The Prince George’s County Rain Check Rebate Program has had a rocky ride this year. Last March, I wrote an article here about the program’s new option to replace turf grass with native plants, called conservation landscaping. Before that story made it to print, I was dismayed to see the entire program defunded by a budget crunch. Many locals protested the loss of the county’s only resident-focused stormwater program, and the county council listened. In July, they reinstated the program and began taking applications again. While the program was in hiatus, I had been working with two Laurel households to convert portions of their front lawns to native gardens. Here’s the story of these Laurel residents, who are some of the first to get their native gardening rebate.
Chris Sasiela, who lives in West Laurel, had trouble with weeds along her fenceline and hired me to help her create a native hedgerow. I designed a long stretch of native shrubs including Carolina rose (Rosa carolina), ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) and aromatic sumac (Rhus aromatica), all surrounded by perennial groundcover plants. And Chelsea and Max Van Tassell, in Old Town Laurel, wanted to stop the erosion of their grassy front slope and convert a large portion of their lawn to a lively meadow-like garden. These homeowners hoped these projects would be the first phase in a larger lawn reduction plan, as they wanted to mow less and support wildlife more.
For both of these projects, we hadn’t expected the possibility of a conservation landscaping rebate. As soon as the program was restored, we had a short timeline to turn in their applications if we were to get a preapproval before September planting. We were motivated, as the county pays $5 per square foot of new garden. Megan Andreasen, our Chesapeake Bay Trust program manager, helped us move quickly through the preinspection, design review and preapproval phases. Chelsea Van Tassell described her as “knowledgeable, helpful and supportive.”
I had not been through the county’s design review process before, and I definitely learned a few lessons. The first hurdle had to do with property maps. A part of the Van Tassells’ lawn, which we had already smothered deeply with wood chips to kill the grass, was technically in the right of way (though not obviously so from the sidewalk). We found this out by consulting the county’s official mapping tool, PGAtlas (pgatlas.com).
Since municipalities will occasionally dig up right of ways for maintenance, that portion of my design for the Van Tassells was denied, and we also needed to add a second area to meet the program’s minimum size of 250 square feet. Since we were out of time to kill any more lawn, we planned to plant a second bed this coming spring. After some hectic design work on my part, I got the second design approved a week ahead of when the first plants were scheduled to go into the ground. The Van Tassells’ rebate will be delayed until after spring planting, but at least the project is back on track.
A second hurdle arose with the design itself. Typically, I try to find the smallest plants I can, like two-inch landscape plugs, as they are inexpensive and will grow to full size in a few seasons. The county’s rebate program requirements assume that all of the plant pots will be the same size. If you choose plugs, the county requires that they be planted six inches apart, while if you choose quarts or gallons, they can be as much as 24 inches apart. I was never able to identify a reason for this spacing requirement, as a plant’s mature size has more to do with its species than how much soil its pot contains. Native plant sourcing is complicated, and I’ve yet to plant any garden that only used one pot size.
In order to meet the county’s requirements, I created a complicated calculator to figure out how much square footage the larger plants would cover so I could determine if the plugs would cover the rest. I was lucky that my designs for both gardens met the requirements; if they hadn’t, I would have had to swap some of the plugs for quarts, which would have complicated sourcing and cost more.
Despite these complexities, we planted both projects right on schedule. Chris Sasiela’s garden was recently inspected, and she has received her full rebate — about half of the cost of this phase of the project. And when I asked Chelsea Van Tassell about her experience, she said, “So far the process for the rebate program has been positive for my husband and I. … Our garden is still young, and about to go dormant for winter, but I am happy to have a pollinator garden now and I am so excited to see it grow next year!”