As our climate becomes more unstable, many people are looking for ways to do their part to mitigate what changes they can in their own backyards. Implementing these changes is often stymied by the amount of physical (and mental) labor required to see them through. We can leverage automation and algorithm/AI/ML driven equipment in our outdoor spaces to create an inviting and comfortable atmosphere while increasing water efficiency, reducing dependence on chemicals, improving resilience to climate instability, and increasing food independence. By combining many of the thought processes common across the tech community with some readily available gadgets and gizmos, these goals can be reached with planning and intentional landscape design. This talk covers forward-looking planting and landscape engineering choices in conjunction with implementing smart irrigation controls, hyper-local weather monitoring, automated mowing, and scaling this process from a patio to a couple of acres.
Transcript
All right, yes, just a quick recap, two reasons for this. Climate change. It’s a big deal. As we just discovered with Helene, and also — and somebody who screws around with IoT and so on outside. Anyway, super-excited for this. First, everybody.
>> That was an auspicious feels great. This is my first talk, thank you. Thanks to Steve and everybody for building this community of weirdos. It has been amazing to be here and being invited to be a part of this community. It’s great stuff.
So I am a recovering redneck I’ve done a lot of stuff. I was a bouncer, to EMT to hospital security. I was a professional opera singer for a while. I was —
AUDIENCE: Are you going to sing?
>> No, it’s too early and I’ve had too much beer over the last couple of days. I was a chef for a minute and I wound up managing 11 acres at a pet cemetery which I was unaware was an option, but I learned a lot about grass and landscaping and how to dig holes.
And I have lots of other stories. We can talk about that afterwards if you like. After the life-altering events of 2020, I decided to go back to school for frontend software engineering and I had the incredible fortune to graduate in June of 2022, and incredible fortune, I mean getting to relive 2008. Being on the Oregon Trail has been uncomfortable.
I live in the greater Denver metroplex. Our climate is rarely predictable and often very, very dry. We also have very high winds, a lot of hail, especially through the early growing season, and for those of you who live in places where weather is less of an issue, gird your loins, because that instability is coming.
A few days ago, I made a critical mistake. I decided to watch videos of previous talks here at Monktoberfest, and I found out that I had made the wrong talk for this crowd, and needed to iterate.
And so I I’ve redone my slides and sort of refocused. Before I start nerding out, first my stack is rainbird 1800 heads and …: The second is a disclaimer, the answer to all questions you may have is also my least favorite answer to every coding question ever …
The third is usually I wouldn’t need to say this, but this is a tech conference, today we are going to be discussing the outside.
[laughter]
For those of you who have forgotten when you open a door in the exterior of a building that like the floor keeps going but the walls and the ceiling disappear and there’s a burning ball, it’s OK. You don’t have to go there right now and you can go there and I’ll walk with you. It’s all right.
So we — we — man, this conference is great. We’re talking about responsibility. You know, in tech, in there is so little responsibility sometimes, with what I feel is misplaced responsibility. Sometimes it’s if the number goes up and maybe people are also important and maybe we show some responsibility to our community and to the people we live with and interact with, and a part of that responsibility is finding ways to apply the cool things that we’re building and things that we’re excited about to real-world applications, and especially at consumer level. A part of my previous version when I went into some of the really cool stuff that’s happening, and being like Ag tech, especially at the consumer level, there’s awesome stuff about spectral images of drones. Anyway, we don’t need to talk about that today. Today we’re going to talk about responsibility in our individual outdoor spaces, in our yards, our balconies, our patios, and our responsibility to ourselves to have outdoor spaces that work for us, that make us happy, that make us want to touch grass. But also our responsibility to the climate, our responsibility to the native sort of ecosystem and to the critters, and our responsibility to our neighbors.
Tech is not magic. And this is a good way for us to show our nontechnical neighbors that we can apply these things — big magical terms, like machine learning and artificial intelligence, to our everyday lives in a way that is responsible and a way that adds value to everything, and instead of just, you know, these nebulous, like, well, what if it grows thumbs and then it kills … Like. Anyway.
