firm’s website.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Flowers soon to be transformed into bouquets for Good Scents Gardens' customers.

Marianne Rzepka

Take a walk through Sunset Brooks Nature Area in Ann Arbor, and you’ll see the next generation of trees that in the past decade disappeared from the streets of the city.

Ash trees are sprouting up in nature areas and woods in and around the city, the successors of the green, white and black ashes we watched die in droves from an invasion of the emerald ash borer. Some of the new trees sprouted from ash trees, but larger saplings were probably just too small for the borers to bother with when the first invasive wave came through and destroyed the larger trees.

“For sure we’ve seen them in a lot of the natural areas,” says Kerry Gray, the city’s urban forestry and natural resources planning coordinator.

The Ann Arbor forestry crew spent at least three years doing nothing but removing ash trees, says Gray. Crews cut down an estimated 7,000 dead ashes along city streets and another 3,000 or so in parks and some nature areas, she says, at a cost of at least $2 million.

Many homeowners tried to save the trees in their own yards, to no avail. An estimated 30 million ash trees in southeast Michigan alone were wiped out.

The emerald ash borer lays its eggs in the bark of ash trees, and the larva proceed to eat the pulpy tissue just below the bark, in the layer that provides the pathway for water and nutrients to reach the branches and leaves of the tree. Soon, the trails of the borer larva effectively girdle the tree, killing it.

David Cappaert in the Sunset Brooks Nature Area. (Photo by the writer.)

David Cappaert spent about seven years working on the emerald ash borer invasion – his home is just a quick walk from the Sunset Brooks Nature Area, which is located on the city’s north side, north of Sunset and south of M-14. Though he now works for a commercial greenhouse, every day he can see a testament to his work on his garage door: the silhouette of a parasitic wasp that bears his name, Atanycolus cappaerti.

The wasp, using its long ovipositor, drills through ash bark to lay an egg near an emerald ash borer larva. When the eggs hatch, they feed on the beetle larva, says Cappaert.

Whether the parasitic wasp exerts some control over the emerald ash borer will be “interesting,” he says. “I don’t predict it will keep (the beetle) under control, but you never know.”

Cappaert got involved in the emerald ash borer saga when the insect was first identified and several counties, including Washtenaw, were placed under quarantine – meaning that no ash wood could be taken outside their borders.

Michigan State University researchers set up shop at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens to conduct research on the insect, and they signed up Cappaert, an entomologist, to do some of the work.

What is now Atanycolus cappaerti showed up in ash trees at Seven Lakes State Park near Holly, Cappaert says.

It’s not that common to have a newly identified insect named for you, says Deborah McCullough, professor of forest entomology at MSU and the go-to researcher on the emerald ash borer. But Cappaert is the reason that the parasitic wasp was finally identified. “He leaned on the taxonomy guy to get it identified,” she says. And now that researchers know what they’re looking for, she says, “we’re finding this parasitic wasp in a number of places now.”

Cappaert says that besides Atanycolus cappaerti, two other likely killers of the emerald ash borer have been found in Ohio, and there could be more.

Atanycolus cappaerti, a parasitic wasp that feeds on emerald ash borer larva, is named after David Cappaert, an Ann Arbor entomologist. (Photo courtesy of David Cappaert.)

Will parasitic wasps someday wipe out the emerald ash borers? Cappaert doesn’t think so. Probably the emerald ash borer will continue to be in the environment, since there are always new ash trees around. But it may reach equilibrium either because there are not a lot of ash trees to eat or because of enemies such as Atanycolus cappaerti.

The destructive emerald ash borer invasion first appeared in southeastern Michigan, and studies have found traces of the pest dating back to the early to mid-1990s. Now the borer has moved on, spreading to 14 states and Canada, with its farthest reach so far in Minnesota, New York and Kentucky, as well as Quebec.

Though I had hoped that every last emerald ash borer had moved on from this area, that’s not the case, says McCullough. Research by McCullough and her students show there still are emerald ash borers in the neighborhood, but studies aren’t sure how many. The insects “probably will never be gone completely – at least not for a long, long time,” she says.

And though Ann Arbor might not have many more ash trees to lose, the emerald ash beetle is not far away. The beetle population is very much at or near its peak in the Lansing and Grand Rapids areas, says McCullough.

One positive result of the years of researching the emerald ash borer is that there now is a protective treatment for ash. Emamectin benzoate, marketed under the name TREE-äge (pronounce triage), must be applied by professionals. The root-injected treatment was developed only two years ago but seems to be nearly 100% effective for at least that long, says McCullough.

I remember writing stories about the emerald ash borer invasion for The Ann Arbor News, and one of the most interesting things about the story was how scientists responded to the insect’s invasion. It was known primarily in Asia and somehow was imported into this country, probably on packing material.

At first, there was little information on the bug – only a taxonomic description and a few paragraphs in Chinese (the emerald ash borer is native to China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan and eastern Russia).

Researchers had to find out the bug’s life cycle – when the borers fed, mated, laid eggs and emerged from the trees. Did the emerald ash borer overwinter – that is, did they stay alive through the winter? (Some larva did.) Would the insects lay eggs in any trees besides ash? (They don’t seem to.) Why does the emerald ash borer exist with some native ash trees in China? (Good question.)

At the outset, researchers brought in pieces of infected ash bark to identify emerald ash borer eggs. But at that point, they didn’t even know what the eggs looked like, and the ash bark has “all kinds of weird stuff,” McCullough said. “Eventually, we figured it out,” she says.

Leaves of an ash tree.

Scientists also figured out how to build effective traps. They found that emerald ash borers were attracted to purple and to stressed trees. They measured volatile gases given off by the ashes. They girdled trees and counted bugs.

“We did some fun stuff,” says McCullough. She does admit that there were some not-so-fun times – stomping through poison ivy, sweating through top summer temperatures and slapping bugs.

After all these years, McCullough says she’d still like to know how the beetles choose which ash tree to infect. “Why do beetles fly past really good host trees?” she asks.

Another problem is how to tell if the emerald ash borers have already infected an ash. It can take a year or longer for an infected tree to show signs of dying, and it’s not so easy to see the emerald ash borers flying around. “They’re up in the tops of the trees,” says McCullough. “They’re fast, and they’re little.”

Researchers are still working on the problem, she says. “We want to model how the population spreads, so we can predict where the beetle is,” says McCullough. In the past, she says, “we were always trying to catch up with the beetle.”

Though any new findings are too late to save the thousands of dead ash trees removed in Ann Arbor, the story’s not done. McCullough and others studying the problem are fielding calls from places that are only now seeing the first signs of the destructive insects.

And Gray is keeping an eye on it from Ann Arbor. “We’re kind of all waiting to see what will happen,” she says.

