Planting pockets

A new day, a new project. This slope is very steep. This is the bank above the lawn and the mighty miscanthus grasses. We call it, imagininatively, the pool garden bank. Being near the pool.   Really, we  really ought to be more creative.

The plan is to have it as a grasses bank. And for the first few years it worked well.   Annual grasses carpeted the entire steep slope.

But in the past few years the vetch has taken over and smothered any new grasses in late spring.

Now we love vetch. It’s a fantastic blue pea family plant which lifts a lot of our garden for a month or so each spring.   But the trick is to pull up this annual clinging plant as soon as it goes over.

Forget and you just have a matt of thick dead plant material. All over the bank.   I managed to clear the bank a while back, and found to my delight that the mighty eragrostis grasses survived the smothering.

So eragrostis planting, en masse it is to be.

So now the plan is to have two little terraces in this steep bank where I can walk and plant and more importantantly, water until the grasses establish.

And in between we can still have the wild annual grasses if we can clear in time.

The top most pockets are where I intend to plant out the thirty or so new eragrostis which I grew from seed in spring. They are having a lovely soft life in tall pots in the shade of the shed.   Sadly, the soil was dry as dust up under this part of the bank. There is a bit of a shadow from the chestnut pole fence (falling down) above.

But luckily it’s all stormy and dramatic weather here right now, so the wind might blow the rain horizontally into my planting pockets.   I’ll leave it for calmer weather before I put them in.

And then I had to make a second little path. With a teensy retaining wall of stones. Boy this is rustic. But it just has to hold off the worst of the erosion until the grasses get in.

I won’t be able to transplant the monster grasses until next spring.   But it’s ready for them now. And not bad work for a 30 foot section of baby wall.

And yes, it’s wonky. But this is a terrace built on solid rock. And there were just too few areas where I could build up the little wall.   So with luck the grasses will hide my joins.