I know it's a new word for most of you. What it means is using native plants and non native plants that thrive in the growing conditions of where you are at. What this does is eliminate the need for lots of watering and expensive extra care things you need to do to make things look good. Where I live is in sand country (as in the almanac). I was lucky in here as a lot of good things were growing here already. I hope this is a fun topic everyone can add on to and teach each other how to save resources. Over the next few years I plan on using less than two gallons of gas on mowing for the year and the only water I will need to use will be on the vegetable garden.
there are other names for it as well. I am all for low-maintenance gardening and landscaping! I don't want to grow something that doesn't like the soil I have or that needs more water than falls from the sky!! I read an article a long time ago, I think in Horticulture magazine, about this exact thing, I think they called it German something-or-other, and it also involved packing so many plants into the landscape that weeds had nowhere to grow...
Wikipedia has about three pages of links that will apply to most any area of the country. I'm not doing the real tight planting in a lot of the areas, I was lucky to have the nice woodland sedge grass growing over most of the yard and letting the pine needles act as ground cover in other areas.
I use a lot of xeriscaping as well. I'm far enough north that most plants need to be native anyway unless you want to have a TON of work on your hands. And I'm in clay... so even most of what would normally grow in my climate won't work here. Guess you could say I'm an "accidental" xeriscaper. We have a push mower. I got it for free from freecycle last spring, and for our size yard it's perfect Dunno how large your yard is, but if you want to save gas prices this might help. It's also supposedly better for the grass, but I've had the reason explained to me time & again and I still don't understand it. love, mom
