Author: Alicia Houk

[This post was written a week ago, but I didn’t have time to post it!]

About a month ago, the wood ducks arrived -surprise!  They’ve come every year for the past five years, and their migration might be long, but their arrival always seems sudden.  Suddenly, wood ducks, know what I mean?  And that is life.  Suddenly, wood ducks. 

In our family, just as slowly and quickly as a long migration, jobs have changed, houses and yards have been bought and sold and packed (almost packed), and now, we are staring down a move to Vermont on Monday, driving a U-haul across the country, with a dog, a cat, and two small kids, and arriving on Wednesday.  As you can imagine, all this feels very surprising.  Suddenly, Vermont.

With the pandemic and small children, we couldn’t go out to look around, so we’re heading to a house and yard (and future garden) we’ve only seen in pictures.  No doubt, more surprises are in store.  Ha!  

As you can imagine, some of my first thoughts have gone to my garden here.  It’s hard to put into words how thankful I am to these plants and trees, and the fireflies, and bumblebees, and butterflies, and all the insects and birds around my house.  Planting this garden, and the joy of watching so much life just arrive over the years, has changed my life and given me direction. And I am so completely grateful for it.  Sometimes I think one of the main reasons for a higher power, or cosmic consciousness, or God, or however you put it, is to have someone or something to thank, somewhere to tell our most profound gratitude.  Maybe I sound like a truly insane gardener, but that is just how I feel about my garden -I got to talk to The Universe about it.  You guys probably know what I am talking about. But enough with the gratitude, let’s get to the complaining!

Here is a list of plants I totally Love, that technically, I should not grow in Vermont, if I am going to abide by the native gardening ideal of only planting regionally native plants (which, as you can imagine, I always thought I would gladly abide by).  I warn you, this little list is brutal:

• Purple poppy mallow. I love this plant.
• Purple coneflowers
• All the other coneflowers!
• Meadow blazingstar!!!
• Prairie sage
• Stiff goldenrod
• Prairie dock
• So Many Others

The area of Iowa where I live is historically part of the prairie ecosystem, whereas New England is a temperate deciduous and mixed forest, and some meadows, lots of wetlands…  So… gardening will be very different.  Don’t get me wrong, I love forests and ferns, but Oh Man, there are some amazing prairie plants it’s hard to imagine a life without!  A life without purple coneflowers -are you kidding me?! No purple coneflowers?  

“Ideally, we encourage you to protect, collect, and sow seed from native plants that originate within or near your own community.

While native plants are ideal, introduced plants are often an irreversible presence in our humanized landscapes.  Many of these species can offer copious floral rewards for pollinators.  Select introduced plants with caution, however, and carefully avoid invasive or noxious plants to protect native plant communities and the wildlife that depend upon them.”

100 Plants to Feed the Bees: Provide a Healthy Habitat to Help Pollinators Thrive, by The Xerces Society

In the past (I admit it.  I’m not proud of it.), there has been a very slightly rigid, perhaps puritanical, bent to my gardening, with thoughts like: the tough among us get creative and embrace the limitations of a strictly native palette (which I know is a ridiculous thought).  But now, I can see that it is easy to “embrace your limitations,” if you live in the prairie region because there are hardly any limitations!  The plants here are just incredibly diverse and beautiful.  But give up coneflowers?!!  Oh, How this challenges my naturally unyielding spirit.  You see, if I were a librarian, I would shush non-natives.  If I were a teacher, I would write their name on the board.  No Mercy.  (Even though it’s not their fault they’re here, and they are just trying to live their lives). 

Some of you might be thinking, “Huh?  What the heck is she talking about?  Purple coneflowers are native plants!”  Well… in the Midwest, yes, but in the northeast, I am afraid not.  They can be planted there, they grow there, insects love them there, they are native to North America, but they are not actually native to the region.  They are a prairie species, and technically, native to just certain areas of the Midwest.  I know, it’s super sad irritating for people like me.  And it definitely raises the question, what exactly do we mean by native?  

