Steve - What about Russian Sage & Yarrow in that brutal area where nothing can grow? I have that, plus irises in my one lone rock bed that gets next to no water during the warm parts of the year. Only time it really gets moisture is in the winter.. and that's because I pile the snow from the driveway there. This year due to the 4' snowbank, the irises are blooming & the yarrow's thick. I didn't even know I planted a butterfly bush in there until a few weeks ago when I saw it & recognized it as not being a weed!! Granted, I don't see the extreme temperatures that you do, but my altitude makes up for that. 90 here is way worse than 90degs at 3000 ft.

The mountains got some snow this past Monday when it snowed. However, I doubt it's going to last any time soon as today's gonna be in the 80s here, which means 50s there.


It's supposed to rain again tomorrow through this weekend. I think that's a Mother's Day tradition, be gorgeous up to Mother's Day weekend, then be crappy for the whole weekend. I don't really care, I'm not a skinMom.

Steve your property sounds beautiful - wild and exciting!

why is part only accessible by helicopter? Do you have a steep canyon or something? I'm not familiar enough with Arizona geography to get a mental picture. I would love to see a photo of what you are describing. The flowers sound really beautiful.
There's places 30 miles from us where gardeners have trouble planting because there are so many rocks in the soil. I have yet to find a rock of any kind on our property. We broke our backs digging big rocks out of a friend's yard to haul back here, and then we paid a fortune to have dump truck loads of river rock brought in for the driveway. They said we need 6 more loads, I said wait until I win the lottery.
Landscapers can easily charge $500 for one boulder here since they have to travel so far.

Cindi - if you scroll towards the bottom of this thread The thread "APRIL '12 ~ Let's chat (late!)" in Southwest Gardening forum you can see some of Steve's property. It's gorgeous. Never been out this way? If you want rocks, we got the whole damned Rocky Mountains you can have. And they're called the Rocky Mountains for a reason!!

Toni,
Russian sage has never grown for me. I tried it in NJ and it died immediately. I tried it here and it died in fourteen months without ever growing. I know it's supposed to be one of the easiest plants on earth to grow, but I've failed with it a total of four or five times. And there hundreds of thousands of cultivars that I haven't yet failed with even once. So I'll try some of them first.

Yarrow might work. There's some white flowered yarrow that was here when I arrived. For a while I cultivated it. Then I realized it's a thug. It slowly spreads everywhere and is virtually impossible to eradicate. When you dig it up one place it pops up somewhere else. I have Achillea Moonshine planted in one spot in the garden and I like its yellow flowers and silvery foliage. It doesn't romp about the garden. So it's a possibility.

Cindi, this photo - which is essentially the view out my office window looking down the driveway toward the street - depicts one rocky part of the property in a different area where it's comparatively easy to walk.



The big boulder you see there is about twelve feet high and wide. The smaller ones are three or four feet in each direction. In this photo you can see that one can walk between big boulders and 'easily' get somewhere else. This contrasts markedly with the inaccessible part where the smallest boulders are 12 ft across and they are too close together to walk between.

Some of the people here have heard the story of my wife who was convinced that she could walk to the other end of the property; after all it is only two hundred yards away. An hour and a half later she arrived home visibly shaken. She told me "I made it within a hundred feet of the end of the property but I simply couldn't get back. I was going to call 911 but then I thought about how the conversation would go. The first question would be 'Where are you.' And I'd have to respond 'In my back yard.'"

Porkpal, It is absolutely gorgeous. I feel like I'm living in a national park. There actually is one just a mile to the west. It's probably better than most in this zip code, but the property is not ideally suited to every kind of agriculture.

Around here if you want rocks you have to buy them; a boulder in the front yard would be a sure sign of affluence. The Brazos River runs along the west side of our property and directly behind the house is an old ford called "Rocky Falls". A geophysicist friend told me that was nonsense, there are no rocks in this area of Texas so I showed him the falls when the river was low. He agreed there were in fact rocks, "but a very poor quality of rock". (!)

We grow rocks.

Every year more are thrust to the surface and have to be removed from the veggie garden or lawn. The area to the north of me is called "Rocky Flats" for good reason. Digging post holes and plant holes, or graves for the animals is always a lot of trouble. There's some pretty nice areas with petrified wood if you know where to look, or used to be before houses were build there.

