We have ton-o’ new plants. Of course.
Jane worked outside from dawn to dusk, and I popped out now and again to assist, but I couldn’t take that icy wind. She came back in after building 50′ of sidewalk (40′ to go) base (it will be gravel, lined with basalt and rimmed in places with retention slabs) and after yesterday wrestling yucca out of the ground. Did you know yucca produces a bushel basket of roots surrounding the central core? In-cred-ible.
We have about a dozen yucca plants. We have buckets full of yucca root bits, each about the size of a middling-sized potato. They’re amazing. And I’m beginning to agree with Jane: the last 4 plants, between two giant hemlocks, can stay there forever; we’re going to bury the rest of the roots with them, and water the mess, and that’s that. It by all evidence will tunnel to the surface and make more yuccas. It would take a bulldozer or at least a bobcat to definitively get rid of it, so we are turning it into a Feature. It’s been surviving, and leaching the water out of the whole bank. I don’t know what it will do if properly watered—scary thought. On the other hand, it’s a desert plant—and may die with too much water.
Jane picked up her longed-for dogwood today, a nice tree, head-high and ready to bloom. She has wanted a dogwood forever. And it will have pride of place beside the dry pond and water feature. Yesterday she got an amazingly inexpensive espaliered apple tree, with a different variety of apple on every branch. That will provide a ‘feature’ for the blank endwall of the garage, so it will look good from that angle, too.
She has pictures—but they aren’t up yet. She went to ‘lie down for a while’ at 7, covered in pain-patches, wind-burned ruddy pink across her face, and unable even to wield a fork with any force in her hands—she had to call for a knife, in order to eat a pretty badly cooked supper, my fault, and two hours after going to ‘lie down’, hasn’t stirred. I’ve been trying to get the house in order, and at least it looks better—and I feel guilty as can be for not being out there digging with her, but I can’t take that cold wind.
Our objective: it takes 800.00 a year to have that lawn mowed, and several hundred more to water the lawn. It will take under 1000 to strip it of grass and install mulch, rocks, and plants, for much less watering. Over the next 10 years, it will save us about a thousand a year not having a lawn. Which we don’t like anyway.
But Jane’s got to get some rest. And I don’t know how to help out there. She’s a much better gardener than I am: her stuff lives. And her set-stones stay set. I carry things when I spot something to carry. But I’m getting concerned about her hands, which are not up to this; and about general fatigue. We’ve both hauled 20-30 lb basalt rocks, about 2 loads a day; and we’re just fried.
I know this seems like a good idea to her at the time, but
there isn’t anything in a yard that won’t be there tomorrow.
Ruining the gardener lacks a certain elegance.
If she’s trying to make me switch into lecturing mode it is
working, because a frozen Jane is not allowed.
Since yucca thrives in Britain, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to kill it by mere watering.
Also, this may be a very good time to spend some of that watering money on hiring someone to do the heavy lifting. Even half a day of concerted effort by someone who is young, eager, and not exhausted will make a tremendous difference.
Look after yourselves, please.
Yucca thrives in water. Rats, again! I so hate to kill a plant. But these are something else.
Alas, there’s just nobody we can afford. And to be quite honest, we’re getting no younger, and we either pay for gardening for the rest of our lives, or we spend the energy we’ve got now to convert this yard into a no-care, or when-you-get-the-urge type garden, which is what we long to have.
Jane’s got pix of before and will have of after, so we can show you what we’re doing.
How much water a yucca can take may depend on the species, but I’d say that giving them decent drainage (so their roots aren’t swimming) would make them happy. And baby yuccas can look so much like something else (mostly some kind of grass) that they’re easy to overlook.
As to tagging the apple branches: there are garden-supply places that sell copper tags that you can emboss with a ball-point pen or a stylus. (Won’t fade, anyway.)
Sometimes you need to engage in a little terraforming. Invasive plants are one of those areas, and I’d count yucca in that category. (A friend of mine is battling that battle right now, I can ask her how she gets on.) The world – and any individual garden – is too small to be taken over by any one plant.
I wasn’t thinking of paying a gardener, just someone you can direct to pick up all these stones and shift them over there, or to dig out all those roots, whatever – doesn’t have to be a professional, just someone young and muscular who can take on some of the backbreaking work. I understand economy (boy, don’t I ever), but if you’re too tired to write, you’re not being economical with your time and spoons.