The idea of nativity, as often applied in native plant circles, is fairly straightforward.  A plant is considered native to a region if  it was recorded in that region as European settlers first arrived and took botanical notes.  If it can be found in the botanical historical record, it is native.  Of course, we know that this botanical record is quite spotty and just a snapshot of plants in time, but it’s what we’ve got.

When we get to Vermont, I will try to talk to some experts, get their thoughts, and proceed to mull over the following:

1. Should gardeners help plants migrate north?  Climate change has insects on the move, as I know from my exciting run in with crickets, so should we think about shifting some plants’ ranges north?  (You see me angling for more plants here?)

2. Are some plants so good for pollinators, and so non-threatening to native plant communities that you should probably just include them in your garden, even if they aren’t really native to the region? (no doubt you see me angling for purple coneflowers in this one)

3. Maybe I should just loosen up and go with Doug Tallamy’s suggestion of making sure 70% of the garden is strictly native, and let myself have 30% of the garden in coneflowers?

4. Maybe purple coneflowers plus cognitive dissonance are not as beautiful.

5. Maybe there’s a lot to be said for just opening one’s heart to new places and their plants.

6. Maybe I can embrace the limitations of a strictly Vermont native palette. Ferns are awesome, too.

At any rate, life is good: lots to think about, lots to do. And I better get back to packing!

Resources:

100 Plants to Feed the Bees: Provide a Healthy Habitat to Help Pollinators Thrive, by The Xerces Society

Bringing Nature Home, by Doug Tallamy, Homegrown National Park

It’s a two sweater night in Iowa.  It never occurred to me to wear two wool sweaters before, but it seems to be the right level of sweaters these days. After many months of being home, with all the staying put and winter, it seems some beliefs have really sunk in, like rocks in the garden.  One thing I believe these days, is that, in a native garden, the flowers, leaves, and garden design are just the very beginning of the beauty.  If you’ve ever sat out with a Joe Pye weed on an afternoon, you probably know what I mean.

There is a peaceful electricity in a native garden, a deep sense of well-being that I believe comes from togetherness.  Plants together with their insects; insects together with their plants.  People together with flowers and insects, again, surprised at all the life and blooming, buzzing, fluttering, singing, sleeping that goes on.  Togetherness in the garden: beautiful and good for the heart.

You may have seen in the news that a late January executive order has set the U.S. on an effort to conserve 30% of U.S. land and ocean territory by 2030, in an effort to reverse the extinction crisis we are in. After decades of documented declines, across birds, frogs, insects, marine life, and more, a United Nations report on biodiversity from last year, revealed that an estimated 1 million species are threatened with extinction, with many expected to go extinct within decades, if humanity continues land development, agriculture, resource extraction, pollution, poaching, and letting invasive species run wild, as we have done for the last century. It is a huge undertaking, but if we want humanity to survive and flourish, we do not really have a choice. I think the native plant community’s beloved Doug Tallamy puts it best:

“Biodiversity losses are a clear sign that our own life-support systems are failing. The ecosystems that determine the earth’s ability to support us are run by the plants and animals around us. It is plants that generate oxygen and clean water, that create topsoil out of rock, and that buffer extreme weather events like droughts and floods. It is insect decomposers that drive the nutrient cycles on earth, allowing each new generation of plants and animals to exist.  It is pollinators that are essential to the continued existence of 80 % of all plants and 90% of all flowering plants, and it is birds and mammals that disperse the seeds of those plants and provide them with pest control services.

And now, with human-induced climate change threatening the planet, it is plants that will suck much of that excess carbon out of the air, build their tissues with it, and pump the surplus into the soil for long-term storage – if we would only put them back into our landscapes. Humans cannot live as the only species on this planet because it is other species that create the ecosystem services essential to us. “

Gardening for Life by Doug Tallamy

But It’s Not Too Late

“The [Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services] Report also tells us that it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global… Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably – this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

Sir Robert Watson, Chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), United Nations Sustainable Development Blog

To reach the goal of 30% of U.S. land being protected, we will have to increase protected lands by 400 million acres, which is twice the size of Texas. At this point, this very beginning point, there is not yet a clear path to get there, but one thing that is clear is that the effort will need to involve private land owners (especially in the Midwest and Eastern U.S.) and people inviting nature back into places it didn’t occur to us that nature needed… like our yards, our schools, our churches, parks, our roadsides, big box stores… the list can go on and on.

