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brigidI live in an area that has vast swaths of wetlands, or drained/former wetlands. The area I grew up in, if you dug down into the soil you could often pull out chunks of clay. There'd be seams of clay interlaced with the dirt, most gray but some of it yellow. I once spent an afternoon entertaining a very bored child by digging clay out of the ground we were sitting on and making two little people and a one-room house for them to live in, complete with furniture. I forget why he was bored, why I was there, but I showed him how to handle the clay to make it soft and how to lay down twigs to make a support for the roof of the little house. We made furniture together.
What I didn't realize is that apparently ALL soil has clay in it, and you can extract the clay using buckets, water, and cloth. How amazing is that?
I spent a lot of time as a kid helping my mom amend our soil so it was fertile enough to support popular, pretty plants and bushes. We should have gone with more native stuff. There's a path along the side of my parents' house that is perpetually in shade, perpetually damp. Nothing my mom planted would grow there. When I was working for a landscaping company we cleared out a bunch of native shade-loving plants, including Solomon's Seal, and I stuck it all in the ground. Twenty years later and it's still thriving with very little attention. I got a little lucky - plants harvested from the wild don't always do well when replanted, and they were a little limp the first year but they rebounded.
We have plans to rip up part of our "front yard" here. It's patchy grass, clover, dandelions, plantain, etc. and is about the size of a parking space. I want to keep some of it grassy ("grassy"... the same stuff we have now, not new turf) but have the rest of it be native plants, a little prairie patch. A few houses around us have done that and it's lovely. It'll be a lot of work to rip up the existing yard, prepare it, put the new stuff in. I have shitty knees. This won't be an easy job for me.
What I didn't realize is that apparently ALL soil has clay in it, and you can extract the clay using buckets, water, and cloth. How amazing is that?
I spent a lot of time as a kid helping my mom amend our soil so it was fertile enough to support popular, pretty plants and bushes. We should have gone with more native stuff. There's a path along the side of my parents' house that is perpetually in shade, perpetually damp. Nothing my mom planted would grow there. When I was working for a landscaping company we cleared out a bunch of native shade-loving plants, including Solomon's Seal, and I stuck it all in the ground. Twenty years later and it's still thriving with very little attention. I got a little lucky - plants harvested from the wild don't always do well when replanted, and they were a little limp the first year but they rebounded.
We have plans to rip up part of our "front yard" here. It's patchy grass, clover, dandelions, plantain, etc. and is about the size of a parking space. I want to keep some of it grassy ("grassy"... the same stuff we have now, not new turf) but have the rest of it be native plants, a little prairie patch. A few houses around us have done that and it's lovely. It'll be a lot of work to rip up the existing yard, prepare it, put the new stuff in. I have shitty knees. This won't be an easy job for me.