I used to live in New England and there is a good reason for all those stone walls enclosing the farms.

Tabby - I noticed that! I have quite a big of petrified forest rocks that came with the load of topsoil I bought a few years ago. I have picked out at least 4 nice chunks at least the size of my hand in it. And, funny thing is that that's the only types of rocks I have ever found in this soil. But growing rocks.. we don't have that problem out in my area.. it's nothing but sand out here under the foundation.

Interesting note from the Denver Post about today's weather:

"Denver fell one degree short of a record high for May 10 when the mercury peaked at 85 degrees just before 2:50 p.m. Thursday, but today's high temperature is expected to be 34 degrees cooler as rain moves in.

The city has a 40 percent chance of rain during the day today and a 60 percent chance of rain on Friday night, with a forecast high of 51 degrees. Temperatures could warm up to 55 on Saturday, but rain chances for Denver are 50 percent, forecasters said."

Read more: Denver could be colder than the mountains this weekend, as rain moves in - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/brea...

I'll happily take your rocks. Our yard is almost solid limestone so it's almost impossible to find anything that grows since the alkalinity is so high. My roses are in raised beds save for one scraggly "Love" that for some reason grows like a weed, unlike the "Peace" and another NOID that both died within six months.

Carey - Limestone! Good stuff for African cichlids!! Texas holeyrock is EXPENSIVE!!! Seriously! If you don't believe me, search it on eBay.

Toni, you have no idea how jealous of those petrified rocks you found in your topsoil. My best chunks of petrified wood came from Parker and Elizabeth but the areas our group used to hunt are now all developed.

It's trying to rain here right now. Of course it's going to rain this weekend since I have to play music outside up in Longmont.

Tabby, I hope your engagement in Longmont went well.

Carey, Speaking of limestone, I remember planting five Old Blush roses in a bed in Round Rock, TX. The bed was created by removing sod and digging. I wish I had just stuck a shovel into the ground to test it before deciding to plant there. There was limestone within six inches of the surface. But I was young then. And I had a digging iron. Over the course of twenty or thirty minutes I managed to hollow out a hole that was eighteen inches deep and two feet wide for the first rose. The second hole was a little smaller. I took a long break and had a cool drink. The third hole was, smaller yet. By the time I got to the fifth my hands were blistered, I was beat, and the hole was just a few inches bigger than the 2 gallon rose. Months later it was really easy to tell what I had done. The roses grew in proportion to the size of the hole. It looked pretty funny.

Porkpal, I was happy to see rocks in Austin. And sad to live so far from them in NJ. I think that the pleasures of living in Texas are redoubled if one lives near rocks and water. Sounds like you did pretty well in your choice.

We chose this location in Prescott for many reasons, but an important one was the rocks. Granite rocks have a profound effect on me. I do love how they look. A contractor once told us that the value of the boulders could be estimated at about $1.00 per pound. If that were true, I guess we have a couple million dollars worth of boulders. Of course, about $1.05 of that value lies in transportation and mark-up: if we were to decide we didn't like them, we'd probably have to pay to have them removed. In a gardening sense, they can be viewed as decorations. Or as very large bits of mulch, preventing evaporation over large areas. They make the growth of certain perennials that need water a little more viable. But they can also mean that on a 2.4 acre lot you can plant 0.4 acres of plants.

Steve, that's exactly why I opted for the raised beds. It was bad enough trying to level out the ground just a little!

My big rose gardening success in Austin was a New Dawn that I planted on the south side of a house next to a downspout. It grew twenty feet in every direction in one growing season without any attention at all. Sadly, I moved before it bloomed.

Sadly, the downspout on the south side is home to stinging nettle and other obnoxious weeds. Someday, that side will be home to my "pleasure garden" - an arbor big enough for a bench that will have climbing roses, clematis and some other scenterific plants.

Rain? We finally got rain - 8.93" of it Saturday morning. We definitely needed it but it could have been doled out more gradually. I had two new lakes: one about 3 acres and the other nearer to 5.

Moo Too tests the waters.

OMG!!! HOLY FRIGGIN' LORD!! almost a foot of rain? All at once???? CRAP!!

Well, you've been asking for rain! I told you to be careful what you wished for!

That's how we get rain, too. Five inches at a time, usually. None of those nice slow drizzles that soak in.

Well, Happy Mother's Day from Mother Nature. Finicky as always!