When Normal is Crazy

I took this picture near my home, but it could be anywhere in the Midwest. Non-native shrubs, mulch, and shorn grass are fairly typical of what modern Americans currently accept as adequate landscaping. But the truth is, the above is land that supports no life. Now just as a thought experiment, imagine this development operating under the 30 x 30, life-supporting paradigm. I can easily see, purple coneflowers, Joe Pye weed, sunflowers, lots of milkweed, monarchs, goldenrod, bumblebees, native grasses, crickets singing, goldfinches, a little rabbit, a little path through to a little open spot with a bench. Now, which landscape would be better for humans? Not only better, but more fun? Why have we settled for so little for so long? Point is, it is so ridiculously easy to imagine something so much better than the old normal.

I believe native gardeners have an important role to play in getting us to the 30 x 30 goal, especially in the “only if we start now at every level” part of the equation. Because we are ready right now. We’ve been ready. We have our seeds in the fridge right now! You say you want me to plant 30% of my yard in native trees, flowers, and grass? I say, How about 50%?! (That’s the 2050 goal.) No problem! We can be the first yards to show how sharing life with nature is a more beautiful life. We can make everybody so jealous of our butterflies that they’ll want their own butterflies. We can put in pollinator gardens at our schools, churches, libraries, city halls. We can spread the word, and maybe most importantly, help build grass roots support for 30 x 30. And plant by plant, we can help show the way towards this necessary paradigm shift, a cultural awakening where we open our eyes, look at the barren fields around us, and realize: this normal is crazy.

30 x 30 is huge. Policy and power finally acknowledging that we need a fundamental shift in humanity’s relationship with nature, from emptying land to make way for people, to filling the world with habitat and learning to coexist. Deep down, I think most of us can sense that, right now, our culture needs just this type of change: more beauty, more kindness, more fun, more togetherness.

Resources:

The U.S. commits to tripling its protected lands. Here’s how it could be done. by Sara Gibbens, National Geographic

Biden’s Historic Action on 30×30, by Alison Chase, Helen O’Shea, Kate Poole, and Zak Smith, Natural Resources Defense Council

Gardening For Life, by Doug Tallamy, Homegrown National Park

UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’, U.N. Sustainable Development Blog

Silent Skies: Billions of North American Birds Have Vanished, by Jim Daley, Scientific American

Top “10” Lists of Wildlife Plants, by Alonso Abugattas, Capital Naturalist

Bringing Nature Home: How you Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants, by Doug Tallamy

Pollinators of Native Plants, by Heather Holms

Sometimes it is best to turn our minds from current events, and return to the beauty of old, continuous events, like sleeping trees, crusty snow, slow and fast approaching spring, quiet seeds sitting on the dining room table… Yes, let’s think about seeds.

An important trait for seeds (and for gardeners to know about) is that, as they reach maturity, many seeds enter a protective dormancy. These dormant seeds are delaying germination until they receive the proper seasonal cues that indicate it is the right time to germinate and grow.  There are many ways that seeds stay dormant, from impermeable seed coats to hormone signaling.  But luckily for gardeners, most seeds can be woken up with the same type of treatment: The Cold Treatment.  

The cold treatment sounds mean, but really it is just a way to mimic winter (nothing mean about pretending to be winter).  During the cold treatment (also called cold, moist stratification), seeds absorb moisture, chemicals in the seed break down, and the moisture and cold provide the environmental signals needed for germination to begin. Depending on the species, cold treatments typically last from 10 days to 3 months. And that is why, nearing mid-January, I begin to think about seeds, and getting my 60 day cold treatment seeds ready to go into the fridge.

The Cold Treatment That’s Right For You

So how does one do a cold treatment?  Well, there are several easy methods, but when you look out into the vast expanse of cold treatment information on the internet, there are two main techniques you will see recommended:  Moist vermiculite/sterile sand vs. Moist paper towel/coffee filter. 

