Hi everyone,
I'm brand new here. I have lived in this house for about 5 years. The previous owners created a pretty decent retaining wall garden which I've spent most of my limited gardening time attempting to keep up with. We have no water system so I have to hand water everything in the evenings which starts to get to be a struggle in late summer/early fall because I am a professional photographer and that is my busy season and this yard/garden is just enormous. So every spring I do a crap ton of garden work and then just pray that it can all last through the season.
I have a few questions below and I hope that's not too many!
1.) We don't want grass because we live in hot, dry Denver and it feels wrong to us to waste water on a lawn that we don't really use. I've thought about just raking in Dutch White Clover. I have a huge bag of it. Thoughts on whether this is a good or a bad idea?
2nd, My retaining wall garden is invaded with Creeping Bellflower. I have spent many hours trying to dig deep to remove those pesky bulbs way down deep but man they are hard to get to. It has started to grow in the plants that I planted last year and now I'm not sure the best way to remove it without destroying my current plants. Is my only option to just do a surface removal? Or is it safe to disturb the plants I planted underneath to try and get to the bulbs/deep roots or whatever they're called? Should I wait a couple more years before trying to do that until the plants I put in are more established? I am a total newbie gardener and my philosophy is that if I plant it and it can't hang then it just wasn't meant to be but I also want to give them a chance and not hurt their root system unnecessarily! But I'm also trying to remove the bulbs/deep roots when possible because I am sick of this damn weed growing over everything!
3.) Any ideas for how to make our lawn space more usable? It's on a little bit of a slope and we recently had to put in a french drain alongside the sidewalk next to our house to help mitigate water flowing toward the house. I'm feeling incredibly uncreative about what to do there. One cool thing is that you can see the football stadium and a view of the Denver skyline from the front side of the yard. So maybe take advantage of that in some way? It just feels uninspired and boring right now. And very few trees throughout so it's full sun all over the yard. This is my forever home so I'm fine with taking projects slow and just building this yard into something beautiful. I will probably have to spread out the money it'll take year by year.
4.) Any recommendations for a bush or plant that is heat/water tolerant that could cover up the french drain outlet we had to do in our retaining wall? We already have a nice tall grass right there next to it so I wanted to put something in that was different so it didn't look weird having two grasses right next to each other.
Let me know if it's better to split up my questions into different posts.
Thank you! Can't wait to spend some time reading through other people's threads and learn more about gardening:)
