Come visit the UC Marin Master Gardeners at Ember Stomp, a free event on Saturday, September 6, at the Marin County Fairgrounds (10 am – 4 pm), to see beautiful, Earth-friendly, fire-smart landscaping and learn how to adapt your garden to wildfires to help your home survive. 

Hosted by Marin Wildfire and Fire Safe Marin, the fourth annual Ember Stomp will also show you how to harden your home and remove combustibles and organics from Zone 0, the first 5’ around your house, to create an ember-resistant barrier to help preserve your structure. You can watch a live burn demonstration to learn about fire behavior. Your children can meet firefighting sheep and goats, and play in the Kids’ Zone, featuring a magician, face-painting, sing-alongs, and interactive games. 

After you enter Ember Stomp, Master Gardeners will greet you with several interactive displays that demonstrate how to adapt your Marin garden to wildfires, helping you envision your garden in a new, fire-smart, and appealing way. Our focus will be on the area beyond Zone 0, just past the first 5’ around your home, called Zone 1. Master Gardeners’ displays will include:

• A garden oasis reveals how moving plants beyond Zone 0 can be beautiful while providing interest and privacy.
• A three-dimensional model illustrating how to strategically place plants. The model is built to scale, stimulating educational conversation and facilitating easy understanding of various fire-smart steps.
• Plant examples with fire-smart characteristics to increase the odds your home will survive a wildfire. Choose plants for your garden that don’t produce excessive dead, dry, or fine debris that can become fuel (avoid bamboo, eucalyptus, Italian cypress, and pine trees).
• Steps to take to ensure consistent maintenance, keeping your landscape well-groomed, hydrated, trimmed, correctly mulched, and free of debris.
• An interactive demonstration to show how fire spreads across the landscape and transfers to the house. A “lean, clean, and green” Zone 1 (5’-30’ from the house) reduces heat and fire movement. We will have examples of inviting gardens that are appealing from the curb as well as from inside your home, as you gaze out beyond your Zone 0 defensible space. We will show you how to use noncombustible materials for walkways, such as gravel, brick, or stone, and break up mulched and planted areas with hardscape, to create plant islands to interrupt a fire’s path.
• Mulch, placed on top of soil, to improve soil structure and enhance your garden’s overall appearance. You’ll be able to see various mulches and learn which ones are best (composted wood chips to a depth of 2” in Zone 1), and which to avoid (gorilla hair).
• For hillside homes, illustrations of appropriate plant spacing on slopes to slow a fire’s travel, while creating beauty, enhancing privacy, and stabilizing hillsides. You will learn that the steeper the slope, the more horizontal spacing you need between plants and trees to keep fire from spreading.
• Examples of native and non-native plants to use less water, avoid fertilizer and pesticides, and attract pollinators. We will also show you how to consider a plant’s size at maturity before you purchase it, to help have appropriate horizontal and vertical plant spacing.
• Pruning demonstrations to help maintain your fire-smart garden. We will show you how to limb up your tree’s branches to provide vertical spacing (for larger trees, remove branches 10’ up from the ground; for smaller trees, 1/3 the height), how to eliminate dead, dying or diseased materials, and how to create more open space by breaking up continuous vegetation (like hedges) that move fire across your garden. See how pruning can enhance a plant’s beauty as well as make your garden more fire-safe.

Marin Master Gardeners look forward to seeing you at Ember Stomp and helping you adapt your garden to wildfires. For more information about fire-smart landscaping, please visit https://ucanr.edu/site/uc-marin-master-gardeners/fire-smart-landscaping

Ember Stomp is free; food and beverages will be available for purchase. For more information, please visit https://firesafemarin.org/ember-stomp-2025/

By Julie McMillan, August 31, 2025

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