Rewilding My Lot

Behind the house next to the patio a few months ago the Bermudagrass sod was manually removed. I knew that I wouldn’t be ready to plant things in that bed until the fall so for the summer I covered much of the ground with cardboard. That is also the current location of the Frogfruit “mother plant”, an American Beautyberry, the compost tumbler, and one of the rain barrels.

It’s time to uncover this bed and prepare it for the fall season, so here’s how that project went.

Here are a couple of “before” pictures. The Frogfruit alongside the back of the house has completely filled in from the original seven daughters of the mother plant, and grown further than it needs to be, so that needs to be trimmed, as does the original plant that is also widespread.

First I pulled up the cardboard, and of course uncovered a mass of ants who had presumably been there all summer. They weren’t at all happy at that intrusion, and so then I had to retreat for a bit to get a few biting ants out of my clothing and gear up with sleeves and two sets of gloves. The cardboard has been moved elsewhere for now — I may use it later under mulched pathways.

Then I trimmed the excess Frogfruit and put some of the cut strands in a big pot with damp compost. I have some other places where I might use it, so I’ll just store them in there for now — it would be too much work to repot them all. But if that doesn’t work out, there is plenty of viable plant to be harvested from the ground.

And then I weeded the whole area.

I don’t have plans for the entire bed yet, but I do have two plants ready to go there. One is the Turk’s Cap (Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondii) that is struggling in a sunnier spot, and another is a Barbados Cherry (Malpighia glabra) that I recently bought.