My last post predicted I'd be working on creek beds this past weekend, but 5 a.m. on Saturday didn't seem the best time to be shoveling rocks into a metal wheelbarrow. I decided to work on stabilizing an area affected by runoff from the tropical storm's heavy rain that I'd just planted in. That's the area surrounded in red in my image. 

Rain from rear roof falls on the back concrete slab, most of which then runs west down the slope, headed for the left, rear corner of the lot. Green shows the gullies of erosion that occur after a heavy rainfall. This is the area I decided to tackle.

I started by digging a giant bag full of tiny native island grasses that have sprouted, getting them now before their foot-long roots are too established. Next steps included wheelbarrows of sand either flung by shovel or carried by the bucketful into the washed-out gullies. Most of the sand arrived magically, courtesy of the husband who foolishly woke early and came downstairs to see what I was doing.

Noticing the particularly obnoxious erosion gully near the right side of the auxiliary parking space off the driveway, I switched gears and focus. We'd decided to create a gravel path alongside that parking space to not only widen it for loading/unloading, but also as one of the primary entrances into the garden. This became a good time to do it. Over several hours remaining in the morning, I dug out a few inches of sand, moved it into the bed to its right to plump it higher and less attractive to rain water, and covered the path-to-be with weed cloth. The husband shoveled and wheelbarrowed three piles of rocks from across the street before he decided to save his back, so I moved that in to hold the cloth intact against the wind. Outsmarting weed cloth in 20 mph winds is a trick-learning game of wits versus mother nature's sense of humor.

The hope for this path/creek is rainwater will choose the lower level beneath the rocks and avoid the bed nearby. I have a small supply of large, blocky rocks I can put against the sidewalk to help with encouraging the flow that way, if needed. Will this work or will it be a typical corp of engineering project with unintended consequences?

My back was tired and the head hot, so I abandoned the rest of the rock-hauling for another time, and again focus-switched to what I thought would be a less painful task, applying hay to the bed. The process is to fill a very large bucket with hay and cover with water (which is supposed to make the hay too heavy for the wind to play with), and then spread it over the newly de-gullied slope. By rubbing the dripping hay into the sand, they intermingle and form a stable sort of paper-mache surface that does fairly well with all but big rains. It can take multiple wettings, stepping ons, and foot wiggling to get the desired result of cohesion.

Compare to the June 20 photo... This is the finished section with hay mulch added to the bed and the new river rock entry  It doesn't look that different, but represents hours of hard labor over several days.

Later that day... I did an inspection of the recently-planted plants to see how they like their sand. I was disappointed to say they do NOT. Almost every one of them has lost most of its leaves. Those that remain are fully or partially edged in brown. Many have tiny new leaves coming out on lower stems, and some are blooming despite their leaf drop, but quite a few look like they've been suddenly poisoned. Hmmm. Choking on salt, I assume. Plus, they've obviously been much too stressed for much too long in their neglected little rootbound pots to stand yet another stressful new adventure. Then off with their heads, I say. I'm turning it over to their brave hearts and roots to figure out how to live.  We'll just give them time and keep planting the others with optimism.

Life has changed dramatically. In this rambling text, I share a few of the details about building our yard, which is one of the many changes in the daily routine. I'm more obsessed with doing than reporting, so much of this already seems ancient.

You know we moved into our new home after a ridiculously long wait. The move was May 29.

A few days earlier, on Memorial day, we made two round trips with a rented moving truck to bring over all the plants. A relatively small percentage of the stunted, weary seedlings I planted from cuttings or seeds, some over a year ago, have died from unfulfilled expectations, but most of the larger ones have suffered through, living on hope.

Our night-working next door neighbor happened to be awake at 8am that morning and was willing to make a few bucks, so he made the plant-moving event less difficult. Imagine close to 800 plants, from a 5' tall yucca and 7' duranta to hundreds of baby agaves in red solo cups. We loaded, drove, unloaded, drove back. Twice. The side yard of the new locale was suddenly full of those plants.

Forget grouping the plants by type so I could easily locate and plan future locations. Because time was short and the kind neighbor with no plant experience placed them in edge-to-edge crowds, it that's taken time to regroup. But before tending to them, we had to busy ourselves unpacking our self-moved breakables and essentials, so there was little time to do more for the plants than give them water.

