Wintertime Flora

It's been a while since I've updated the blog and thusly I apologize sincerely to our many (two) blog followers.

So when last we talked, I'd taken down all of the perennial cover crop and had dug a swale. We then spread a mixture of perennial rye and New Zealand White clover from Peaceful Valley. Both, but especially the clover have taken amazingly.

The brown tufts are the recently pruned down red grass, fountain grass and feather grasses we also planted for additional erosion control and "texture". Whatever that means. It's pretty cool to have a bright green lawn in the middle of winter that isn't being enhanced with chemicals or engineered greenery. The clover is so great for a lawn because it needs no mowing, low to moderate water (in the hotter months only) and adds valuable nutrients to the soil. We pulled a few weeds out of the lawn and the upturned soil revealed a solid 2 inches of dark-chocolate colored dirt on top of the original clay that was there when we first moved in. Additionally, this ground cover took exceptionally well to the low point of the swale.

You can see the indention of the swale along the length of the yard. We've neglected to blow the leaves out of the yard from the fall, which explains some of the brown you see in the yard. Otherwise this yard is thickly covered with 5-6" of clover. It has taken beautifully to both sunny and shady areas.

During the summer we planted Palestine/Strawberry clover in the lot next to our house. It has also thrived wonderfully during the winter (even completely covered in leaves from the 5 oak trees in the yard).

Check it out:
So, basically, the clover is super resilient and would flourish even better if we were a little more on top of getting rid of the leaves in the yard.

Upcoming this spring: we're going to do a tree guild in the front yard centered around a live oak. In the lot next to us, we're going to perhaps do some fruit trees and stuff, but we'll see.