Almost done now

We moved a full 10 yards of bark this weekend, in order to finish up on our backyard project. Moving bark is not difficult as its not particularly heavy, but there can be a little stress and strain from doing repetitive activities like shoveling and wheelbarrowing anything for three days. Luckily, with ibuprofen, anything is possible.

I'm thrilled with how it all came out! We'll finish up planting in a week or two and then all we have to do is construct a brick container in front of the gazebo to house my bulbs. 

Now we just need some nice weather so we can go outside and enjoy it all, but with our area in such severe drought, I won't ask for the rain to stop just yet.

Even the side yard where our chickens are housed got a spruce up with some extra bark and flagstones!

Bringing home the color -- update!

So I've come to the most fun part of the back yard landscaping project, which is picking out the plants to adorn the growing space! For us, this is the perfect time of year to plant, as it's temperate and not hot enough for the plants to get shocky when placed in the ground. And since it's supposed to be 70 degrees this afternoon -- perfect planting weather both for me as well as the plants -- I think a trip to to the nursery is in order.

I already did a diagram of how I want this section of the yard to look, ran the drip lines, etc, and so it's just a question of finding the plants themselves. I've picked drought-tolerant, easy keepers which will be a pleasure to look at but don't need a lot of work, since my work efforts are mainly centered in the vegetable and fruit growing areas of the property. 

The only plant here which requires some vigilance is the Yellow Broom, which tends to get moths laying eggs in it and then hatching, thus destroying parts of the plant. I will have to be sure and put on some bacillus thuringeinsis (BT) spray on a regular basis in the summer months to ensure I get my yellow flowers...but I think yellow flowers are worth it.

I also bought four milkweeds about a month ago, with the idea of using them in this section of the yard -- but after seeing the constant problem they have with aphids (and you can't spray them with anything other than water if the Monarchs are going to use them) I've decided they will go in some side areas where their looks will not be so important. What with old age encroaching, perhaps I should probably find a space like that for myself as well. Just put me on the side where you can't see the imperfections unless you're really close up. Ah, with plants as with life, yes?

And I'm ordering two rose bushes as well -- after the holidays, so I don't have to go down to the post office and wait in a long line of Christmas package senders and pickers-up. I'm going for one "Barbara Streisand" hybrid tea rose, which is a gorgeous lavender (to complement the blue agapanthus and lavender plants, plus the purple crape myrtle tree) plus a "Good as Gold" yellow/gold rose for an accent color. 

Since I was five years old, I've known that there's nothing better than going to the nursery to buy plants. Talk about a gift that keeps on giving, especially appropriate during this time of year.

Update: Here it is all set out in the yard, waiting to be planted...Provence lavender, foreground, couple of yellow brooms, salvia, penstemon, agapanthus and one very nice Italian buckthorn, which was a whim kind of purchase. I think it adds some nice variance in color from the natives.

I feel like I'm in the home stretch, but that's because I'm ignoring the fact that there is 9 yards of bark I have to order and move into place. Denial is SO convenient sometimes!

Patio remodel: Next step completed!

So this weekend we finished the gravel section of the patio remodel. The idea was to make a tertiary, kind of funky fire pit area with an inner and outer core of gravel and flagstone. We'll add some chairs at a later date -- I'm thinking maybe some bright red adirondack chairs around the fire pit, plus a few colorful, large urns here and there? 

The rest of this section of the yard will now be filled in by bark and drought-tolerant plants, which will be the most fun phase of things to create, since I can coordinate colorful plantings that will add some softness and some bright spots to what would otherwise be a very earth-toned landscape. 

So the next stop will be the nursery. I will be buying the smallest plants possible, knowing they will jump in growth over the next few years. So many people want things to look mature right away in terms of their landscape, but I'm content to wait until little plants grow. 

And then this project will be finished! We really can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I'm sure something new will pop up which we need to attend to sooner or later. But the major remodeling/landscaping phase of owning this home will be finished and we can finally put our feet up and enjoy it.

