Note: I wrote this post in April, shortly before I started doing full-time propagation work at a local nursery and filling most of my remaining free time with gardening to fulfill this grant. I’m not going to change the verb tenses. I am at the point now, at the end of September, where I can look back at how the lawn killing, plant selecting, planting, and plant maintaining went. I’ll add a little note at the end explaining my further thoughts about other reasons I didn’t have the energy to blog about the process midstream.

***

Warning…. this will be long. This is the first in an ongoing series documenting installations in my yard for my Terra Foundation Grant. The backstory is that the annual Landscaping with Colorado Native Plants Conference administers multiple grants every year for homes and organizations to plant Colorado native plants. (Can we stop for a second and think about how friggin’ cool this is? Money for plants! More please. More for EVERYONE.) I applied for and received a Terra Foundation Grant.

“The Terra Foundation Residential Grant provides $1,000 for native plant material to install a new garden where turf has been removed in a home landscape. The Terra Foundation is committed to biodiversity and water conservation. Please see additional requirements listed in Section 2. Ten grants available.” Here are the extra requirements:

1. Removing existing non-native turf grasses from the area for your new garden. Non-native turf grasses include Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, tall fescue, and fine fescues (creeping red, hard, chewing, and sheep). 
2. Irrigating new plantings with drip irrigation or by hand, as part of Terra’s focus on water conservation. 
3. Including a diversity of native species and growth forms to support biodiversity. 
4. Maintaining a record of plants, documenting successes with photos. 
5. Purchasing plants from local growers. 
6. Reporting at least 20 observations of plants, pollinators, and birds on community science projects. Ex: iNaturalist, Budburst Phenology Project, or eBird.

Here’s how I am addressing the above.

Readers of my blog know from a previous post that our backyard lawn is not healthy because of a poorly designed subsurface irrigation system. Because our kids are grown (one graduating from college, one a college sophomore, one starting college Fall 2024), we are in a long transformation of the backyard. We freecycled the swingset and the sand in the sandbox (I cried). Last summer, we installed two rain gardens, using water from downspouts to water them, and killing patches of lawn. We will go further this summer, killing a patch in the back side yard (west) and a patch adjacent to the patio.

Our preferred killing method is the lasagna method (a). We put down a layer of cardboard (some of this is big pizza boxes from my Sharewaste.com contributors, thank you!) and cover with several inches of mulch. We have two sources for the mulch. The first is another great freecycle find: I have hooked up with a guy with a stump grinding business, and he drops a couple yards of seriously the best mulch every month or so. The second is the city mulch pile. Arborist mulch (like these sources) is the absolute best stuff–it’s free, it has low embodied carbon (local, reuse, nothing killed to produce it, low shipping emissions, etc), it has a mix of particle sizes, it includes ground up bark and branches, and it breaks down to a make a great soil amendment. In addition, a friend who has used sheet plastic to solarize parts of her yard has offered me the use of her plastic (both clear and black). I will use this in the sunny areas of the yard and compare the two types of plastic and the lasagna method.

From that previous post on irrigation, I’ve made it clear that my preferred methods of irrigation are by hand for establishment, using rain gardening techniques for the long term, and hand supplemental watering in dry periods. (b) Honestly, one of the best ways of having success with this is to know the microsite conditions.

For example, in my application, I referred to the side yard as shade alley. Right now, it gets morning shade from our house and afternoon shade from the large cottonwoods to the west in our neighbor’s yard. We have planted a native box elder (Acer negundo) right outside our kitchen window, as well as several chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) and wild plum (Prunus americana) along the fence. These are all keystone plants, serving as host plant for a few hundred species of caterpillars (which grow up to be pollinating butterflies and moths or which feed baby songbirds). We are hoping to plant one to two more native trees in this area to provide shade to the western walls of our house when our neighbors’ cottonwoods fade out. We will plant an understory of native shrubs.

The site adjacent to the patio is full sun. We may plant a couple of SMALL heat-tolerant trees in this area, but we don’t want anything too tall which could shade our solar panels. This site will get some runoff from the patio, but otherwise, it’s a good place for super xeric native plants.

For both of these areas, we have made a list of possible plants, including a diversity of native grasses, forbs, shrubs, and trees, with the intention of acquiring the plants from Wild Ones Front Range plant swaps, Harlequin’s Gardens, and the High Plains Environmental Center. (c) (e) Trees might come from Fort Collins. When we plant things, I will list them all in posts here; in my application I committed to blogging about them, labeling them, and participating in future garden tours. (d)

Just as in previous plantings, I am basing decisions on habitat and microsite needs. I’ve explained above and elsewhere that I am considering sun/shade (and heat), access to runoff from downspouts, where things are with relation to the house (shading walls, not blocking solar panels or winter sun), and contribution to habitat. Regarding that last one… for pollinators, I use resources like the National Wildlife Federation’s Gardening for Wildlife Eco-Region Keystone Plants lists. For birds, I use Audubon’s Habitat Hero plant finder. I also consider that I need to include warm season grasses, cool season grasses (often important host plants for insects in the butterfly/moth family), forbs and shrubs which bloom in as many seasons as possible to serve a wide range of pollinators and birds, and native trees which fit all of these purposes.

Killing grass and finding and planting additional trees and shrubs is my first priority, along with any additional moving of soil which has to happen for rain gardening. Trees and shrubs are foundational plantings, and it can be harder to find certain species. It’s important to find them and plant them as soon as possible.

Last but not least, I maintain an iNaturalist account, and I post all of my observations there. I intend to establish a project that is within the bounds of my yard in order to document everything we see. (f)

***

I’ll end with just a teaser on why I felt stymied about sharing mid process, and I promise that I will write more about it. I think my feelings about this are not unusual, and talking about it openly now might be helpful for others. Basically, the reason I didn’t share stories and pictures midstream is because landscaping projects, especially those which are drawn out over a period of time, can be UGLY. Even though I knew I had a plan, even though I was told I had scored very very high on the rubric for the grant, I had self-doubt and self-judgment, and I just didn’t want to share pictures of my yard looking like hell. I’m a master gardener and a native plant master. I’m involved in conservation groups. AND I have a freshly minted landscape architect living in my house, and I didn’t want to share the messy middle of my project. Hmm. I need to write more about that.

My last thought… I will share chunks of my narrative and goals for the grant in a future post as well. I realize that it would be helpful for others to understand why I was successful in landing the grant and what exactly I’m intending to do.