A few ground rules for 2016

Grass in the public winter garden just down the street

I started the new year by reading Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West, which is all about designing plant communities. That gave me so many ideas for what to do in my yard, and I headed straight for the plant catalogs and websites. I started adding plants to my cart and of course the total price got scary real quick. I had to step back and think about what's reasonable, so I came up with my gardening ground rules for 2016.

Don't take on more than I can finish and maintain.
I have big ideas for every area of the yard, and it is so tempting to jump in and buy all the shiny new plants. But I work a 40+ hour/week job, sometimes have to travel for work, and my husband occasionally likes to do other things on the weekends.

What I plant has to grow well and keep out the weeds, because while I occasionally enjoy pulling a few weeds, it's not something I want to spend a lot of time on.  I have a few favorite vegetables and fruit and berries that will always need water, but I don't want to have to continually water everything else. 

I need to focus on a few areas, think about how much time and energy I will realistically have, make sure what I'm planting will be mostly low maintenance - and plant what I will enjoy! 

Think about a community of plants in each area.
I need to learn more about plants to see what grows well together for the existing conditions instead of planting whatever catches my eye. To keep out weeds there need to be plants that fill each niche: plants that are structural, others that have seasonal interest, and lots of groundcover.
Big seasonal interest plants are what always draw my attention (flowering currant, dahlias, hollyhocks, etc.), but they don't grow in isolation. Good groundcover will keep the weeds out, and that means I need a lot of these plants - which can be very interesting on their own, I've just never paid much attention to them before.
There's still room for impulse buys like annual starter plants, to fill in around everything else.

Observe what grows on it's own.
It's easy to assume that whatever appears in my yard that I didn't plant is a weed, but if a plant is growing on it's own, that means it's suited to the conditions. I don't enjoy weeding, spreading mulch, more weeding, and endless watering in the summer. The plants that grow on their own don't need that. I might want to keep some of them instead of weeding them out, like the wild geraniums that I noticed growing in the shadier part of my rose bed this week. I've always pulled them in the past, but they're pretty little plants, and if they will keep out the bittercress and dandelions, then I won't need to add a lot of mulch every year. Or if I don't like the plants (the creeping buttercup that wants to take over the lower hillside), at least use them to get ideas for what similar plants would appreciate those conditions.

Use native plants where it makes sense.
I like the idea of having a native yard for a lot of reasons, but especially because they grow well here. But I'm interested in a lot more plants than are native here, and it's hard to find some natives, especially many of the groundcovers. Plus, parts of my yard just aren't native conditions, this hill was a forest once upon a time, not a sunny grassland. I'd like to do away with the grass, but I'm not interested in growing a forest. So I'll use what plants fit well together, which will include non-natives from similar conditions - but I will pay attention to what is native and think about those first.