In one, you mix seeds with moist vermiculite (or sterile sand), and in the other, you fold seeds into something like a moist paper towel (or coffee filter).  Which technique is best for you depends on how you will eventually plant your seeds.  If you plan to grow seeds in individual cells or pots, by all means go with the paper towel!  It will allow you to see the seeds after the treatment (that’s mostly impossible in the vermiculite method) and transfer them individually to their little spots.  On the other hand, if you think your children will likely find some mortal peril, while you are dutifully picking seeds off of a paper towel, and you need to quickly scatter your seeds on an open tray or directly into the garden, by all means, go with the vermiculite!  

How One Gardener Does A Cold Treatment

Now, in no way at all am I saying that my method is The Best Way to do a cold treatment or start plants.  It is really just how I can manage to get it done between cleaning up broken snow globes and making sandwiches.  And for me, it is mostly Good Enough (which, in some cases, is hard to distinguish from perfection).   

Supplies:
Snack-size plastic baggies
A permanent marker
A medium sized bowl
Vermiculite or sterile sand
Water

Procedure:
1. I label my little baggies with the species name, the number of seeds in the bag, and if they are surface sown (because I won’t remember that in a month). 

2. Usually, I fill about ¼ to half of the bowl with vermiculite, and slowly add and mix in water, until I can squeeze the vermiculite and it stays together in my hand, but no water comes out.  In other words the vermiculite is moist, but not sopping wet.  However, I recently read someone else’s technique where they want just a few drops of water to come out when they squeeze, and that is what I am going to try this year. 

It seems there is a little wiggle room here on the moisture, so don’t let the pressure of making this moisture decision deter you from undertaking cold treatments -you can do this!  Seeds in the wild experience a variety of moisture levels as they overwinter naturally, so from a biological perspective, you want enough moisture that your seeds will fully imbibe (technical term for absorb) water to initiate the changes in their physiology, and on the other hand, you don’t want them to be surrounded by so much moisture that they are deprived of oxygen.

3. I grab a little handful, maybe 2-4 tablespoons, depending on how many seeds I’m starting, of the moist vermiculite and put it in a bag and then I add my seeds in and mix it all together, and zip up the bag.  Usually I start something like 100-400 seeds of something.  I try to go by hundreds because I’m thinking ahead to when I will scatter this mix onto open flats a.k.a. germination trays.  For me, thus far, I find about 100 seeds per tray works pretty well.  But I do adjust this based on past experience with certain species -ones where almost every seed germinates I would do less than 100 per tray, and those where it’s been more sparse, I would do more.  

4. I throw the small bags into a larger bag that says if it’s a 30 or 60 day treatment.etc., and toss it all in the back of the fridge for 10 days to 3 months, depending on the species requirements.  

5. Every couple weeks, I check them and make sure nothing’s too dry or molding, or sprouting early.  If too dry, I add water.  If there are seeds molding, I remove the offenders. If they are sprouting early, I plant them.

5. At about the right time, I get them out, fill up a tray with moist potting soil, and then sprinkle the vermiculite/seed mix, onto the top of the tray, then cover them with  a couple more sprinkled handfuls of potting soil (unless they’re surface sown), and just like that, the seeds are cold treated and planted. Hooray!

Below, I will put links to a number of very good additional resources on how to complete cold treatments.  And somewhere out there, there may even be The Best Way to do a cold treatment. Please let me know if you find it!!

I’d also like thank Ann Casper, a grower at Prairie Moon Nursery, for explaining the pros and cons of vermiculite/”goop” vs. the coffee filter.

Cold Treatment Resources:

Germination Codes and Seed-Starting Basics for Native Plants, Prairie Moon Nursery *Excellent pictures and instructions for both methods!

Native Seed Propagation Methods, Missouri Botanical Garden
*Interestingly recommends first 24 hours in extra moist conditions, then adding extra vermiculite to reduce moisture for the rest of the cold treatment.

Native Plants: Learn to Grow Your Own Webinar

Other Resources:

Dormancy and Germination: Making Every Seed Count In Restoration. O.A. Kildisheva, K.W. Dixon, F.A.O. Silveira, T. Chapman, A. Di Sacco, A. Mondoni, S.R. Turner, A.T. Cross, Restoration Ecology Vol. 28, No. S3, pp. S256–S265, August 2020

One of my favorite flowers in the garden is a plant that some might mistake for a weed: Annual fleabane.  Now, a fleabane doesn’t sound like much, but I love this plant, and each year I am excited to see where it will grow – a spot in a garden bed?  The lawn? A planter? Anywhere?  It is all ok with me. 