Echoing tyr and green_knight….MOST IMPORTANT!! Take care of yourselves. It looks like you are going to have some cold weather for the next few nights. Why not take a few days for R&R?
Spring weather sure does keep gardeners on their toes! 😉
Don’t forget to label those apple branches with something relatively permanent. Friends of mine produced something similar – he does his own grating, but assumed that OF COURSE they would remember which were the grafted branches, and what they were……….
Old fashioned Butchers Grease Pencil lasts the best I have found. The so called permanent markers last at best one season. I have dug up old wooden labels from my veggie garden that I had used the grease pencil on, and I could still read them after three or four years!
This does seem a good idea. It’s espaliered, meaning it is a straight, topped stick of a tree with 6 grafts, 3 on the left side, 3 on the right, so it will grow flat-back and flat-fronted, against a wall. Its six branches each produce a different variety, among them Fuji, which is my favorite. I think it has Fuji, Gala, Red [or Golden] Delicious—I can’t remember; Gravenstein, and something called Yellow Transparent, which Google informs me is a very early bloomer and will pollinate all the other apple trees. Plus one other. It will probably be enough to produce a ‘map’ of the tree and store it in the filefolder marked ‘pond’, which we use for the back yard—but doing it before the current tags wear off would be a good idea.
One problem up here in Washington, of all places: the local culture is terrified of stinging insects—I suppose since they have such a dearth of spiders to worry about seriously, they are quite, quite paranoid about wasps, hornets (granted I’m not fond of hornets) and, by transference, bees. Just about every house in Spokane has a trap for wasps, which can get quite cheeky, especially when you’re eating outside, but they show no aggressiveness. So bees have a hard time. And considering the threats to the fruit industry from the depletion of bees, it’s a serious matter. Down in Oklahoma, nobody fussed about honeybees—ground-dwelling bumblebees could be a problem; but the ordinary mud dauber wasps, yellowjackets, etc, heck, you just assumed you’d get stung now and again, take a couple of Benedryl, and generally just wave them off: they really will not sting unless you’re bothering their nest or accidently hit one. Hornets, now, will give chase…but not wasps. So they’re really not of that great a concern…unless you’re allergic, of course, which is a very, very serious kettle of fish, and, thank goodness, neither of us is.
I have noted, however, that our strawberry plants are producing strawberries, so I would hope that there are bees about.
I’ve been vaguely contemplating a small apiary, but don’t know how DH and the neighbors would react. We are polluted with paper wasps, and don’t know if there would be a territory fight between the bees and wasps or not. DH doesn’t like stinging insects of any flavor, so it may be moot; he barely tolerates the wasps, who have tiny (10-20 cell) nests attached to anything they can glue a nest onto. If they ever get organized into bigger nests I may have to declare war, but for the moment, we have detente.
Yellowjackets, OTOH, I don’t like. We don’t have any around here, but I remember having to watch out for the nests when I mowed lawns back in OH — a small bare patch around a hole in the ground with insects flying busily in and out. My brother ran over a nest by accident with the mower when he was young; it was a bad scene. We came back at dusk and poured about a quart of gasoline down the hole, followed by a match.
Ok, Jane and I have agreed: this is plant-plants day. We have plants in the garage, we have trees, we have shrubs, we have more shrubs, we have junipers and burning bush and things we’re not sure of, and we are planting them all on the side of the house. I’m having an attack of sciatica, old problem, always feels convincingly like the leg or hip, but the origin is that little muscle that threads its way through the pelvis and crowds a nerve: once irritated, it’s just a pita. So I really don’t want to run the Mantis, but I want to help, and depotting plants and spreading roots and watering is going to be just about my speed.
So we are taking today much easier. I still have a third of the pond to vacuum, too. That’s a bit of a strain on the back, but mostly it’s just a pita. 😆
Sure easier than coping with it chemically—I have a hard and fast rule: no chemicals in the pond. Period. And the muck we’ve gotten out is pretty gross. A hose came loose and dumped some on my work shoes: I was so happy. Those are going in the washer when this job is done.
