This park strip bed is mostly on my neighbor’s yard. My neighbors are getting old, and most of their landscape is taken care of by a variety of relatives and professionals. One such person tilled up the bed, and I knew I had to take immediate action. I went out and talked to them and volunteered to take over the bed, explaining some of what I had envisioned. It was readily agreed to, and I promptly mulched it in wood chips. I then took out my design hat and and brainstormed several directions the bed could take.

I took a trip to the garden center and ended up with a currently simple, but effective design. There are three grasses Calamagrostis  ‘Avalanche'(Variegated Feather Reed Grass), Deschampsia ‘Schottland'(Scottish Tufted Hair Grass), and Helictotrichon ‘Sapphaire’ (Blue Oats), and a ground cover Oenothera “Shimmer” (Evening Primrose). I want to plant more in the bed, but decided I would start with a basic foundation and add more later after I see how these plants did. (It’s cheaper that way too.)

The garden is super easy to maintain–I hand water it twice a week right now, and it will need even less water later on. The only other task is weeding, which I do once a week with a winged weeder. The weeds were coming up pretty good because of all the tilling at first, but now its hardly any work at all. (I wouldn’t have tilled the bed first if I was in charge–I would have just done a light hoeing to get rid of the weeds.)

I like the bed mostly because it is the only part of my garden that isn’t a tree, something I don’t want, or an annual. Right now it’s a bit underdeveloped, but it’ll just keeping getting better as the plants grow in.