front yard 1: an intro
I decided to post gardening stuff by project, which means I'll be backtracking around a year or more to get things started.
The front yard is not an inviting place. It is gloomy and shady, except for a bit of afternoon sun. An ugly eucalyptus with a penchant for dropping branches towers over it all. The house sellers tried to hide things with a layer of nuggety brown mulch and clowny marigolds, but within a month, all the junk that was hiding underneath started showing up again. After half a year, it was mostly weeds and grass.
september 2008, march 2009: what it started as
Not everything was bad ... in the spring, I found a ton of violets hiding in the grass. The yard also came with a cute green japanese maple and what I found out later were a mexican bush sage and several japanese anemones.
I watched and charted and researched for almost an entire growth cycle. Some things, like the begonia and princess flowers, didn't make it through my turning off the water. Some things, like the volunteer baby loquat tree, I weeded out. Some things, like the blue potato bush, I tried to chop down thinking they were shrubby weeds, until they came back the next year with flowers and proved they weren't. (Most things I ended up finding in various excellent California plant books at the library, but the blue potato bush was a tough one. Be impressed by my image-search abilities.)
L: what it came with, R: what died in the first 6 months. the marigolds dried into little husk corpses
The plan is to have a much better front yard, done mostly by myself. It will be drought tolerant, and have California natives where reasonable. It will also probably take 3-5 years to get there.
List of useful books and websites about drought tolerant and CA native plants:
- Las Pilitas nursery website - incredibly useful articles for the beginner
- Northern California Gardening: A Month-By-Month Guide - by Katherine Grace Endicott - indispensable. tells you what to do, when. I found the 1st edition in a used bookstore, but it looks like there's a newer one out.
- Golden Gate Gardening - by Pam Pierce - really practical tips on gardening in this area. I learned the names of half my weeds from this book. I think a 2nd edition is coming out this week, and it will be mine.
- Bruce and Sharon Asakawa's California Gardener's Guide - I used their books to ID most of the stuff I had
- Designing California Native Gardens - by Keator & Middlebrook - in-depth view of ecology, gardening, design
- Plants And Landscapes For Summer-dry Climates Of The San Francisco Bay Region - similar to above. detailed explanation of things, more about design and ecology.
- any book with the words "Western" and "Sunset" in the title