A Second Chance for Would-Be Conservation Stewards

In my April column, I wrote about the Michigan Conservation Stewardship Program in Washtenaw County, a 40-hour course on environmental issues for the public. The program, hosted by the county’s Extension Service, lines up a variety of speakers over two months to introduce ecological issues through talks on wetlands, forests, grasslands and other natural resources.

The course was planned for the spring but postponed until this fall because of a shortfall of enrollees. The course is now scheduled to start on Saturday, Sept. 11, with an introductory class lasting a full day. After that, classes will meet every Wednesday from 6-9 p.m. beginning Sept. 15 and ending Nov. 3, with two additional all-day meetings on Saturday Oct. 9 and 23.

Sometimes participants will be up to their waders in a stream or foraging for plants along a railroad track. Everyone will have to do 40 hours of conservation-related volunteer work before graduating. Last year, projects included surveying parkland and installing a native plants garden.

The course costs $250, which is due by Sept. 2. You can get an application and brochure online or at the extension office, 705 N. Zeeb Road. If you have any questions, call Bob Bricault at 734-997-1678.

If you’re interested in knowing more about how the environment works, this is the course to take.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

If you like going touring other people’s gardens – especially because someone else is doing all the work – you’ll love Hidden Lake Gardens.

They’ve got a guy who mows the lawns full time, along with a couple of part-timers. They’ve got people on their staff who can move a full-grown tree in less than half an hour. They’ve got volunteers who help weed and dig and plant, all so you can take the time to literally stop and smell whatever flower is currently blooming.

There are acres of displays, including an extensive collection of dwarf and rare conifers, a hillside of hostas, and the requisite annuals and perennials, along with a tidy conservatory and miles of trails. If you bring your lunch (yes, there are picnic areas) and some bug spray, you’ll be able to spend the day looking at plants, listening to the birds and appreciating the swaths of lawn that someone else has to mow.

“Our mission is the enjoyment and education of the public,” says Steve Courtney, who manages the site for Michigan State University, “and enjoyment is first.”

Courtney recently gave me a guided tour of the grounds. Located west of Tipton, in Lenawee County, Hidden Lake Gardens is at least a 40-minute drive from Ann Arbor (if you can avoid any backups at the construction on M-52, south of I-94). But if it were any closer, it wouldn’t be the quiet hideaway I found when I went to visit last week.

Hidden Lake Gardens is run by Michigan State University, the state’s center of all plant knowledge. Why it is so far from MSU’s East Lansing campus makes sense only when you find out that that’s where Harry Fee chose to live more than 80 years ago.

Fee’s family made its money in utilities, and in 1926 Fee took his share, intending to retire to the countryside. He wanted property with a lake, and Hidden Lake fit the bill. It’s a natural kettle lake, the result of glacial formations eons ago, with a depth of about 65 feet. (Fee had his sailboat sunk in the lake for some reason unknown, and Courtney says it’s down there still.)

The property is located in the Irish Hills, so it includes some interesting geological features, including two other kettle lakes and a kame – a moundlike structure of loose soils left by a glacier.

Fee’s first plan was to become a gentleman farmer. That didn’t work out, so he decided to go into nursery plants. When the Depression hit in the ’30s, Fee decided he wouldn’t compete with local nurseries, and he’d just grow plants.

He was no landscaper. There is no design or plan for this site, which Fee said was simply developed as he went along. So, you still will find nursery stock, like the two hillsides of vinca – properly labeled – as you drive along.

Fee’s idea was to set up a series of “scenic pictures” for people to appreciate. He put in a road that went around the lake and up onto Juniper Hill. You can still drive up there today and see the wildflowers, the junipers and conifers along the lower edge.

In 1945, Fee donated the property to what was then Michigan State College, though he was still a figure in the development of the property until his death in 1954. Over the years, MSU has added to the property, and today’s Hidden Lake Gardens include 755 acres.

An estimated 50,000 people visit the grounds every year, but when I was out there on a weekday, I had the place pretty much to myself. It is the perfect place to hide away.

There’s the conservatory with a display of bonsai just outside. A colorful demonstration garden is filled with perennials. There are collections of ginkos and maples. (But don’t look for the ash collection, which nowadays is only a collection of dead tree trunks, courtesy of the emerald ash borer invasion.)

If your Aunt Minnie loves gardens, but is in no shape to hike into the back 40, it’s not a problem. You can drive her to the top of Juniper Hill to see the view. The road passes right next to the hosta garden, where she’ll only have to walk a few steps.

Hosta fans probably have already seen the garden at Hidden Lake Gardens, which was set up along one edge of Hidden Lake on the site of Fee’s original rock garden.

Hostas at Hidden Lake Gardens.

The Michigan Hosta Society planted the garden and takes care of the 800 or so cultivars, says Courtney. The thing to appreciate is not some rare hosta – there are none, he says – but to see the variety of plants, including some from hybridizers.

And don’t miss the Harper Collection of Dwarf and Rare Conifers, which Courtney rates as the best in North America. (If he’s pushed, he admits it’s the best if you count South America, too.)

In 2012, the collection is set to host the national meeting of the American Conifer Society. The only problem is finding the closest hotel to put them in, says Courtney, who is on the society’s board. It might not be the worst thing in the world for them to camp out there.

Even if you’re not an expert in conifer taxonomy, you can sit in a tidy gazebo and smell the junipers in the collection, which includes the towering snake spruce and the weeping Japanese larch. There is the Cedar of Lebanon, which shouldn’t even be growing in this climate, says Courtney. “The first five years, it lost every one of its needles,” he says. Now, it’s flourishing.

There are trees that light up the landscape, and some unusual specimens – genetic oddities that look like two different trees growing as one.

The collection was started in the 1980s with trees from Justin “Chub” Harper, who donated his conifer collection when it got too big for his backyard in East Moline, Ind.

Harper, who died in March 2009, was the kind of collector whose interest jumped from roses to day lilies. Then he found conifers, filling his own yard and that of his neighbors. In 1980, MSU staff headed over to Harper’s house and loaded three tractor trailers with 351 trees to start the collection.

Some of those original conifers are still in the collection, but trees are added and subtracted to the collection all the time, says Courtney. Twice a year, decisions are made on whether to keep a specimen or “send it for a short trip on the chipper truck,” he says.

Maybe that’s why those conifers look so good – even lush, if you can use that word to describe a pine tree. But if you start to wonder why your arborvitae can’t look this good, consider the fact that every autumn the Hidden Lake Gardens staff put up an electrified fence around the conifer collection and around the trees on Juniper Hill to thwart the deer looking for a breakfast, lunch or dinner.

The namesake of Hidden Lake Gardens – a view of the lake.

