The (blessed) rains (and snows) have come again to the North State and my garden rain gauge has measured 4.2 inches of rain this month. My rain barrels are full to overflowing, and this harvest gives me a small but happy sense of self-sufficiency. We’re only talking three barrels at this point, but still, their harvest provides me with a happiness along the lines of being able to build a campfire, make my own preserves or knit a sweater. (more…)

Since 1917 a plant nursery has lived on the site where Native Grounds Nursery & Garden Center in Mount Shasta City now thrives. For 91 years people of the Northstate have journeyed to this same pine-tree-sheltered spot on Mount Shasta Boulevard as you enter the small mountain town of Mount Shasta City to buy their plants, their soil, their seeds. Dating back to the original nursery, a hefty, gnarled old Wisteria vine winds its way through one of the tall pines and blooms its heart out every spring. “People stop and ask us what that purple flowering pine is,” say Native Grounds Nursery owners Lori Oliver and Terez Maniatis. A little stone house, once home to the original nursery’s founding family, sits just to the left of the Wisteria festooned pine stand and at the heart of the bustling Native Grounds site. The site is actually home to three businesses owned and run by Oliver and Maniatis: the year-round Mt. Shasta Florist, as well as the Native Grounds Nursery Garden Center and Native Grounds landscaping.

Oliver and Maniatis began their business life in the gardening world in 1993 with a small landscape design and build company also called Native Grounds. When the old Mt. Shasta Nursery & Florist came up for sale in the late 90s, the women jumped at the chance. “It has always been a dream of ours to own a nursery,” Terez told me. “We wanted to be able to grow a lot of our own plants to our own high, organic and sustainable standards - to be able to provide our clients with a wider selection of interesting plants - to model and keep educating our clients and customers about the benefits of organic and sustainable gardening products and practices. To be even more involved in the gardening cycle.”

The modeling of more sustainable practices started right when Oliver and Maniatis took over the nursery in 2000. They had to safely dispose of “truckloads” of older, toxic chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. At the same time, they brought a full-line of organic soil supplements and plant foods into the garden center. They moved their design/build and maintenance landscaping business onto the nursery grounds and renamed the nursery Native Grounds. While they also own and run the florist business on the same piece of property, they left its name as the Mt. Shasta Florist. Mt. Shasta Florist, which now carries many organic or sustainably grown cut flowers, and Native Grounds Landscaping remain open year-round, while Native Grounds Nursery & Garden Center closes from the end of October to the first of April.

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Jeff and Cheryl Armstrong founded Chico’s NutriLawn, a company specializing in lawn and shrub fertilization and recreational lake management, 20 years ago. They currently care for over 2000 lawns in the Chico area and they employ 18 people. In the last two years the Armstrongs have moved their business away from the chemically dependent mainstream and toward a more sustainable future through what they term “biological” lawn care. Photo above: Jeff Armstrong at a ground breaking ceremony for the Northern California Natural History Museum.

I first met Jeff Armstrong in person when I heard him speak on sustainable lawn care at an evening lecture hosted by Northern California Natural History Museum’s Museum Without Walls program last winter. Since hearing his talk, I have spent time with Jeff - driving with me as he made his rounds evaluating lawns, I have watched him brew compost tea, look at his brew under a microscope, and then watched him apply that compost tea to some of his lawns. We have talked about soil chemistry and mineral balances; preserving Northstate water quality, and whether it is possible to have a lawn as part of your landscape and still be a sustainable gardener. Ultimately, what is clear to me is that Jeff Armstrong is a man who likes a good lawn in the right place, likes healthy plants of all kinds, and has been positively re-born by his personal epiphany about two years ago that environmentally friendly and sustainable lawn care is the only future for him, his family, for the people who work under him and for their families, for the financial viability of his business and for the environment – local and global. Photo above: Jeff Armstrong applying foliar compost tea to a client’s lawn.

Jeff’s personal epiphany led him first to the library and the internet to research what other people were doing in the field of environmentally friendly lawn care and agriculture. He studied the work of Dr. Carey Reams, who developed and wrote widely on what is called the Brix Method of evaluating plant health and quality through analyzing plants’ sap, primarily for levels of carbohydrates. To simplistically summarize the Brix Method, the analyses of the sap of plants is used to determine what the soil in which they live might need in order to improve the health or nutritional value of the plant. Armstrong also studied the work of Dr. Elaine Ingham, who writes and teaches widely on another plant health approach model known as the Soil Food Web. Again simplistically, the Soil Food Web starts with any given soil’s micro-life, primarily looking for nutrient, mineral and organism levels. The Soil Food Web approach encourages a healthy soil biology with a good population of beneficial soil micro-organisms which in turn feed and protect the plants. Both the Brix Method and the Soil Food Web are used widely by growers of all kinds trying to increase the quality and quantity of their crops while never depleting their soil. In the course of his studies, Armstrong has also spent time visiting soil specialists, microbiologists, other sustainable lawn care companies, and mines producing leonardite, the primary source of humic acid a critical element for the health of any soil, among others. He has attended workshops and symposiums. He has thought long and hard and continues to do so. Photo above: a cross-section of a thick, green healthy and well cut lawn.

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Ken Chase is the owner and founder of Lifescapes, a full-service landscape company based in Chico, and working throughout Butte, Tehama and Glenn Counties. (www.lifescapes.us). Ken’s family has a background in rice farming around the Colusa and Woodland area and his wife Becky’s family was in the nursery business in Chico. Ken’s first paid residential landscape design job came in 1973 when his father-in-law saw Jim and Anna Mae Normoyle working in the front yard of their Butte Creek Country Club house. He stopped and said: you should hire my son-in-law Ken to help you out here. And they did. That very first design involved Twisted Japanese Black Pine and some beautiful large rocks in a serene arrangement.

Lifescapes, the company Ken Chase started from that first garden, has now grown into a well-established and well-respected award-winning design, build and maintenance company with 50 employees. The name in part refers to Ken’s strong belief in goodness perpetuating goodness and therefore in doing things thoughtfully and carefully – including (and in order of his personal priorities) being a husband and father, being a business owner with responsibilities to his employees as well as customers, and providing beautiful landscapes for people’s lives. Chase sees all of these facets: family, home, work, and environment as being critical to a person’s overall “Lifescape,” and thus the name of the business. Although Ken has worked on almost every kind of landscape you can think of – from a monumental fountain in front of a casino to planting three small trees in a suburban front yard - his “love of creativity – of proportion and scale and of mimicking the natural world” he observes while backpacking, hiking and fishing, often leads him back to interesting conifers – such as that early Twisted Japanese Black Pine.

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