The Greens

While our new house in Roseville was spacious and new, the backyard started to take on a life of its own. The simple idea of a little garden, where the plants were conveniently raised to the level we could easily tend them, had turned into a swamp with riparian trees and swaying cattails, as well as a mixture of California poppies and various other wildlife. The problem was pretty obvious, in retrospect.

I had actually observed right after moving in that the house we bought sat on some of the hardest earth I’d ever encountered. On a noticeably hot day in August, before the landscapers installed our yard, I had attempted to plant a tree in the barren wastes behind the house. I started one weekend with a pick and a shovel. After working for about an hour or so I had drilled a hole in the hardpan about eight inches deep. Thinking the ground was perhaps particularly tough in the heat of the summer, I filled the hole with water and took the train to work. When I returned the next weekend, the only thing in the hole was the water that hadn’t evaporated. Suspecting that dynamite would crack the foundation of the house, I decided to leave trees to the landscapers.

So, it was pretty obvious what had happened with our raised beds. We had created giant bowls, with concrete bottoms and wooden sides, which were filling automatically with water from the sprinklers. The nice organic mulch had come with its own plant forms, one of which was the cottonwood tree.

And, to even approach the beds I needed a good pair of rubber boots. The crushed granite had also turned into a mushy moat of goo, three inches of muddy uck, in what was supposed to be a surface more like concrete. With nowhere to go, water simply accumulated until it created a suspension of tiny granite sand. I cut the irrigation to the whole area until it dried out, and added some thick gravel to provide footing in case it got saturated again.

But, free trees! I decided to plant a couple of them on the west side of the lot, in the hope of creating some shade for the house during the summer. In a way, this was a bright idea, because cottonwood trees are almost indestructible and grow like weeds. The cattails were more problematic.

I tried weeding. But, when I tried to pull up the cattails, they simply disconnected from their roots. Cattails are daisy-chained together beneath the surface. Any eradication requires digging them out—a grim, laborious task. Or poison, which would be inconsistent with organic gardening. Cutting back on irrigation helped by drying out the planters, but that killed other plants. However, with steady work, I was able to rid the beds of trees and cattails. We managed to get a few other plants to grow, eventually. But, given the extreme temperatures in Roseville, it was never going to be a real garden, not without serious landscape surgery. And, using the area required continuous careful attention to irrigation settings.

Thus, the pattern was set. During the summer, the only rain we got came from the sprinklers. With careful attention, we could titrate them to the level we needed to get tomatoes to grow. In the winter, we got whatever rain nature wanted to dump on us. The bowls would fill with water, and the paths would turn into canals. Nothing to be done about it.

While we stayed in our nice house in Roseville, the cottonwoods continued to grow. In a few years, they had reached about thirty feet and started to provide some good shade to the house. This was excellent news, because they were shading the southwest corner of the house (which contained the master bedroom). The not-so-excellent news was that cottonwood trees have leaves pre-coated with some kind of super glue. You can’t rake them up because each leaf sticks to the rake. Doggies can’t romp in the yard if it has any cottonwood leaves in it, or they come in stuck all over with them. Worse news yet was that the trees had sent out roots into our neighbor’s backyard, where they liked the cracks next to the in-ground pool. Thus, just before selling the house, we had them cut down and removed as part of a backyard makeover.

It was clear that the yard had to be changed. Many weeds had invaded, the crushed granite filled with water in the winter, and the raised beds had no drainage. To fix this, I installed a French drain through part of the yard, giving the water some way to escape. I sifted all the weeds and big stones from the granite, and I put in weed barrier underneath it. I also sorted out the ground in the raised beds and put in new plants. We had new grass installed.

We acquired a free tree from the City of Roseville, which was giving them away to anyone who wanted to plant one. You merely had to come to a class and learn how to plant it. I picked out a red maple, which was a very nice tree that would not grow too big. I was able, with some work, to create a hole for it that had a nice bench in the center and a wide dip around the outside where the roots could spread out. I poked some deep, narrow holes around that for them to dig down into the earth.

With these changes, we were able to make the yard completely useable—just before moving out. It may have helped the house to sell during the downturn in 2002. I hope so, because it was long, hot work. Somehow, we had managed to buy a house when prices were rising and sell it when prices were declining. Day after day went by with the house on the market, staged so that we could make it look exactly like people think a house should be. Finally, someone gave us a low bid and we took it. (We had already bought a new house in Lincoln, just a bit up the road, so we couldn’t wait for a better offer.)

After selling the house, we found out that the new owners had great plans for it. They intended to gut all our interior finishings and remodel it. They also intended to rip out the backyard and put in a pool.

–Rich Wingerter

Tags: Desert, Greater Sacramento Area, Hardpan, House Selling, Irrigation, LinkedIn, Organic Gardens, Roseville, Tree Planting, Water, Weeds

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under By Constructor, Use Stage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.