And consider that Hidden Lake Gardens runs with a staff (including the mowers) of six full-timers and about 25 seasonal workers, as well as a number of volunteers who run the gift shop and do some of the gardening. The gardens’ budget is about $1 million, Courtney says, and that includes endowments for the hosta and conifer collections. The rest comes from donations, whatever comes in with the $3 entry fee and things like copyright payments for two kinds of trees. MSU is on the hook for Courtney’s salary and infrastructure, such as taking care of the roadways.

The gardens might not be too close to East Lansing, but it is not forgotten. When MSU horticulturists find they’ve got too many trees around, they might move them over to Hidden Lake Gardens. They’re also working on some new shrub specimens and on cultivating some of the trees with interesting characteristics that are already on the grounds.

And there is other research going on. In the past, a drug company used trees on the ground in their study of the breast cancer drug Taxol, says Courtney. Currently, traps have been set out to see if a new insect pest, the sirex woodwasp, has made it into the area.

Though last week was the first time I’d been to Hidden Lake Gardens, I’ve resolved to come back in the spring to see the corridor of crabapples and lilacs blooming. In the fall, I want to see the colors on the sweet gum and the tupelo trees by the conservatory. And there are a number of sassafras and maples – Mr. Fee had one grove of sugar maples, now towering over everything else, specifically planted in the woods.

And winter will be the time to really see those conifers again.

For Something Completely Different: Dead Beetle Giveaway

The only people who don’t hate Japanese beetles are people who have never had them around.

The iridescent green-and-brown bugs look kind of interesting – until you see hundreds, or even thousands of them, on the plants in your yard doing the two things they have evolved to do: Eating the leaves and, let’s say, reproducing.

A Japanese beetle. (Photo courtesy of Michigan State University)

Here’s your chance for revenge.

On Wednesday, July 28, Michigan State University will be giving away bags of frozen Japanese beetles, an estimated 15-20% of them infected with the protozoan pathogen Ovavesicula popilliae. You don’t have to pronounce it, you just have to know that MSU entomologist David Smitley has been studying it for years and found it effective in cutting the Japanese beetle population.

The frozen bug giveaway will be from 10 a.m.-noon at MSU’s Tollgate Research and Extension Farm near Novi. At 10 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 11 a.m., there will be talks on the Japanese beetle project, then everyone will get a bag with about 50 of the freshly frozen bugs. You get to take them home and put them in your own yard to help establish the pathogen in the soil. (Go online for more details about this event.)

The pathogen doesn’t kill Japanese beetles; it just weakens them so that, for example, an infected female will not lay eggs.

Brought here from Connecticut, the pathogen infects only Japanese beetles, not people, pets or other insects, Smitely said. His biggest worry is that he’ll have more than the expected number of Japanese beetle haters.

About two years ago, he had a similar giveaway on a golf course south of Detroit and ran out of the infected insects. The people who went away bug-less were not happy, Smitley said when I talked to him a few days ago. “They were mad,” he said. “They were really mad.”

So get in line early. I plan to be there too, to get me some of those frozen beetles. Once again proving that revenge – even on bugs – is best served cold.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

There’s a lot to learn from growing a garden, and a lot of Ann Arbor’s schools are finding that out.

Gone are the days when plant studies meant each student sprouted a lone bean seed in a Styrofoam cup. Now students as young as 5 are planting vegetable gardens and watching them grow.

“It’s, like, cool to see things grow,” says Yonatan Hodish, 13, a seventh grader at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack.

I visited garden projects at three Ann Arbor schools – Ann Arbor Open, Bryant Elementary and Burns Park Elementary – to see how tending a garden is helping kids learn. Though much of the growing season is ahead of us, students were able to harvest some early crops before leaving on Friday for summer vacation. Volunteers will tend the gardens over the summer, but kids will return in the fall to see how the foundation they laid this spring has paid off in edibles.

The garden at Ann Arbor Open is in a former sand lot located between Miller Road and a tennis court, along the now-closed driveway and not far from the school’s butterfly garden and a native plants area.

The sand provided a good base for the garden, says teacher Aina Bernier, but it needed a lot of compost and manure before students could start planting there.

Seventh- and eighth-grade students work in the garden as an elective, and in addition to planting, weeding and harvesting, they do experiments, such as planting old seeds to see how they’ll grow, or treating plants differently – less or more water, less or more sun – to see how they’ll do.

Griffin Roy, 13, likes gardening at school. “Having a garden at home is kinda like fun,” he says, “but with friends at school it’s much better, in my opinion, because you can socialize.”

Amani Imran, left, and Rina Ishida, both 7, stayed behind to finish up weeding their class's garden plot at Bryant Elementary School. (Photos by the writer.)

At Bryant Elementary School, students literally had a long row to hoe this semester.

First a strip of ground was plowed up in a large field up a small hill near the school. Then students set to work picking the rocks out of the bed and laying out 17 plots, each about 2 yards square, one for each class.

But the gardens still weren’t ready for planting, because “Mrs. K wasn’t happy with the soil,” says Bryant second-grade teacher Jeanne Kitzmann, making fun of her own insistence. Students had to put in topsoil and composted manure to get the soil in shape before seeds and seedlings could go in the ground.

Kitzmann, who grew up on an Iowa farm, had her second grade sow radishes, lettuce, watermelon and sunflowers. They had a radish harvest several weeks ago and a salad party before the end of the academic year Friday. Not bad for students of 7 or 8 years.

“One of the best things about working in the garden is that it fit into every grade level,” says Kitzmann. Kindergartners were learning about soil, first graders about plants and weather, second graders about plants.

And when Kitzmann’s class was picking rocks out of the soil, they were studying geology in the classroom. When they were measuring out the plots, they were using the metric measurements they were learning in school.

Second-grader Anthony Walker, 7, fills buckets with wood chips to spread on the walkways at the Burns Park Elementary garden.

Students at Burns Park Elementary School started their own garden this year, too. By the end of the school year, kindergarteners were tending sunflowers and morning glories, hoping the two rows will intertwine into a green arch by the time classes start again in the fall. When this year’s first graders return as second graders, they should be able to see how the three types of beans they planted have climbed their three stick-and-twine teepees that were set up this spring.

In the past few weeks, the third graders planted popcorn, which was just starting to poke out of the ground when the academic year ended. Fourth graders have two large beds with pumpkins and honeydew melons.

And since they won’t be back in September – they’re moving on to middle school – the fifth graders worked on the lettuce and radishes, which were harvested before the end of the school year.

Every Thursday, students could spend their recess working in the garden. Students worked on their own class projects or helped with other beds, including tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, flowers and a row of raspberries.

