DryStoneGarden

This weekend I pulled out our summer veggies and started most of our winter plants. It was a little late to be taking things out; our basil was starting to brown from the cold, the green beans were being eaten by a pest, and the zucchini was still healthy but had slowed its production. (I had planned to wait until we finished our garden shed, but that project has gotten more ambitious and is taking longer than I expected. The shed will be very cool when it’s finished, but for now it’s just at that tantalizing phase where we can see what it will be like but can’t yet use it.) After five winters at this garden, everything this winter will be plants we’ve grown before — favas, snap peas, beat greens, chard, kale, broccoli, parsley, radishes. There’s less of it this year, as our veggie garden has been slowly turning into a fruit garden, with blueberries, huckleberries, currants, and strawberries now filling up the edges

The other change from past winters is the stone edging on three of the four beds. In August, I pulled out the old scrap wood edging I built five years ago and I replaced it with scrap stone from several recent projects. Some of the stone is a little small and raggedy on the backsides of the beds, but overall I had good stuff to work with and it was fun working with four different kinds of stone in one little area. I came up one stone short with the cabernet wall and I bought the two corner stones to use with the beige sandstone, but it was a near-perfect quantity with about eight of the little bluestone squares leftover and nothing else. The saw-finished sandstone is more contemporary than I would have chosen for our garden, but I really like it.

Without the zucchini it looks a little bare and and in need of more tidying, but the stone just makes it so much better.

My last post on Joshua Tree is from Barker Dam, aka Big Horn Dam. The park is a desert, but it received more rainfall a hundred years ago and homesteaders tried raising cattle there. A couple of ranchers in the area made a seasonal reservoir, first a rancher named Barker in the early 1900’s, then William Keys fifty years later. Personally, I thought it was a little weird to see this empty reservoir and rather jury-rigged dam in the middle of the desert. Keys was the kind of guy who would kill someone in a dispute and then make a stone marker to commemorate/brag about it afterwards, and some of that character (or lack thereof) shows in the design and craftsmanship of the dam. But the birds seem to like it and the visuals are interesting and it’s a stone structure on the national register of historic places, so here it is.

The reservoir was done in a couple of phases; the bottom nine feet are faced with rock and the upper six feet of concrete were added by Keys in 1950. He made a sign in a smear of concrete to commemorate/brag about this too.

The concrete had rock dumped in between the forms to save money. You can actually make a pretty nice wall this way if you place the rock a little more carefully and scrub more concrete off the faces off after you take away the forms.

Behind the dam there’s an interesting pattern of bathtub rings. Apparently the reservoir still fills to the top, flooding twenty acres during the wettest time of year.

There’s a second, lower dam below the main one, full of cattails living off the seepage.

And a cattle trough below the second dam. All in all, a funky little area.

‘Perspective — that is the reward for hiking to the top of Ryan Mountain.’ (J. Tree signage)

In Joshua Tree there’s a peak named Ryan Mountain. I might have resisted the bait, but then at the trailhead I found a sign proclaiming that ‘The…hike up Ryan Mtn. is a reaffirmation of life. The pulse accelerates, the senses become more acute, and one may renew the acquaintance of lungs and muscles previously taken for granted.’ (Robert B. Cates, Joshua Tree National Park: A Visitor’s Guide 1995) So what’s a blogger named Ryan to do? I of course want my blog to be reaffirming. So, photos from the hike are below.

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Occupy Joshua Tree

Anita and I spent most of last week at Joshua Tree. It’s one of my favorite places and very photogenic. These are some of the photos I took.

Years ago when I first saw Joshua trees, I thought they were just about the goofiest things growing on the planet. After working with plants for a number of years and seeing a lot more succulents, I don’t find them nearly as strange. Still somewhat Dr. Seuss-y, but not nearly as much.

The showiest color in the park was in the red seedheads of a buckwheat. The foliage was quite red too. Really striking against the dried grass or stone.

Some of the spots in the park look like the work of a talented gardener with a loose, naturalistic style. This path, (click to see it larger), looked like it had been deliberately edged with red and yellow foliage.

The Sulfur Buckwheats were still in bloom. They were doing the same thing — blooming from the cracks in the boulders — when I was in the Buttermilks around this same time last year.

There is one species of manzanita in the park, A. glauca. I saw a few nice healthy ones, but the most beautiful was a deceased one. I don’t think I’ve ever had that opinion about a plant before.

And the desert can make a dead car look beautiful too. A great, great place.

This is one last thing after several posts about lawn alternatives and sort of a bleg. I’m quite taken with Nassella laevissima, a tussock grass from Chile, in a beautiful planting at the UC Botanical Garden. I’ve been to that garden a bunch of times this year, and that meadow always strikes me as just about the best thing in the entire garden. But I’ve never seen it growing anywhere else around here. I probably saw it when I was in Chile fifteen years ago; I remember lots of beautiful grasses like this and it’s listed on the plantlists for some of the parks I visited. But no one seems to grow it here; I haven’t seen it in any of the new sod mixes, on any of the availability lists, at any of the specialty grass nurseries, or in anyone’s garden. Even online all of the photos are of this one single planting at the UC. I asked a friend who works at the botanic garden and she says it has been there for years and always looks this great with very little maintenance. Also, she says it doesn’t reseed like its poorly behaved relative, Mexican Feather Grass. So I’m just curious about why no one else grows it here in California. If anyone does know anything about it, please let me know.

Carex pansa, Dune Sedge

We recently checked in on a garden in Walnut Creek that we helped design and install two years ago. There’s a fair bit going on in that garden, but one of the things I was most interested in seeing was the Carex pansa lawn that we planted. C. pansa is one of the main lawn alternatives that gets talked about these days. It was our first experience with it. So far, two years after planting, I’m pretty impressed.

A Box of Lawn

We planted it as 2″ plugs ordered from Greenlee Nursery (they have a great webpage for Carex Pansa). I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was a surprise when some cardboard boxes showed up with the grasses stacked inside. I don’t remember how many, but it was somewhere around 2,000, and I ended up planting about half of them by myself. I had scheduled the planting on a Friday, but we got rained out and then I was too soft to make everyone come back to help me on the weekend. I averaged about one hundred per hour. Maintaining straight rows and regularly spacing seemed actually kind of hard.

April, 2010, six months after planting, not much new growth yet

July 2010, starting to spread with the warmer weather

A quirk of this lawn is that it is watered with sub-surface drip irrigation. We were nervous that the plugs might not get their roots out in time to find the water, but we planted in November and they sufficiently established themselves by summer. Some of the plugs grew in quicker than others, and I’m guessing that’s because they were closer to the emitters. You can plant the plugs at six inch, eight inch, or twelve inch spacing depending on your budget and how fast you want them to fill in. We did eight inch spacing. The irrigation is managed by one of the weather-satellite/internet-based controllers that do all the thinking for you, so I don’t know how much water it’s getting at this point. Less than a traditional lawn for sure.

October 2011, 2 years

Along with water usage, I wish I had a good cost comparison. The plugs cost about three times as much as sod, it was definitely more labor to install, and we had to weed it several times in the spring and summer. But now that it’s saving the cost or labor of mowing and using less water, it should be making a big comeback on the economic side of things. Also, because it was irrigated with drip irrigation, it qualified for a rebate from the water company. I have a few more photos below. Read the rest of this entry »