Garden maintenance for California requires an understanding of what happens on a month-to-month and seasonal basis. There are some gray areas in the dry garden maintenance routine, but if you or your garden team possess these basics, the outcome becomes a about the process (the evolution) and not the product (the end result) of your garden.
The beneficial qualities of your maintenance provider:
- Foundational horticultural knowledge
- Experience with water efficient irrigation practices
- Understanding of soils and the soil food web
- Acknowledgement of current climate conditions
- Readiness to adapt to changing weather conditions
- Sensitivity to habitat and biodiversity
A newly planted garden needs to be nurtured, much like a nursery full of babies. Each one is uniting with the soil and the underground organisms with which they interact.
The most important thing you can be doing in that first two years are:
- Managing your water and monitoring the soil moisture. Make sure your garden is getting the water it needs during the cool months, and not too much during the hot months.
- Pulling, cutting the weeds or “undesirables” that spring up after the rains.
- Being patient as your garden establishes. The relationship between the sun, the plants and the soil is sometimes slow, but key to a thriving, prolific, regenerative landscape.
Your California garden plays a crucial role in the local eco-region and our lives. Take a moment to think about what would happen if every home had 1,000 square feet of native plants in their garden. What if it were even more??
Shawn Maestretti Garden Architecture offers horticultural maintenance consulting and collaborates with landcare specialists such as Saturate. As a garden devotee, I admire everything about Saturate and I believe they are the beginning of a new eco-era in landcare.
Members of the wonderful Saturate team.
All photos in this email were provided by and are property of Saturate.