Annual Fleabane is a graceful, 3 to 4 foot tall plant that blooms from early June through much of the summer, with little white daisy-like flowers. They are bright and cheerful during the day and seem to glow at dusk.  And on an evening (even if I am just taking out the compost), when I pass through the annual fleabane, with the fireflies flashing, I feel like I’ve wandered into a magical place -all the more magical because I did not plant this plant!  I’ve never planted it.  Years ago, annual fleabane just arrived in my garden and planted its own plant-self.  

Depend on Disturbance

Annual fleabane is in a class of plants that has recently been getting a little more attention: Self-seeding Annuals.  Short-lived plants that will grow and bloom pretty quickly, set seeds, and then… die.  But their seeds carry on!  And once in the garden, the cycle of blooming and seeding should continue, as long as your garden has a little open spot for them.  

Many plants that fit into this live fast, die young life plan are considered to be disturbance dependent. In nature, they are depending on bare ground creating events: a flood, or fire, a tree falling over, or a new buffalo wallow, something that opens up a patch (or thousands of acres in some cases) of soil and creates a space that is mostly free of competition for light, water, and nutrients.  Disturbance dependent plants need to grow fast and spread many seeds before bigger rooted, bigger bodied, longer lived plants take residence and out compete them.  

In my garden, a disturbance mostly means our dog digging for moles, or me smothering a spot with a forgotten tray of plants, or the kids playing with the jet setting on the hose.  As galling as some of these disturbances can be, annual fleabane and other self-seeding annuals need these dynamic, ephemeral patches of bare earth in the garden where their seeds can continue making a go of it.

Native Gardens: Playin’ Chess, not Checkers!

“A traditional gardener’s definition of success is when a plant survives, but an ecologist doesn’t view that plant as successful unless it also reproduces.”

Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher, Garden Revolution, How our landscapes can be a source of environmental change

In the excellent and useful book, Garden Revolution, How our landscapes can be a source of environmental change, Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher write so well about how to ecologically design meadows (or prairies) so they are successful and self-sustaining in the long term. And most of the ecological lessons for larger plantings are just as useful in a smaller home garden. One point they raise is the importance of including plants with multiple reproductive strategies. Seed droppers, wind dispersers, animal dispersers, rhizomes, stolons, you name it, these guys are arguing for biodiversity. And although they have noble reasons for doing so, like supporting more complex ecosystems, they also have an eye to practicality: filling the many ecological niches (a.k.a. the many ways plants grow and function) in a garden, means there is less opportunity for weeds to fill those niches, and that a garden can become less maintenance over time.

For example, let’s say the ground got a bit messed up when you were transplanting purple coneflowers. Well, if you have enough fast growing, self-seeding annuals dropping seeds in your soil seed bank, that spot is more likely to be filled by black-eyed susan, or annual fleabane rather than some lousy garlic mustard (or some other exotic invasive) -that is the general idea.

Now, if you do not have children or dogs who will blissfully destroy your garden for you, you can be intentional when creating bare earth in the garden. In Garden Revolution, they discuss this: placing seeds heads of cardinal flower on bare ground right where they’d like to see them in a couple years; gathering seeds, scratching up the dirt and helping easy spreaders spread, right where they want them. Last fall I gave it a go because I’d like more annual fleabane in the lawn. I know it sounds a little crazy, but for me, leaving patches of annual fleabane to grow up and walk through, or pass by, here and there in the lawn, creates such an ethereal atmosphere and an expanded sense of being in the garden. The garden -not just for garden beds anymore.

