Boy Scout founder and “Be Prepared” motto creator Robert Baden-Powell, when once asked “Prepared for what?” replied, “Why for any old thing”.  Thank goodness Eagles Scout Troop #542 practiced this motto and had the foresight to help Upper Dublin High School be prepared for the stormwater produced by Hurricane Isaias by designing, sourcing and installing a vegetated swale on their campus.

Over a year ago, UDHS rising Senior Griffin Johnson, while studying Environmental Science, conceptualized a vegetated swale project which merged his landscape and environmental interests with his need for an upcoming Eagle Scout project.  He proposed the project to his High School Principal, and luckily for Griffin, the school administrators were all on board and the project could move forward.

The vegetated swale provides UDHS with a tool to better manage stormwater runoff from the adjacent parking lot and roadway, in a more appealing way.  With advancements in landscape design and soil blends, stormwater management systems are both functional and beautiful.

The project began as they all should – by understanding the existing soil condition, and how it may need to be adapted to ensure a successful installation.

In this case, the soil just needed to be amended with compost to increase the organic matter content and provide a great balance of moisture holding capacity for dryer conditions while also creating a more porous soil structure to allow for drainage during heavy rain events.

The plants chosen for this project are native to this area, suitable for both wet and dry conditions, and are pollinator-friendly to help support the local ecosystem.  Over 1000 plants and shrubs were installed in the vegetated swale.

Boy Scouts, along with their friends and families, worked hard to complete this project.  In addition to providing the design and installation labor, Griffin was able to secure over $6000 of plants, materials, mulch and compost donated by garden centers and suppliers in the region.

As shown above, the project functioned as designed to trap stormwater in place and provide slow percolation into the soil.  Without a stormwater system, water will continue to run, eroding soil and carrying sediment and pollutants into fragile watersheds.

This project allows UDHS to be prepared for upcoming rain events, but there was something no one was prepared for, and that was the delays and precautions required due to the pandemic.  When the school shut down in March, no one was allowed on campus.  Before work could commence, a Covid Plan of safety guidelines mandated by the Boy Scout Counsel and Troop#542 had to be developed and enacted.

When asked for his key takeaways, Griffin is thankful for the opportunity to be part of this project.  He feels it has helped him become a better leader, enabled him to meet new people, and be able to leave a beneficial lasting mark on Upper Dublin High School.

Troop #542 would like to give a big shout out to the companies that donated time and materials for this project:

Allied Landscape Supply

Clearview Nursery

Coles Nurseries

Laurel Valley Soils

New Moon Nursery

North Creek Nurseries

Primex Garden Center

Think Green

Tuckahoe Nurseries

Typically, we plan our vegetable gardens around companion planting guides similar to the one below which shows which food crops cohabitate well with each other. 

For example, we know that tomatoes don’t play nice with cucumbers, but are bff’s with basil and spinach.

But did you know that tomatoes also love being grown with various flowers, including allium, marigolds, calendula, and nasturtiums?
Let’s take a look at all the ways nasturtiums help vegetables like tomatoes to grow big and healthy.

1. Flowers attract pollinators and beneficial insects which help with vegetable production and controlling pests.
Pollinating insects like butterflies and bees are crucial for vegetable development. With squash, for instance, you can have lush vines and leaves topped off with stellar large flowers, but if those flowers aren’t pollinated, no squash will develop.
According to horticulturist Erica Shaffer, adding flowers and herbs to your garden repels some pests, too. “While I have yet to see a nose on any insect,” Shaffer said, “Mixing flowers and herbs up with vegetables confuses critters. Different smells camouflage each other and fewer pests are drawn to your garden.”

2.  Blooming plants are often used as a ground cover or space filler.  Nasturtiums are fast growing flowering plants can provide a “carpet” to shade soil and out-compete weeds.

3.  Flowers can act as a sacrificial “trap crop” to lure pests and make it easier to remove them. Nasturtiums attract butterflies and moths that attack cabbage family crops, distracting them from your more valuable vegetables.

4.  Flowering plants produce chemicals to repel insects from attacking a plant’s leaves, flowers, roots and fruit. Nasturtiums and some varieties of marigolds can be used to fumigate the soil as a natural deterrent to harmful root knot nematodes. Their strongly scented flowers and foliage can also help repel insects above the ground.

5.  Soil fertility can be improved by incorporating plants that can fix atmospheric nitrogen. Legume plants such as beans, peas and clover have root nodules that harbor Rhizobium bacteria that help to fix nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with plants. The symbiont plants will have nitrogen for their own use and for the benefit of the neighboring non nitrogen-fixing plants.

If you have already planted your veggie garden, it’s not too late to add some flowers!  And don’t forget to show off your garden and use the #VforVictoryGardens hashtag!

