Philosophy

Environmental Integrity

Garden Cycles' founder Steve Richmond with early crew, Kim Kuykendall and James Day.

Why the bicycle trailer?
It doesn’t make sense to work for the environment and unnecessarily burn gasoline in the process. The impacts of carbon dioxide include warming ocean temperatures (climatecentral.org) that decimate migrating salmon (Mackerel Blamed for Wild Salmon Decline). Climate change is largely responsible for repeated droughts that threaten forests from Mexico to Canada (Western Wildfires).

Despite the hypocrisy of “eco-name” truckscapers, the reality of a green business sometimes requires delivery of woodchips and plants by truck. The founder of Garden Cycles continues to be car-free ( more than 30 years), and recently adapted to an electric bicycle (and loving it!), thanks to a sponsorship from A lki Bike and Board using Bafang E-Components.

Planted trees mitigate my own and clients' carbon footprints. I also purchase carbon credits from Evergreen Carbon. When I had employees, I offered wage incentives to “green commute.” Not everyone can do without a car, but those looking to reduce their “ecological footprint,” can buy and hire locally.

The point is - giving back more than you take.

Underground stabilizing roots - Bob Edmonds photo

Restoration Practices
We’ve all heard “Right plant, right place.” Let’s add, “Right tool, right timing,” aiming for a net environmental gain. It’s all about working with nature within nature-defined limits.

Our approach to restoration is simple: 1) Thoroughly eradicate invasives, taking great care to preserve existing native plants, 2) Incorporate woody debris (woodchips, woodstraw, branches, logs) into and on the soil to increase the stormwater sponge and filtration capacity (recreating the plant-sustaining “fungal food web” that existed before bulldozing, root removal, and soil compaction (call811.com/ before you dig), 3) Emphasize evergreen groundcovers, shrubs and tree canopy to intercept winter stormwater and reduce weed reinvasions, 4) Plant diverse native plants for ecosystem resiliency, and 5) Take measures to reduce ladder fuels and chip kindling loads while retaining nurse logs for soil moisture.

For slope restoration, our goal is to establish a buttress/retaining wall of large-tree roots at the toe of the slope (photo above illustrates robust exposed roots) that compresses slope soils above, and a blanketing underground web of diverse roots throughout the slope that pins everything together. Unlike geo-engineering with immediate benefits, the roots of healthy vegetation bind individual soil particles and grow increasingly stronger with age, improving wildlife habitat, stormwater filtration, and natural beauty.

An experimental method to rebuild soil on steep-slope slide scarp using pallets as structure to hold woodchips and minimize soil damage from foot traffic. We then plant in the margins with rhizomatous species that spread throughout.

Frill and saw-frill herbicide applications

Herbicide Tradeoffs
Try hand-removing knotweed's 8-foot deep roots along a salmon stream, and erosion will smother salmon eggs. Cut it, and it will regrow with 20 times the stems. Smother it with weed cloth for years and it will still survive, and the pollution from transporting and disposing rolls of plastic is worse than herbicide. Leave the knotweed to spread, and the food web for insects that feed salmon fingerlings will be severely impoverished. The consensus for best practices is to apply salmon-safe herbicide to eradicate knotweed before replanting native plant habitat.

One-third of the world's topsoil has been lost to erosion since the agricultural revolution, mostly from tilling and over-grazing steep slopes to feed growing populations. Preserving remaining soils is a natural security issue. Cover cropping, no-till, and manuring methods of organic farming will play a large roll in the solution.

However, careful applications of herbicides on steep slopes are a key tool to avoid soil disturbance that causes erosion, necessary to remove aggressive, habitat-destroying introduced species (English ivy, knotweed, Scot's broom, Butterfly bush). Soil disturbance from manual grubbing exacerbates stormwater runoff that is more toxic than herbicide, affecting salmon, orcas, and all of the Salish Sea. Tainted stormwater runoff comes mostly from air pollution, plus toxins from roads, pet feces, and chemical lawn care.

Garden Cycles is an aquatic-licensed applicator contracted by city and county municipalities to carefully apply herbicide to invasive plants, helping restore native plant communities on public lands. Ecosystem managers responsible for large acreages are focused on efficacy to remove invasives given limited budgets and near exponential spreading holly. It would be the height of government incompetence to drive crews out to remote sites to ineffectively uproots plants that only grow back, damaging soils and causing pollution more carcinogenic than herbicide, according to recent World Health Organization reports. Government agencies tasked with protecting environmental and human health carefully navigate the tradeoffs of judiciously using of herbicide, when necessary, with oversight from the Dept. of Ecology, Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, and Dept. of Agriculture.

The unnecessary tragedy of forest restoration is that, even after careful and thorough herbicide applications to preserve bio-diversity, forests are continually re-infested by invasive seeds sources from neighboring private lands. Government must find a way to motivate stewardship of all lands, public and private.