THE COASTAL GARDENER:Act responsibly in garden, lawn care

I’m standing at the base of Buck Gully. Little Corona del Mar State Beach and the Pacific Ocean is to my right, Crystal Cove State Park is a few steps straight ahead. A steady stream of water flows at my feet.

I could be standing and looking at similar streams at dozens of other locations.

But standing here, at Buck Gully in Corona del Mar, the “stream” flows strongly, about 350 gallons every minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — all year, year after year. But it hasn’t rained in more than two weeks. This isn’t rainwater.

Three miles away, at 6:30 the next morning, I’m driving slowly through the streets of a Newport Beach community. The sky is just beginning to brighten. The neighborhood is peaceful, the gardens beautiful; a typical morning in paradise.

Today, the high temperature will top out at a cool 62 degrees. As I move slowly down the streets with the windows down, the morning air is crisp. The quiet is interrupted every now and then by the sound of sprinkler heads popping up, followed by brief gurgles and then sputters, as water rushes out of the pipes. The lawns and landscapes are receiving their scheduled dose of water.

Many of these lawns and gardens were recently fertilized with Miracle Gro or Scott’s or Bandini, or something similar. Snails and slugs are beginning to rise, so baits are now in place to stop them in their tracks. Weeds are unnecessary in a garden, so a little Roundup here and there or maybe some weed-and-feed on the lawn keeps these undesirables at bay.

Up ahead, a row of sprinklers pop up. Within a minute or two, the sidewalks are wet and the gutters are flowing. Gravity draws the water down the street a few yards, where it drops into a hole in the curb and disappears. I stop the car and wait. Four or five minutes later the sprinklers drop back down and out of sight, where they will wait for their next command, perhaps tomorrow morning. A few lights are now on inside some of the homes, but the streets are still deserted and motionless — except for the little streams of water that gravity pulls along.

Down at Little Corona Beach, the stream at Buck Gully runs a little bit stronger.

As gardeners, none of us intends to waste irrigation water or to feed our oceans with nitrates or phosphates or anything else. We use fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, snail baits and other products to keep our lawns and shrubs healthy. For many of us, our gardeners use these products on our behalf; we may not even know what, when or how they are used. Nonetheless, pesticides are applied in our gardens, not in Upper Newport Bay or Crystal Cove State Park.

Unfortunately, oceans and bays are where many of these products end up, carried by runoff water from our landscapes.

Early in the morning, a simple electric controller opens a valve. Water rushes through plastic underground pipes, sprays out of little nozzles and onto our plants. But a portion of that early morning water runs across our landscapes, over our curbs and eventually into our ocean, carrying with it a daily load of fertilizers, pesticides, bacteria, pet feces, heavy metals and other pollutants.

The Newport Coast development alone releases an estimated 24 million gallons of contaminated runoff into our protected marine habitats each month.

It’s a very serious issue. As coastal gardeners it is our responsibility to take action. It’s time for us to do the right thing.

There are some easy steps that we can take to reduce our impact on the coastal environment. A few of them are obvious — irrigation timing, station cycling, simple changes to sprinkler patterns, proper use of fertilizers, mulching, using ocean-friendly products and cleaning up pet feces. But there may be some less familiar high-tech solutions that we can also incorporate — like smart-irrigation timers and super-efficient sprinkler heads. In next Friday’s column I’ll suggest a few easy steps that we can all take to curb landscape runoff and coastal pollution.

By next week, another 60,000 gallons of landscape water and pollutants will have gone into the ocean — from the “stream” at Buck Gully.

ASK RON

I have been having problems with nematodes for several years. They suck the life out of my impatiens. How do I get rid of them? And if I succeed, will I also kill the good ones?

SUSIE SAMPSON

Newport Beach

Nematodes are one of the most common, yet frequently overlooked, garden pests, because they are very small and feed on plant roots.

Nematodes are a very complex issue, but one of the best things every gardener should do is maintain high levels of organic matter in the soil. The higher the organic matter, the more likely that organisms antagonistic to harmful nematodes will develop. Nematode controls also include summer solarization of the soil, summer fallowing, weed control and growing an alternating crop of African marigolds. To learn more about managing this pest in a garden, go to www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7489.html .

your toughest gardening questions, and the expert nursery staff at Roger’s Gardens will come up with an answer. Please include your name, phone number and city, and limit queries to 30 words or fewer. E-mail stumpthegardener @rogersgardens.com, or send to Plant Talk at Roger’s Gardens, 2301 San Joaquin Hills Road, Corona del Mar, CA 92625.