Flowers, wildflowers and dirt

Honestly, not much grows up here.

Oh, sure there’s a riot of wildflowers in June and July as long as Mother Nature cooperates and provides snow and rain.

The soil at my house is just plain old bad. It’s like cement. The weeds do really well, the dandelions provide bees with their first taste of spring and the wild raspberries do incredibly well. But since the yard is enclosed, no critters keep the foliage in check so the job falls to me. Actually it falls to whomever I hire to weed wack and fight the the wilds of the Bar B.

The first year the raspberries were formidable. The canes were 15-feet long and arched in a canopy of thorns. The thing is they didn’t produce any fruit. I remember the first guy who came in to cut back the raspberries, dig up their root balls and get it under control. He did the job once and blocked my phone number.

Actually, digging up the root ball just made the wild raspberries, well, mad. They began to proliferate at an alarming pace. Every nook and cranny had raspberry leaves sprouting in utter defiance. Even rooting them out had little effect. Armed with leather gloves, I gave it the old college try. I had the entire edge of the deck cleared out. Plucked clean without a trace of that bastard berry-bearing plant.

Then it rained. It rained a lot. Wildflowers celebrated, the lodgepole needles lost their yellow color an took on a faint shade of green. After our showers, I checked the rocks around the deck. Raspberry plants pushed up into the sunshine.

I hired two kids who have a fairly popular business providing lawn (ha-ha, lawn) service. One guy was clearly in charge: The Boss. They stood in front of the underside of the deck and perused the situation. Boss looked at his underling and gave him the news: start pulling that stuff by hand. Kid looked down at the industrial weed-wacker in his hand and back at Boss. He sat it down and got down and began to pull.

Now I figure there was some sort of powerplay going on with those two. Maybe Kid had dated the Boss’s sister or had left an important piece of equipment laying outside in the rain. Maybe Boss owed Kid money. At any rate, Kid started pulling. Boss began working on the waist-high grass. He trimmed the area in front of the gate, He mowed down all the wildflowers in the back. He clipped back aspen suckers. Scorched earth.

Aspens and wild raspberries are very much the same. They’re like gray hair on a woman’s head. You know how the legend goes – pluck one gray hair and seven will show up for its funeral. It’s like that with aspens and wild raspberries. Now aspens are great. Wild raspberries are great. When there’s a ‘normal’ winter and spring with plenty of rain, the raspberries have flavor in full bloom.

You know how else loves the raspberries? Critters. Birds, mice, voles, chipmunks and racoons wait with baited breath for berry season. In the last few years, the oversupply of fruit means the berries become the bait.

Mid- to -late summer is death season. My cats lie in wait near the berries and wait for their pray. The Girls have the patience of a rock. Skeeter once stayed in one place for six hours until she caught some poor four-legged furry victim to snatch. This year will be different. There’s a few plants with leaves but no berries.

Now this is an issue for the critters that rely on those berries. I think many have moved on to greener pastures.

Many friends up here use greenhouses to raise tomatoes, onions, lettuce, radishes and all manner of exotic herbs. They grow things in covered, raised garden beds to keep critters out or they use pots.

Flowers grow best in pots The ground is that bad. No root can thread through it and the soil is low in nutrients. Even using home-grown compost the ground yields nothing.

But buy a bag of soil, grab some petunias and plant away. Line them on the deck on barring any furious hail storms, you get a crop of beautiful flowers.

Typically the growing season is June 15 to September 15. Before and after that, the weather plays Russian roulette with light and temperature.

If I was going to buy a house these days, I would definitely use xeriscape plants and rocks to cut down on how much water I needed to use. The house in north Denver needed a lot of water. I was trying to xeriscape but a garden that’s half xeriscape and half non-native plants is a thirsty garden.

I’m taking my pots with me when I go to create a patio garden. Petunias are one of my favorites. I might even try to grow a few tomatoes.