glassflamer

My my husband and I live on a steep hillside lot in Spokane Valley, WA. My gardening efforts are pretty much limited to containers. The space for our home/garage/studio was excavated from a gneiss granite strewn hillside. At the entrance to our driveway is a huge boulder that dwarfs the oversize double garage. It is beautiful – if you like rocks – but digging a hole in our ground is an hours long project so I just take the easy way out with deck pots.

The other problem we have here are deer. I used to like deer. Now I love/hate deer. :) They are very pretty but also very destructive. We live near a protected natural area so we get to enjoy/contend with a lot of wildlife. Moose come through about once a year and eat the trees. They are not careful pruners so you can pretty much count on a butchered tree. Porcupines too, eat the bark and ruin the trees. There is a small space at the base of a boulder where we have four roses growing. A while back we noticed that the bushes were getting crushed, the canes were being snapped in two and the new buds were being eaten – a big mystery until Rod went out late one night and saw the culprit. Porcupine. Oh, well. What do you do about a thing like that? Smile I guess. At least the porky ate well. :)

I have grown roses in the past. Our last two homes had plenty of room and good soil so I was thrilled to be able to have beautiful gardens. Another thing I did once is create a large winter-hardy cactus garden in Nampa, ID. That garden became kind of famous in the area. It was not uncommon to glance out the window to see strangers in the yard enjoying what was very unique that far north. That garden had two Joshua Trees that had been raised in northern Nevada. Amazingly, they survived and grew well in Idaho. Such fun. I will look for the photos and post some pics. We sold the home to my mom and she wanted a more traditional look so she gave all of the plants and soil to a lady and her son on the condition that they remove every speck of plants and soil. It was really hard to see it go but I have to admit that it was difficult to weed! I did get to view the cacti in their new location and it was interesting to see how the new owner put things together – completely different but still beautiful.