Northern Nevada gardens and landscapes: Spring cleanup includes preparing for fire season
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By JoAnne Skelly — Everywhere people are cleaning up after winter eager to make their landscapes beautiful again. I see folks weed whacking, mowing, pruning, preparing and planting gardens.
However, with the highest hazard fire season upon us, it’s also time to think about wildfire defense in addition to all the normal landscape maintenance chores. My friend Lance has the right idea — he’s removing junipers on his property as part of his spring cleanup. While junipers have many interesting varieties and grow quite easily, they are highly fire prone.
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Lance belongs to the Fire Safe Chapter in his Sheridan neighborhood in Douglas County. The Chapter has been proactive in removing fuels from their community. Periodically they have had dumpsters delivered to the neighborhood, so people have somewhere to put all the plants they remove.
Perhaps, if you have junipers in your yard, you have seen branches die off or have noticed dieback on others’ plants. This is often due to winter rodent damage caused by voles or ground squirrels eating the bark off the branches close to the main trunk. Stems die back and become even more of a fire hazard. Add these dead branches to all the dried up needles that collect under the plants and you can have highly ignitable “gas cans” in the landscape.
For a more fire safe home, keep junipers, sagebrush and other high fire-hazard plants 30 feet from the house and other structures. From 5 feet to 30 feet from the house make sure vegetation is separated from other plants. Clean this area of all dead or flammable material.
Then, keep all plants in this area low-growing, green and free of dead or dying material. From 30 feet to 100 feet or more get rid of all dead or dried vegetation and keep trees and shrubs separated from each other by at least 10 feet. Remove all ladder fuels, which are those plant parts that touch or lead up like a ladder into the canopy of other plants.
The ideal to reduce fire risk is to surround the home with plants with a high moisture content that are less likely to ignite and burn; and hardscape, such as rock, cement, patio pavers, etc. It is imperative when building homes in wildfire-prone areas such as ours that fire safety be a major factor in landscape design. Appropriate manipulation of the landscape prior to a wildfire can significantly improve the chances of a home surviving.
For more information see the Living with Fire Defensible Space Guide here.
— JoAnne Skelly is Associate Professor & Extension Educator, Emerita at University of Nevada Cooperative Extension skellyj@unr.edu.
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