So I’m going to start by covering one of the basics of the way that I approach landscape design and these integrations. I’ve moved stuff for a time, and feel free to hit me up afterwards or on Slack. I love talking about this. I’ll talk about it all rabbit-hole, just straight yeet into the rabbit hole all the time, let’s go.
A lot of my friends these days are tech-based. Many of them have fairly recently purchased homes, after making that sweet, sweet tech money, and when you buy a home you inherit the previous owner’s home whether it was their hobby and they’re out there every single day building some wonderful wonderland or they were the other way and just neglected it for decades.
And what I’ve found with most of my friends is that their biggest issue is overwhelm. They don’t know where to start. It’s kind of like walking into a codebase that you aren’t familiar with, where do we start? What do we do?
And there are a lot of parallels between the technical world and this sort of landscaping world, and like if you have a tiny outdoor space with that patio, or a balcony and you know, it’s kind of like reacting to — it’s necessarily pretty simple just because it’s pretty simple and you can add particles, but there are only so many square feet and you don’t need much in the way of infrastructure. Micro-servers or things like that. If this is a spatial and I talked with some folks last night, bale garden is super-cool, and you can plant a couple of tomato plants and some peppers and like a container of zucchini in one straw bale in a little bin on a piece of concrete and, like, grow a pretty incredible amount of food. Anyway, Google it. Come talk to me. This is one of those rabbit holes that I’m tiptoeing around the edges of.
As you move up a size, we have complexity, just as in an application, testing, data, all of that, you start adding irrigation, zones, weather stations, planting choices, if a balcony is something like an idea box, an enterprise application is kind of like a golf course, and then, like, Disney World might be something like, I don’t know, enormous generative AI company. Anyway.
But all of these projects, you have to have a goal in mind. When I was learning to code, I had recurring nightmares, I don’t know if this works for anybody else, but I would go to sleep and I’d be coding and coding and coding and coding, and I could never make it work because I never knew what I was trying to do, and so your yard can be like that, too.
So the first thing you need to do is figure out what your needs are and what fits your needs.
This may mean something like removing all of the turf in your backyard and replacing it with like a stamped concrete pad and pergola, and some shrubs, it may mean adding a chair and some hanging baskets on your patio or balcony or you may need to plant several hundred trees as a wind break several yards north of your barn. That is why it depends. When you’re doing your own work, you probably need iterating. We iterate so much. Now, you’re working at the speed of plants, so we’re not sprinting, we’re slowly moving into the future, but it really helps to define sort of the minimum viable product for every step.
Whether it’s going to be a zone at a time, or prepping one bed or planting one tree. But I also have minimum viables for each of the steps that I’m doing.
So for example, again, in Denver, rain — water doesn’t come from the sky. That’s not a thing. So whenever I commit to plant, it gets three things: It gets a supplemental slow-release fertilizer. It gets Mycorrhizae. It’s the fungi that grow on the outside of the roots and facilitate a lot of the water and nutrient transfer. It’s also how plants communicate with themselves. It comes in a powder. It’s like steroids for plants. It’s amazing.
The third thing is irrigation. In my yard, a plant is not planted unless it has water. Every single time, because it will forget. And then I will make myself more work.
So this chunk of our backyard is a good example of sort of that iterative process. I started out when we moved, it was very, very sad turf and then I didn’t want to throw water on it for no reason and it wound up looking like this.
So I killed the existing turf grass with a product that will remain unnamed.
[laughter]
Yeah, and then I dethatched it.
I put on top of it our — Denver Water was kind enough to provide this grass seed mix. It’s native. It’s great. I also added on the other side a field — a short grass field mix with a bunch of wild flowers and then a put a locally produced processed poultry waste fertilizer, which is what I would suggest. Again, it’s a pretty responsible product. It’s something that’s made fairly locally and because it’s processed organic material you don’t have nearly the carbon input to the product that you’re putting on your yard.
So one week out, nothing, right? Now we’re two weeks.
Three weeks out.
Five weeks. You can see we’re starting to get wildflowers. They’re not blooming yet. They’re in there. Sorry to get some weeds, just up against the wrong place and this is at two months and I’ve mowed it at this point, but you can see that we’ve got a lot of coreopsis and some bachelor’s buttons and this is a chance — it will get more attention next year.
