As an adolescent and young adult I lived in the Antelope Valley part of the Mojave Desert. Mostly brown. Dad put in a couple of nice lawns, and a huge (60’ x 4’) strawberry patch with some peach trees in it to boot. He and the neighbours also put up block walls, so we were not troubled by tumbleweeds. Pretty much, weeds were not an issue. Maintenance? Mow the lawns and water them and the plants. Reap the tasty produce, and when the strawberry plants got to thick invite the neighbours to dig some up to take home and plant.
Now that I live in Rainland, it’s hard to get stuff not to grow! The blackberry bushes grow like kudzu, and the ivy grows like ivy. Pain in the arse, says me. During the warm month (OK, months) the grass needs frequent mowing. Being a fairly rural area, weeds blow in from all over. Someone planted some low-growing, light-green decorative plants that won’t go away. (The SO thinks they’re pretty.) I trim the cedars and the limbs eventually grow back. The back yard has a fine crop of ‘carpet moss’, thick moss that grows on the soil. It’s a little spongy to walk on. Trees grow so high that limbs and tops are knocked down by wind storms. (We had a tall wild cherry tree chopped down last Autumn because it was getting dangerous.) And the cedars grow so thick that they provide easy access for the squirrels to the power lines, resulting in blown transformer cut-out fuses a couple/few times a year.
Now, I like forests and cool and green and rain. But sometimes I wish I could just pave the property with concrete. Maybe have decorative concrete planters for strawberries and herbs and things. Today I’ll mow the lawns, clean the fire pit, trim the grass from around the fire pit, go around with the weed whacker, and maybe saw some limbs. (And there’s always wood to chop.)
If you pave the property over with concrete, you’re going to have to round up some RVs to park on it. But where would the decorative lawn flamingos go?
When I am in WA in August I hardly eat anything except wild blackberries. If you can’t beat them, join them. I cannot understand the antipathy the locals have to blackberries. Free food. And delicious.
That sounds like the Arizona Republican Party Immigration Policy in a nutshell.
However, back to the OP.
Living in Las Vegas, it is hard to get anything to grow other than tumbleweeds. We have finally found a few indigenous plants (aka weeds) that seem to grow easily and have spots of color that make the yard look nice.
I know when people here look at photos of gardens in lush areas of the US and sigh, I always tell them the reason things look so nice is it rains a lot, a real lot, to get them that lush. I know in Illinois the grass would grow without touching it, unlike here where you have to coax every blade. Flowers would bloom, fighting for more sunshine whereas here the sun burns them to ash. To have a garden in Las Vegas that looks like a garden in your area, we would have a monthly water bill of $200 and be the scourge of the neighborhood and maybe even be fined by the water department.
Yes, living in prime location for green lush gardens is certainly a plus for those gorgeous gardens you see in magazines, but they do neglect to mention the amount of work involved in mowing grass, pulling weeds, trimming trees, caring for gardens plus you have poison ivy, mosquitoes, humidity and rain, rain, rain.
When I bought this house, my friend gave me a lawnmower with it. I found a stump and bent the crankshaft. It was cheaper to buy a new one, so I got a Craftsman. I found a different stump with that one and bent the crankshaft. Bought another mower. That one stopped working last year, and I just got it out of the shop a couple of weeks ago. I decided to have the first Craftsman fixed. (The other mower was donated. The shop will fix it and give it to a needy family.) So after having the bent crankshaft fixed, I mowed the lawn today. Hurray! No stumps! But there was a large root i found. Bent the crankshaft. With five minutes on the rebuilt engine. Good thing I had its replacement in the shed, and got the lawn mowed before it started raining.
We have blackberries in our garden (a cultivated variety, with big, sweet fruit, much nicer than the wild ones). But the bramble bushes are so vigorous I swear you can almost see them growing while you watch. Several times I’ve got so fed up with them that I’ve thought “Free fruit be damned, I’m getting rid of these” and hacked them back and pulled up great rootballs the size of footballs, and the next year there’s just as many as ever. In fact more, as seedlings emerge all over the place, thanks to birds that have been eating the fruit.
A few weeks ago I chopped back dozens of the ever-advancing tendrils and a week later they must have grown three or four feet in all directions. On the plus side, we have a freezer full of blackberry ice cream.
Sorry, I don’t know. They’ve been there a long time. I wouldn’t recommend my variety though, anyway: although the fruit is large and delicious, the brambles are viciously thorny, which makes harvesting them a pretty painful experience. There are plenty of modern thornless, or nearly thornless varieties. ‘Loch Ness’ is meant to be a good one.
Get two goats for everything from knee high to about 7 ft (if you get the right breed) and two sheep for the grass and low stuff. The goats will even do the trimming work around your fire pit.
