One of my goals is to fix up the yard.  It looks horrible right now, and I want to make it nice and hospitable.  Each year, I try and add a few plants around the house, and most of the time, I forget what I planted, how big they are supposed to get, etc.

This year, I’m going to write down what I’ve planted and their care instructions.

In the flowerbed below our front window, I planted 3 Fold Coin Asteriscus plants. They are yellow perennial flowers that are supposed to end up 3′ wide and 1′ tall.  They are full sun, require low amounts of water, and will survive at 30 degrees F or above.  The card states that it is a compact matting to mounding evergreen perennial that has dark yellow, wide-disked, daisy-like flowers that rest atop elliptical, silky, green leaves.  Blooms winter to spring and blooms with some flowers all year.  The minimum temperature of 30 degrees might make it so it dies this next winter, so we’ll have to see.

I also bought 3 purple/mauve wallflowers for the same flower garden as the Asteriscus plants.  The wallflower is a full sun plant, requires a medium amount of water, flowers in the spring, will get 30 inches tall and 18 inches wide and is hearty up to -40 degrees F.  The card states that it has fragrant flowers that are great in the rock gardens, cut, or planted with spring-flowering bulbs.

We also planted a rose bush in the same area with redish-orange blooms.  It sort of sticks out because of the contrasting colors, so if the yellow flowers die this year, we may change it up with more red flowers next year.

In the back yard, we planted 2 flowering pear trees.  One of them is supposed to get 30′ tall and 40′ wide, while the other one will get 30′ tall and 20′ wide.  We positioned them so that they’ll eventually block some of the sun on our house in the late summer evenings to help cool down the house.

I also have a 20′ tall blue spruce in the back yard, and a 8′ tall apple tree.

All of the new plants received a dose of root starter fertilizer, the existing trees got some tree spike fertilizer that’s supposed to be slow acting so that the tree will get it’s food all year long.  Everything also got a dose of insect repellent, which is poured into the ground and sucked up through the roots.  The apple tree was especially bad with earwigs last year, so hopefully this will help.

I’ve spent the last 12 years watching various parts of my landscape die, and I’m now ready and willing to do something about it. It has to be done on a tight budget so I’m planning on it taking several years to finish, which is probably a good thing anyway because it will take plants several years to grow to their mature size and I’ll probably change my mind a few times as to what I actually want.

As of July of 2007, my backyard is basically a wasteland of weeds, a couple of dying rose bushes, one nice 20 feet tall blue spruce, one apple tree that’s about 10 feet tall, and about 20 junk trees that started from seeds that fell off the neighbor’s tree. These junk trees range from 6 inches to 8 feet in height.

My Landscaping Goal

I want to convert my backyard wasteland into a place where it’s confortable to spend time in. The kids need a place to play, there needs to be some shade to block the oppressive summer sun, and if there’s enough room, trees that will give us some privacy.

My house is a split entry. The basement is about 5 feet in the ground, and the upper level’s windows are about 10-15 feet off the ground. My neighbor’s house directly behind me is about 10 feet higher due to the fact that the ground slopes. For privacy, I’m going to need a tree or trees that are at least 20-30 feet tall.

The area that I live in is a desert. Summers are hot with little to no rain, and winters are cold and snowy so the plants that I choose have to be able to survive under these conditions.

I’ve tried and failed to successfully grow a lawn in the backyard. Whatever the reason, the lawn simply could not survive the summer and by August, it was completely brown. We gave up on it several years ago and killed the entire backyard. Since then, the dead brown lawn has been replaced with a carpet of weeds. As I proceed with this project, very little space will be devoted to lawn - in fact only a small patches will have any lawn at all.  The rest will be flower beds, ground cover, rock gardens, etc.

Climate Zones 

The US hardiness zone map puts me in either zone 6 or 7, but I’ve read a few articles that state that I should focus on plants that survive in zone 5 or lower. I’ve read that each part of the yard can be in a different zone; for example, the dryer vent will raise a small area a zone, as well as the southern side of the house because sunlight reflects off the house and helps raise the temperature.

USDA Plant Hardiness Zones divide everything into 11 zones, which are based on the average minimum temperature in 10 degree Farenheit increments. Zone 3 is -40 to -30 F, 4 is -30 to -20 F, 5 is -20 to -10 F, 6 is -10 to 0 F, etc. Since it uses an average, I can see why it appears that I’m in a higher zone, but temperatures have dropped to -10 degrees F before, so it makes sense to try and stick to zone 5 or better for the majority of plants.

There’s a lot of work to do before my backyard will be comfortable, habitable, and something that I can be proud of.   Right now, it’s in the design phase and consists of a few chicken scratches on a pad of graph paper.  When I’m happy with the design, I’ll post the drafts.