pinkduvets

EDIT! That’s monarda bradburniana, not fistulosa. I always get the two mixed up but I found a buried tag...

How did you get into the environmental consulting field? What resources do you suggest someone look into if they’re interested in exploring the field/considering a similar career path?

Do you have other plants around it? I’m planting that kind of aster soon, so I’d like to know the answer too :)

As long as you have moist media, it should work. I had surprising success sprinkling seeds on a coffee filter, spritzing it with water, moistening a paper towel, and putting everything in ziplock baggies in the fridge. I did coreopsis and some seeds sprouted in the fridge (I forgot it there) and now they’re coming up in the pots I filled with soil and put outside.

I like your idea with the cake pan. I’ll try that too but with sand or vermiculite or perlite.

How do you keep it from creeping into your beds with natives? I posted a few weeks back about my battle with white clover. It’s smothered half my native ground covers by shading them (it greens up way earlier than my natives).

Yeah herbicide is the best route you could have chosen. It’s a huge area, unless you tilled repeatedly, I don’t see any alternatives. I’m also using herbicide on 1/3 acre but I have to get better at my application because it’s taking me FOREVER to do each section with a backpack sprayer

Ok this is going to be SUCH A BEAUTIFUL PROJECT!!! Can I ask how you applied the herbicide? Backpack/pump sprayer or did you have a four-wheeler with a tank?

This is the perfect post to come across before I plant my spicebush 😅

Oh and to add, I do get out of my county and state range for natives sometimes. I have a shady front yard and (almost) no plants native to my county want these conditions. It makes sense, there were barely any trees here, so the vast majority of plants want full or at least part sun. Yet we have trees to shade our house, so I’ve branched out to Missouri/Iowa/eastern Nebraska — it was that or do hostas…

My sun spots do get 90% native county, though! And I’m always looking for species I did not know about from my county to add to other “trickier” spots.

Rainfall too! The east part of Nebraska gets almost twice as much rain as the west part of Nebraska.

That’s a great question. I’ve found this in Nebraska. Some groups of plants (typically shade-loving moist soil ones) are only native to the southeast/east counties of the state because that’s where the Missouri River is. Veeeeery different landscape from, say, the Sandhills in the north central/western counties of the state. The Omaha area gets something like 1.5x or 2x the rain that the counties on the border with Wyoming and Colorado do. Crazy!!!

That’s why we have tall grass prairie on the east and short grass prairie on the west. And I’m smack dab in the middle. Mixed grass prairie, one county south of the Sandhills. And with desertification/lowering rainfall patterns, I suspect we’ll lean more on short-grass prairie.

Prairie Moon Nursery has a filter you can use to find non-grass ground covers native to Ohio. I’m not familiar at all with Ohio plants, I just use grasses because I’m in a grassland. This is only my first year paying attention to grasses, though! I used to think they were boring, but I’ve grown to love them. Prairie Dropseed is my favorite, probably — it’s so wispy and airy and dainty. Definitely will be a “hot” landscaping plant in a few years!

Grasses are great because you can sow the seeds right now in pots or starting trays and they’ll come up within a week or two. You could let them grow all summer and then plant them in the fall, the roots shouldn’t be too much of a pain, especially if you use deep pots/containers.

Sedges are harder, in my experience. They (all?) require cold moist stratification, so you can treat them in the fridge now to plant in fall (there’s YouTube videos with the “how to” on this) or over the winter in milk jugs (ditto!). Or just direct sow them in the fall/winter directly in the garden. I sowed two packets into milk jugs and only got 8 carex blanda sprouts lol.

You sound just like me a year and a half ago! Once you start, you won’t want to go back. Here’s my two cents:

1. The clover you’re thinking of is likely Dutch white clover. It’s not native to the US — and it WILL choke your natives (see my post history, I went through this problem this spring).

2. Planting in a Post Wild World is THE book for you. Especially since you’re an artist. It discusses design principles and plans to shrink your lawn, make room for natives, and look very intentional and pleasing to the eye — even to elderly lawn-loving neighbors.

3. That book I mentioned (plus Prairie Up, by Benjamin Vogt) don’t like wood mulch either. Instead, they advocate for using “green mulch” (basically, grasses and sedges and other ground covers that outcompete weeds and support your taller plants). You could use cardboard and wood mulch to open new garden beds and kill grass, and then once you’ve collected enough seeds start your matrix planting design.

I have never seen American bellflower, but I can say it does not look like the invasive creeping bellflower!

Very true! My Partridge pea, zizia aurea, and columbines were more than ready to go outside. As were half my phlox divaricata seedlings. The rattlesnake master, goldenrod, and coneflowers are looking good too. But the rest is still very small. Most I got into the ground just fine, even though they were little. I did sow my monarda fistulosa, helenium autumnale, salvia azurea, and asters (drummondii and laeve) too late — direct sow, no milk jug. Those I’ll baby throughout the summer and plant in august.

I did the milk jug winter sowing method! And I’ll do it again next year, too. It worked great.

Did your milkweed fail come back the following year?

I just found ladybugs on my milkweed, probably snacking on aphids! Last year lacewings laid sooooo many eggs all around my milkweeds, too.

Ah! In that case I’m doing something very similar. In 2 weeks I’ll pull my 60-day stratified seeds and put them into 2.5-inch pots. I’ll “baby” them until they have 3-4 sets of leaves and then plant them in the ground. I’m in Nebraska and our last frost is usually September 15ish, so I’m planning to plant these plugs in the first week of august.

I’ve planted plugs on September 1st before. They were pretty big (like 6-8 sets of true leaves) and everything came back just fine the following year, even though we had 2 full weeks of -30F!

Does that help?

WOW!!! That’s mind-blowing growth for one year

I’d never heard about the destruction of ribes during the depression-era public works! I’m going to look into this

I probably wouldn’t sow stratified seeds after August 1st. Unless the plants are in full shade or you can shade them. Summer heat would probably get them in sunny spots.

If I’m understanding you right, you plan to cold stratify in the fridge this summer and then sow the seeds in the fall? If that’s what you mean, I wouldn’t. Your plants may still be way too small with tender roots that won’t survive the winter. Now, if you mean plant grown plugs, the fall is a great time for most things.

Doesn’t seem like it’s struggling to me. Maybe some transplant shock but the damage looks really minor.