Last Chance to Win Theodore Payne Garden Tour Tickets, A Note on Our Backyard and a Mini-Rant

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Gardening, Native Plants
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A reminder that you have until 5pm today to enter our Theodore Payne Native Plant Garden Tour ticket giveaway.

We have slowly introduced more and more native plants into our garden for a few reasons: to reduce water use, to sustain wildlife and to reduce maintenance. On that last point I’ll note that there is no such thing as a zero maintenance garden, but I will say that California natives are, generally, a lot less fussy than annuals.

This year we’ve also decided to hire a professional to come up with a design for our troublesome backyard. The first order of business is to jackhammer out an ugly concrete patio and deal with some possible foundation issues. I’m hoping, with our designer’s permission, to share the work in progress. I’ll just say at this point that it’s really helpful to have an outside set of eyes especially if you’ve been living with a space for so many years that you’ve lost perspective and openness to new ideas.

Lastly, I must toot my digital horn and note the excellent timing of my February 28th anti-Facebook rant. It’s time to #DeleteFacebook and #StartGardening with #NativePlants.

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Designing California Native Gardens: The Plant Community Approach to Artful, Ecological Gardens. Inspirational, practical, and easy to use, this book was created with the aim of conveying the awesome diversity and beauty of California’s native plants and demonstrating how they can be brought into ecologically sound, attractive, workable, and artful gardens.

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10 Comments

  2. Hahahaha. You two are always ahead of the curve! Thanks for letting the rest of us follow along.

  3. So are you actually deleting your Facebook account? I thought that you had decided against that course of action.

    • Unfortunately, I can’t delete my account due to two organizational commitments. But I haven’t been posting anything or checking it much. The ickiness of Facebook’s business model has been enough to break the addictiveness of it.

  4. The backyard plans sound interesting but reminded me to ask if there might be an update on the hillside front garden?I started reading Planting in a post wild world last night and would love to know how whether its inspiration worked for you?

    • I need to do a longer post on this. For now I’ll say that the hillside meadow idea did not work for a few reasons: the space is too small and awkward for a meadow, we did not have enough time for proper maintenance and we did not water it enough. That said, we just replanted it with a simpler native plant scheme.

  6. My jackhammered backyard patio resulted in a pathway that gently meanders across the frontyard.

    • Our landscape contractor is a big fan of reusing concrete. He may try to use some of the patio concrete.

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