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Showing posts from August, 2017

Landscaping by Design

We’ve been taking a three-part “California Native Garden Design” class with Orchid Black at the Theodore Payne Foundation . The intention is to figure out what to do with all of the rest of Farmer Karen’s land that surrounds the vegetable garden. That is a big swatch of space. (We know: we measured it and drew a scale plot plan of it.) It’s a corner lot, so it has “yard” on the south side instead of that useless skinny strip that separates houses. Between the labor and the cash, Farmer Karen is envisioning this as a phased project to be achieved over an undefined span of time. But even if your first step is the parkway, you have to look at the global stuff first. That includes: What native area is your land located in — woodlands, desert, chaparral, river wetlands? What space do you have? What kind of sun do you get? What kind of soil do you have? What kind of slope(s) do you have? And, oh yes, what is your goal? If you have a speaking relationship with Mother Nature, yo