Then move day came, bringing us way too many boxes, almost all of which went into the garage so the house could remain uncluttered. The movers had the same mindset as the kind neighbor, dollying in stacks of unrelated boxes, which I quickly re-sorted into stacks of now and later as I could. There were three of them and they were quick. The inventorying of the stacks and finding the desired ones has been an ongoing time commitment since then  A progressive perception-action iteration cycle.

Once we established the basics for living inside, I went outside. Glory be.

Ray and I have applied our usual working style to planning and executing the yard layout and design of beds, pathways, and destinations. He was quite good at advising on the big picture and the science behind designing our large, quartered compass bed, finding north with devices we can't see in the sun and which keep changing their minds, creating a circle within the circles and then segmenting it into equal quadrants. To be sure he doesn't feel like just an advisor to my yard, I asked him to design the middle third of the back yard using his right-brain style to complement my structured left-brain.

The design has gone through several stages over time. This image of the lot below is a not-to-scale, though somewhat reasonable resemblance to show the current plan and imagined possibilities. We staked the first draft outline of the quartered compass bed (in the back left corner) and paths to it from the driveway weeks ago using little pink marking flags. A second draft redefinition allowed for new ideas. We confirmed the final design with spray paint just before moving. Last week, we outlined the middle third of the back very quickly. It's quick when Ray says What if we did this completely different thing than you've been thinking all these months, and I say OK, let's do it, though with these little detail changes. We've laid out the hot tub outline (which we'd done at least twice before but lost to either rain or a sand delivery), and will design the right side, Gulf-side, once the concrete pad is in and the tub delivered. Gray lines are paths already marked or, on the right side, imagined.

Meanwhile, the planting has begun. I started before the move with a couple of dozen small scraggly ground cover rootlings on the few areas along the front sidewalk that hadn't been washed away by the last few month's flooding. Since the move, I've planted a couple of dozen or so plants in beds from the driveway to and including the compass bed, and in beds here and there to the right of it. Also, I've begun agaves and yuccas to the left of the driveway. Progress, fun, hard work. It's critical to get plants into the ground because none of them are happy about this move and the hardships they've had to face since then. Having been being moved from a protected, mostly shaded environment to one of 30-40 mph winds and sunrise-to-sunset sun from the Death Star is bad enough, and many of them are finding their descriptions of being moderately salt tolerant to be less than accurate.

Back left corner of the lot showing compass bed and paths.

Side yard, left/west of driveway

But wait! We put everything on hold and even went backwards by accommodating Bill the tropical storm. All the nicely grouped plants sitting and waiting to be planted were in jeopardy, so into the garage they went. Not kidding. It only took a couple of hours, and the rain shower toward the end only added to the adventure. Bill was a non-event, so back out they came after he passed, though for now I've left the smaller ones still in their large plastic tubs used for transport. Bill was sunny skies and a strong breeze, and then his mighty tail brought the monsoons. Five inches of rain 36 hours later flooded the yard again, but at least gave all the plants a good baptism. The next day, we barely missed an astonishing 8" more that fell on the bluff of the mainland 10 miles away. Thank you, father sky, for letting that one pass us by.

Since then, I've been building creek beds down the slopes from the house where the erosion proves that water from the roof will fall and will take whatever it can with it — sand, protective hay, plants. (No, gutters don't work out here because of the high winds that like to send them flying into the next county.) Future torrents of gushing of water can still fulfill their mission of going from sky to roof to sand to plumping the ground water level, but should do so without harm. Let's see how it feels about its own Schlitterbahn made of landscaping cloth covered with layer of river rocks, and surrounded with a mixture of hay-embedded sand.

I've created five so far and have about four more in the back to do and at least double that in the front. Probably two on the right side of the house. The nicest creeks curve and the straight one looks only so-so. Going with the path the water has already chosen for itself must be respected — function over form. I'm doing a highly curved creek this evening that I think I'll like better. At this rate, it'll take the full weekend to do the creeks out back if nothing distracts me. The wider, longer, or multi-tributary creeks will take much longer because I have to haul in quite a bit of filler sand first, and the truckload of rocks is way down the driveway. Across the street. Downhill. The gym membership is paused.