A few months ago, I got a landscape designer to draw up plans for the backyard and the front yard. It’s a challenging ecosystem because we have shade, bad soil and lots of deer. And I wanted, as much as possible, native plants. The designer was a lot of fun to work with as she spent an afternoon at our house and then drew this design on graph paper which I really love! (I want to frame these someday). Of course, I don’t know any plants she listed so I would have never been able to plan this myself, but she thought of all the different seasons and how they’ll give different colors in spring, summer and fall and how tall they would be and how to block more traffic noise (we live really close to the freeway).
Right now, our backyard is a Japanese stiltgrass wasteland that grows knee high for years and I’ve done nothing about it. I see the invasive tree of heaven encroaching from the sides which I’m going to try to kill with herbicides this summer. Jeremy really wanted to return the back half to trees, so that’s what we are doing. I did get a landscaper to quote me to put it all the plantings in, but man it was a lot, I totally didn’t want to pay for that, so I’m going to try to do it myself. Bit by little bit. I’m a little afraid that the deer will eat all of it in the nanosecond I’m on vacation, so I don’t want to spend out a ton of money to have it be a buffet for deer. Even if the deer didn’t eat it, I also didn’t want it all to go in at once and then I’d be overwhelmed taking care of it because I don’t want to hire out the garden work (at least not right now).
Yesterday, I went out in the middle of the day – so cold and snow covered yard, and marked out the grid and then placed flags for the center six trees. I’m dreaming of spring.