Garden Tour

This last weekend Big Ag and I took to the streets for the local gardens tour held in our city. We were out shopping for ideas on our backyard remodel (after lawn removal) and at the last house we went to, boy did we hit pay dirt!  A beautiful, drought-tolerant yard filled with interesting plants and hardscape with lots of smaller areas to sit and enjoy nature.

I think that's the solution to having a large yard -- break it into smaller spaces that invite relaxation and an intimacy with the plants and animals who you share space with. You don't need a huge lawn to enjoy your yard unless you have several children under the age of 10, and then I'd say it's probably a necessity for your sanity.

But once the kids are grown and gone, or if you don't intend to have any, there is no reason why your garden space should not be a multipurpose living space where the business of growing food and the hobby of gardening can intersect with relaxation and entertainment beautifully.

Dying Nicely

Our summer project of killing half our lawn is already off to a good start. As you can see, much of it is brown and the good news is, everything that is brown is what we WANT to get rid of. In other words, the lawn we are keeping is staying green and the lawn we're removing is dying nicely. Some more will die as the summer wears on, but we're off to a really good start.

In a way it bothers me to kill a healthy lawn; that is the farmer in me whose job it is to keep things green and growing whenever possible. But sometimes having to kill something is inevitable.  I do not smile when I see my dead lawn, instead I tend to look down at those moments and remember why it is that I have to kill it: It's so we can plant some appropriate plants in the space, or add additional patio area.  It's also so I'm not throwing good drinking water on a crop that provides nothing for us but something to look at and walk on. And most importantly, it's because if everyone is cutting back -- and even if they are not -- using less water during a drought is the right thing to do.

A time to die.

Any good farmer or homesteader should have trouble with killing living things; the day it doesn't bother you is the day you need to pack it in, buy a condo in the city, and seek the services of a professional therapist, because taking pleasure or just not caring about the times when you have to be a participant in the taking of any life is just, well, creepy.  

I find when I have to kill something, whether it's a plant or a creature, I go down  little checklist in my mind.  Question One: Is the killing necessary so that something else may live or so that something does not suffer? Question Two: Is there a better way to accomplish this rather than taking said life?  If the answer to #1 is yes, or the answer to #2 is no, then I know what I have to do.  But truthfully, there isn't a spider, ant trail, chicken or patch of grass I don't run through the aforementioned checklist with before commencing with killing it. 

Thankfully today it is only part of a lawn that has to die here, and I can honestly look forward to the things that are going to take its place.  But no matter what, I am cognizant of the fact that as the homesteader here on this particular patch of land, part of my job is deciding what lives and what dies. It's a responsibility I hope I never take lightly.

More lawn removal

Here's an ariel shot of the domestic end of our homestead -- our house and yard. Our acreage is off to the left side of this photo and can't be seen in it, but it's there, just down the hill beyond those trees.

If you see the highlighted areas in the image, that represents the second portion of lawn we will be killing and getting rid of this summer, as part of our back yard renovation plan. As you can see, the front yard has already had its lawn removed and drought-tolerant landscaping has been put in.

So if we took out half the lawn in putting in our front yard landscaping, raised beds, and chicken coop/run on the right side of the house, this new project will remove about half of the half that's left. Meaning in three years, we've taken out 75 percent of our water sucking, useless, non-edible lawn, which should bring us to a point of well exceeding the State's mandate that we reduce usage by 25 percent, due to the current drought.  

I'd love to take out even more, but we are leaving a bit of lawn on the back and side of the house, first because we can't landscape over our septic tank, and second because we plan on having a fire pit and want to be able to apply the sprinklers to it if it's ever necessary, since it's rather close to the house.

So I'm already excited, dreaming of what's going to go onto those highlighted areas -- more Spanish lavender, more red hot pokers, and more ceanothus, plus some other natives I've been wanting to try -- including milkweed, main food for the lovely Monarch Butterflies that live around here part of the year. Plus a larger patio area for entertaining. Who says water conservation can't be beautiful?

And the best part is that easiest phase of the project comes  first: shutting off the water in those zones, sitting back and letting the summer sun bake the unwanted portions of lawn into dead, yellow straw, which we can then just landscape over. 

