Wildlife Gardening: Desert yard (in progress), 1 by Equilibrium

Equilibrium wrote:
I haven't laughed that hard in a long time- a thrasher feeding station! Around here, squirrels rip everything apart burying nuts and then trying to relocate their nuts again. Squirrels uproot plants with wild abandon. Most of which aren't found until I get home from work and then they're baked pretty good by the sun... as in dead. Your thrasher feeding station looks quite innovative. Soon you will have an entire garden of wire mesh cages just like we have gardens of chicken wire and fruit tree netting and exclusion fencing! And here I was thinking to myself that you all didn't have to deal with squirrels and along comes the mention of thrashers and their nasty little habits.

We have one native prickly pear (Opuntia humifusa) here in Illinois and we use hot dog tongs to work with them but some leather rose gloves will work in a pinch. I don't envy you working with so many plants that are out to get you back for messing with them and many of the little stickers are blond colored and you can't hardly even see them to pull them out of your own flesh when you do get stuck. I so hate pain.

What's going on around here? I'm a stick gardener. I stick plants here and I stick plants there. I stick plants everywhere. For the first time my husband asked me to please start pulling this landscape design together. Landscape design? Why... I didn't have one- oh bother! I knew I needed a windbreak of evergreens for shelter and protection for my birds as well as to shield a portion of my home so I did start sort of haphazardly on a windbreak this year but there was no actual design to what I was planting because I simply stuck evergreens here and stuck evergreens there. I always knew I would be eliminating my lawn and that it was only a matter of time before it was bye bye so I've been plugging along at plantings that do just that so that when the day comes, I can go and waste all the turf grass here and go with a combination of no-mow and native buffalo grass. Ok, landscape design time??? Oops, I don't have any artistic abilities to pull things together yet wanted to try to appease hubby so I got to thinking about what I could do to make it look as if I was cooperating. Hmmm, I started trenching around plantings, then I started adding 6" borders, then I added contractor grade landscape fabric to block out weeds, then I started piling on mulch and volia! Happy husband!

Here's a photo to start desribing to you what I've been doing-