The Case for Self-Seeding Annuals, Continued

Some of these self-seeding annuals are plants that are already common in the garden, like black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta), or some often arrive of their own accord, like tall bellflower (Campanula americana). But I guess I feel like a bigger case needs to be made for this class of plants because while looking things up for this post (and my own garden), it became apparent that, while many are easy to find, some of these plants are just not available. For example, I would really love to get large flowered clammyweed (Polanisia dodecandra subspecies trachysperma) -very difficult to find the seeds! And I’m sorry, I know I’ve been talking about annual fleabane, but you can not buy the seeds anywhere! I’m sorry! What gives! (Fortunately, if you keep an eye out, you might be able to just find annual fleabane in your yard.)

• 

• 

So here is my extra case for self-seeding annuals, beyond biodiversity and weed suppression (which are truly good reasons in themselves).

1. Self-seeding annuals are fun. I’m not just saying this because I am enthusiastic about these things. It is true.
2. These plants pop up in surprising places and keep the garden design lively and changing.
3. Unexpected plant combinations can be inspiring.

4. Many bloom their first year and have a long bloom time!
5. This is especially good for the first year or two in a planting, adding flowers before longer-lived perennials come into their own.
6. They plant themselves!  (I really, really appreciate this.)
7. Many are host plants for a variety of moths and butterflies, and
8. Some support pollen specialist bees.
9. A lot of these guys are pretty short, which can be useful in the garden.
10. Surprise reasons that I don’t know right now that are even better than the reasons above.

With all that said, after some searching and cross-referencing, here is a list of native self-seeding annuals and biennials that I am excited to include in my Mid-west garden (and many are native to other regions as well).

Native Self-seeding Annuals! (and some biennials!)

Many thanks to Dr. John Hilty of Illinois Wildflowers for the use of the following photos and for maintaining his great online wildflower resource (each flower name links to Illinois Wildflower’s botanical information when possible).

And if there are any plants you think I have missed here, please let me know!!

A printable list can be found here:

Quick Garden Tips

Just a couple tips when trying to encourage these guys in the garden:

1. Try to reduce mulch in the garden, or reduce mulching in early spring. Mulch that suppresses the germination of weed seeds will also suppress the germination of self-seeding natives. Mulching later allows for seedlings to grow a bit and then you can mulch around them.
2. If an area is quite thick with self-seeded seedlings, go ahead and thin them out to a good plant spacing, so the ones left can grow well.

I’m very curious to know what your favorite self-seeding annuals might be. Please let me know in the comments!

Resources:

Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change, by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher

Illinois Wildflowers, by Dr. John Hilty

Native Plants of the Midwest: A Comprehensive Guide to the Best 500 Species for the Garden, by Alan Branhagen

Prairie Moon Nursery

Growing Home with Native Self-Sowers, by Jared Barnes

Tips for Using Self-seeding Plants in the Garden, by Megan Shinn

Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center

Plantiful: Start Small, Grow Big with 150 Plants That Spread, Self-Sow, and Overwinter, by Kristin Green

Cultivating Chaos: How to Enrich Landscapes with Self-Seeding Plants, by Jonas Reif, Christian Kress, Jurgen Becker

Part of the invisible beauty that runs through pollinator gardens is the spirit of reciprocity.  We gardeners, who have been given so much, shout out with our flowers, “Come!  Eat, drink, live! and be merry,”  calling in bees and butterflies, from near and far. And one of the most important considerations in our beautiful pollinator gardens is to try to provide food for as long as possible: pollen and nectar, from early spring to late fall.  Now to make sure we have a long bloom time, with a handful of species blooming all the time, we need a sense of which and how many flowers will bloom when.  Oof -my brain is starting to feel complicated. If you are like me, a task like this requires a little planning.

Thinking About Planting Seeds

There is no better time than November to start thinking, planning, and ordering seeds for next spring’s garden.  Why seeds?  Well, for me, I need to order seeds because I want a huge, crazy ton of plants (and I don’t think I’m alone in this!), and I don’t want to spend very much money. 

While plants are typically $4 – $13 or more a piece (plus the crazy shipping costs!), a seed packet of 200-1000 seeds/future plants is $3 – $5 !!  And that is why I begin thinking about seeds in November.  But that’s so early!  The aromatic aster is still blooming!  Why November?!  The Cold Treatment is why.  