Parent Lynda Norton estimates that up to 150 students regularly showed up on Thursdays, spending time recording the temperature, looking for bugs and pulling weeds, instead of playing on the nearby playground equipment.

Like many gardens, the 5,000-square-foot garden is much bigger than what was originally planned, says Norton. The idea was to start small, maybe a third of what is there now. “We had a plan,” she says, “then it morphed.”

Students laid out the beds, hauled wood chips and compost and made signs for the rows of vegetables. But parents have gotten just as involved.

They did the heavy lifting – amending the hard clay with compost, building raised beds and some of the structures, such as the strawberry bed. Parents volunteered their time helping the students in the garden, and there have been a number of donations from families, including some stepping stones dropped off near the fence recently.

And now that summer is here, there is a waiting list of families who are volunteering to do watering, weeding and harvesting at the garden.

Though the garden isn’t even a year old, it looks established, with a fence built with the help of a grant from the Ann Arbor Public Schools Educational Foundation, and a neat shed, purchased with a grant from Lowe’s, that shelters gardening tools and garden diaries of some of the students.

Last week, a number of students in the garden during recess headed for the watering cans or spray bottles. Those with spray bottles spent some time watering fellow students instead of the plants. But others made sure their flowers and vegetables got some hydrating.

Thirteen-year-old Alex Schmidt, a seventh grader, shows off the lettuce he picked in the garden at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack on Thursday.

At Ann Arbor Open, watering is just as popular an activity in the garden – last week, that meant making some mud to squish around in – but students really liked seeing how much everything grew over the final weeks of school, especially when they returned after a week away and found both their vegetables and the weeds green and lush.

Not everything grew so well. Early in the spring, 13-year-old Madeline Qi and her friends planted radish seeds packaged about 15 years ago. As might be expected, they didn’t grow very well. Even the radishes that grew from the newer seeds had some problems. “Our poor radishes,” Qi says. “We kept pulling them up to look at them.”

But she has hopes for the pumpkin vine, so she’ll be back over the summer to check out its progress. “I have never grown a pumpkin before,” she says, “so I want to see how it does.”

Bernier says students are encouraged to come out and see how the garden is doing this summer, and she’ll email everyone if something is ready to be harvested.

Eighth grader Marley Beaver, 14, was out on the last day of school helping with the lettuce harvest. She’ll be going to Skyline High School next year and the worst thing, she says, is that “they don’t have a garden there.”

On the last day in the garden last week, the sun was shining and there was a breeze when the students came out to harvest lettuce for end-of-the-school year salads.

You know the answer to this question already, but it was posed to 12-year-old Fiona Powell: In the last days before school is out for the summer, would you rather be sitting inside or out in the garden?

“Definitely,” she says, “out here.”

Seventh-graders Ben Van Dijk, left, and Sam Lewis, both 13, harvested lettuce in the garden at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack at the end of the school year.

From left to right: Taylor Hanback, 7; Shyanne Wilson, 7; Daniel Dotson, 8, second-grade teacher Cheryl Ervin; Aboulaye Sylla, 8; Michael Davis, 7; Omar Mohammad, 7; and Ezra Conway, 7, take a close look at the lettuce in their garden plot at Bryant Elementary School.

Third-grader Quentavia Keene, 9, waters the flowers in the Burns Park Elementary garden.

Third-graders Claire Bott, left, and Callie Hastie, both 9, pick peas in the Burns Park Elementary garden.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

Tomm Becker hasn’t been afraid of a spring frost killing the lettuce, tomatoes, cilantro, kale and chard he’s growing at Sunseed Farm.

That’s because he’s growing them under the plastic cover of a 30-by-96-foot hoop house, which since last fall has been a source of vegetables through most of the winter.

Hoop houses let the sun in, and the solar-powered heat warms up the soil and keeps tender plants from freezing in early and late frosts. When a strong wind flapped the hoop house cover at Sunseed Farm last week, it blew through the openings where the plastic had been hoisted to provide ventilation. The day before had brought cold temperatures and heavy rains that flooded the nearby rye field, so the side flaps had been down to keep the heat in.

“The great thing (about hoop houses) is you can control everything,” Becker says.

Hoop houses aren’t just for farms – a backyard hoop house can give anyone a head start on the season. Then even into the winter, you can grow some cold weather crops – like lettuce – or store root crops, like carrots.

But like anything else in your garden – ponds, chickens, a compost pile – a hoop house is a project that never stops.

Small Farms, Year-Round Local Produce

The Sunseed Farm hoop house is working so well for Tomm and Trilby Becker that they’ll be getting another one in about a week at their farm off Joy Road, just northwest of Ann Arbor. In time, they want to have about five hoop houses to grow a variety of vegetables throughout most of the year for members of their CSA (community-supported agriculture) program.

The Beckers’ hoop house, along with several others in the area, were built with microloans from Repasts, Present and Future, an organization run by Lisa Gottlieb and Jeff McCabe to support local farmers. [Much of their funding comes from donations raised during their weekly breakfast salon – Friday Mornings @ SELMA – held at their home on Ann Arbor's west side and featuring local chefs and locally produced food.]

With hoop houses, says Gottlieb, a local farm can produce food for most of the year. “For our climate, hoop houses are really something terrific,” she says.

Hoop houses allow you to control, to some degree, the microclimate within the structure. When the sun is shining and the temperature is going up, you can open the vents to cool down the heat that can easily climb to more than 100 degrees, even in the winter. And when the heat increases, the humidity also builds up. After a while, the plants just can’t breathe, Tomm Becker says.

Of course, there are things that are beyond anyone’s control. During the winter, clouds and cold – along with the shorter daylight hours – will keep pretty much anything from growing. “In late December and January,” says Becker, “everything is pretty much in stasis.”

The trick is to plan ahead, planting crops late in the past season that can be picked in the dead of winter, he says.

It’s also tough to control what gets into that hoop house, which can be a warm and comfortable place for greens-eating critters – like mice and voles – during the winter. And some insects, like aphids, will find a warm, moist hoop house their idea of heaven. Moisture also is a wonderful medium for growing fungi, which is not good unless you’re raising mushrooms.

Backyard Hoop Houses

If you’re interested in simply feeding yourself and your family, you might be able to get by with a 1,500-square-foot hoop house, says John Hochstetler, who has four hoop houses that provide about 6,000 square feet of space for growing vegetables and flowers for the market. It can even be pretty cheap, he says, if you save your own seeds.

The first thing to do is figure out what you want in a hoop house. “If you don’t know what you’re doing,” says Hochstetler, “it’s going to be a big mess.”

Get some good materials, including heavy duty plastic and a framework that will stand up. Hochstetler’s first hoop house was built with plans he found online, and PVC piping from a big box store. The first heavy snowfall smashed his work flatter than a bug. Lesson learned, Hochstetler now builds his hoop houses with steel frames.

