#native planting

[milkweed-and-beebalm]

You can barely see him, but my milkweed is finally doing its job! There’s a (single) monarch caterpillar on my milkweed plant!

I did bring him inside so I could protect him until he turns into a butterfly. His name is Frederick

And only a day later, it’s started!

[oakenroots]

I planted 40+ germinated acorns today. I would like to say I planted "oak trees" but they're literally just acorns and will need to survive the blistering hot Georgia summer and the daily 40° F swing (Today was 85°- last night was 45°) to earn the promotion to "sapling" in the next year.

This past fall, whenever I was playing with my dog in the yard, I would pick up acorns and toss them into a terra cotta planter I put outside for the purpose. I didn't know if they would cold stratify on their own but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. I ignored it all winter and today I found 42+ germinated acorns in the planter. 36 of the 42 are indoors because they were tiny sproutlings with roots only as long as my finger but the 6 largest went in pots outside.

Hopefully they adapt to the separation and the dematting of the acorns well and the majority of them make it to sapling stage. I've got 25+ acres of wetland to reforest with native trees, so they're barely a drop in the bucket of what we need but they took close to 0 effort to get this far. They will hopefully live 75 years+ in their new homes once they're transplanted to their final location. They're southern red oaks, which are native to the area but have had their populations severely cut back by human advancement since they're usually a wetland species.

The best time to plant a tree that takes 50 years minimum to mature is 50 years ago. The second best time is today, and the third best time is tomorrow.

[leebrontide]

Switching the dark thorn bed to a light thorn bed

Some of you may remember my post about planning a raspberry and rose raised bed along the long back edge of our yard.

Turns out there are just too many lighter roses I love, and Ty likes yellow raspberries the best, so the small raised bed will be dark roses and raspberries, and the big bed will be light ones, plus native pollinator friendly plants.

Emphasis on repeat fruiting raspberries and repeat or continuous blooming roses with pollinator access.

Jude the Obscure rose

Big Bluestem grass

Rainbow apricot echinacea

Prarie dropseed

Roald Dahl rose

Double Gold raspberry

The Lark Ascending rose

Ann raspberry

Evening primrose

Pat Austen rose

Switchgrass

Dannahue rose

Early meadowrue

Comte de Champagne rose

Lady of Shalott rose

(feel free to rec Minnesota native plants that go with this scheme if you have ideas!)

[ivyandbone]

My bluebonnets are on their way to flowering! I'm so excited. I've been out in the yard checking their progress every day.

I've lived in Texas my whole life and this is the first year I'll have lived somewhere with bluebonnets in the yard. I'm so proud of these little souls, I was so nervous when I started them indoors last fall. Almost every single one made it! I forgot how many I germinated, but I planted 10 in this bed and only 1 died because it got eaten by garden snails and couldn't recover.

The rest that I had leftover I gave away to other members of my NPSOT chapter, I hope they're doing just as well if not better.

I'd love to find the names these and other native plants were given before white people came along. As much as I love and hate my state it's a part of me and while I love that these are Texas bluebonnets and our state flower, I wish I knew more about how they were thought of and used by the indigenous native peoples.

If anyone knows where I can look to for those kind of resources please let me know!

[writersraustin]

I love looking up new "weeds," which are native and non-invasive, and all of the top results are from cis white men landscapers about how to kill and control it.

Why is the plant bad? Absolutely no reason.

[mossmosss]

my newly planted wild blue indigo is doing vry good :]

[leebrontide]

The front yard plan

The dream is for there to be no grass left at all by the time it's all grown up.

Please picture this as the shady front lawn of a charming Victorian with a nice porch.

The trick will be getting enough rhythm and structure for it all to feel very deliberate despite being mostly fairly loose-structured native plants.

[leebrontide]

Behold, my gardening white whale- one of the rarest berries on earth, the cloudberry. This subarctic dwarf raspberry will happily tolerate not only the frigid winters of Minnesota (it's actually native to the northernmost bits of my state) AND the highly acidic soil we've inherited.

It's said to have a flavor like a cross between a raspberry, a mango, apricot and passionfruit, but a bit sour eaten fresh. The fruit is so soft and delicate that they're nearly impossible to ship or sell as fresh fruit. This means they are ideal for, and highly sought after for, jams and jellies.

If you've never heard of them before it's likely because they do NOT lend themselves to farming. For one thing, you have to have both male and female plants, nearby one another. AND it takes years for the plant to reach fruiting maturity- which means you don't know whether any given plant is male or female for years after planting it. To top it off, these little plants aren't heavy producers- growing between 1 and 20 berries per year. Compare that to my raspberries which we were practically drowning in by year 3.

But just look at them.

Just little bitty 8-12" video-game-looking fruit.

And I mean they're called CLOUD berries. I live in Stormbrew House. My name is Brontide. Come on. I need them!

The barriers are these:

Water. These little guys love peat bogs. I don't have any peat. And thanks to Climate change our summers keep getting dryer and dryer. The one thing I can think is if I dig a trench near one of the roof gutter spouts- I've seen people do that to have a bit of wetlands in their yard, so maybe?

They are incredibly difficult to get ahold of! They're a threatened species in MN, and they aren't farmed. Supposedly, even in Scandinavia where they're the most plentiful the location of well-developed cloudberry communities is a family secret passed down through generations. You CAN buy seeds online, but this is a rhizome plant. It's gonna grow way better via rhizome than seed. They're notoriously finicky seeds, and tbh I'm not great at seeds at the best of times. And I can't find rhizomes or cuttings for sale. Even if I did, would they be illegally harvested? It's a conundrum.

So, my dream may or may not ever come to pass. But I live in hope.

I am very open to suggestions.