Take a few minutes to see the front yard /rock garden, much of which was recently revised (the actual ‘garden’ is in the back. The backyard video will have to be downloaded separately, WordPress is not allowing it right now).
Dave put in the stone path lining and retaining wall features over the winter, and also recontoured the hill, leveled the terrace, and put a nice capstone on the existing concrete retaining wall so it blends in. A big swath of the rock garden area was dug out about 1 1/2 feet deep, then filled with smaller gravel, peat, soil and larger gravel, to make it a true rock garden habitat so some of the more challenging desert plants could thrive. This area gets all day sun, which is why we wanted to level a terrace for vegetable garden boxes there. You can see four lighter colored petrified wood structures in the rock garden – those are take from the garage of our house at Lopez, the original builder obtained them in the 1960’s, and they are embedded in the gravel area. Many of the plants put around it are small right now, but next year they’ll be more color there: lavender monardellas, yellow desert daisies, orange Indian paintbrush, Lewisia tweedyi, yellow gaillardias and balsam root, pink hookers onions, bluebells, dark purple Setosa iris and pink pussy toes as well as a few others…..
A few pix of the current garden, still getting salads every few days. Now with onions and carrots, and a few nasturtium flowers for color!
Dave erected a temporary “fence”, made of two green support rods and stiff green plastic honeycomb netting. He fashioned wire hooks on the rods and sewed the three sides of the netting along the bottom with green plastic coated wire. Each panel can be unhooked and lowered separately to access the plants, but preventing the deer from getting in. They might poke their heads a little into it, but the netting could be sharp against their faces, and all they’d get is nasturtiums and onions, which they don’t like. The lettuce and hopefully the green beans and cucumbers will be relatively safe from the deer. The tomatoes aren’t protected, yet.
ellensgarden.us 