If you’d like to start with something a little smaller, Ann Arbor architect Dave Sebolt has designed a hoop house measuring roughly 12-by-12 feet that costs about $200 to build. And it’s got a shape that will keep the snow load from building up.

“The one I put together has a little roundedness on the top,” Sebolt says. “It gets into a 40-degree slope, more a parabolic arch. If the angle is 45 degrees or steeper, the snow will slide off.” (Click here to download a copy of his plans.)

He also found that snow piled around the base of the structure might cause the ribs to collapse at the ground level. His solution is to simply clear that snow away. It might also help to mulch along the base or use foam to keep out the critters.

Sebolt also suggests that hoop house builders stretch the side plastic down into the ground, to better anchor the structure against any winds that might tip it over or fly it off to Oz.

There are advantages to larger hoop houses. Smaller structures can overheat quickly. Larger ones also can overheat, but it will take longer. By the same token, larger structures will take longer to cool, which keeps frost off from the plants more effectively.

No matter what the size or the season, you’ll have to keep an eye on the temperature. Sebolt recommends using heat pistons that expand with the heat to open ventilation windows and contract when the temperature cools, so that the windows close.

The heat/cold, moisture and sun principles are the same whether you’ve got a commercial-size hoop house, a portable cold frame that fits over a single bed or something as simple as a glass bell jar or the bottom of a plastic milk carton.

I don’t have anything like a hoop house in my yard, because the space is just too small. But I might be able to use something like a cold frame, which is just a wooden box with a cover that lets in light and keeps frost away from transplants.

They can be small, portable and much cheaper than a full-fledged hoop house. You could put a 5-by-10-foot cold frame together for as little as $25 if you use recycled materials – using an old shower door for the top of the cold frame, for example. Ann Arbor’s ReUse Center or Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore are great places to look for what you need.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

Gardeners spend a lot of time working in their own world – moving the perennials, planning their walkways or weeding their vegetables.

But for some gardeners, the Michigan Conservation Stewards program has ushered in a larger world outside their backyard landscapes.

“My garden is something I do for me, but the stewardship program is what I do for others and for the larger environment,” says Mary Duff-Silverman, who went through the course last year.

The stewardship program introduces participants to the plants, animals and forces of nature that defy outsiders’ attempts to impose order. Instead, the steward-in-training has to understand the rules of that larger environment, with its invasive plants, water aeration, ground water and other natural processes.

This spring is only the second year the course has been offered in Washtenaw County. It’s a series of 11 classes that range over a number of ecological topics, including the ecosystems of wetlands, forests, lakes and streams.

This year’s program begins Saturday, April 10. If you’re interested, get more information online – you can also download the three-page application form from that website.

It will cost you $250 for the 11-week program, but some scholarships are available. Applications were due April 1, but late applications will be considered until the classes begin, said Robert Bricault, who is overseeing the stewardship program as part of his job as education coordinator at the Washtenaw County office of the Michigan State University Extension service. You can reach him at 734-997-1678.

Members from last year's Michigan Conservation Stewards class, on a field trip to Matthaei Botanical Gardens looking for bugs in Fleming Creek. (Photo courtesy of Bob Bricault.)

The program begins with an introductory session that runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but participants usually meet on Thursdays from 6 to 9 p.m. – with all-day field trips on Saturday, May 22 and Saturday, June 5.

The program requires that each student present a final project, something a bit disconcerting at first, said Duff-Silverman. Then, she thought of Dicken Woods, just four blocks from her house. Seven years ago, the 10-acre parcel was the center of a struggle between neighborhood residents and developers. In the end, the Ann Arbor City Council sided with neighbors who wanted to turn the neglected land into a park instead of a housing development or branch library.

Now you can walk through the area on a wood-chipped, figure-eight path. Some of the invasive buckthorn, honeysuckle and oriental bittersweet have been removed, and faded marker flags show where new trees – that look like twigs stuck in the ground – have been planted.

After talking to city parks staff last year, Duff-Silverman planted an entry garden of perennials near the entrance off Dicken Drive.

But that was just the beginning, as she became more involved with the site. Duff-Silverman now knows every foot of the nature area. She can point to the old well on the property, show where a house originally stood and explain why the vernal pond near Dicken Elementary School isn’t good for ducks (it dries up in the summer).

Mary Duff-Silverman at Dicken Woods Nature Area in Ann Arbor.

This year, she’s looking to establish plants like skunk cabbage in the wet, mucky areas, and she’s thinking about how the site could be used for educational projects.

“I was an armchair ecologist,” said Duff-Silverman. “The stewardship program got me out pulling on waders.”

As part of the stewardship course, participants attend talks by instructors from the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, state natural resources and conservation organizations – people with a wide experience you might not ordinarily encounter. On its field trips, the group sees the effects of prescribed burns or learns how to gauge the health of an ecosystem from the insects in a stream..

Some of the 18 members of that first class ended up counting frogs or working on signs or setting out trails. “It not about the extension service, because we don’t have a lot of volunteer efforts going on in conservation,” said Bricault. “But we have a lot of contacts with people who are doing conservation.”

The program even has an old hand like Bricault excited. Last year, he was helping with a tree count at Scio Woods Preserve on Scio Church Road, when he came across a wild growth of paw paws.

That tree inventory was part of a project done by two other members of the stewardship program: Judy Parsons and Dennis Purcell, who chose to do a survey of the preserve, which isn’t far from their home.

The couple have been out at the preserve this year, removing invasive species and planning for other improvements. “People see us working out here and thank us,” said Parsons.

The county parks department has done some improvements on the site, which was purchased only a year ago. Now there is a parking lot and an information kiosk near where a vacant house used to stand.

On one recent day, you still could see signs of the old homestead in a spray of snowdrops in a circle of an old garden bed. Over to one side was a pile of honeysuckle, hacked off by Parsons and Purcell, waiting for a county disposal crew. On the other side was a growing pile of wood chips, remnants of Norway maples on the property, waiting to be spread along the trail.

Judy Parsons and Dennis Purcell at Scio Woods Preserve. (Photo by the writer.)

On a walk through the preserve last week, spring peepers and wood frogs were calling in the background. Trout lilies and spring beauties were poking through the dead oak and hickory leaves on the ground.

Purcell’s eye was quick to find the first green shoots of invasive garlic mustard, which he pulled out and put in his pocket for later disposal. He’s disgruntled at the invasive plants that have spread mostly at the edges of the property, but heartened by the cache of native blue flag iris in one of the boggy wetland areas.

And he’s thinking of improvements, such as placing benches in the woods, especially at a bluff overlooking what he and Parsons have dubbed Dead Turtle Pond.

