How to have a beautiful, low maintenance, drought tolerant landscape.

Selecting plant materials for a drought-tolerant garden.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• shovel
• mulch
• small hand tiller
• plants

1. Visit the Las Pilitas website, click on "plant communities"; enter your zip code or city and learn about the natural plant community you live in. (Man has changed this dramatically in favor of exotics from other lands.) This is a website for California native plants.

2. At the bottom of the roughly two-page discussion of your plant community is a link to an extensive plant list of plants native to your area. At the far right of your screen you can click on individual plants and see a photo. He has thousands of photos.

3. Make a list of the ones you like the most or just print out the information and photo of those plants.

4. For economical reasons you may decide to focus on one section of your landscape at a time. Remember high to low--taller plants behind shorter ones for a layered effect. Know the ultimate size the plants will get.
   NOTE: Planting beds should be a minimum of 4' wide; if you're layering, then at least 6'.

5. Next, you may need to prepare the bed. Remove old plant materials; level it, check the irrigation to make sure it is working. California native plants need water too--just not nearly as often, especially once established.

6. Purchase the plants. Make sure you are ready to plant when the plants arrive. So many people leave their newly purchase plants sit for days, weeks(?) before they plant and neglect them. You want to plant fresh, healthy ones, not half dead ones.

7. Now, do your layout. You don't have to plant the very first day (Just don't let them dry out!) Put the plants in their place. Stand back and take a look, maybe a photo. REMEMBER what their ultimate size will be AND ALLOW FOR IT. Move them around a bit. It's easy until their planted!

8. Now, get the shovel, dig the hole. Come on ladies. We're not weaklings! This can be your gym! Well, part of it anyway.
   
   Holes should be NO DEEPER than the root ball. So remove the plant from the pot to see how deep that root ball is.

9. Water. Always when planting: a wet root ball into a wet hole.
   Pack the soil in around the rootball. Press down on that root ball to make sure it MAKES CONTACT with the soil under it. I always make sure the bottom of the hole is flat, cause the root ball coming out of the pot is and you want contact.

10. Build a soil berm around the plant to hold water. Remember you want to encourage the roots to grow out from the plant, so you want the root ball to be wet equally with the soil around it. The berm should be out a bit from where the root ball ends. Once a native plant is rooted, it will probably no longer need or want the berm.

11. Water the planted plant well.
    
    Tip on watering: When you water anything, do it well. Drought tolerant and native California plants included. Just getting the surface wet is not watering and is not even healthy. The water needs to be at the root level, so do it well.

12. Mulch. Mulch can be anything used to cover the surface of the soil. For desert plants, rocks or gravel work best; for chaparral or woodland plants, barks work well.
    
    This is important. Mulch does many beneficial things. It insulates the plants roots from heat and cold; it deflects sprinkler water (so that mud isn't splashed up on your stucco or fence); as it breaks down it improves the texture of the soil. It even keeps weeds to a minimum and makes the ones that do get through easier to pull out.

13. Water the area down again to wet the mulch.
    
    California native plants are fragrant, colorful and fast growing and can be selected for a variety of looks, even tropical.

14. Love the land you're in! California Dreamin'. Livin'the dream.

[vallain]

on 7/20/2008 Wow, I think you have 3 articles in 1 here. Lots of info. Wish you would add the Las Pilitas website in the resources section so we could just click on it. 5 stars.