Building our California Native Garden
Our new California native garden is almost ready to plant! One of our goals in stewarding this land is to help propagate native plants. The land now is mostly overrun with invasives.
Eric prepared for this weekend’s work day BEFORE the rain started. Smart guy!
We had seven very large Eucalyptus trees in one section of our meadow. One of them was at least eighty feet tall! Tall trees take out carbon from the air and give animals a habitat - great, right? Although eucalyptus offer a nice habitat, they are also invasive and their roots aren’t able to stay firmly in the ground. They take up a lot of water, grow fast, and become big and heavy.
This creates a problem when heavy rain creates soft earth. One of the trees fell during our brutal winter rains this year - crushing a major section of the native tree underneath. The other trees in that cluster seemed healthy, but they were growing over the adjacent oak trees, blocking out sunshine that they need, they were sucking up the ground water. The area that is now the Deviled Eggery actually used to be much wetter. At that time, landowners were planting Eucalyptus for firewood, cheap sources of lumber, and to reduce and divert surface water. As a result of these and other poor land management practices, now we have lost much of our wetlands, and we even have areas nearby with wells that are dry. We realized that the Eucalyptus were going to continue to cause damage, so we had the rest of them cut down. As it turns out, there was some internal rot and the trees were not as healthy as they appeared. We are now using the trunks of these trees to frame our new native garden. This weekend was a huge effort to move the trees from the middle of the property, closer to the house, where our new garden will grow. Of course, it was pouring down rain on our workday!
Luckily, we have a dedicated team of volunteers who help out with physical labor, rain or shine. We decided to add sheet mulching, including foot scraps, old salads and straw. This will attract worms and increase the health of our sandy loam soil. We asked a neighbor if we could use their hay that was soiled by animals. We added cardboard to keep weeds down. This creates a barrier that suffocate the weeds that are below it. Worms love cardboard! It all breaks down in to healthy soil. Plants don’t want the high nitrogen compost.
California natives are interesting and beautiful. Some are edible, which is a lovely bonus. Indigenous cultures have used these plants to weave, build, for ceremonies, for medicine, and to eat. You can grow some things that are “once in a while” foods, like herbs. ReLeaf Petaluma taught us that Black Oak, a common deciduous native tree, has acorns that were used by animals and humans, including Indigenous communities. So we are planting them in the hopes that this diversity will attract bugs and animals benefit the animals around. We are learning more about ethnobotany, the study of plants and the people that have thrive on them throughout history. We are looking at what benefits not just us, but everything that came before us and that will come after us. We hope we can leave this land healthier for future generations.
We give a huge thank you to all the volunteer help - Ashleigh Bowman, Leo, Gia, Catherine Tullner, Shepherd, Shannon Kollerer Wiseman, Alex, Caleb, Celine, Audrey Leytem-Whitbeck, and Saill White. And thank you to our in-kind donors and partners including, our local shelter (COTS) and Lynne Gordon Moquete from Una Vida.