Asked if he’s developed a sense of ownership over the property since he first took a look at it more than a year ago, Purcell brightens like a light bulb. “I guess I do,” he said, smiling.

After all their work, you’d think the two had finished with their part of the project, but Parsons takes a look at the area just behind the parking lot and surveys the invasive plants that have taken root in the area that was probably once someone’s backyard.

“We’ve still got about 10 years of honeysuckle removal to do,” she said.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

Friends don’t ask me how I feel about February. They’ve already heard me say that there’s a reason why the worst month in the year – cold, icy, gray – is the shortest month. And when it’s over, it’s still winter.

So when the first of March rolled around this year – coming in like a lamb, instead of a lion – I was left blinking in the sun and looking like I just crawled out of hibernation. There was sun and steadily rising temperatures, so sue me if I think spring is already here.

But though the temperatures are already in the 50s, these weeks can be the winter of a gardener’s discontent.

We want to get out there, we want to start digging, but we know it’s just too darn early. It’s even too early to set up the grow lights to start my tomato plants from seed. Some stoics will tell you it’s even too early to walk on your lawn!

I know there are things I could be doing to get ready for the growing season. I could be planning my vegetable garden, getting serious about the seed catalogs that are piled up around my reading chair, or sharpening my garden spade.

But these are things I could have done anytime over the past winter months – and I didn’t. Spring fever may get me going on these tasks, but this is the time of year when an array of classes, talks and projects are more apt to get my attention.

If you’d like to ease into the growing season, you can start simply by calling up Dial-A-Garden at 734-971-1129. There are a number of recordings that change monthly, and you can see a list of the topics at online. This month, there are recordings on crabgrass control, testing leftover seeds, starting vegetable seeds and spraying fruit trees.

You also can learn about forcing spring-blooming branches. Some branches – like forsythia and quince – will bloom more easily than others, says Madolyn Kaminski, who oversees the Dial-A-Garden programs. You simply cut some long whips from those bushes and put them in vases in your house. Every day, change the water and snip a little bit off the bottom. In about two weeks, you’ll get some early spring blooms. The closer it is to the time the bush would naturally bloom, the faster you’ll get blooms on your cuttings.

If that’s too much fun for you, it’s also time to spray your rose bushes with sulfur lime, says Kaminski. She swears that you’ll be surprised at how it will reduce the amount of black spot.

Kaminski also is in charge of the Herb Study Group that meets once a month at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens, 1800 N. Dixboro Road. Members next meet on April 7 to discuss starting herbs from seed. The meeting will start at 7 p.m. in Room 125. If you’re interested, just show up.

“Four to six weeks before they go in the ground is the best time to start your herbs,” says Kaminski, who is successfully raising a 6-foot-tall bay leaf tree at home.

If you’d like to get out of the house, this time of year is good for pruning – just ask the crews in my neighborhood hacking at the trees crossing the power lines. You can prune your own shrubs and trees, and now that there are no leaves to get in the way, you’ll have a clear view to clip out any crossing branches or trim lopsided edges.

Normally, I would recommend stopping by any of the volunteer work days usually held on the second Saturday of the month at UM’s Nichols Arboretum and the third Saturday of the month at Matthaei.

But not this month. This month, there’s too much mud, so volunteer days for both places have been canceled for March, says volunteer coordinator Tara Griffith. If you still have time in April, you can make sure the volunteer days are a go by calling her at 734-647-8528. It’s just for the morning, and you can learn a lot by lopping out invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle with professionals.

Book cover for "Easy Edibles" by Sheri Repucci.

If that’s too much action for you, settle down with a copy of “Easy Edibles: A Beginner’s Guide to Growing Organic Food in the Lower Great Lakes Region” by Sheri Repucci, who used to be in charge of garden activities and coordination at Project Grow.

The book is aimed at beginners because they are often “overwhelmed” by details when they talk to seasoned gardeners, says Repucci. But the book’s also good for those seasoned gardeners who appreciate a compendium of common sense basics. Besides chapters on setting up a vegetable garden and choosing plants, there are profiles of a number of easily grown vegetables with typical height, sun and soil needs, planting depths and harvest times.

The book – issued by Ann Arbor publishing house Alice Greene & Co. – can be found at Border’s, Downtown Home and Garden, Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room and Hollander’s, as well as at Matthaei and Zingerman’s Roadhouse. Or check the publisher’s website.

I enjoyed the “Challenging Vegetables” section, which included some of the crops – corn, potatoes, eggplant – I grew last summer without much thought. That conforms to my planting philosophy of “just stick it in the ground and see what comes up.”

Repucci, who now lives in Toronto where she’s studying the effects of healing gardens at York University, has more reasoned advice, warning any gardening wanna-be not to mistakenly jumpstart the growing season. “The spring can fool you,” she told me in a recent phone call. “Even experts can be surprised at how fast the weather can turn.”

Too early and an unexpected freeze will turn those tomatoes into limp sticks. Even if the weather isn’t too cold, planting in soil that isn’t warm enough will set your tender plants back, Repucci says.

Just what I don’t need to hear – although it’s something that I know. So instead of going out and urging my daffodils and tulips to hurry up and bloom, I’ll take another piece of Repucci’s advice.

She says her research into the therapeutic qualities of gardens tells her that you don’t have to dig or prune or plant things in the ground to get the benefits.

“You just have to look at it,” Repucci says. “What makes a garden therapeutic is looking at it.”

Guess I’ll just pull a chair up to my kitchen window and watch the rest of the snow melt while I plan a new raised bed.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

Five years ago, Alex Young spent his days trying to get Zingerman’s Roadhouse up and open. A long-time chef, Young signed on as manager and chef there, moving his family to a farm outside Dexter.

But on his one day off each week, he picked up a shovel and started his garden. Every week, he dug one row, laboriously turning up deep layers of soil, trading physical labor for the stress of embarking on the new business venture.

That spring, Young wore out the heavy sole of his boot from the edge of the shovel and had a dozen rows in his 75-by-75-foot garden.

“It was a stress reducer,” he says now, and he still sees the calming and even meditative side of growing food as that garden sprouted into Cornman Farms, a business that still is growing.

As a chef, Young worked all over the country before moving with his family just down the road from the farm where his wife, Kelly, grew up. Now, from the deck of his home just outside Dexter, he can look out at acres of vegetables, as well as at the new barn, used mostly for storage and for spring plant propagation, and the hoop house, both built in the past few years.

In his life as a chef, Young, who has been nominated for a prestigious James Beard Award three years in a row, oversees operations at the Roadhouse, one of 10 businesses under the Zingerman’s umbrella. The restaurant emphasizes American food, and while fresh produce, cheese, meat and other items come from all over the United States, more and more appear from Young’s own growing farm.

