I know this blog is called mymicroprairie.com, but it can be about other kinds of gardens, too. With no big trees, my front yard gets tons of hot, direct sunlight, so it’s perfect for a microprairie. My back yard, though, is mostly shady, especially in the summer, when the trees are all leafed out. My prairie plants that would thrive out front might not like it as well in the back. But may back yard needs some TLC, too, so I’m going to focus some attention back there as well.
To start with, I discovered when I moved into my house that all of the landscape plantings around the yard seemed to be in the wrong places. Shade-loving hostas are sitting in full sun, while forsythia and potentilla, which prefer full sun, are sitting in the darkest parts of the yard. It makes me sad that someone spent a lot of money having these plants put into places where they’re not going to thrive, and that whoever was advising them—presumably the landscapers—didn’t have enough knowledge to get even this most basic principle of gardening—sun exposure—right.
So I’m going to gradually switch things around in the yard. Although I love hostas, and it’s very un-Minnesotan to not have hostas in your yard, they have to go. If they were only planted in the wrong places, I could just dig them up and move them to the right places. But I believe most if not all of them are also suffering from Hosta Virus-X, a plant disease that is very easily spread. Even though it may not kill the plant, it makes them look awful. One batch of hostas by my front door was officially diagnosed with Hosta Virus-X and all my hostas look suspicious, so I have to assume they are all contaminated, as is the soil where they were planted, so I can’t replace them with new hostas either.
The hostas won’t have died in vain, though. I’m going to use this hosta debacle to not just put the right plant in the right place—I’m going to choose the right native plant for the right place.
Choosing a plant based on the place
What does that mean?
It means that if the hostas weren’t sick, I could just move them all out of the sun into the shade, and they would do just fine, and the bees do love their flowers. But is that the best I could do? I’m here to help pollinators, and there’s a question out there of how much nutrition pollinators really get from the flowers of non-native plants. Most honey bees in the U.S. aren’t native either, of course, but we have native bees, including endangered ones like the rusty-patched bee, that need to be supported, and there are other kinds of pollinators. If we’re going to encourage them, we need the native plants that are best for them.
It also means that instead of falling in love with a plant, then trying to find a place in my yard where the conditions are pretty close to right for that plant and shoe-horning it in, or worse, plopping the plant in a spot that doesn’t have the right conditions for it and babying it along while it suffers, I’m going to take what I know about the microclimates in my yard and look at my list of native plants to see which ones work for each particular microclimate, in this case, the southeast corner.
So here’s the plan: I have sketched out a native garden for that spot, but not a microprairie. For my shady and damp back yard, I need plants that are native to a shady, damp location.
Hence, my native woodsy garden. But it’s sunnier in this southeast corner of my yard—it gets a few hours of morning sun—compared to the southwest corner, which is shady all day. So for this spot, I need plants that thrive in:
– Partial shade (some sun but fewer than six hours a day).
– Clay soil.
– Damp soil that doesn’t dry out.
– Alkaline soil (or at least doesn’t hate it).
Some native plants are real utility players, like the coneflowers I have in the front yard. They’re very unfussy as long as they get some sun, so they should do fine here in back, too. But other plants I’ll be looking at wouldn’t be as adaptable: they’ll need the partial shade and damper soil.
Problem-solvers
But this garden has another purpose beyond giving me a chance to try out some new plants. I’m going to use it to solve a couple problems, too.
Besides feeding pollinators, this garden is going in a spot where the grass has a tough time growing. The shade here has made it hard for grass to look decent, so instead of trying to force grass to live where it doesn’t want to, let’s stick in some plants that do want to be there.
I’m also hoping this garden will help with a little problem of erosion going on at that corner of the yard. I live on top of a ravine, and so at the back of my yard there’s a steep drop off down to the road below. The side of the ravine is covered in trees and wild plants, but I’ve noticed now over the last few years that the back edge is slowly getting shaved off, especially in the southeast corner, where there’s no retaining wall.
The erosion is being caused by rainfall flowing down out of the back yard. It’s not a huge issue—I asked a technician from the city to come out and take a look at things a few weeks ago, and he said the back edge of my yard looked pretty good compared to some yards in the area. So that’s a relief.
But there is the fact that we’re having much more epic rains these days. I talked about this a little last week, how in just the last few years we’ve been having rains that, instead of coming down in fractions of inches, come down in multiple inches. Just last year we had four separate rainfalls that dumped more than four inches at a time.
That’s not normal. Or I should say it’s not average, looking back over weather history. Instead of nice gentle rains that soak into the soil, these massive gully washers flood yards and fields, washing away soil as they go, especially on anything not level, including along the back edge of my yard.
Bare land is way more susceptible to erosion. We see that with conventionally farmed fields that are tilled at least once in the spring and maybe multiple times more during the summer, then left bare all winter. There is little to stop the topsoil from washing away in even just a heavy rainfall. The saying goes that if you stand on the bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis, you’ll see an acre of Iowa floating by beneath you every minute.
Erosion control, however, can be as simple as planting plants that will cover the ground and hold it in place. Ground cover, even just a lawn, slows down the force of raindrops hitting the bare dirt and also slows down the water running across the ground that would otherwise carry soil away with it. And the native plants I’ll be choosing have long, strong roots that can hold soil in place. And covering that bare soil holds the carbon in place, too.
While it won’t solve the erosion problem completely, I’m thinking it will be a good solution. Not the best solution, because that would involve a very large retaining wall and cost around $15,000 to $30,000. I don’t have that kind of money or that kind of patience, and I would hate to see my hillside torn up like that. So I am going the smaller, more manageable route with my little woodsy garden and the addition of some drainpipe to help direct the rainwater down the hill in a less damaging way.
I may not get it all done this year, but then who wants to be completely done with their garden? Where’s the fun in the that?