In the garden by SignyM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

In the garden

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Saturday, May 3, 2014 11:34
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Saturday, May 3, 2014 4:35 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Well, over the past three years I've xeriscaped part of my backyard and planted a bit of this and a bit of that to see how things grow and how well they do.

Three Canary Island Pines... to shade the back of the house. In three years, they've gone from being 6 ft tall to being 12 ft tall! Most typically, around here they look like this when full grown ...

A few hollyleaf cherries. Good for bees (in flower) and birds (in fruit). If I'm lucky, eventually like this ...

A few manzanitas. They bloom in the winter and provide food for hummingbirds.

California currants underneath the avocados. Birds, bees, and hummingbirds

Cleveland (musk) sage, loved by hummingbirds in the summer when it blooms

Germander sage

and autumn sage

Sagebrush

and Spanish lavendar

and sun drops

Best of all, I FINALLY planted my vegtable garden last weekend- tomatoes, basil, peppers, eggplant from pots and beans, green beans, sunflowers, and corn from seed. The corn is coming up!

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Saturday, May 3, 2014 8:20 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

G, you're certainly not alone. I stand in awe of her, too; I think most of us hate weeding, and I've still got a bunch of little 6-inchers sitting in the back yard that I bought over a month ago, that my eyes slide away from every time I go out there and I think "tomorrow...". I've managed to plant half a dozen of them, but I keep putting off the rest... ;o)

And the problem with planting things and watching them grow is that then you have to TAKE CARE OF THEM! I thought perennials would be so great, 'cuz you don't have to re-buy them every year...unfortunately most of what I planted is in hanging pots, so eventually I had to put 'em in the ground, and now our back yard is RAMPANT. That's one more thing to feel guilty about, hee, hee, hee.

I'm in awe of Sig 'cuz she plants "good" stuff, native and low-water stuff (and veggies; we tried that many years ago, but everything got eaten). I NEVER planted anything until I was in my fifties, then went nuts; went on buying/planting sprees every year, went through a couple of years with a plastic greenhouse, lights and seeds, had upwards of 50 hanging baskets, plant stands, etc., color-coordinated all kinds of stuff. Now, since I can't bear to kill anything, I'm stuck with it all and my back won't let me keep up with it. While I've planted a lot for the bees/hummers/etc., none of it is classy stuff like Sig does, and most of it is water-hungry.

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Saturday, May 3, 2014 10:20 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Not so much a green thumb, because you haven't heard about the ones that died/failed!

I planted three sun drops (calylophus) but only one survived. A beautiful Salvia Clevelandii (a version whose leaves smell like a combination of honey and sage... inotxicating!) failed mysteriously after doing so well. My white yarrow... needed a lot more water, apparently. So did my pinchusion flowers. And the guara (a Texas native)... man, I dunno about that plant. It needs SOMEthing, but I'm not sure what. Colder winters, maybe. One thing I learned... you can kill a plant with too much water just as surely as you can kill one with not enough. When a plant does well, I attribute that to it finding its "happy spot" because you can have the exact same plant one foot away, struggling.

Because it takes a long time for perennials to establish (first they sleep, then they creep, then they leap) I decided to scatter mixed annuals for the first few years... scarlet flax, oriental poppies, and cosmos. (Comos will freely reseed if they're happy. I had a particularly large patch in my veggie garden a few years ago, and a family of goldfinches discovered them and spent a week stripping them bare. Needless to say, I didn't have many cosmos come up the following year, but the goldfinches were fun to watch!)

I seeded the garden THREE TIMES this year. The first time, in Feb, seeds sprouted .... but died due to heat/ dryness. The NEXT time, later in Feb, I waited until a rainstorm was due. Unfortunately we got a deluge, and it washed the seeds away. The THIRD time, I told myself I was going to water the friggin' garden every single day... which I did, for a week. A few cosmos (which are remarkably hardy) came up but that was it.

[...Insert picture of bare mulch here...]

I think the weather was STILL too hot/dry. That's why I'm so excited about my corn coming up now... we've had near-100 degree weather for the past week (just after I planted) and I'm pretty sure I'll have to re-seed something. But, corn loves heat!. Apparently. Lesson learned!

Eventually, I started all my annuals indoors, in pots, and xplanted them into the garden. (

to mother nature)

Oh, I forgot to add that I started three different kinds of milkweed- narrow-leaf, wooly, and purple. They're ugly plants, really, but they're the ONLY monarch larval food, so I put them in the back of the garden where I won't have to see the chewed-up leaves and caterpillars, and have had many monarch visitors looking for a place to lay eggs. I'm so pleased! And since the avocados are NOT xeric, I planted creeping grape (mahonia repens), Catalina perfume (Ribes viburnifolium), Rhus trilobata, and snowberry underneath them, but it's way too early to see how they'll do. (Fingers crossed.)

AFA weeds... if you mulch, mulch, mulch, weeding is not so much of a problem. My biggest struggle has been Bermuda grass, because I dug my veggie garden out of the lawn, and there's one thing about Bermuda grass... it spreads by stolons, it spreads by roots, and it spreads by seeds. If you leave one shittin' little piece of root, it will turn into a clump! After an 18" deep weed barrier, four years, and many diggings, I STILL have Bermuda grass coming up in the veggie garden! So THAT, I have a terrifically green thumb for!

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Saturday, May 3, 2014 11:34 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Yeah, I was going to mention mulch. I am in love with mulch. And I too am in detest with Bermuda grass.

Anyway, it sounds like a lovely garden. Do you have a lot of space?

ETA My experience with hollyleaf cherry is that they stay pretty shrubby - especially if there's a bunch of them planted closer together (and they do seed themselves as well! one tree can become a clump, two trees a hedge!) kind of like this:

But every now and again, one will find its place - perhaps a deep source of water - and grow into a magnificent 100 ft tree.

OONJERAH - We are too dumb to live and smart enough to wipe ourselves out.

"You, who live in any kind of comfort or convenience, do not know how these people can survive these things, do you? They will endure because there is no immediate escape from endurance. Some will die, the rest must live."

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