Record numbers of families are going back to their roots by growing their own food.  The renewed interest in urban farming during the Covid-19 virus is likened to the victory gardens movement during food rationing in the 1940’s.  In addition to providing locally grown nutritious food, gardening provides a number of other benefits.  “When we interact with green, outdoor environments we tend to breathe more deeply and at a more regulated pace,” Monique Allen, author of Stop Landscaping, Start Lifescaping, tells us. Ultimately, this “oxygenates the blood and releases endorphins, which are natural painkillers and mood enhancers.”

Whether you are a new gardener or an OG, we invite you to join the #VforVictoryGardens community of new generation victory gardeners.  We, along with our partners, The US Composting Council and Rodale Institute, have bushels of resources to help you create your best garden ever!

Show off your progress and connect with fellow gardeners by posting photos of you in your garden with the V for Victory sign to your social media accounts with the hashtag #VforVictoryGardens.

Rodale Institute will be selecting a random gardener who uses the hashtag and gifting them with a whole bunch of great items.  And of course, don’t forget that a great garden begins with healthy soil.  Make sure you amend your soil with compost or use a compost-rich Garden Soil when filling your raised beds.  You can find local suppliers which carry Laurel Valley Soils Premium Compost, Enriched Topsoil and Garden Soil here.

Here are some interesting and helpful gardening resources for you:

Close your eyes for a moment.  Take a deep breath, and as you inhale, you smell the rich, earthy scent of soil in your garden.  When you exhale, you imagine kneeling down to the ground, grabbing a handful of soil, and feeling the warm sun on your face.

You’ve been here before, right?  This memory brings a smile to your face, because you can remember how happy being in your garden makes you feel.

Did you know that exposure to Mycobacterium vaccae, present in healthy soil, actually altered the brain chemistry of mice in the same way that anti-depressants do?  This friendly bacteria activates serotonin, releasing neutrons in the brain (otherwise known as the happiness hormone). Working in the garden, or even taking a walk in the woods can provide enough of a dose of Mycobacterium vaccae to uplift you.

The next time you feel anxious, a little digging or a walk down a nature path may help calm you down and improve your mood.  And remember, the healthier your soil is, the healthier your soil bacteria will be, because soil is a living system, just like our bodies.

Now is the perfect time to get digging and to prepare your gardens for the planting season.  And it is an even better time to take advantage of all that natural soil serotonin!

If you arrived home to find a ruptured pipe which had gushed 1246 gallons of water on to your floor (enough to fill 31 bathtubs), you would certainly be alarmed about the damage it caused.

But what if that 1246 gallons of water gushed off the impervious surfaces on your property (the roof, driveway, patio, etc.) and into your landscape, your neighbor’s yard or out onto the street?  You may not worry about it if your neighborhood has not historically been at risk for flooding.

More often than not, however, we DO need to worry about it.  Below is a great illustration which shows where rain travels in a typical landscape.  Most stormwater that falls onto our properties is not typically absorbed where it falls.  In fact, the rushing water from many houses in the neighborhood will combine, creating an escalated risk of surface flash flooding. This problem often becomes magnified as the stormwater travels further down through the watershed, carrying all types of pollutants (fertilizer, motor oil, animal waste, etc.) onto our streets and into our sewers, creeks, rivers, bays and ultimately our oceans.

It is important for all of us, as professionals in the green industry and homeowners, to understand how we can help reduce runoff by slowing stormwater down and capturing it in place so it can soak in naturally where the soil can filter and clean the water.

Almost every day when we turn on the news, we are seeing firsthand how catastrophic flooding is destroying neighborhoods, farmland and industry in places that have never traditionally been at flood risk, right here in the USA!  Excessive rainfall is definitely alarming and is a new reality that needs to be accounted for. While climate change is a huge part of the problem, another contributing factor is the rapidly expanding amount of impervious surfaces spurred by economic growth.  These two things, when combined, create chaos.  While mitigating climate change will take time, there are easy and quickly implementable solutions we can do right now to counteract the displacement effects of impervious surfaces.

At Laurel Valley Soils we have traditionally considered our work to be strictly horticultural related, providing soils and compost for farms and landscapes.  Now however, we find ourselves on the front lines of stormwater management.   Many of our new products are designed to mitigate storm water runoff, such as our rain garden soil, Bio-retention soil and structural soils.

However, we cannot forget the benefits that our cornerstone product – compost – provides.  Did you know that for every 1% increase in organic matter, a cubic foot of soil holds an additional 1.5 quarts of water?

This new field of stormwater management really excites us, and we were thrilled to kick off 2020 by attending a landscaping/grounds maintenance conference which for the first time offered sessions focused on stormwater management techniques.