Now, once you’ve defined your intercepts, I actually use we for some of our bigger projects we make tickets and pass them off. And just find your workflow. I have a very additive approach to landscaping design. I prefer to add instead of removing things.
So we’ll fix between your shrubs, we’ll overseed instead of scraping it.
This is especially important when it comes to soil health.
A healthy soil biome will include microbes, invertebrates and fungi. It breaks down all of detritus. It’s best to disturb your topsoil as little as possible. You put a hole where you dig your plant.
This also applies to weed suppression. In my opinion healthy turf is the best weed barrier. But it can’t be everywhere. It shouldn’t be everywhere. Especially in our climate.
So I’ve been using cardboard, covered with mulch and it’s worked great.
You can use the flattened cardboard boxes. Make sure you pull all the plastic tape off, because then you have plastic in the soil, but the heavy-duty floor protective like ram board or something I else works very well. It’s not plasticized. I source pretty much all of my mulch through chip drop. It’s dope. So chip drop is an act that pairs local arborists with local homeowners, and basically you get whatever is in the truck. Whatever they’ve just run through the chipper/shredder. When you sign up and you see the amount of mulch that they’re going to bring to your house, it looks like a lot. Mulch is Schrodinger’s landscaping, it is both a lot of mulch and not enough mulch at the same time. So what’s lovely is you’re using, again, locally sourced materials that would be going to landfill. You’re adding biomass to your yard. You’re building your soil and providing enough food for all the little things in the soil.
And the cardboard breaks down pretty quickly. But especially when your mulch is almost free, you can actually put four to six inches on top of the cardboard, which is more than enough to kill off even pretty established turf and it goes away pretty quickly and you don’t have plastic in your yard.
All of that being said, moving dirt — you don’t want to disturb topsoil, but moving dirt can be pretty beneficial. First you can add topographical visual interest to, you know, you have a flat yard, and that kinda can really affect the biome, and the other benefits are hydrological. So I’m going to talk about irrigation in a second, but you can use physical structures to augment whatever existing lawn that you have, like, using berms to provide extra height to plants. It also gives you well draining slopes. You can provide shape on the back side of one. Pans are a progression that you can put around plants sort of collect the water to run down into the bottom, and then swales are usually diagonal lines to prevent runoff and erosion, and also, again, provide additional water to specific plans. A lot of folks have pretty strong opinions about turf. Shockingly, I do, too.
[laughter]
Well, the turf has been pretty popular nationally, it’s not always the answer. Astroturf is NEVER the answer. Don’t, don’t do it!
[applause]
Also, I try to avoid landscaping plastic. Do the cardboard thing. These are not — just, DON’T!
So I read some studies when I was preparing for this and I skimmed, by skimmed, I mean I skimmed the abstracts, and they all — I did several, and they also conclude that turf lawns tend to be roughly carbon neutral, well, if they did — they do sequester some carbon, you have to provide the inputs. Especially, irrigation, water, does have a carbon footprint, fertilizers and such, but you can have at least a little bit of a carbon sink by choosing your inputs wisely.
If you live in a region that currently does not require additional irrigation regularly, I would strongly suggest you consider adding a simple irrigation system when it’s appropriate.
Because of the way the climate is becoming less stable, you may need it sooner than you think. And even if that’s not the case, being able to add irrigation to something that you have to hand-water like flower beds or vegetable gardens, is fantastic. It also means that you can go to a conference and not have to worry about your plants.
If you already have an inground irrigation system, I would suggest upgrading components instead of moving to a new system.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with some kinda cool — at least in theory — proprietary startup-y systems, and they — I think I have a slide about it later. Anyway, find your leaks, fix your leaks. My personal favorite upgrade and the one that I would start with is the Rachio3. I’ve installed many of them at this point including my family members and any of my friends that I can commit to do the thing. It’s well designed. I haven’t had any issues, and their software is fantastic. The app allows you to have a really, really granular description of your yard, including soil type and slope, and it uses the information that you provide in conjunction with the Weather Underground weather network to provide hyper-local weather information to your clock so that it automatically adjusts your watering schedule based on current weather conditions, recent weather conditions, soil saturation levels, as well as the season.
