Our neighbor keeps plants inside chicken wire fences, but I’d prefer having the plants in the open. Thank you for the useful post – I’ll be looking into Hakonechloa!

Danielle

I was excited to read your blog entry because I did a similar thing in my garden outside Boston five years ago. Most people thought I was nuts, but I filled in a shady drop-off with the wood chips from three trees that had to come down. I planted rhodos, mountain laurels, azaleas, yews and a variety of woodland perennials. Like you, I made big planting holes and filled them in with brought-in soil. I thought it would be a while before I had to do more than water, but it turns out that every year I have to add a lot of manure to counteract the nitrogen-stealing that the rotting wood chips actively engage in, shovel a couple of yards of soil onto the areas between shrubs and add mulch (more wood chips!) since the shrubs’ roots get exposed quickly when the surrounding soil sinks. The good news is that the sinking is almost over and the dirt is great! Now the perennials I added have a bit of rich forest to live in instead of a wood pile and are beginning to spread. So it looks like it takes about five years to transition from chip heap to soil. Other benefits to this method: the surrounding large trees don’t seem to suffer from having airy chips dumped on their roots the way they would from dense soil, and the shrubs avoided competition with tree roots as they were establishing themselves.

Thanks for the fun pics and tutorial!

Fence or otherwise protect your garden, enclosing it with small size chicken wire or some such stuff. That’s OK on a small veggie garden but ugly elsewhere.

Apply rabbit deterrent to particularly affected plants (not for edibles)- see Gardeners Supply or Gardens Alive catalogs.