...or building a house from scratch.
Re-vamping the front yard, that is. As I understand it, when painting, you start with broad brush strokes, and then add the detail. When building a house, you need the foundation and framework before you can really do anything else.
Well, re-vamping my front yard reminds me of both of those tasks.
First I had a vision of what I wanted -- a shady yard that was wildlife-friendly.
Then came the broad brush-strokes, or the skeletal frame of the house: planting the trees. You've read about that in my other posts here. Two weeks ago, I added what will most likely be the final trees - 2 semi-dwarf Golden Delicious Apple trees, courtesy of the local big-box store. I went in to buy mulch, but the garden-center worker said "Come over here, you need these!" and showed me two trees that had fallen out of their tubs. They were still alive, plenty of green on them, and she said I could have them for three dollars each. One was over seven feet tall, the other over eight feet, so I grabbed them and brought them home to grace the front yard.
Unless I give up the idea of a pond, I don't think I have room for any more trees. *chuckle*
So the broad brush-strokes are complete, the skeletal frame in place, and it's time to start filling in the areas between. My budget won't support any major plantings this fall, but that doesn't mean I can't work on filling in the gaps.
Everything I have read about a wildlife-friendly yard tells me that the critters need "travel corridors." For you and I , those would be the sidewalks and crosswalks that we use to safely move from one place to another without being run over by motorised vehicles. For birds, chipmunks, and assorted other local fauna, moving through wide-open spaces can be deadly, so a "travel corridor" is essentially the shrubs and other plantings that are between the various destinations. In my case, that's the areas between the trees.
My ultimate goal is to have a variety of native shrubbery provide the travel corridors between the trees. I'd totally prefer to plant those shrubs in the fall, so they'd have several months of cooler weather in which to establish their root-systems before dealing with the full heat of a Georgia summer. Ideally, my October weekends would be spent doing just that. Alas, the budget precludes such options this year.
But I can plan those travel corridors, and prep the soil. My yard is almost entirely red Georgia clay interspersed with various-sized rocks, neither of which can be considered the world's best planting medium. So I'm spending my weekends marking out the locations of the planting beds between the trees and digging up the sod. If it's a weedy section, the sod is trashed. If it's a grassy section, I'll take the sod I dig up to a friend of mine, and we'll use it to fill some bare spaces in her yard. We tested the concept a couple weeks ago, and the grass we transplanted is still alive, so it seems like a good concept.
My little Mantis Tiller is a crucial partner in this phase, just as it was in the tree-planting phase. It seems that when I bought my tiller, it came with a free accessory: the border/edger tool. This accessory is designed to give you good crisp borders between your lawn and your flowerbeds -- I'm using it to mark the boundaries of the planting beds, clearly identifying the areas where I need to remove the sod.
Our unseasonably hot weather is limiting the time I can spend on this project - by noon it's over 80F, and later in the day, it reaches or exceeds 90F. So it's early mornings and late evening times, for now. I keep hoping the weather will break, but there's no sign of that happening anytime soon. But while the hot weather keeps me from working outside all day on this project, it can't stop the planning. Just as artists gather inspiration from the work of other artists, so too with landscapes. I've been devouring books about native plants, learning more about what will most benefit my local fauna. Each book extends my understanding a little more, and every book thus far has fed my enthusiasm for a wildlife-friendly yard.
Once the sod is gone, I'll till the bed, add some sort of soil amendments, and leave it alone until spring. Come spring, I'll either start planting shrubs, or I'll continue amending the soil and wait until fall to plant. I can always seed those beds with clover or wildflowers while I wait for the weather and my budget to cooperate with each other.
An added benefit of digging out the "travel-corridor beds" is that it eliminates mowing for those sections of the yard, bringing me that much closer to my five-year-goal of not needing a riding mower. I thought I was jumping the gun when I bought that self-propelled walking mower from my friend last spring, but apparently not.
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