Tex - thank you for the website. The selection of natives looks great. I'll have to find other people to go in with me. Buying in lots of 25 is a little bit high for our acre. I can see DH's face if I tell him we have 75 new shrubs to plant. BTW I went on a garden tour in Corrales a month ago. It's about 15 miles from us, but a completely different landscape. No chamisa, cholla or yucca constricta. But sand sage is everywhere! I thought of you as I looked at whole hillsides of it. Shooting the rats isn't an option. I'm sure we'd be arrested if anyone thought we were firing off guns. I have terrible eyesight so I'm not touching a gun any time. Sandyslopes - I would not put out poison. There is too much wildlife here and we depend on ground water for survival. I'm not going to trap the rats and move them to some other unfortunate person's land. But honestly I can't think of a single good reason to keep the rats alive. They're very destructive. DH's car repair ran to almost $3000. They harbor all kind of other pests like fleas and ticks. They're probably food for predators but there are lots of other prey, like the hundreds of rabbits on our property. I'm considering putting out water, if only to keep my plants alive. We already keep water out for the birds in the walled garden. The deer have completely wiped out our apricots, cherries and grapes. They check on the apples regularly. We see whole families grazing on our land. I doubt this is just for water. This is a harsh climate and I don't blame them for taking what is available. But eating six wine cups, three agastaches and several poppies and coneflowers we had planted in painstakingly amended caliche is more than I can tolerate. Cheryl

Hi, I'm interested in 5-10 seeds of the following which are listed in order of importance to me. Hope you'll find SOMETHING in my seed list of value to you. Quite an impressive list you already have. Brugmansia Charles Grimaldi, Versicolor Peach & Moonflower Datura metal double purple & Wrightii Regal Alcea Hollyhock doubles Passiflora incarnata,quadrangularis,ligularis TY-Sandy

I agree, I want my soil lean so the plants stay in check, the only amendments have been coarse sand for drainage--- no feeding ever. What looks great along the roadside can become a huge 'triffid' in your yard or a flopping mess, many plants loose their appealing character in amended soil. I've done a lot of trial and error---if it works, keep it, if it doesn't pull it out and do something different. Around here, grasses are essential for a natural looking native landscape because thats what you see around here. It seems to me like a lot of people using natives zero in on the more ornamental and flashy flowering plants, what I think of as accent plants and they snub the duller or common lowly plants. In the end the results seem too contrived, like a flower bed or conventional landscape. Low grasses tie everything together & it helps to have other common filler plants, ones that reseed easily and fill in spaces for continuity like in nature. My best filler plants besides grasses is Helenium annum (bitterweed), Talinum (Flameflower) and Dyssodia (Fetid Marigold). These are common low growing roadside weeds that bloom from spring to frost, the repeats add harmony. I finally planted two Ironweed plants, Veronia Lindheimeri (Woolly Ironweed) sent to me by a friend in Texas. My understanding is its what goes on underground that is the problem rather than seeds but it depends on the variety. This variety is OK and very pretty, the leaves are narrow and silvery. I had read in a book about a woman who regretted planting ironweed because after several years the roots underground were so widespread and massive that it took over a small landscape and she understood why the name Ironweed was given to this plant because it had roots like iron and was not removable. I'm careful about planting the larger aggressive plants like that and Goldenrod due to space issues. I'm too dry for some of them like Queen of the Meadow or Joe Pye Weed anyway. It would be nice if there were checks and balances in nature as tuben claims but unfortunately, that is simply not the case most of the time. Around here Smooth Sumac is a very pretty native and so is Red Cedar but unfortunately those so-called natural checks and balances don't keep either one in check (along with several other native trees), quite the opposite occurs. Unless someone intervenes grassland keeps disappearing. The native Americans used to intervene regularly to keep them intact and deforested but now so much is all broken up, fenced, paved, lawned, constructed on, cut down and otherwise broken up into little pieces that those old interventions (mainly that would have meant fire either natural or controlled) are suppressed. As is the case with prairies, fire suppression in forests is now proving to be a problem of misunderstanding, Smokey the Bear went a bit overboard from what I learned recently.

Hey Jay, the Smilax and Rubus are in a thicket at the back of the lot and Im just going to let them grow wild for the birds. It was hard to get that close to the Rubus to take the picture, had to step through a lot of poison ivy. I just looked at that Astragalus, and on BONAP, none of them are native in my county but canadensis is close. I didnt really have this concept when I was ordering these plants and seeds a couple years ago. Crassicarpus looks like a good one for you to grow, and a food source. Ribes hirtellum and triste are native to my county, but the thorns on mine dont seem to match. My property used to be farm land I wonder if somebody grew that Ribes on purpose at some point. I just noticed a couple weeds in my front flower bed. One was a walnut tree, the other, an oak. One in the white oak by the looks of it too. Thanks squirrels! into the pot farm: