Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today with a kind of tutorial, or maybe an oblect lesson. You may remember me from such posts as “No Fun At All”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
A morning pose, to be sure.
A couple of days ago the guy I live with decided to transplant the giant sacatons, Sporobolus wrightii, from where they had been planted in the back border. They’d been there for a couple of years and were doing very poorly.
One reason why they were doing so poorly is that that back border is a few inches higher than the field behind the fence, so the soil is very, very dry. There was a perennial border there, years ago, but as it became hotter and drier here, almost nothing would grow there, which is why the rocks were placed there, artistically of course.
The only happy plant is the four-wing saltbush, Atriplex canescens.
The guy I live with said the rocks might help keep the smooth brome from coming into the garden, though I doubted that.
Once again, the buffalo grass looks worse in this picture than it actually is, though it looks to me like the bunny-chewed area is getting larger. The sacatons were planted where the rocks are now. A cool season drought-adapted grass, sleepygrass, Achnatherum robustum, is going to be planted there. He has a bunch of plants, grown from seed and potted up, waiting on the patio.
The decision to move the sacatons wasn’t taken all that lightly. The guy I live with has decades of experience working with dryland plants, and in heat like this (it’s 93F, 34C, with 13 percent humidity), but he was a bit wary.
He did study a paper on warm-season grasses, which these are.
Click to access MDjs_WSG_10_3_11.pdf
He also wondered about the name “sacaton”. It’s from the Spanish zacatón, originally from the Nahuatl, meaning a big coarse grass. (He looked that up too.)
They were dug up, and set in that tub, with some water. (That tub is one of two; liners for half-whiskey barrels, and came with a pump. No “water feature” for our garden, but the tubs come in handy.)
The sacatons always looked withered and dry. Grasses tend to curl their leaves in hot and dry weather in order to reduce the need to pull extra water from the soil, but these looked really bad.
A day soaking in water was all they needed.
The real problem revealed itself when the sacatons were first dug up.
This is not good at all. The guy I live with said he forgot to look at the roots when he first planted the sacatons. The roots are so tightly packed that only some of them are doing the work of absorbing water so it can be pulled to the leaves by osmotic pressure.
After the roots were thoroughly soaked, he took a piece of metal (a nail would work) and “feathered” the roots so there was more surface area.
He could have repotted these into larger pots, with the root ball surrounded by sand, and watered for a couple of weeks (the “super genius method”), but these are warm-season grasses, as I said, so they needed to be replanted now. Certainly not in autumn or winter.
He dug three holes, because there were three sacatons. I admired his mathematical skill there.
He also dug some sand and put it in a bucket.
Notice that the bucket of sand, with some gravel, is on a small dolly. He claimed he could have carried that out to the three holes, a hundred feet away, but I knew the dolly was a much wiser choice.
A small amount of sand was put in the bottom of each hole, and the sacatons were planted there. The root balls were surrounded with the sand and gravel so the roots would leave the root ball faster, watered with the water the guy I live with had saved from refilling the water in my water bowl, and then covered with soil, making sure that the top of the root ball wasn’t too deep, but also that none of the root ball would be exposed to the sun.
The planted sacatons were given a mulch of pine needles.
The guy I live with explained that it isn’t true that pine needles will acidify the soil; the needles are practically neutral pH by the time they’re this dry.
There are also some chunks of pine cones spit out by squirrels. The guy I live with said it also isn’t true that wood, like pine cone chunks, on top of soil will deplete the nitrogen in the soil.
Sacatons (we also have the alkali sacaton, Sporobolus airoides, in the garden) inhabit alkaline soils in nature but they don’t really need it. Our soil is pretty much neutral pH.
So that’s the riveting, courageous story of the sacatons. Hopefully they’ll get as huge as they ought to be.
After all that, I’ll leave you with a picture of me, in my Kitchen Fort, enjoying the breeze from the swamp cooler.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 