For homeowners and contractors who want to learn more, Penn State Extension has a wealth of information available to help you confidently offer products and services that improve stormwater management for your customers, employers, municipalities, or your own properties.

Below are links to a few short videos provided by Penn State Extension about what is stormwater   https://extension.psu.edu/what-is-stormwater and why we should care about it: https://extension.psu.edu/why-should-i-care-about-stormwater.

Want to see some great examples of beautiful and creative stormwater management projects?  Here you go!  https://greenbuildingunited.org/uploads/attachments/cjhhv57qy0ylrnku0m701qg4i-exceeding-intent.pdf

Of course, you can always reach out to Jake with any questions!

Can you imagine what your 1/2 acre lawn would look like with 80,000 people per year walking through it or stopping to lay out a blanket for a picnic and some sun?  With that dense foot traffic, your soil would be compacted and cracked like the Liberty Bell!

This is what many popular public landscapes, such as the Independence National Historic Park (INHP) in Philadelphia, PA, endure every year. As you can imagine, it is a huge challenge to maintain healthy turf, as there is no down-time for rest and recovery to properly address the damage and stress created from the heavy use.  Most often maintenance treatments like weed killer, grass seed and fertilizer are applied in an ever losing battle to just keep turf alive.  We call this the “life support approach”, feeding the plant from the “top down” where one is just buying time until inevitably a major renovation is required. This is when Laurel Valley Soils gets the chance to address the landscape properly from the “bottom up” and fix the soil profile by amending it with compost.  Whereas healthy soil equals healthy turf, this approach is more like curing a disease vs just treating the symptoms.

Independence National Historic Park, located in the heart of Center City Philadelphia, is a 15.5 acre park which famously houses the Liberty Bell and attracts approximately 5 million visitors per year.  As the birthplace of our nation, it is imperative for the INHP grounds to be beautiful and welcoming to the people who travel there from all around the world.

Brightview, the largest landscape contractor in North America, has been providing the ongoing maintenance for INHP.  Last year, they reached out to the National Parks Service with a very bold proposal.  Knowing that the maintenance they were performing on a limited budget was not providing the results the landscape deserved, they proposed doing a full “bottom up” renovation and offered to provide this service pro-bono.

Of course the Parks Service said yes!  Brightview then approached their network of suppliers to join them in donating products and services for this project. When Laurel Valley Soils got the call from Brightview’s Scott Chambers, INHP Project Manager, to invite us to be part of such an important project, we were thrilled and happily donated several loads of compost.

Brightview got right to work removing the stressed turf and extra soil.  Then they brought in 100 yards of LVS Premium Compost and tilled that into the remaining onsite soil.  This both aerated the soil to relieve compaction and increased the organic matter content at the same time.  Then they installed a new irrigation system and laid sod after the final grading.

Healthy soils have a well-balanced structural matrix with organic matter providing the glue that creates good aggregation.  Well aggregated soils provide pore space for oxygen, biology and drainage.  Good aggregation also improves the ability to resist erosion and compaction, while increasing the ability to store water and nutrients and promote deep penetrating root growth.

Soil’s macro pores should have a ratio of 60% water and 40% oxygen.  We all know that plants need water to survive.  But just as importantly, oxygen is required for root systems and soil microbes to be able to breathe. The organic matter supplied from the compost helps aggregate the finest soil particles such as silt and clay into larger soil particles called “soil peds”.  These soil peds are what build a good structural matrix that provide pore space/aggregation.  A helpful visual is to think of a jar of marbles.  The marbles will have void spaces between them.  Even when pressure is applied on these marbles, the matrix resists compaction maintaining the voids. Poorly aggregated soils that lack pore space will see compaction quickly set in and the water to oxygen balance break down.  Dense compacted soils will quickly flip flop from being water logged to being dried out. Additional, equally important benefits provided by compost are slow release micro and macro nutrients that will continue to feed plants for years after only one application.  These nutrients are organic based and safe for our children, pets and environment.  And let’s not forget the biology which compost provides to the soil.  Think of healthy soil biology as a natural immune system for soil that helps it fight off turf and plant disease.

During the dedication ceremony and official reopening of Independence Hall National Historic Park, we asked Scott Chambers what his biggest challenge was with this project.  Without missing a beat, he exclaimed “Mowing it!  We’ve had to mow three times already this week!”  Now that’s a challenge we think anyone would be happy to accept!

Watch a video of the project below:

Wait—what?  We hear about sustainability every day.  What has changed?

Soil scientists predict that within the next 50 years, if soil is not protected and regenerated, it will be impossible to feed the population, keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and halt the loss of biodiversity.  So just sustaining soil is no longer acceptable.

