DryStoneGarden

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. (more…)

Indigofera heterantha, Indigo Bush

As part of the projects we’re doing in our garden, this weekend we took out our Indigofera heterantha. (The common name is Indigo Bush because one of the related species, I. tinctoria, is the historic source for indigo dye.) I’ve shown it in bloom day posts a few times. Kind of sad to see it go. Anita bought it on a whim five years ago to try it out, and we’ve liked it, though not quite so much that we’ve ever planted one for a client. It’s a good plant, with nice pea-family foliage and flowers, and it’s pretty much the best thing blooming in our garden this time of year. But it’s also the last plant to wake up in our garden in the spring and it gets a lot of dried-out twiggy stuff on the ends of its branches; people ask us if it’s dead unless we cut it back. I think people usually shear them to maintain a rounded form, but ours is shaded by our bamboo for part of the year so it has grown upright and leggy and we limbed it up to the shape of a very small tree. We liked it and would have kept it longer, but we needed to clear space to move our old garden shed. It was a choice between removing the Indigofera or the Dr. Hurd Manzanita, which isn’t much of choice at all. Sorry, Indigofera. Farewell.

Indigofera heterantha, Indigo Bush

There&#'s a shed in there

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see our old garden shed, hidden amongst the bamboo. We cut down the bamboo and then rolled the shed out of there. The poor Indigofera was blocking where we needed to move the shed, but it was the only casualty of the project so far, along with the bamboo which our garden can well afford. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully conveyed how much bamboo our garden has, but it’s a lot, like ‘open a restaurant for panda bears’ lot. It’s the defining feature of the garden, twenty foot high golden bamboo on all sides completely screening our yard from the neighbors. We did two loads like you see in the photo below, and that only scratched the surface.

Just part of what we took out

Town Mouse and Country Mouse have started posting photos of their gardens on the first of every month. Below is the dominant view of our garden at the moment, the site of our old shed waiting for the next phase of bamboo removal, the not-so-fun digging phase. I’m not sure if we’ll have a new garden shed in this view by the start of next month, but we should be pretty far along.

Where the shed used to be

— I’m doing website chores. Bear with me if the blog acts funky for a little while. —

We’re off to Belize for a short vacation. We were planning to go to Joshua Tree, but that didn’t sound restful enough; sometimes vacation needs to include a beach. I should have a post or two on the Mayan ruins and the plants when I get back.

Before leaving, I wanted to make note of the deciduous plants in our yard on the same date, March 23, that I did last year. A few plants are earlier this year, somewhat more of them are a little behind, overall the lists are very similar. Last year’s list is here, this year’s is below the fold. (more…)

The Garden

I took some photos of the garden on Wednesday during a break in the weather. Something about the light misting rain made everything look like spring had begun. The foliage on the plants was green and happy, and now today, three days later, a number of new plants are in bloom. The first Sisyrinchiums opened, the first of the species Tulips, the first Oxalis cultivar, the first of the Bearded Irises, and the first Cal Poppies on the block opened next door, with ours sending up buds. I was wondering if the warm dry January might have brought an early spring, but looking at a post from last year it seems that the plants are leafing out on a similar schedule, and looking at last year’s March bloom day post I think the bloom times are nearly the same. I’ll be able to compare on bloom day, and I’ll probably do a post later this month when more things have leafed out.

Favas, Parsley, Chard

The veggie garden liked the February weather, the alternating rain and sun, and the abundance of worm juice produced by the rain. The favas were planted earlier this year, and as a result are blooming earlier too.

Chaos

Our shadiest bed is now devoted to three blueberries and chaotic mix of Yerba Buena with reseeding Miner’s Lettuce, Mache, and Cal Poppies.

Rocoto Pepper

I havent been giving the Rocoto Pepper enough credit for its ornamental value. The peppers have been the most consistently bright thing in the garden all winter. There used to be more of them on the plant, but the last couple of storms have knocked a lot of them to the ground and we’ve been of course harvesting them. The red ones are hot, so we rarely use more than one of them in a single dish. Last winter the plant went mostly deciduous, but this year it didn’t drop any leaves. If it were rising out of a denser planting it would look great.

Rocoto Pepper

New Zealand Tree Fuchsia and Tasmanian Tree Fern

The New Zealand Tree Fuchsia has about a dozen flowers but they have the same green to red coloring as the leaves and you can’t see them unless you’re up close. It had flowers for last months bloom day, but I didn’t notice them.

Ribes sanguineum, Colocasia Black Magic

I like how the Ribes looks with the Colocasia and the bamboo. A lot of the woodland natives look rather tropical when surrounded by all of the bamboo in our garden.

Ninebark Leafing Out

The ninebark leafed out after the Ribes sanguineum ‘White Icicle’ in the shade but before the seed-grown Ribes sanguineum in the sun. The Ribes sanguineum opened its first flower yesterday.

Tulipa saxatilis

And its nice to see the first of the species Tulips opening. They are a week earlier than last year, but I think that’s because they are naturalized this year. Last year was the first time I planted them and they have about doubled in number. Pretty nice.

Before -- June

‘Having a casual, wild, productive, diverse, beautiful vegetable garden is frankly a lot more fun than watering and mowing and pouring pesticides on our lawns.’ Fritz Haeg

Another collection of photos from last year, shots of a lawn-to-vegetable-garden conversion we did. Before this one, we hadn’t had good success installing veggie gardens for clients. We’ve incorporated them into larger designs and helped with ideas for the layout and so forth, and a lot of our clients have already had an area of veggies somewhere in their yards, but the couple of veggie gardens that we had personally installed and planted just ended up being neglected and later converted to ornamentals. Veggie gardens seem to require a certain amount of personal involvement and DIY spirit; you have to really want to go out and dig and weed and plant, and the sweat equity of the installation seems to be part of the motivation for following through and making it a success. Anyways, with this garden we did the layout and the lawn conversion around the beds, and left the installation and planting of the veggie beds to the client. It was a lot of fun to go back and see what got planted and to hear about the harvests.

After -- Late June

The installation was actually pretty simple and easy. We dug out a little bit of the grass in the corner near the gate, but for the most part we left the lawn in place and just put the paths, boxes, and plantings on top of it, laying weedcloth in the places where we wanted gravel, cardboard where we wanted plants or veggie boxes. The clumps that we did dig out we buried at the bottom of the raised beds underneath cardboard. None of the grass has come back, without using any chemicals or hauling any of the grass to the dump.

Late June

The raised beds are prefabbed from a company in Oregon, just plopped down on top of the lawn and filled with soil. The client is a good carpenter and would have normally built the boxes himself, but the logistics of the project were much easier with them ready-made. It’s a pretty slick design (the boards are modular, the pins that hold the boards in place can also serve to anchor hoops or stakes, the wood is a rot-resistant hardwood) and installation took only a couple of hours, one of those things where it’s easy to copy the design but even easier to just buy it. A nice aspect of this site was that putting the veggie boxes on the diagonal made them orthogonal to north.

July

November

December -- Favas Newly Planted in the Front Bed

There’s an architect, Fritz Haeg (he has a blog while he is in Rome on a fellowship), who has made lawn-to-veggie-garden conversions a big focus of his career. He has a book, Edible Estates, Attack on the Front Lawn, and there’s an interview on the ASLA blog from shortly after I did this project. Clearly, he doesn’t work in deer country, or his attack would include 8-foot-high fences, but it’s great to see someone really promoting the idea of changing lawn to edibles as a political, cultural, and environmental act.