And then the creative planning and real physical work begins, probably next winter.

All part of moving things forward in a (very) dry land.

Hail the Mighty Buckthorn

I have posted in the past about our issues with light pollution, specifically from our neighbors' lights.  This weekend Big Ag and I were at the nursery, picking out some drought tolerant and freeze hardy plants to replace those we lost in the Big Freeze back in December when we stumbled upon some small versions of this attractive looking shrub/tree:

Meet the "John Edwards" Italian Buckthorn.  Drought and freeze hardy, loves well-drained soil with lots of calcium, and evergreen. Grows 2 - 3 feet per year, or more.

Meet the solution to our light issues.

We bought three of these to add to our backyard landscaping, and another four to plant along the south fence of our house, where our neighbors have six spotlights, which shine all night long.  We have a similar light-loving neighbor along the north side of our property, and will be planting a high hedge of 15 - 20 buckthorns there, to completely block the lights from that direction.  It will also give us a bit more privacy and block the unsightly view of his assorted cars and trailers.

We shopped a fence which would do the same thing, and the price came in at approximately $3500.  We're not willing to spend that much on something that will only decrease in beauty as it grows older. We can buy the Buckthorns and get them planted for about 10 percent the cost of the fence, and they will actually grow in beauty and majesty as they age. I love hedges, and finding a plant we can use for one that is also drought-tolerant is a boon for us.

I'm looking forward to a much greener view outside with these lovelies in view, and especially to a darker yard, which their thick foliage will help provide us.

Green in the midst of drought

As any Californian can tell you, right now we are in the midst of an extreme and historic drought.  We've had a few years that have been light on rain, and the last 12 months have been bone dry, with less than an inch of rain falling.  

But in the midst of all this brown, I've had something of a green revelation:  In drought conditions, eating a more vegetarian diet is a great thing to do.  Raising plants uses less water than raising a large supply of animals, since animals require those same plants plus more water to drink, to keep their living spaces clean, etc.

My solution is not going to go completely vegetarian, but rather mostly vegetarian for the foreseeable future.  We still plan on raising two hogs (split between another couple and ourselves) for our chest freezer this spring, but with the right kind of planning, that one hog could provide the bulk of our meat for an entire year, and since it's not factory-farmed or butchered, we can use water more wisely while raising them than you could on a larger scale. Our other source of animal protein will be our laying hens, since their water use is negligible, and they provide such a delicious product -- eggs!

And in the meantime, searching for that vegan chocolate mousse I made for our dinner party the other night has led me to several lovely vegan and vegetarian websites, chock full of yummy recipes, which has me excited to begin to eat more vegetarian meals. I think we could easily make do eating meat just once or twice a week, and there's no question that not only our bodies, but also our geographic region, would be the better for having a less water-intensive diet. 

In the midst of drought, bring on the green, I say.

Finished!

This morning Big Ag and I went out to breakfast, then over to the landscape rock place to buy some fill gravel for our front yard project.  They dumped a couple of Bobcat loads into the back of the truck, and off we went towards home with the rear end of the truck hangin' low.

A few bucketfuls later, and we were finally there...at the end of the front yard remodel.  Here's a couple of pics:

We've come a long way from the huge, water-sucking lawn that was in place when we moved in....

To Weed Block Or Not To Weed Block...Hmmm

A Weedy Dilemma

So this morning I installed weed block in our front yard, before laying down some bark and finishing the lawn removal project we started last fall.  And just to be sure I was doing it right, I checked a few internet sites, only to find out there is a massive backlash against the use of landscape weed block, from gardeners everywhere...which leads to the dilemma:  Do I weed block or not?  Basically the arguments against it go as follows:

Weed block is ultimately unnecessary, because the mulch or bark you spread over your yard will 1) deter weeds all by themselves, and 2) break down and enrich the soil as it decomposes. But if you put weed block in place before laying your mulch or bark down, when the bark breaks down it will not become part of the soil -- it will just sit on top of it, uselessly. There's also the little issue of landscape fabric being non-recyclable, with some being made of plastic compounds.

