Betsy and I bought our ‘retirement’ home here in the Glade back in 2002. At the time we were both still working, so we used the house mostly for a weekend get-away. After Betsy retired we moved up here, but I was still working so we didn’t have a lot of time to work on our yard. It was only after I retired that we could really get busy on projects.
Don’t get me wrong — the house is beautiful and was (and hopefully still is) very well taken care of. But there were a couple of problems on the outside. Our house is built on a slope and we had some erosion problems. We handled the uphill side of the house by building a retaining wall and putting in a long flower bed. We’ve planted a ground cover — periwinkle — on the downhill side of the house. The periwinkle is spreading and has greatly reduced the amount of erosion we have there.
That left one problem area. There’s a fairly steep drop-off from the driveway near the house. The previous owners had started a rock garden, but when we got the house it was mostly rocks and weeds in that area. We cleared out the weeds, but wanted to find a way to keep the weeds from coming back so abundantly. Needless to say the soil is very poor in that part of the yard. And to make things more interesting part of the hill is in deep shade while the rest in quite sunny.
We finally settled on sempervivum — hens and chicks. The semps require very little care and do a good job of multiplying and filling in the spaces between the rocks. The picture above shows a part of that rock garden with several different varieties of sempervivum. Both Betsy and I love them and we highly recommend them for any problem areas you might have.
Senior Moments 
Leave a Reply