Greetings

[CompulsiveGardener]

Hi, CG! Sounds like you've found a good niche. I like gardens and native plants, but I'm pretty lazy, so mostly we just have "messy" landscapes, lol. iris, congrats! Those lilies look amazing! I mostly have daylilies - they are easier. no staking needed!! But I must admit, they are not nearly as stunning as some of the Asiatics.

I have plenty of daylilies and other easy plants to fill in the landscape and add different colors. I planted crocus right into my front lawn, and they bloom and are done long before the grass awakens from winter.

One way I like to use the 'easy' plants (daylilies, hosta, wild geranium, bee balm, native sunflower, and more) is to fill in areas I have recently reclaimed from lawn until I find new plants I want to add. They quickly establish a sort of frame, so that the space looks landscaped while I'm still working on it.

I mostly add new spaces by covering the lawn with cardboard or old cotton clothing that is suitable for nothing except the rag bin, and then about 4 inches of mulch (which I can haul for free from a county site). The cotton clothing lasts longer as a weed barried than cardboard, and those areas are generally available for planting a year later.

[catherine]

Sadly, my Montmorency cherry, as well as my Harelson and Paula Red apple trees, all succombed to fire blight.
The birds and I used to race for the cherries!

I have a solo cup filled with cherries we picked today. The pickin's are slim thanks to the birds. I even saw a chipmunk in the tree eating them.

[Selah]

Welcome, CompulsiveGardener! Michigan-raised here (Ann Arbor) now living in the Great American Southwest. I loved gardening when I was growing up--although it was just basically following my mom's orders. I envy you--I love the Southwest, but where I live, it is absolute crap for gardening Midwest-style--and Southwest-style, too!

[Rogar]

I've used a similar method to get rid of some traditional lawn. Cardboard topped with mulch and I've heard that newspapers also work. I have to say after a year or two the decomposing sod makes for some good organics. I originally had a plan to replace with all natives, but that soon became unrealistic, mostly due to availability, and I've settled for things from the southwest somewhere. It's taken a while to get everything established, but I have something in bloom from the early spring to fall along a 15 foot strip of the front yard. It has has low water requirements , but I've learned that "perennial" is something of a misnomer. There's always something that doesn't make it through the winter or just is old. At the foot of the Rockies but still in the arid southwest.

Plus a mid-sized vegetable garden, some raised bed, some in ground. After a few years of replacing rotting boards in a 4x4 square foot raised bed, I bought a 6x2 foot "Vego-garden" metal raised bed and filled it with primo but expensive raised bed soil. Tomatoes are liking it a lot.