The qualities of common garden sage are reflected in the fact that the plant is named after wisdom itself. It’s aromatic, culinary, medicinal and ornamental, growing in short perennial shrubs that bring in bees, butterflies and hummingbirds with its white or pink blossoms.
A lawn, with its grassroots, is tough. It lets us walk all over it in a way that sage would not. However, we don’t really need to walk all over every inch of the yards we cover in lawn. We don’t need to mow it all.
With that in mind, I’ve been working for the last couple of years on reducing the size of my lawn. I’ve put in a stretch of tall ornamental grass that never gets mowed, but is burned to the ground every spring. I’ve planted a group of spirea bushes. I’ve started an herb garden, based around a stone path and a line of lavender. Last autumn, I dug the beginnings of what will be a large bed of lily of the valley and mint, with a butterfly bush in the middle.
This spring, to add on to these earlier projects, I begin the sage project. Yesterday afternoon, for less than 3 dollars, I bought a pack of sage seeds – Salvia officinalis, heirloom. The envelope was from Seeds of Change, a company that promotes genetic diversity in horticulture.
By growing sage from seed, instead of from cuttings, I’m doing a little bit to see that the genetic diversity of the common sage is preserved. If I had gotten sage plants from a nursery, I’d most likely be getting clones – cuttings propagated from a single plant that had the features someone thought would make it nice for the garden. Often, the cuttings from just one plant can account for the majority of the sales of a species of plant in nurseries all across the country. At other times, seeds are the result of the carefully controlled interbreeding of hybrid strains, done in order to provoke vigor, but leaving gardeners with sterile plants themselves.
The sage from Seeds of Change are created through organic open pollination, meaning that the company has fields of sage that are never sprayed with pesticides or herbicides, so that bees, butterflies and hummingbirds can come along and feed from the nectar in the plants’ flowers, and pollinate the flowers in the process. Thus, every seed in that package of sage is genetically unique. Most of the seeds will probably grow nicely for me, but each one will be a little bit different.
I’ve planted 40 seeds inside, in small pots on a warm window sill, and have probably another 40 left for a second planting. I think I can reasonably expect to have 20 of those seeds grow successfully to a size where they can be transplanted. The trick will be keeping fungus from killing the seedlings while keeping them wet. Sunlight, with the tray of seedlings outside to be hardened off on warm afternoons, will be the best fungal disinfectant.
Those 20 sage plants will grow to just a few inches tall this year, but next year they’ll grow to be a good foot tall, with a spread of at least as much as that. In years to come, I can expect the plants to grow to perhaps a foot and a half in height, covering 3 or 4 square feet each very well. So, in a few years, I’ll have replaced between 50 and 75 square feet of grass with the sage that I have planted this morning, creating a nice sweep of good-smelling, good-looking plants that will require just a touch of weeding now and then, but never any gasoline-powered mowing. My plan is to keep the plants mulched with straw. That’s worked well in the portions of the herb bed that I already have established. Eventually, the shade produced by the sage plants themselves, combined with the natural mulch of their own fallen leaves combined with leaves fallen from nearby trees, ought to be sufficient.
Of course, there are often unexpected events in gardening, but I figure it’s worth a shot. I’ve only had to spend a few dollars on the sage project, and the time I would have spent mowing just a portion of lawn – if the weather were warm enough for the grass to grow yet.
Don’t forget sage tea. In the middle east this is شاي الميرامي . Shai meremeeya. I have a cup of it beside my computer right now, as I usually do in the winter.
I tried to grow this in the middle east and had a terrible time with aphids killing the plant. I am shameless with pesticides, I’m afraid, and even now am battling the spider mites on the jasmine with chemical warfare (and losing). With herbs though, I’m afraid to use anything and just hope the plant will grow faster than the bugs can eat it. I hear they count as protein.
You may want to check out this site. http://www.organiclawnsforamerica.com
It is a six step organic approach to treating your lawn safely. You get the expertise of a professional lawn care service, enjoy the satisfaction of doing the job yourself and enjoy the convenience of having the products delivered directly to your door.
It’s pretty cool!
I don’t think you get it, Owen. I don’t want to spend my time fawning over a big lawn full of grass that requires mowing every week. I want to get rid the lawn to the greatest extent possible…
…and you don’t need to spread corn gluten all over your lawn every spring. You just plain don’t. Nor do you need to go spread a “kelp booster” every autumn. That organiclawnsforamerica.com is selling green snake oil.
My lawn is already organic. I don’t spray it with anything. Spraying chemicals is not the problem – mowing the grass is the problem.
You’re absolutely right, jClifford, but I’m afraid this year my lawn is going to get a pre-emergence crab grass chemical product–the crab grass absolutely takes over–followed by Scott’s Turf-builder Plus. Maybe though during spring break this week I’ll go around with a shovel and piece of string between two sticks and move the brick mowing borders out another foot or so…
I’m also thinking the clothes line poles are a pain to mow around and need to be circled with day lilies, which just happen to be ready to divide again. Maybe fill in with annuals this year until they can grow some.
When it comes to mulch, there’s nothing like grass clippings. Straw doesn’t really decompose, but grass does. Eventually it becomes compost.
You might also think about “red basil”, an annual which is actually a deep purple color with ruffly leaves. Mine is self-seeding and a good ground cover, although it does sometimes come up very thick and requires a little transplanting human guidance.
I need a good plan for the shade area under the maple tree where all the water from the downspout collects in the winter. Maple has such shallow roots, it’s impossible to grow anything, including grass.
The trick with grass clippings is that it contains grass seed. The straw I get, when it does contain seed, contains annual grass seed that doesn’t cause me trouble later. Lawn grasses, however, are perennial and spreading nuisances. Straw does decompose where I live, but it stays around long enough to be a full year’s mulch.
I sure wish I could get OUR lawn to spread and go to seed. Only the crab grass does that–and the creeping charlie from the neighbor’s yard. I do mow every week, to try to get it to grow thicker, so maybe it doesn’t have time to seed. If you compost properly (in a large enough container, 4×4′ I think–there used to be a government bulletin about it) there is supposed to be enough heat generated from decomposing to kill all the seeds. I’ve only composted weeds without seeds myself, in a 1×2 or so pit and adding soil and water to the top for the bacteria needed for decomposition.
My mother uses grass clippings between the rows of veggies in the garden with great success. I think she puts it on pretty thick though, so even if something germinated, it wouldn’t have any light to grow or be able to push though an inch or two of matted stuff. Also she keeps it away from the stems, something about dampness or maybe slugs. If there are weeds that do grow, I think she just piles the grass clippings on thicker. At the end of the season I suppose it either gets tilled under or goes in the compost box.
I didn’t take over the mowing until late in the season last year, so all the clippings I had got piled on the garden after harvest with an inch of dirt thrown over it. Wonder how THAT will work out.
Try using Neem on the bugs; it is organic. I grow it in Belize and use on my organic garden.
… and does this Neem not harm, or at the very least drive away, the pollinators?