What can I plant next to my house? Minnesota lazy person edition

May 22, 2023 11:34 AM

I would like to plant some plants next to my house. They should be perennial, drought-resistant and hard to kill. There are two beds involved.

I like native plants and have access to an excellent native plant-oriented garden supply store. But I would rather not spend one million dollars because I am not the world's greatest with plants.

One bed would be long, narrow and next to the house on an east-west axis. It gets a ton of sun and tends to dry out. Obviously I can water things but in general it's a hot, dry area. This seems like a bed for one kind of plant

One bed is deeper and on the east side of the house. It gets good sun through mid-day and then is shaded. This is a bed where I'd be happy with just one plant but could also plant something in back and something shorter in front.

Since these are next to the house, I don't want to plant anything with really deep, disruptive roots that might be bad for the foundation.

I live in Minnesota, so it gets very cold and quite hot and we often have periods of drought. What should I plant? The only thing is, I do not want to plant hostas. If it's nothing but day lilies all around I can deal, but I don't want hostas.

posted by Frowner to Home & Garden (15 answers total)

I'm having pretty good luck with elderberries. They're persistent cusses. Also perennial and native.

A hazelnut (aka filbert) might like the hotter area. They like sun.
posted by humbug at 11:38 AM on May 22, 2023

Sunchokes are fun: nice and tall, beautiful flowers, very hard to kill, will spread/fill in on their own, edible tubers for humans too! You can sometimes find them for sale as food at crunchy co-ops and health food stores, you can plant those too if finding live plants is difficult.
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:52 AM on May 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

We have irises and roses along the sunny side of the house, they’re supposed to be good for keeping moisture out and they’re really pretty. I haven’t killed them yet, it’s been years. I’ve also literally never watered them even in heatwaves and they come roaring back every year.
posted by ohio at 12:02 PM on May 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm having pretty good luck with elderberries. They're persistent cusses. Also perennial and native.

As a bonus, elderberries are a cinch to propagate. Cuttings will easily root in water and tend to transplant pretty well. Your startup costs are basically $0 if y ou can find one growing on a roadside. Around here (Zone 6) they're starting to come into full bloom.

I took 8 cuttings from a largish elderberry bush under a regularly mowed right-of-way in my yard. Of those, 6 produced roots, and 5 survived planting into the yard over last year into this spring. The berries and flowers can both be made into excellent syrups for flavoring.

Note that the berries must be cooked before eating, and make darned sure what plant you're taking cuttings from.
posted by jquinby at 12:21 PM on May 22, 2023

Elderberry bushes send out suckers and can get massive, so I wouldn’t plant them next to a house.

I recommend doing some research via the Prairie Moon Nursery website. You can filter based on sun exposure and soil moisture, take a look at the kinds of plants that are listed, check out the plant height and blooming season, and make a list to take to the garden store (Mother Earth Gardens, I assume?).

In my Minneapolis yard, golden alexander and blue false indigo plants bloom early and are doing great in a hot and dry south-facing bed. Coreopsis and wild onion bloom after that and are indestructible. Then wild echinacea/coneflower, liatris, ironweed, and sunflowers bloom in late summer.

For an east-facing bed you can do almost all the same plants as in a south-facing bed, plus some smaller, more well-behaved shrubs. Serviceberry, aronia/chokeberry, viburnum, and dogwood shrubs all bloom and produce berries for animals (some of which are edible for humans).

If you plant little potted seedlings, take the time to make little chicken wire cages for them, or the rabbits will attack and leave you with nothing.
posted by Maarika at 1:22 PM on May 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Also: Bachmans on Lyndale has a surprisingly good selection of affordable, native shrubs if you want to save a little money. Or you can buy bare root sticks from Prairie Moon in the fall/early spring and save money, but you have to wait years for those to grow into real bushes.
posted by Maarika at 1:27 PM on May 22, 2023

Ornamental salvias (sage) are popular in California for your first situation. Many are native (though I don't know whether ones that survive in Minnesota are), they don't need watering, bloom freely, smell nice, and attract bees and suchlike. There are annual and perennial ones.
posted by ogorki at 4:09 PM on May 22, 2023

Irises, both the bearded/ dutch variety, and the Siberians, are beautiful. They like moisture. Peonies have stunning flowers, then are a nice small green bush, die over winter. Poppies from seedlings are extravagant bloomers. All of these like sun. I use daylilies where erosion is a problem.

Lilacs are wonderful; and a nice way to screen an area a bit. Dwarf cherries bring all the birds to your yard, or, if you get there 1st, you have cherries. Apple trees make food. Apples and cherries have lovely blossoms in spring. Blueberries can be high- or low- bush, look nice, make food for you or birds.

Maybe an asparagus bed? Plant them deep with good compost, enjoy them for years. They get ferny and look okay after harvesting. I have a big sage plant that looks nice, has flowers in summer, and sage is nice to have, also a patch of thyme.
posted by theora55 at 5:10 PM on May 22, 2023

Autumn Joy Sedum is one of my favorite low maintenance plants. It's a perennial so it does back in winter and then emerges in Spring. Toward late summer it gets pink flowers and in New Hampshire my plants stayed attractive through the end of October. They also are easy to propogate so one plant can turn into many.
posted by MadMadam at 5:19 PM on May 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you do want elderberries, let me know and I can mail you some sticks that will sprout. They can be trained to grow as a thicket like bamboo or as a shrub or even like a tree. To me their medicinal use, good looks, good taste, good ecosystem services make up for the maintenance, but I agree you don't want them too tight against the house.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:50 AM on May 23, 2023

I'm in western Minnesota and I have a couple patches of tiger lilies, also on the east-west sun-facing side of the house, that grow big, take very little effort to keep alive -- as in 'do nothing to preserve their lives, they're impossible to kill without poison and even then you won't get them all' . And they're native! -- edit: although I think I have the orange day lilies instead, which are more invasive, which fits my experience with them
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:52 AM on May 23, 2023

My edit window closed, but apparently there's native tigerlilies, but the tigerlilies you get at the store are not native.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:04 AM on May 23, 2023

Southern Ontario here, and my favourite is cranesbill geranium. A ground-spreader, easy to pull and transplant, stays green even through winter. It prefers a sun/shade spot, needs almost no care, and has pink blooms at the beginning of June. Google Lens tells me mine is a Bigroot Geranium.
posted by Enid Lareg at 8:48 AM on May 23, 2023

My favorite low-maintenance perennials (Zone 5, Chicago suburbs) that work in both sun and mildly shady areas are cranesbill, irises, peonies, and catmint.
posted by sarajane at 9:42 AM on May 23, 2023

I've been trying to eradicate Sunchokes aka Jerusalem artichokes from my vegetable garden for years. They came in a packet of mixed sunflowers. The tubers are edible but cause gas. They seem to regrow from the tiniest bit left in the ground. Maybe this isn't a problem if you don't want to grow other plants there?
posted by SandiBeech at 8:14 AM on May 24, 2023