karinoyo

Productive over the past week (somewhat). Well, not really, unless you count quantity.

Just today, brought back a quarter-ton of road base, along with a stretch of geotextile fabric and 10′ perforated tube so I can finally do the french drain. Then set up a compost pile — three old fence boards laid over concrete block, with chicken wire stapled to ‘em, then more wrapped around it in a rough perimeter. Ended up with a compost pile that’s 6 long, 3 feet deep, and 4 feet high — and managed to squeeze in all the leaves, thatch, and various weeds I’ve pulled just from the front yard. (Guess I’ll need to do a second pile just for the back yard.)

Hard to believe that’s two and a half cubic yards of compost, and that when it’s done baking, it’ll be some good stuff that people around here would pay $50 for. I mean, it’s just weeds and leaves and stuff. Okay, a lot of green and brown stuff, and I pitchforked that load from where I’d piled it along the driveway, all the way back to the northwestern corner of the house.

Yesterday I uprooted two bushes that had been by the garage, and transplanted to driveway gardenbed — waiting to see if the two make it. (If not, I’m not going to cry; I’m pretty sure they’re both non-native anyway.) That cleared out a space about 3 feet by 5 feet, and today I dug down about a spade’s length and moved all the extra dirt out of the way (actually, I moved it to the spot just vacated by the stuff I’d moved to compost pile). Then down with the geotextile, and then I unloaded about 7 cubic feet of road base, and then watered it down to confirm the drainage was going where I wanted.

Unfortunately, it’s pooling at the far end (away from the garage, fortunately) so I guess this means I’ll need to do a second channel to get the water to keep running out of the area and into the adjacent garden bed. Tomorrow I put down sand, then move the old pavers into place… and there will finally be a spot for the trash can & wheelbarrow that isn’t right out on the open driveway.

And then I start ripping up the brick walkway, and tearing out (or cutting down) the endless pecan saplings. (Of anything I’ve done, that’s the worst: dealing with those stupid pecan saplings… once the baby tree gets higher than six inches, the tap root is already so deep it’s impossible to yank. I end up digging down about a foot and literally sawing off the main root… here’s hoping that really is all it takes to kill the damn things. Not saying I don’t like pecan trees, because I do, but not when they’re only eight inches from my foundation.) Then it’s onto building the boardwalk from driveway to front stoop, though I’m still working out plans on how exactly to do the main steps.

At least I wised up before I got too far, and didn’t go with a whacked, too-ambitious, not-really-suburban yard plan: now I’m allowing for a four-foot walkway minimum, and trying to come up with something that’s appealing for future owners instead of impressing my bizarre style on the ranch-horror landscape. Err, okay.

Oh, and one dantana is in the ground, as well as a texas mountain laurel. Tomorrow need to get the sweet viburnum in somewhere in the front yard (may just pick a spot at random at this rate), along with finding the right spot for some wild leadwort in the backyard. Still need to pick up several bushes of agarita, for planting under all the windows. Three years and I’ve finally found this region’s answer to pyracantha.

In related news, I also now (finally) know where to go when I have questions… and where to go to get plants only when I already know exactly what I need and don’t need to quibble over details. The nursery I visited on Tuesday is in the latter category, but I should’ve known that one was coming from the get-go, when I asked the first nursery-person I saw: can someone here point me out all the natives for the blackland prairies?, and double points if you know which ones do well in a riparian environment…

The girl’s answer: “Well, I only know the natives for this state.”

I was this close to telling her, “Gee, no, when I said, native, I meant MONTANA.”

What the hell do you think? “I’d like to see natives to planet earth only, because Mars gardening is just so last century”?

[I should’ve taken it as a sign when I asked one of the people working there, “what’s a good native plant for part-to-full-shade, dry, with clay soil?” and the response was a half-hearted shrug, and baffled grin, and the reply, “I dunno…” — worse, followed by, “What would be good?” …say what? (I wanted to reply, no, I asked you first!) Hell, it was like me asking was some kind of joking trick question or something. What? “Hello Mister Car Salesman, which car here gets the best gas mileage?” “Gee, I dunno, which do you think gets the best mileage?” “WHO’S THE FREAKING SALESMAN AND WHO’S THE FREAKING CUSTOMER, BUDDY?”)