Is there a college or high school near you? If so, then getting some young eager (cheap!) bodies to do some of the heavy lifting may be as easy as putting up a sign on a bulletin board. Especially if you throw in some pizza and beer (for the college-age kids, of course!)
I will admit that I had been getting worried about my removed front yard, because the ground cover just sat, and sat, and sat all winter long. But now that it appears that spring is sticking around, there is definite creepage going on! The nursery’s statement that it should be solidly grown in by July is starting to look like a possibility. I plant in fall to take advantage of the free water and let the roots get established before the plants have to deal with the blazing hot summer sun, but it is always a bit stressful having a yard full of plants that don’t look like they are doing anything.
Hell, the College of William & Mary has a Science Fiction club. I’m sure they’d trade yard work for a writing workshop except for the little matter of being 3k miles away. Also now knowing whether you’d be at all inclined to do that.
That said, I think it’s great you’re doing as much as you can yourselves. Humans are not meant to set around growing moss…
And it’s cheaper, and there’s a certain satisfaction in looking at something and knowing every stitch of it is yours.
In this case, Jane is up to her elbows in mud and in a mood—she hates mud, categorically, and we weren’t able to put the plants where they’re at all permanent: part of these are for the front and we are in no wise ready for the front. She’d wanted to have this set up much more permanent, but beyond that, she’s done all she can physically do and it’s not as finished as she’d like.
I depotted plants, ran the pond vac, dealt with the pond effluent all over the walk and patio, and I’ve had about as much pond-bottom muck as I want to deal with for a while. It’s going to set in and rain this week, big storm moving in off the Pacific, so we’ll at least not have to worry about watering the plants, and there’s not much we can do underwater, so we may have an enforced break.
And my weight was up a pound. Go figure.
Hard as you have been working, call it “added muscle!” That’s what I do… 😉
Yucca is an arid plant. We get huge clumps of it out on the dry plains. It makes sense that it has roots that go to China.
Happy gardening!
I vaguely recall something ethnobotanical — the Hopi and/or Navajo used to roast yucca roots to eat, use the sap as shampoo, and the fibrous leaves for both weaving and brushes. Yet another way for you to fritter away time, experimenting with all those leftover yucca plants!
I was going to suggest day labor, though college students are just as good. Given your time frame, it’s hard to imagine the cost of help being significant, i.e. surely your time is better spent writing than gardening.
If money is a concern, well, I’ll just strap on my hubris and give career advice. I know some writers make money doing various kinds of government consulting. Others write for computer games, and make good livings doing so.
As for writing as writing, I don’t want to suggest media (or gaming) tie-ins; I know you’ve done it but I think you add more value than the kind of cookie-cutter approach those require. I would think about subgenres that sell better. I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that contemporary or near-future settings are popular, something where it’s easier for a reader (or viewer) to put themselves in the story; science fiction or fantasy both work. Space opera also seems to work; hero-oriented (or heroine-oriented) stories with space combat seem to work. I’m suggesting writing with a view to selling to television, as that has dropped bags of money on friends of mine. Some writers will alternate between their serious works and books that are a bit shallower but more fun, accessible, and commercial. Odds are you already have ideas that you’re just not working on, and your agent can probably suggest currently popular themes and motifs.
Anyway, just a thought. I mean it just seems like gardening should be a focus only insofar as it’s fun, not a chore.
From what I’ve seen, yucca in a damp climate seems to be self-limiting. In my parents’ garden here in south-west Wales (one of the wetter places in the northern temperate zone – I seem to remember an annual rainfall of about 40 inches from my pre-decimal schoolbooks) there were three or four long-established yuccas set in a large lawn. They were probably decades old when I first saw them, and I watched them over a 35-year period.
Each of them was about 6-8 feet tall, consisting of a vertical trunk with one or two leaf clusters at the top. Periodically they’d throw out angled branches or new trunks. However, as soon as these reached a critical size, the stress would become too much for the mechanical strength of the stem to support, and they’d just snap off (or rot through at the base and then snap off). The vertical stem survived because the stress on that was mainly compressive rather than bending, and its height increased only slowly, if at all.
I’m not sure how relevant this is to your situation, but at least it seems to offer some hope that the things won’t ramify endlessly. Moisture won’t kill them, but shade might, if only by encouraging them to grow taller than their pulpy stems can support.