California Natives Garden

Today I did a bunch of weeding and grading work, both on my front planting strip where I'm putting in a California natives plants garden, and behind the roses where the ground is all lumpy, and in the back, where I didn't take any pictures because all I did was make huge piles of pulled weeds.

This strip of plants along the sidewalk is beloved by dogs and cats and kids and random trash-throwers, so I wanted plants that could stand up to some traffic, that were pretty but not so precious they would get stolen (like the roses) and that would handle not being watered, because at the time I designed the garden I thought we would be paying for irrigation water.

Today I took a hand weeder and pulled even more bermuda roots (down to six inches below the surface, and there are plenty more where those came from), shook out even more rocks, and then called it done and planted the natives I bought at Annie's last week. When I was planting them I realized I have a thing for lupines and I should probably branch out a bit.

The other thing I did a lot of today was loosening the soil above the roses and pushing it forward to make a leveler yard above the roses, and around the magnolia. Here's the view from the living room window. Won't this be nice when the roses come into bloom? Eventually we want most of that front open space to be a permeable patio space, where we can sit out on summer evenings and talk about power tools with the neighbors.

Technorati Tags: california, gardening, plants, roses

posted by ayse on 04/01/06