Earth Month dawns with a plethora of activities

Deciding that our planet deserves more than just a day, Charlotte decided last year to celebrate Earth Month rather than just Earth Day.

Although there had been a couple of events in the town’s month-long planet pageant this year, the official kickoff was this past Saturday, April 5, at the library.

Burlington’s arborist V.J. Comai threw out the first pitch with a talk and demonstration, with tree clipping tools in hand, of things he might do if booked to clean up and rejuvenate trees on the town green.

Because trees are so susceptible to both diseases and parasites, he emphasized the importance of sterilizing your tools between cuts to keep from spreading them.

Some things that are named as tree diseases are actually parasites. Over his 30 years of hiking in Bolton Valley, Comai said he has noticed a significant decline in stands of native beech trees there.

This decline is due to what is called beech bark disease, but it’s not a disease; it’s a very small insect.

If you look closely at the bark of a beech suffering from beech bark disease, you’ll see “very tiny white cotton-looking stuff on the bark, but it’s actually a scale insect,” Comai said. “It’s a tiny, little insect that has piercing mouth parts that punctures into the bark and is sucking out the plant juices.”

The cottony substance is actually coating over the insect, he said. After they have feed for a number of years, a fungus moves into the wound sites. After some years of decline, eventually affected beech trees will die.

Of course, this isn’t the only threat. For example, there’s beech leaf disease, which also isn’t actually a disease but a nematode that’s feeds on leaves and skeletonizes them.

Comai doesn’t think that beech leaf disease has made it to Vermont yet, but it’s moving this way. It has been found in Massachusetts.

Oak wilt disease has been making its way across the Midwest, moving through stands of oak trees. This disease is transferred through root systems, where root systems have grafted together.

“It’s one thing after another,” he said.

Because oak wilt disease is usually found in big stands of oak trees, it’s one of the reasons why arborists are recommending planting a large diversity of trees.

“We figured the other day, we’ve planted a little over 2,100 new trees in Burlington in the seven years that I’ve been there,” Comai said. “Gone are the days where we’re lining the streets with one species of tree. It’s all about diversity. We’re planting as many species as we can get away with.”

Although Charlotte is known for its heavy clay soil, the soil is nutrient rich. He recommends against using 10-10-10 fertilizer. One of those 10s refers to phosphorus. You don’t want that because, as we all should know, phosphorus is an issue in our waterways.

“It ends up in the lake and causes all kind of problems,” he said. And in his experience in testing soil, he hasn’t seen a phosphorus deficiency.

In fact, he doesn’t typically use any fertilizer on trees, unless there are visible signs of problems on the foliage, Comai said.

We are seeing more diseases and parasites attacking trees, he said. This is due to two things; one is the way that things are moving across the world, and “things are hitching a ride.” The other reason is our warming climate.

Comai believes that the warming climate is having an effect on our sugar maples. He is seeing 30- to 40-year-old sugar maples that “should just be hitting their stride, that seem to be struggling.” He worries about the long-term prognosis for sugar maples.

“We’re seeing pests and disease problems here that were never a problem before, because the insect might not have survived our winters, and now they are,” said Comai. “And it’s likely to be more in the future. So, it’s daunting.”

In the library after Comai’s tree presentation, Charlie Nardozzi followed with a talk on ecological gardening.

Nardozzi has worked for more than 30 years bringing expert gardening information to home gardeners through radio, television, talks, tours, on-line and in print. He hosts the award-winning  “All Things Gardening” on Vermont Public Radio.

He sees ecological gardening as the next wave in gardening. Starting around World War II, a system of gardening began that he calls chemical-based, where the solution to everything in the garden was seen as chemicals in fertilizers and pesticides.

In the 70s and 80s we were into organic gardening.

“I used to do garden coaching and go to people’s houses and they’d say, ‘Yeah, we’re organic gardeners. There’s our vegetable garden over there. We don’t spray anything or put any chemicals on it.’ But then you’d look in their shed, and they’d have weed killer for the lawn and sprays for their trees.”

So, organic gardening often tends to be segmented.

Now, he said, we are “moving into another whole realm, which is what I’m calling ecological gardening.”

In an ecological-garden yard, you don’t grow separate rows of beans, corn, peppers and a little distance away have flower beds. Instead, everything is integrated. Everything is grown together.

“And it all starts with the soil,” Nardozzi said.

Soil is a living entity, he said, not just an empty vessel of sand, silt, clay, water and air spaces “and a few earthworms here and there. There’s a lot going on in the soil.”

Ecological gardening protects the native fertility of soil and builds upon it by mimicking what’s happening with natural systems and enhancing those systems in the process.

He said that for the last 10-20 years, we have been really analyzing soil and finding that soil has more than just earthworms, ground beetles and larger organisms in it. There are also lots of microbes in soil — lots and lots of microbes.

“There are over 4 billion microbes in one tablespoon of healthy soil. These are fungi, bacteria, viruses, protozoa, all kinds of microbes,” Nardozzi said. “What they’re finding is that what’s happening is that these microbes create networks in the soil, and these networks help move water and nutrients around from the soil to plants, and even between plants, too.”

In ecological gardening, gardeners work to protect the interaction between plants and microbes.

In a forest after a big windstorm has blown down trees or after it’s been clearcut, there is always something on the soil. The goal is to mimic that in the garden by putting down organic material like hay mulch, chopped leaves, grass clippings or growing plants.

“You don’t want to have bare soil,” he said. “No-dig gardening is not new. It’s been around for generations, but it’s kind of having a new wave.”

No-dig gardening is very similar to no-till farming or lasagna gardening.

To kill grass in your garden, you put down several layers of newspaper and then cover that with mulch, grass clippings or kitchen scraps and then cover this with 4-6 inches of compost. If you layer things like this in your garden in the fall, he said, in the spring you can plant right into it because things have broken down enough that your plants will grow.

With this gardening technique, you will be mimicking what happens in nature, creating a fertile soil that still has access to the native soil, so the plant roots can get down into it.

Nardozzi recommends using a mix that is 60 percent topsoil and 40 percent compost as your top layer. He also strongly advocates for buying local compost so you will get local microbes.

With ecological gardening, the soil wins, which means the plants and the planet wins, he said.

Nardozzi used to think that plants take nutrients out of the soil, so you have to replace those nutrients because the plants wouldn’t release the nutrients until after they die. Now they realize, as the plants are growing, they’re releasing nutrients.

“It’s important to always have something growing on your soil, because the soil needs those plants as much as the plants need that soil,” Nardozzi said. “It also sets it up so that it’s less work, less maintenance for you, and you get healthier plants and healthier produce.”