24. The Native Meadow Experiment - Summer & Fall

We are well into Fall and it’s a great time for planting natives here in Northern California. In my yard, that means the next round of plants for my little backyard meadow. Its hard to believe that just last January I planted my yard with new native grasses, my how they’ve grown! (see this earlier piece for the details).

The main tasks since planting the grasses have been basic maintenance: weed pulling and watering. Getting weeds early is critical, and I tried to go through and pull weeds once a week before they got too out of control. When the rains tapered off in early summer, I had very few weeds to deal with, good news for sure! For the first 4 to 8 weeks after planting the grasses, it’s a good idea to water every couple of days (when rain doesn’t do it for you). After that, I went to a deep watering once a week, making sure to wet the ground thoroughly out to the edge of the foliage. This approximates the edge of the plant’s root zone and encourages the roots to grow further out. An important aspect of making plants drought tolerant is to water them deeply so they develop large root systems that can draw water from a larger area. Next year, the watering should be limited to dry weeks in the spring and extremely hot spells in the summer and fall.

It has been great to see first-hand how each type of grass grows and changes over the seasons, and a few have become my favorites. The Idaho Fescue (Festuca idahoensis 'Tomales Bay') is a nice compact size that looked good all summer, improving with the emergence of seed heads in the last few months. The California Fescue (Festuca californica) has done great overall, but a couple of plants aren’t as vigorous and may need replacing. The same is true for the Reed Grasses (Calamagrostis). The Red Fescue (Festuca rubra) shot up fast and looked really great flowering, but it is spreading fast and may eventually take over too much of my small plot. The one Needle Grass (Nassella cernua) that I planted ended up being a favorite of the birds, with the ground around it completely pockmarked from what must be birds foraging for the seeds.

Trimming native grasses is done in place of natural grazing and fires that occur in their natural environment. I’ve read that you shouldn’t cut newly planted grasses until the second fall to be sure they’ve had plenty of time to establish good root systems. I did, however, cut most of the seed heads off my grasses as they started to droop and die on their own, and lightly cut back the fast-growing Red Fescue. An interesting coincidence the day I did this trimming was a high fire danger and some small local grass fires, which sort of implies the timing was right.

Companions for Grasses

I’ve been reading up on what other types of plants naturally occur in a native grass meadow, again considering what would occur in my locally native plant community, the Coastal Prairie. The plant types more or less sort into two categories based on growth cycle – perennials and annuals. In the Bay Area, a perennial may not necessarily die to the ground each winter, but it will have a down time. Annuals do have a one year growth cycle, but can re-seed and come back. The perennials should be available in the nurseries, but the ephemeral nature of annuals makes them less available and less useful as nursery grown plants, best to add them to your garden from seed.

Narrowing down the choices involves the same things as when the grasses were selected - the site specific environment as well as personal aesthetic preferences. Plant size is an important factor for me since many shrubby plants are simply too big for my small space and the low grasses I’m using. I’m also interested in having year-round beauty in my meadow, so the designer in me ended up prevailing over completely staying within the locally native plant community. One other factor is being able to find these plants, which can be more difficult for perennials, but in the Bay Area there is a whole series of native plant sales each fall that you should plan on attending. After doing some shopping around at these sales myself, I decided on the plants shown in the list below.

Installation

I’ve already done all the hard work for this area by preparing the soil for the entire area last winter, so the installation is a simple matter of getting the new plants in the ground. Planting seed is a little bit harder, and this will be my first time, so we will see how it goes – in particular it will be hard to tell a sprouting wildflower seed from a weed, so there will be some trial and error there. With this second round of plants in the ground, things are coming together nicely, very exciting to see after so long!

References:

Designing California Native Gardens, by Glenn Keator and Alrie Middlebrook

Handouts and Notes from my attendance at the California Native Grass Association’s workshop: Using California Native Grasses in the Water-Conserving Landscape www.cnga.org