Yeah. There are other ones. This one is great.
Depending on the age of your system, you should also consider upgrading your sprinkler heads. Depending on what system you have, it could be as easy an unscrewing the emitter and installing a new one. I would recommend the Hunter rotators. These you can get anywhere.
I like rain bird 1800 heads, personal preference, and while you’re replacing heads, you should probably go ahead and consider switching to a conventional pressure, which means if you get down in pressure on your head, it moves instead of breaking.
A lot of these efficiency upgrades qualify for rebates, either from your water supplier or your local government.
I also had a tempest weather station. It’s great. It brings me joy. It has no moving parts, which means it doesn’t ice up, which is fantastic. It’s solar. It has a sensor on the top to tell how much rain you’re getting, it feels the raindrops which is really neat.
And it uses an array of microphones to determine what direction the weather is blowing. It and it also has its own endpoint, which you can use — it works with if this, then that, out of the box, it also will connect to the Weather Underground network. Yeah, with this weather station, you can do scripting, you can use it to do — again, it’s another really well designed product.
As you work on the upgrades, I would stick to things you can get locally. I’ve used some kind of cool-looking startup-y products and their boards aren’t necessarily backwards compatible, so if this one breaks, and anyway, and the other thing is any local sprinkler guy can work with the things I just pointed out. Which is great. You don’t have to have a specialist. I mean, if you like to tinker, cool, but I would suggest things that you can get at Home Depot or Ace.
So now we’re throwing water. Let’s talk about what constitutes healthy turf. I don’t like monocultures. Monocultures are bad, and in my region, I suggest a mix of ryes and fescues, both of these blue grasses work OK in Denver as part of that mix, but I like to overseed with those ryes and fescues, another thing in Denver is mowing height. There’s a pretty direct correlation between the height of the grass and the depth of the roots, especially with cool-season grasses that do well in Denver. Usually the longer you leave the grass, the more drought-resistant and durable it is. I usually cut mine 3.5, 4 inches. Some of our native grasses have a foot of growth, they have 15 to 30 feet of downward growth. It’s really pretty incredible.
I like mowing a lot. It’s kind of my happy place. I put on my headphones, and I make the lines straight, and I switched to an electric mower, I have an Akida, it’s quiet. There’s no fluids. I would suggest going electric if you haven’t already.
It’s totally worth it. I may or may not go with a robotic mower, because I like mowing, and I don’t want to necessarily let it get away from myself. My parents, however, are retirement age, they’re aging in place, my dad does not like yard work, so in the spring we changed his front yard to buffalo grass, which is a native. It grows about 8 inches and it stops, so there’s very little mowing. I just finished fixing the backyard and in the spring the whole thing is going to get him probably a Husqvarna product.
So once that’s done, that aging in place will be removed. Behold.
[applause]
My family got me these wonderful white New Balance for Father’s Day, because they’re very funny.
I like this picture, it’s pretty, but if you see the stakes in the middle of the grass, those are there for dragonflies. dragonflies like to rest on something like that small diameter in the middle of the field and the sun is a great way to encourage more dragonflies. We’re not going to nerd about dragonflies, but they eat a lot of mosquitoes. Doing something like is a great way to encourage natural mosquito control in your space.
We inherited a very sad, big patch of turf, we’re on a half acre in the Denver metro, which is a lot of yard. So we’ve been slowly chipping away. — sorry, that was — so this is from the other corner. This is the front of the house. We removed the turf and added our vegetable garden and flower garden.
As you plan for plantings, there are some things to consider, so to request carbon sequestration out of the way, a tree will scale in size and age, it means that you’ll need 40-plus trees per person to offset an average American carbon footprint. We have a big yard and there’s not that kind of space.
Much less for like the five of us, and I would assume that woody shrubs are going to scale about the same way.
I like to ask my clients, my favorite question is, where does your esthetic fall on the scale of Dr. Seuss to Downton Abbey? Generally speaking, there aren’t any wrong things to plant. You should plant what makes you happy in your space.
Unless it’s invasive. Then don’t, please.