Those are convincing arguments.

Nonetheless, I still weed blocked the front yard anyway, using non-plastic weed block.  Why?  First of all, because enriching the soil around the yard is not something I am interested in.  If I had spreading groundcovers, or planned on a more busy garden, adding plants as the years went on, I would leave the weed block out of the mix and just bark over the yard, since good soil would be something I needed in the future.  

The mostly-native plants that are growing out there will be receiving natural compost and of course water, but most of the yard is being left fallow, intentionally, because we want to use very little irrigation on anything not producing anything edible.  All these plants we put in do well on very little water and poor soil, so they are well-adapted to what's there now.  

The other thing is that while weeds ARE deterred by a thick layer of mulch, many of the native weeds we have here put down deep tap roots and, once in, are almost impossible to yank out.  A layer of weed block assures that, if those weeds do start to grow, they will not be able to get under the fabric layer and will therefore be easier to remove.

I also wonder how many people don't use the weed block and then end up using copious amounts of Round-Up instead of old-fashioned weeding.  I am a realist, and know I will be concentrating more on our food crops than our front yard, so I want to make sure I have to do as little weeding as possible, because I absolutely hate using Round-Up and avoid it at all times....even though it has low mammalian toxicity, it is still extremely hazardous to creatures like toads and frogs, both of which reside on our property in abundance. So thanks, but no thanks.  

So often things seem to come down to using what we consider to be the lesser of two evils.  I'm not in love with weed-block, but if it prevents Star Thistle from settling in as permanent yard-scape plants, as well as allows me to pull weeds easily instead of resorting to chemical warfare, then I'm willing to bite the bullet and use it.  

That being said, I am getting extremely excited as we approach the end of this lawn-killing endeavor.  The front yard has looked so bad for so long, to see bark and green, growing shrubs will be much easier on the eyes than how it's looked recently.  I'm sure our neighbors will agree.

Food Not Lawns

One of the first things we did when we moved here was to take out the water-sucking front lawn.  Out here in the country, running any water means using a precious (and dwindling) resource, and also running your well, which costs you money.  So you'd better love what you're watering, because you're paying for it. 

Since the huge front lawn not only wasn't giving us anything back in terms of food, but also requiring water PLUS going out when it's 90 degrees to mow and edge, we decided the big front lawn had to go. So we stopped watering it.

We are planting shrubs. These are not giant gopher holes.  

So here we are now, in January, with the lawn good and dead, and we have begun to fill in the former lawn space with some lovely, drought-tolerant plants, shrubs and trees.  We have lots of rosemary and lavender, and also some Torch Flowers, Gold Coin, Santolina (medicinal in addition to being a lovely landscape plant), ceanothus, a China Berry tree, and some other native stuff.  

We bought all these at the local nursery.

So we're at that same nursery this last weekend, buying vines and talking to the lady there about our neighborhood, which she's quite familiar with.  We're discussing the house that's kitty-corner from us, which was foreclosed on and where everything, trees included, died when the bank stopped watering.  Call it another casualty of the Great Recession.

But then the lady (who obviously doesn't know which house is ours) quips, "And what about the house across the street from the foreclosure?  Those people have totally killed their lawn!  I don't believe it!  Why would anyone do THAT?"

Ahem. Yes, I'm sure you guessed it.  We are "those people."

I relayed this to her and she pretty much died of embarrassment right on the spot.  But it does lead one to wonder:  Are people still so behind the curve they believe watering a half-acre of turf is somehow a wise thing to do, in an area where the water table is dropping?   

While it is hard to be considered "those people," conservationists have to be willing to stick to their guns and realize they may be out in the lead in terms of forward thinking, and that some people still haven't understood the reasons behind conservation of water and other resources, and the urgency of getting on with it. 

Like the old saying goes:  When you're two steps ahead of the crowd, they'll call you a crackpot.  When you're one step ahead of the crowd, they'll call you a genius.

Signed, 
The Neighborhood Crackpots.