Progress on the hillside

February 21 and March 18, 2016

This area of the yard sure has changed in three weeks! I dug up all the weeds and grass around the blueberries and pulled out the groundcover fabric that was giving the grass roots something to grab onto. Last year, I had planted a lavender and a creeping phlox in the middle of the blueberries. Those were too close together so I split the creeping phlox into three pieces and moved it lower. I also planted three rock roses, three yarrow, and a mix of crocosmia corms. I've never grown crocomsia but love how they look.

The section down the hill had been covered in cardboard for about two months and I was amazed at how easy it was to dig out the grass. Cutting out the old groundcover fabric was the hardest part!

Raspberries will go down the middle, I'm just waiting for them to arrive. I transplanted a few groundcover strawberries on the south side and just added three aquilegia (columbine) today. Yes, impulse buys at the nursery - but I'm ok with that as long as they were on my list of plants that I'm interested in. I'm also growing aquilegia from seed so may have more to plant in here.

Looking up the hill, northwest

Next, I'm planning to get a few stepping stones and experiment with how to put them on the north side of the raspberries. The hill is steep and it'll be nice to have some steps to keep from sliding downhill when I'm picking raspberries.

The berm across the bottom is composed of cardboard, upside down grass clumps from all of the digging I did, a thick layer of miscellaneous plant bits from around the yard, and a layer of mulch. I scattered wildflower seeds on top of the mulch, to have a (hopefully) pretty temporary solution while everything decomposes and settles.

The middle section above that, between the raspberry row and the blueberries, is cardboard, upside down grass and bark mulch. I ran out of everything else to pile on it but wanted to use up the rest of the grass clumps.

There is, unfortunately, groundcover cloth somewhere under this, so I'll probably need to dig it out in the fall or next spring. I just didn't want to let all of the organic matter from the grass that I dug out of the other areas go to waste!

Temporary berm at bottom of hill

I put cardboard in place to kill off more grass, and I plan extend it all the way up to the grape trellis as soon as I can get more cardboard. The recycle box in Ikea's parking lot was sadly lacking boxes this week. I'm doing it this way rather than just piling on mulch because of the groundcover cloth that has to be dug out.

Once the grass is gone, I'm looking at a mixture of groundcover plants and perennials to cover the rest of the hillside, with a lot of bright colors: coreopsis, echinacea, yarrow, kinnickinnick, native thrift, and native grasses if I can find any that can handle the hot dry conditions. Don't be fooled by the nice black dirt in some of these pictures, there's a lot of clay and rocks underneath!

Blueberries with new companions