He’s already had the first of four heirloom dinners – the next, on Aug. 25, will feature a tomato tasting, the last, on Nov. 11, will emphasize pickled produce, and Cornman Farms just happens to have rows of pickling cucumbers growing right now.

Though he knows he can’t really supply all the Roadhouse’s needs with his small operation, Young is hoping to maybe provide half of it.

At the farm now, you’ll find all the basics – garlic, beans, cucumbers, lettuce, squash – growing in the sandy loam soil, but basic to the farm are the native American crops: tomatoes, potatoes and corn.

Alex Young, chef of Zingerman's Roadhouse, in a hoop house at his farm near Dexter, where he grows heirloom tomatoes. He's wearing a Cornman Farms T-shirt. (Photo by the writer.)

There are eight or nine varieties of tomatoes in the fields at Cornman Farms, but heirloom tomatoes dominate the 92-by-30-foot hoop house. The structure, built two years ago, has a shape akin to World War II Quonset huts, but instead of a covering of metal plates, it’s covered in plastic, which catches and holds the warmth from even a weak spring sun to give plants an early start.

In the case of Cornman Farms’ hoop house, young plants also are helped by a radiant heating system installed in the ground. To regulate the warmth in the hot months, the lower part of the plastic wall can be raised to provide a little cooling cross-ventilation. Young would like to add solar heat, and maybe expand by adding two more hoop houses.

This season, the hoop house incubated a number of tomato varieties, including Mortgage Lifter, Brandywine and Valencia – some of them so tall they needed to be topped off.

Mark Baerwolf, the farm’s full-time manager, says that’s a good thing at this time of year. It will take at least two months for any new fruit to ripen – maybe more, given the cooler and shorter days of fall – so when you see newly blooming flowers in August, you can be pretty sure they’re not going to produce any ripe tomatoes. Pruning them just lets the plant direct its energy to the tomatoes that are already on the vine.

Overall, the farm produced about 18,000 pounds of tomatoes last year, and is planning on about 23,000 pounds this year, Young estimates.

Heirloom potatoes are planted in a nearby field, arranged according to when they’re ready to be harvested, from the early Red Gold and knobby Irish Cobbler, through the Green Mountain, Bintje and German Butterball, to the Kennebec and Russell Burbank varieties.

The potatoes currently take up an acre lent to Cornman Farms by Young’s neighbor. Next year, Young plans to grow about four acres of potatoes on part of the 100 acres he rents from another farmer nearby. His goal is to have at least 10 acres of potatos, his estimate of what the Roadhouse needs each year.

“It will take a few years to get there,” says Young, “but I will.”

A farm named Cornman has got to be growing some corn, and there is a yellow variety, Henry Moore, growing along with winter wheat and a red bean variety “Merlot,” on part of a rented field a few miles away.

But outside his house, Young is trying out a patch of hard-to-get red Trentino flint corn, an heirloom variety from Italy, hoping the deer won’t bust in for a taste before it’s ready.

There haven’t been any total crop failures, says Baerwolf, though there have been some vegetables that were disappointments. Both the sweet potatoes and the Moon and Stars watermelons grew all right, but they needed a longer season to be at their best, he says. That just means that they should be started early in the season in the farm’s hoop house to give them lots of time to ripen.

Baerwolf was a line cook at the Roadhouse when he started spending half his time each week working at the farm three summers ago.

“Everything I was growing was showing up (at the Roadhouse),” he says.

The number of hours he spent at the farm grew, and now he’s there full-time, along with two seasonal employees. Once a month, a group of Roadhouse employees come out to do a little work and get lunch on the deck. Sometimes, says Young, some of his good customers come out to the farm and help with jobs like gathering potatoes.

Cornman Farms isn’t a certified organic operation, a designation that requires a long process, but it’s the kind of place where they use compost tea – made by steeping a bag of compost in water before spraying the mixture onto the plant – instead of chemical fertilizers.

They’ll even use food scraps from the Roadhouse to make their compost, says Baerwolf.

Young sees his farm as an alternative to the food industry’s agricultural methods, where human hands may never even touch crops growing in the field. It’s an idea that seems to be catching on, with recent books and movies that show the often unappetizing ways much of our food is now produced.

Still, when it’s cheaper to buy a $3.99 burger from MacDonald’s than the Roadhouse’s macaroni and cheese for  $13.50, what’s a better deal?

Young will say it’s the mac and cheese – which is made with handmade cheddar and pasta from Italy – because though you might pay less money for industrial ground beef at a fast food outlet, you’re not looking at the true costs, such as the toll on your health, on the welfare of animals or on the agricultural environment.

While he was at the Washtenaw County 4-H Youth Show last month, Young was taken by a bumper sticker that read, “No farms, no food,” though he might change it a little to reflect his support of many smaller farms over massive agricultural conglomerates.

“I’m thinking there should be another one: ‘More Farms, Better Food,’” he says.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile. 

Marianne Rzepka

Cecilia Sauter’s rain garden solved the problem of a wet and mushy side yard at her Ann Arbor home and may have helped her neighbor with water in her house’s foundation. Greg Marker, of Ypsilanti, uses a rain garden to hold runoff from three sump pumps and his house’s gutters, which resolves some water problems with his neighbors who live down the hill from him.

I just wanted to get rid of some lawn.

The thread that ties the three of us together is that we got help from Washtenaw County’s Office of Water Resources Commissioner (formerly the Drain Commissioner), which provided us with rain garden designs and helped us buy the native plants called for by the plans. The county’s program started in 2005, and so far it’s helped set up about 50 rain gardens. 

No, a rain garden doesn’t grow precipitation. It takes care of water running off roofs and driveways, or pooling where no one wants water to pool. Basically, you dig a shallow bed  – 3 inches deep with a flat bottom – and direct the rain into the bed where it can soak into the soil instead of running into the storm drains or making a mess in your basement.

With a rain garden, the water soaks slowly into the soil and ultimately into the ground water, instead of cascading down the storm drains and into local streams and rivers, taking things like fertilizers with it. There’s a bit of extra incentive for Ann Arbor residents: For homes with a rain garden, the city utilities department will cut your water and sewer bill by $2.80 every quarter.

Sauter’s rain garden accommodates the precipitation that falls on her roof and about half her next-door neighbor’s roof. The downspouts were routed underground and now empty into the rain garden that sprawls across the length of her back yard.

Cecelia Sauter and her dog Snowy in the the back yard of her northeast Ann Arbor home, where she has put in a rain garden.

The rain garden is constructed so that water fills up one end of the bed, then spills into the other half. That happened the first year, Sauter said, but this year, even with all the rain that fell this spring, the first half of the garden has pretty much taken care of all the water.

