Faced with nearly sterile silt and bentonite clay, I spent the first few years in my Centennial garden amending soils variously with manure, commercial compost, peat moss and, at one point, unscented kitty litter. My goal was to double-dig the entire one-eighth of an acre.
Double-digging is drudgery akin to a chain-gang labor. You dig a trench one spade’s depth, piling the soil gopher- style along one side. After adding several inches of soil amendment to the bottom of pit you spade it in as deeply as possible. Then you shovel the pile back into the trench and amend that by adding more organic matter and mixing it into the soil thoroughly.
I’m sure I’m missing some nuance of the process, but you get the idea: human rototiller. Two sons and my husband were assigned to help me dig a few feet a day. Looking back I’m amazed that they complied with this insane request for even the several weeks it took for them to organize a labor stoppage.
Soil amending continued solo. Add to that two decades of mulching, fertilizing and top dressing with even more compost, and the soil bears no resemblance whatsoever to what was originally there.
What I did was considered good horticulture at the time. It still is, if you’re planning to grow vegetables. Roses and traditional perennials love it. But I’d planned from the start to grow mostly native plants.
Colorado native trees and shrubs have been tolerant. I’ve had good luck with chokecherry, black locust, sumac (warning: All three sucker badly), clove currant, desert holly, sand cherry, rabbitbrush, squaw apple, four-wing saltbush, rock spirea, lead plant, snowberry, serv- iceberry, mountain mahogany, foxtail and ponderosa pines, Western river birch, aspen and bur oak.
Not too surprisingly, really, because these aren’t strictly short-grass prairie plants. They grow in rockier places, in the foothills, and in washes where more moisture and presumably more organic matter collect.
Local wildflowers don’t appreciate being treated as if they were tomato plants. The few that do grow are those that are so vigorous that if they weren’t native, they would be considered weeds (whiplash daisy, golden aster, heath aster, purple tansy aster and poppy mallow), and those planted in the few remaining areas that I never did get around to amending.
Thank goodness for the American Great Plains, where extra precipitation results in topsoil several feet deep and where much of the natural flora has been replaced by food crops.
Pale purple coneflower, golden Alexanders, cup plant, goldenrod, milkweeds, prairie coneflower, brown-eyed Susan, prairie clover, coreopsis, sunflowers of all types, shelleaf penstemon, bluestar, turtlehead, Joe Pye weed, obedient plant, culver root — these prairie immigrants adore my soil. Turns out that with a bit of irrigation I’ve created Kansas. Not exactly what I had in mind but still satisfying to provide refuge to some of the wildflowers that we chased off the land to make room for corn and wheat.
Marcia Tatroe’s most recent book is “Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West,” ($29.95, Johnson Books). E-mail her at mtatroe@q.com.