50 years is well within many of our lifetimes, and certainly our children’s and grandchildren’s lifetimes.  So how can we, as professionals and homeowners, make a difference?

REGENERATE YOUR SOIL WITH COMPOST!

We must make a conscious effort to build soils through sustainable landscaping and farming practices and compost is just the tool for the job!

We have all seen depleted soil. It is lighter in color, dry, and incapable of growing anything except for maybe the hardiest of weeds.  Depleted soil is caused by many factors, including:

Erosion

Bare exposed soils are vulnerable to erosion from wind and water. As soil particles are removed, so is essential biology and nutrients required for plant growth including (N, P, K, Ca, S, Mg).

Loss of Organic Matter

Most soils are severely lacking adequate levels of organic matter. The US Composting Council, through their Strive for 5 campaign, recommends working towards achieving a soil organic matter (SOM) content of 5% to improve water holding capacity, soil structure, and most importantly, provide a habitat for microorganisms.  As SOM breaks down, it must be replaced either naturally or via amendments.  Soil cannot replace organic matter on its own.

Lack of Life

Soil biology decomposes organic matter, building soil structure and synthesizing otherwise soil-bound nutrients into plant-available nutrients. The image below is a great depiction of the relationship between soils rich in organics and biology which support healthier, more nutrient dense plants.  Humans, pets and livestock benefit greatly from these plants when consuming the vitamin, mineral and nutrient rich plant tissue. As an example, a tomato plant growing in soil rich in SOM, biology and nutrients will pass the micro and macro nutrients to its fruit, providing sustenance for the human consuming it.  Without biology’s help, the fruit will resemble a tomato in appearance only, and provide minimal nutrients and flavor.

One of the easiest and most environmentally friendly ways to regenerate soil is to amend with compost and compost-rich soil blends.  Laurel Valley’s locally produced Premium Compost provides organic matter, nutrients and indigenous biology.  Incorporating compost in your soil projects is a win for you and your clients by improving soil conditions today and for the future.

50 years will be here before we know it, and don’t we want to leave soil better than we inherited it?

The latest social challenge for millennial farmers and soil enthusiasts…

When was the last time you heard an adult say “I soiled my undies” and you couldn’t wait to see it?  Never?  Well we want to change that!

About a month ago, we decided to participate in the latest “millennial” challenge, and are grateful we didn’t have to dump buckets of ice water on our heads, or dance alongside our moving vehicle.  We just had to soil our undies!

Healthy soil contains a diverse community of microbiology.  In fact, one teaspoon of healthy soil contains over ONE BILLION microbes!  This biology contains a multitude of strains of beneficial bacteria and fungi that work together to provide a symbiotic relationship between soil and plants.  Plants secrete compounds that attract microbes, and in return, microbes eat organic matter and deliver nutrients to plants in a form in which plants are able to uptake them.

So here’s where the undies come into the picture…

Microbes aren’t picky when it comes to organic matter.  100% cotton underwear is just as appetizing to microbes as hay or leaves or banana peels.  For a fun, cheeky way to show the power of microbes,  Laurel Valley Soils has joined many farmers and fellow soil enthusiasts throughout the world in the #SoilYourUndies challenge.  We purchased some brand new Fruit of the Loom tighty whities to bury in our soil and compost to see for ourselves how quickly the microbes will decompose the cotton.  Based on the results from others who already completed the challenge, it was thought that to completely break down the underwear, it would take about 8 weeks.

We buried our undies in a fish tank filled with Laurel Valley Premium and Fresh Compost, in a raised vegetable garden filled with our Garden Soil, and in a windrow of Premium Compost.  Imagine our delight when after only 3 weeks, this is what we saw in the fish tank???  There were some HUNGRY microbes in there!

We will be displaying the results of our #SoilYourUndies challenge, along with lots of great information about making and using compost at the Kennett Square Mushroom Festival on September 8 and 9, 2018.  Stop by our Booth# B57 where you can have the pleasure of meeting 1 billion of our finest microbes, and even take some home for your garden!  We hope to see you there!

Want to Start Offering Topdressing?

Already Offer Topdressing, but Want to Increase Sales?  

Check out our Topdressing Marketing Tool Kit!

Topdressing Flyer

Here is a flyer you can send to your customers via EDDM, add to a Val-Pak campaign, or slip into your door hangers after other services.  We will add your company info (for FREE!) and send the file to your printer.  Here is a sample:

Eblast Template

Want to send an email to all your customers to promote Topdressing, but don’t have the time to design something catchy?  Well, look no further!  You can download this template, or call us to have it tweaked for you, and voila!  Instant Eblast!

Download Topdressing Eblast Template

 Have questions? Need help?  Call Suzanne at 610-268-5555 or email:  Suzanne@LaurelValleySoils.com.