Ahem. Anyway.

Main gardener points out several plants, and I must say I was rather perplexed to see that a 3-gal plant was about $15. That’s significantly lower than anywhere else… and then the girl woman suggested elaeagnus (silverberry) as a great plant for the southern facing, full-sun, dry and rocky part of the yard. I didn’t recognize that name, so I must’ve asked three or four times, “this is a native plant? wow, the name really stands out, I don’t recall seeing it in the state’s database of native plants for this region… native, hunh?”

Even as I was leaving, I asked the guy who loaded up the car for me (to get second opinion): elaeagnus is native? Oh, yeah, he said, sure thing.

Hmmmm.

I got home and searched. Lo, the power of google and a dose of wiki, and I find that the only elaeagnus native to north america is elaeagnus commutata, which is actually native to Utah, the Rockies, Colorado, and that would be about six thousand feet higher in elevation and about four or five days’ drive north. Unh-hunh.

Except that the plant I bought was actually elaeagnus fruitlandii, which is a hybrid or sub-something-whatever but derived from elaeagnus pungens, a plant native to… JAPAN.

So, about that “when I say native,” I mean, WAS HERE LOCALLY BEFORE YOU WERE BORN. Duh.

Which meant I went ahead and turned around — in the middle of all the oblivions out for evening traffic, oh joy — and took the plant back to the nursery. The same woman helps me. “Was there something wrong with the plant,” she wanted to know. (I didn’t bother telling her that I’d bought the only specimen that did not have something wrong with it: no dead lower leaves, no yellowing, no crisping, no dry or overgrown rootball, and that it’d taken me a half-hour sorting through badly or not-at-all-pruned overgrown 3-gal buckets to FIND it, either.)

“Yeah,” I told her, “the problem is that it’s NATIVE TO JAPAN.” She looked at me, and looked at the plant. I couldn’t resist; I added, “which, incidentally, IS A LONG WAY FROM HERE.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, it’s in the book.”

The Book being a superficially ‘handy’ guide done by the state, listing all sorts of plants to grow (along with the really helpful list of Invasive Non-Natives To Avoid). All the nurseries etc get these books for free, and a fair amount of the time when I ask about natives, I’m offered a copy of the book. Uh, no, I’ve had a copy for three years now, and that’s more than long enough to know the book is NOT worth what these lazy nursery-folks seem to think it’s worth. For starters, there are sixty something pages of plants, and on average one plant per page that’s actually native to my region; maybe three plants per page native to the adjacent plateau — when you add it all up, it’s not really a huge amount of locally-native plants per total listed. That is to say… the majority? NATURALIZED.

Which, in case it’s not completely clear, is NOT THE SAME as ‘native’. No, no, just NO.

“The fact that it’s in the book,” I told her — as she at least made no noise about ringing up my card & putting the credit back on my acct — “does not mean that the elaeagnus you sell is the same as the elaeagnus that’s native to the Rockies and naturalized to the Great Prairie. That would be elaeagnus commutata, and what you have here is elaeagnus fruitlandii, and furthermore, when I asked for recommendations on native plants, I did not mean ‘naturalized’, nor was I defining ‘native’ in some loose sense whereby any plant raised from seed in this state is automatically ‘native’.”

I might’ve said more, but she was saved by running my card awfully quick, so I signed and left. She didn’t wish me a good day, and I wouldn’t have accepted it gracefully, either.

Then I went to the nursery only a mile down the road, asked at the entrance if there was someone who knew native plants… and was directed to my choice of one of five people, all of whom were able to not only tell me what was native to the state in general, and further which were native to this specific region of the state, and further which were native to a specific sub-region (of which this city alone has five completely distinct ecological/botanical areas) and could rattle off the latin names and the regional names (”Maybe you heard it called Widow’s Tears, instead? That’s sometimes called Virginia Spiderwort; it’s tradescantia virginiana“) and I think about then I went into paroxysms of gardening glee at the information overload.

Yeah, so I ended up getting a Mountain Laurel that was about $25 for a two-gal plant… but on the other hand, I didn’t need to dig through eighteen of them to find one healthy one, and in the long run I got so much information in the twenty minutes I was there that I’d willingly consider the extra $10 to be a tip for the awesome service.