A Patient Garden Before and After in Santa Cruz
Everyone loves a good before and after. Here’s where we started in 2022 - with a dead fence, a neighbor’s rusty shed, and some bits of IKEA wood scraps holding the whole patch together.
Laura, how in the heck did the yard get like that? Well, it all started with a tiny little abandoned house next door. A tiny abandoned bungalow, filled with overgrown weeds and at least 15 feral cats.
A tiny overgrown abandoned house - that became a magnet for some weird shit! At one point, we spotted a man fully passed out in the backyard shed, surrounded by empties, with a spoon stuck straight in an open jar of grape jelly. A colony of feral cats kept things stanky.
(California’s housing crisis, of course, means this little sugar shack is worth north of $500K and will likely be a $4k/month vacation rental. But that’s a story for another day….)
dude’s here planning another poop
FEB 2021 (??)
Over time, the feral cat community began using the top of the neighboring shed as a litterbox. While the jasmine smelled good, the entire edifice smelled like … well, shit baking on a hot tin roof. The shit fed the vines, and overtime the entire thing kinda grew into one big messy stinky cat poop fed monster holding up some broken planks.
I’m very allergic to cats and mold, so I’d swell kinda purple and get “the bad kind” puking migraines if the wind blew my way.
Shit couldn’t stay!
The vines looked kinda cool, in my opinion, but the fence itself … well, heck, you can see it disassembling itself right there! The pressures of the vining plants were popping the boards loose, and the posts had almost dissolved at the base into splinters.
Winter 2018: Shortly after moving in.
Winter 2021: Overgrown during 2020
The rest of the backyard was suffering the same fate. Grass seed blowing from the abandoned house next door took root - have you ever tried to kill grass growing through a deck? It doesn’t care what you try. Those Pinterest weed killers don’t work.
Chemicals? Not here, only a few blocks from the otters.
2018: UGH my hands are killing me just remembering this weekend … pulling up all the weeds and wisteria growing through the deck …
“Controlling this chaos organically wasn’t working. It must be displaced!”
2018: It will stay like this approximately ten minutes.
REDESIGN 22
“the new design had to withstand feral cats, foggy coasts, droughts and whipping winds”
This beach house in Santa Cruz is rented, and certain elements were fixed: a wisteria on a trellis, the salt-corroded splintery redwood deck, and of course plenty of hippie friendly statuary.
Challenges:
Feral Cats, the vengeful type
Wild whipping winds
Foggy coastal mornings and their mold
California drought watering rules
I have no idea what I’m doing
I grew up in Arizona and have never seen most pollinator plants
OCTOBER 2021: Remove grass & add lavender & beans
THE PLAN: Gently deter cats by adding stinky plants. Prevent grass from accumulating by using beans for ground cover. Cover splintery deck with old outdoor rugs from the Atlanta house.
Can you spot those two tiny lavender plants? These are the only garden-store plants in this design: the rest is grown from seed!
Here my extra hestia dwarf bean seedlings help to refurbish the landscaping bed. Abandoned and barely watered, they actually thrived down here until the seasonal winter rains came. Those whipping, punishing winds threatened to murder all these seedlings, so I used some of those handy bricks to build shields until they were established.
The solution to finally killing all that grass? We hired a team to do a massive cleanup, and pay them twice a month to come pluck grass out of the boards and landscaping beds. I’m sure it feels silly to them, but it’s helped so much with the cat allergies.
WINTER 2021: Fence update
Fast forward: move the shed, cut the vines, and then the atmospheric rivers bring a year’s worth of rain in a week. Down went the fence, and here is the new one going up as the house next door gets a makeover.
Awh, the sad sight of extra IKEA parts trying to keep this thing from falling over.
BEFORE: This fence busted! The boards snapped at the base and pitched into the yard. The only thing holding it up is that chaise and a pile of bricks.
AFTER the fence was replaced.
BEFORE: Fun fact, that trash bag was originally on the neighbor’s roof shed, holding down that tarp, holding down the poo. Yum!
AFTER: Fresh redwood.
MAY 2022: Annual Seedlings layered in, Jade transplanted
Recognize these bricks from the pile left after the fence redo?
Here the lavenders get settled in, alongside jade cuts from the front yard.
BUDDHA’s GARDEN: Awh, this guy is jamming now that he’s surrounded by these jade plants.
Cost: $0! We salvaged these cuttings after our landscapers trimmed the mature 6 foot trees in the from.
JUNE 2022
Here we are all decked out with cushions. Sunflowers are up, zinnias are green and bushy, our beans are getting going. We’re about a month behind what I’d planned due to the crazy cold spring, but chugging along.
Naturally with the cats, these cushions live indoors, but here we are set up for a socially distanced chat in the backyard.
All of these patterns here are leftover from our Craftsman house in East Atlanta Village. The rainbow mat does a nice job of tying it together right?
“Not photographed: Ocean Breeze”
JULY 2022: Zinnias awaken
Cool, a pair of tiny raccoon brother thieves has dug out a hole.
A fat squirrel planted this seed, and a fat pair of raccoon brothers harvested it.
From indoors.
August 2022: Beans are up, Zinnias are out!
The beans have finally climbed the trellis against their firmest wishes to grow to the west instead.
2022 Backyardening
We went from this ….. to this …. with two small lavender plants, some repurposed rugs and pillows, and several packets of seed. During a historic cold winter, hot drought year. I learned a lot and can’t wait to pick out zinnia seeds for next year.
Winter 2021: Blech. At least we know things will grow here!
