Making a Garden

At the classes I've been taking at the Santa Fe botanical garden, I am learning about gardening in the high and dry. I'm finding out about best plant choices and I'm getting some good design ideas.

The area directly under the windows behind the rock bed is where I want to make a garden.

After rain and water issues, the big garden topic here is soil. Our dirt is rich in minerals, because there is no rain to wash mineral content away. But it's low on organic material, fungi and bacteria. You have to add compost to get the soil ready for the living microorganisms to come.

I bought bags of stuff called composted cotton burrs, which was recommended by the nursery. Because cotton is a high input crop (it takes a lot of fertilizer and water and add-ins to grow cotton), the chopped up, composted remains of cotton plants make rich stuff for gardens.

Rich stuff.

But now I'm worried I have over-amended the area below the dining room windows where I want to put in a small shrubbery. I'm planning on putting in low woody plants that all want dry, lean soil. 

To get to workable dirt, I had to remove the gravel mulch and the horrid disintegrating landscape fabric, and what remained was root filled hardpan. You can see it in the central area, while the areas to the left and right have been amended with the composted cotton burr material.

Ugh. Scooping up gravel, tearing up landscape fabric. Messy, dusty, hard work for an aging gardener.

Removing gravel was a week long chore. Raking did not work, so on hands and knees I scooped up what I could and hauled a half bucket at a time out to the front yard to fill in bare areas. It took forever. The early March weather was lovely and warm and pleasant while I scrabbled around in the dirt, so I didn't complain, although my knees lamented loudly at every opportunity.

In the end there were tons of pebbles still left in the sand, so I called that "drainage enhancements" and added bagged topsoil and the cotton burr compost on top of it. Too much, I think. 

I needed to raise the level of the soil here. In the brief downpours that do come, rarely but heavily in summer, rainwater pools. The drainage path gets overwhelmed. 

Too much water at times in summer.

I need to redirect some water from the overhead canale (I'm researching rain barrels). But I also needed to add enough soil to absorb the water, and now this new garden area is rich and fluffy and soft and more even with the edge of the rock ditch. 

This will be my major experiment in southwest gardening. Can I make it work? Here's what I have:

Water -- too much at times but mostly dry all year

Soil -- over enhanced now, probably

Light -- southeast sun, late afternoon shade and high tree canopy shade

Competition -- roots from mature trees

Protection -- right up against the house

This empty area will be filled with low mounding shrubs. I may tuck in colorful perennials too.

Here's what I plan to put in, not all natives, but all suited to dry conditions and poor soils:

Agastache -- tough, a dry loving native, I got a rose pink flowered one

Hypericum (St. Johnswort) -- Blue Velvet, an indestructible workhorse

Caryopteris -- a dry lover, this one has dark blue flowers

Rhus aromatica (Gro-low) -- low mounding sumacs with glossy foliage

Ceanothus (NJ Tea) --  beautiful low lilac-looking plant that wants no water, lean soils

This is what will fill the garden space under the dining room windows. 

When the shrubs fill in you won't see the demarcation between soil and gravel around the aspen trees. When the shrubs are little, I may add some taller perennials -- that will fill up the area for a while.

Try to imagine the area filled with rounded shrubs and beautiful forms and blooms. I can see it. Can you?

Doesn't that deep black soil / compost look too rich for what I have planned? Will my selected plants, chosen for their dry loving, low nutrient ways, just up and die on me in this rich artificially enhanced garden?

We'll have to see. It's all an experiment and I am here to learn . . . .

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