I (unfortunately) need to create a visual screen barrier between us and the neighbors. He is slowly but surely turning his bottomland into a junkyard, broken lawnmowers, jet skies, boat trailers, you get the idea... They are all nicely lined up right on the fence, and completely out of his sight (yay for him). For me, they are highly visible when we are down at our farm pond, not too bad from the house itself. I don't have any intention of complaining to the neighbor, it is his property to do what he wants with and is not hurting me. I do want to screen it, preferably with natives.
This particular area is wet, standing water almost all year long. Sunny and flat. I'll be planting along our northern fence line, and the neighbor adjoining property is even wetter than ours - more of a bog. We've planted a few Doug fir seedlings but it's too wet for them and they are yellow and struggling. My thought is to try to propogate some native plants I already have, with the idea to put them in the ground this fall. I have tall Oregon grape, red osier dogwood, and ribes available. I know ribes is easy to start, dogwood not so simple, no clue about the mahonia (forget its new name). I will pick up some sitka willow and Pacific ninebark at the County sale in early February, knowing those will be tiny bareroot seedlings. We also have beavers, so I'll likely put those gawd-awful blue tubes around them until they get established.
I can dig up and transplant cedar and hardhack, both seem OK in wet. I have one sweet gale that supposedly will sucker, but thus far has not spread noticeably. I'll perhaps try to get some starts going from that.
Just tossing this out for input and ideas. I'll post pics at some point for before and after. The other thing I'll do is encourage the blackberries to grow over his dead equipment, although I have little control over whether he will clear them off or not (doubtful). I just hope he doesn't poison anything, all of this wet ground drains into our salmon creek. He's a nice guy, just can't say no to free junk...