Now her side yard is dry, said Sauter, and another neighbor, who used to have a wet foundation in the rainy seasons, now seems to have no problems. As an added plus, there are plants blooming in her yard all season, from wild geraniums to the Joe Pye weed. ”It is awesome,” said Sauter.

Marker, a civil engineer, knows something about water, and he had an idea of how to channel the rain that would run off his property and onto his downhill neighbors. The pear-shaped rain garden he installed several years ago handles runoff from his entire roof, as well as the water from three sump pumps that carry water from the footing drains under his basement.

Before the rain garden, all that water “left me with a soggy yard,” said Marker. In the winter, “the sump water would come out (of the ground) two or three houses down and ice up.” Now the water goes into the rain garden and soaks more slowly into the soil.

There was a slight problem with the rain garden in the winter, when the ground froze. Though the outside temperature was below freezing, the water pumped up from underground was a steady 58 degrees, Marker said, and it just ran out over the frozen garden.

But Marker set up a system of valves, and each winter he redirects the sump water from the rain garden to a pipe that takes it to the storm drain that runs under the nearby street. Each spring, he directs the sump water back in the garden, where it warms the soil and gives an early boost to the plants there.

The county rain garden project is run by Harry Sheehan, an environmental manager at Water Resources, who came to my house last summer to start the process of building my rain garden. His office provided a landscape designer, Janis Das of InSite Design, who came up with the shape of the garden and a selection of native plants. (This year, the county will use Master Gardeners to design the gardens.)

Sheehan also helped me lay out the design on my lawn and had an intern with a Rototiller available to help rip up the grass. I also got a discount on the plants, which were purchased through the county. The design was meant to capture the water coming off half my roof and from one of my neighbor’s downspouts. The water normally runs along one side of the driveway, and now that water should run through a rock-filled trench into the rain garden.

I was responsible for digging the bed, which had to be at least 3 inches deep and flat. Flat. That’s what had me standing in the yard, raking the bed like one of those little Zen gardens. I would rake, then measure, then rake, then move the stakes used to measure the depth and rake again.

It gave me a chance to get caught up with my neighbors, who all wanted to know if I was installing a pond  – ”A koi pond?” asked one neighbor. It’s planted now, and if Sauter and Marker are to be believed, the sweetspire, anemones and geraniums will be handling quite a bit of water that would normally run into the street’s storm drain.

The plants in the rain garden have to be able to take the hot, sunny conditions of high summer in my front yard, which faces southwest. But they also have to handle a rush of rain water that can come anytime from April to October.

I’ve mulched it all, but I expect there will be some small touches – such as adding a pile of rocks for contast and making the garden look a little less like a volcano (a neighbor’s description – I didn’t see it until he said it). I’ve also got to get out there and pull up the many maple seedlings that have recently sprung up.

After the last few heavy rains, I think the only change I’ll make is to enlarge the trench that leads into the rain garden bed. 

The county has posted more information online, including a video tour of several local rain gardens installed under the program, with a list of plants and the garden designs. This year, Sheehan plans on helping another 10 rain gardens become reality. If you’re interested, email him at sheehanh@ewashtenaw.org to see if you can get on his list. 

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

We have had a whole bunch of the stuff that brings May flowers in the past few weeks, so a lot of gardeners have spent time indoors, hoping that the necessary showers won’t wash out the tender tulips, daffodils, crocuses and other spring-blooming bulbs that have already started to bloom.

Some would-be gardeners wish they had some showy spring bulbs to worry about. But though they missed the first wave of fall-planted bulbs, they shouldn’t worry, because they can plant some summer-blooming
flora now.

These bulbs, tubers and corms give a great show when they bloom. The downside is they can’t survive our tough winters. That’s why we have to put them in the ground in the spring. Some bulbs need some cold weather before they’ll bloom, and that’s why Miami doesn’t have a tulip festival. But summer-bloomers like gladiolas, dahlia, calla and canna just can’t take that kind of refrigeration. Leave them in the ground through the winter and you’ll most likely get squat the next summer.

If you’ve got lots of time in the fall, dig them up, store them in a cool basement and plant them again the next year. Or just treat them like annuals, planting them, along with the pansies and impatiens, in the spring.

Barb and Tom Kraft usually plant some canna in pots on their deck. They don’t have a lot of other spring-blooming bulbs, because they’re often too busy selling them just when they should be planting them.

Tom works for Vandenberg Bulb Inc., a family-based business in Howell that operates as a distributor for plants and garden supplies. Besides the spring-blooming bulbs, the company also offers perennials such as hostas, bleeding heart and astilbe. It’s a wholesaler, but you can find its products in stores in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

Tom  started working for the now-defunct Neilsen’s greenhouses when he was still in high school, went to horticultural school in Chicago and was a grower for several greenhouses before he started his job with Vandenberg.

Barb and Tom Kraft

You can find Barb at Downtown Home & Garden in downtown Ann Arbor. Local gardeners know Downtown Home & Garden as the place where they can just pull into the former feed mill’s 100-year-old building to load up bags of compost, mulch or fertilizer. Just don’t run over any of those other pesky customers.

(Full disclosure: The Krafts live about two blocks from me, near Argo Park. Their two sons, now students at Michigan Technical University, delivered my Ann Arbor News years ago.)

Except for some miniature gladiolas, Tom couldn’t think of a spring-planted bulb that could reliably stay in the ground through the winter. If we have a mild winter or the bulbs are in a protected spot where the ground won’t freeze, you might see a gladiola or calla come up again the next spring.

Otherwise, if you want to see them again, you’ll have to dig up the bulb, corm or tuber in the fall, then store them somewhere they won’t freeze, sprout or grow mold until spring comes around again. Even now, you could wait a little before planting. The ground’s not likely to freeze again this year, but the bulbs won’t really start growing until the ground gets a little warmer, said Tom. And the longer they sit in the ground, the more likely that rot will set in.

If you want, you can start these bulbs off in pots and plant them when it gets warmer out, Tom said. Gladiolas and cannas are pretty easy to grow and can cost from $1.99 to $4.99 for fancier varieties, such as the striped Bengal Tiger canna. At  that price, you won’t go broke if you forget to water them in the heat of the summer or passing deer eat them to the ground.

Dahlias are a bit pricier and more fragile, Barb said. “You have to spend time with them.”

Elephant ear, a caladium, might be tempting for new gardeners, but Tom says it is a bit of a challenge. It grows quite slowly and needs a lot of warm temperatures to look like the plants you see in the advertising.

You won’t find that kind of climate in Michigan, and that’s why the annual caladium festival is in Lake Placid, Florida. 

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.