Yucca

Day 282: Valleys tend to be romanticized as fertile, loamy places where crops grow lushly in rich, black soil. Whoever created that myth obviously never met a glacier. This valley...my valley...is nothing but rocks and glacial flour overlaid with a thin layer of fill. Decent soil was brought in to give grass something to hold onto, at least on two sides of my house, but twenty feet from the structure, you're like as not to hit a Volkswagen-sized boulder if you can hack through the compacted silt layer to dig down three feet. Consequently, the farther away from the house foundation you get, the greater the need for clever xeriscaping. Enter the Yucca, purloined from my foster sister's house some years ago and plunked down in one of the least fertile spots in the yard. Tough as this plant may be, it has not spread as much as I'd hoped, although it valiantly struggles on and produces a flower spike every year.