And usually you encourage people to find native, or at least regionally native options. There’s usually something that fills the same niche as another ornamental. We’ve been focused on planting nativist trees and shrubs that provide good habitat for little critters that we have currently in our yard, not counting the actual garden, apples, peach, golden currant, elderberry, blackberry, raspberry. We have fresh berries from April to now. We have different kinds. It is so much fun. We’ve also got a bunch of fragrant herbs. Most of them are from the kitchen.
We’ve also got feverfew, chamomile and a bunch of other things. Kitten break.
[applause].
This is Moany Myrtle. She’s very shy and she just had kittens. They were about the size of a potato, and they’re very, very cute.
I’m assuming everybody is pretty aware of our pollinator issues. This is a Monarch that laid eggs on our milkweed and then they made a chrysalis and they hatched. It was very, very rewarding, because it worked, right?
And so best practice for pollinators is to make sure there’s a wide variety of flowers present. We often think of European honeybees. In Colorado, there are several thousands of species of pollinators, and they range from thumb-sized bumblebees that should have no business being able to fly, all the way to flies that are hard to see with the naked eye. Obviously those two bugs do not eat at the same buffet. Increasing plant diversity also increase the number of niches to be filled. They also attract non-pollinator insects. You have the ground-dwelling beetles and such that eat all the detritus that falls. Another thing to do when planting with pollinators is to make pollinating highways, so instead of planting a blob somewhere, you plant a strip along your fence line to kind of encourage movement.
They provide sort of food and travel route, but they also provide cover and travel route for small … So we have been adding tremendous biodiversity to our garden, like critters, by getting good cover. Like, this is along our fence, and so this year, now that everything is going, we have skeeks, a couple of different species of garter snakes, toads and frogs, and also provides cover for small birds. They love those boundaries. And you know, it’s also pretty.
But you’re but you’re planting appropriately for one specific case. I’ve brought up carbon sequestration a couple of times and there really aren’t a lot of ways that individuals can make a super-big impact, but we can all do our best. In fact, we have a responsibility. We need — we all have kind of changed all our lightbulbs to LEDs, if we can, if we have the resources and we’re sited well, we’re adding solar, a lot of us are buying more efficient dishwashers and some of us have cut down on our beef consumption, having a healthy yard with a diverse biome is an overlooked thing that we can try to do. And by irrigating responsibly and efficiently and by reducing the amount of turf we have by planting more trees and shrubs, we can increase the amount of carbon that we’re sequestering just by making small changes over time.
I mentioned the diversity of our food-bearing trees and shrubs, we also have a pretty solid garden. It’s currently about half cut flowers, we have flower bouquets in the house all the time. It’s amazing. It never occurred to me that that was just an option. We strongly suggest it.
We are currently growing more produce than we can consume, which presents some opportunities to participate in mutual aid.
Which is another way that we can interact responsibly with our community.
So far, most of our excess has gone to neighbors and family. When we get home, we will be in the middle of tomatopocalypse and we may be able to take a couple of flats to a local food pantry.
And so instead of just killing them, I’ve been transplanting the suckers up to our flight fence and the intention is over the next couple of years we’ll have a second blackberry bramble is accessible to the road and in season, eat as many as you want. Even, I mean you can do all the things. Our efforts don’t necessarily amount to much. But however, we have the privilege to kind of be the first domino.
As you start improving your yard with sort of these ideas and goals and like, you start yard-shaming your neighbors, or at least they’ll start noticing what you’re doing — life got weird a little while ago, for everybody. I don’t know if you guys remember dark times and it’s hard to interact and talk with our neighbors. A lot of us lost contact. But this is a good way to start conversation and spark ideas and explain how you’re incorporating technology in your watering and explain the choices that you’re making with planting, and you can be the anchor house on the block, right? Get your neighbors interested and involved, and I love the idea of a whole neighborhood with very individual yards full of little creatures running around, taking baskets of whatever everybody’s growing back and forth, back and forth. I think that — that’s pretty responsible way to live.
I thank you for listening to me ramble. I appreciate the opportunity to share something that I’m — that I am I find really important and I really enjoy. Pick me up on LinkedIn, Slack and email, find me afterwards, I will talk for hours. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
[applause]
