Gardening blog entry (before & after)

In response to my sister's repeated requests for pictures of our yard and gardening efforts, here they are - a last minute effort before we are off for Germany. What follows are pictures that portray the result of hours and hours of tough toil that went into making our yard a pleasant place to look at. (Please forgive the weird formatting of text in this entry. Blogger doesn't always do what I want it to.)

First, the before pictures. The two pictures below show what our back yard looked like about 2 weeks after we moved in (try to ignore the very pregnant woman and just notice the beautiful yard). We don't have a picture of our front yard, but be assured - it looked exactly the same!Okay, after a year and a half of dragging in various found objects (rocks, wood, rain barrels & a swingset) scavenged off the yards of people who moved away, pulling hundreds of thousands of bad weeds, collecting a lot of seeds from plants we liked in the desert & sowing them last fall, and spending a few hundred dollars and a few hundred hours on more nice plants, trees, & soil amendment, here is what our back & front yards look like now:

One of the biggest projects we did in the past month was to (attempt to) begin a lawn in our back yard. We blew almost $100 by ordering 140 plugs of Buffalo grass over the internet - a miracle cultivar that's supposed to love clay soil, love intense sun, stand a lot of foot traffic, need only a fraction of the water of more conventional Kentucky Bluegrass, and shoot out "aggresive runners" to spread fast around the yard.

I'll let Papaya Daddy tell the story of our planting. Before I cut & paste the email he sent to his dad explaining the process, let me just tell you a little about the soil in our yard. It is hard, heavy, cement-like, grayish black clay. The best tools for working with it are the pick-ax and the jackhammer (the man who installed our satellite dish for the internet used a jackhammer). Anyway, here's what went into planting about 120 square feet of grass. We:

• pulled weeds
• used a spade fork to loosen the hard clay down to 10 inches
• spread on sand, gypsum, all-purpose fertilizer, whole wheat pastry flour (that's right, it had gone bad, so we figured...flour comes from wheat and wheat is a grass, so...you are what you eat?)
• Mixed in above materials with the spade fork
• Sifted the mixture with the fork, bringing the big clumps to the surface
• Pulverized the big clumps by whacking them with the fork
• Loosened the clumped roots of the 140 grass seedlings (or "plugs", little tufts of sod), by cutting shallowly with a pocketknife (suggested to release growth & repair hormones)
• Planted the plugs
• Stomped on the plugs (suggested to improve root contact)
• Watered with "root stimulator" (diluted seaweed extract & "Superthrive" vitamin concentrate)
• Stood back and admired.

Our lawn - now you, too, can stand back & admire!

Believe it or not, after three weeks of heavy watering, the plugs are actually starting to green up & put forth a few runners. I think they actually might make it.

After the lawn was finished, we received our next internet order from High Country Gardens - 33 little plants. I also got 12 dianthus plants at church for Mother's Day, and it was time to transplant the little herb seedlings we had been growing inside (into five different planned herb gardens). Although the seedlings were little, they were all supposed to grow into large perennials, and so required a 12-inch square hole each. As we found out, that's a deep hole, especially when you're chipping away through cement. This is how the sequence of our perennial planting went (for each of the 33 plants):

• Use all of the muscles & tools at our disposal to excavate a 12 square inch hole. Use a measuring tape so we don't fool ourselves (what I thought was 12 inches was usually only 8 or 9).
• Amend dirt before refilling hole. Measure out 3 gallons of native clay. Mix with 3 or 4 gallons of coarse sand (we collected about half a ton of it from on top of the mesa and filled up our Corolla, almost killing our suspension to get it back down). Mix in about a gallon of planting mix from nursery in Flagstaff, 2 handfuls of YumYum organic plant food, 2 handfuls of gypsum (to soften the soil further), and a heaping tablespoon of phosphate. Try to get it all mixed up.
• Pour amended dirt back into hole.
• Try to find a place to dump all of the native clay we're not putting back in.
• Unmold plant, scratch out roots with knife, and actually plant it.
• Form a well around the new plant.
• Fill well with clear water & let drain.
• Mix up root stimulator & fill well again; let drain.
• Mulch plant (fill up well) with coral colored gravel (again, picked up in Flagstaff) - any other kind of mulch would blow away on days like today (the wind has been blowing 35-50 mph since this morning).
• Shake out arms & start on the next hole.

We found that it was one thing to admire plants online and click them into our shopping cart, and another thing altogether to actually receive them, plant them, and take care of them. But they're all in now (and still living), and we're excited about what will come of them. Here are a few sample pictures:

This will one day be a lovely patch of blue & purple flowers (lavendar, salvia, blue flax, & one Arizona Sun gaillardia for contrast) -

note the abundance of mint behind (the sunflowers are native & all came up from the seed we scattered last year)

This will one day be a lovely patch of red and orange flowers (agastache, penstemon, dianthus, & gaillardia)


Our mini-Stonehenge in the front yard (2 types of lavendar & one penstemon)

Our Maynight Salvia - favorite plant so far (because it's flowering!)

While I was typing this, the wind blew over the Oranges & Lemons gaillardia flower in the front yard that was just starting to open up - snapped off half the plant. We've been watching it & anticipating for almost two weeks now, and we are pretty upset. Hopefully, the other half will come back again. This is not an easy place to garden - but that makes it all the more exciting when we do succeed!

Our happy, happy back yard