Many seeds require something called a “cold treatment” in order to germinate.  A future post will discuss how to do a cold treatment, but just quickly here: for a cold treatment you get a little bag, label it, put some damp sand or vermiculite in the bag, mix your seeds with the sand, and then, depending on the species, you refrigerate it for typically 1 to 3 months.  Then you get it out and plant your seeds.  This mimics winter and breaks the dormancy of the seeds so they are ready to germinate. Without it, germination rates can be lousy, or even Zero! 

So, working the timetable backwards, if we want to start planting our home-grown plants out in about mid to late April, we should probably start our cold-treated seeds about March 1st, let’s say.  Many wonderful, awesome species require a 60 day cold treatment, so to make that March 1st deadline, they need to go into cold treatment about January 1!  Hmm!  So Here We Are, Late-November, trying to figure out bloom times and garden designs and seeds orders.  No problem.  We’re right on time.

The Beautiful Spreadsheet!

In a previous spring post about Planting a Pollinator Garden: The Quick Start Guide, I mentioned how useful a spreadsheet can be for  determining where gaps are in your garden’s blooming, but in the spring, I did not want to blind you with the full glory of the spreadsheet, because it is truly most useful now, for fall planning.

Here is an example of a garden spreadsheet for a “quick pollinator garden” which has a number of species in bloom throughout the season. It was created simply by cutting and pasting the desired species from the larger Flowering Times spreadsheet, which is linked further on, and then organizing them by bloom time.

Using a spreadsheet like this is an adaptation of a planning technique shown in Planting: A New Perspective by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury, a really useful book by two extraordinary gardeners. And looking at the spreadsheet above, we see that in this garden there will be about 6 or 7 species in bloom through summer, but that the spring looks like it could use some additions to increase species diversity.

I’ve found this type of flowering time spreadsheet really useful for visualizing the garden over time: which species will bloom when, how long the garden’s bloom time will be, and how biodiverse the flowers are at any moment, spring through fall. And understanding and planning your garden in time means that the insects who come to your garden can stay possibly their whole lives (what a nice thought), and you can enjoy abundant insects and flowers all gardening season long.  

The Big Flowering Times Spreadsheet!

Above is a section of the Flowering Times spreadsheet you can link to and/or download to help with planning.  It is a compilation of many species’ bloom times, plus a little extra planting information. The Flowering times shown are based on my Mid-west experience and info from mid-western nurseries, so bloom times will need altering to match your local bloom times. And many species are listed, but by no means, are all species included -feel free to add them!  And if you see any ways you’d like to make the main document better, please let me know, and I can make you an editor of the Flowering Times spreadsheet.  Many hands make light work, or maybe many hands just make work more fun.

So! To check out your planned garden’s bloom time situation, you can just find all the species you’ve got your heart set on, cut and paste them into a new spreadsheet, organize them by bloom time, and voila! A way to see what will be blooming when. Good for pollinators, but great for garden design: for co-ordinating flower combinations, plant arrangements, and so on. I know I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years, staring back and forth, from my helpful spreadsheet to my garden map, trying to visualize what each month will look like. And on that note, I guess I better get back to it.

What is your favorite native? and why? Always looking for recommendations this time of year!

Resources:

Planting: A New Perspective, by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury

Prairie Moon Nursery

Missouri Wildflowers Nursery

Prairie Nursery

As of yesterday’s rain, almost every leaf has fallen off the trees -is it a coincidence that I felt myself looking forward to spring this morning?  I really miss the leaves when they are gone, so I try to remind myself: the leaves are not really gone, they are simply on the ground.  

For years gardeners have gotten advice about “fall clean-up.” That they should cut back dried plants, rake up leaves, maybe use leaf blowing machines, put leaves in bags to be carried away -all in the name of tidiness (oof -so much work!).

But, more and more, gardeners interested in supporting birds and butterflies and pollinators are discovering an ancient truth: it’s better if they don’t do all this stuff.  Dried plants and leaves on the ground are actually important winter habitat for a variety of struggling insect populations: fireflies, bumblebees, solitary bees, butterflies, and moths.

The New Fall Do-Nothing Advice

“When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.”

Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation

It cracks me up just how Taoist new gardening recommendations are.  The advice for a nature garden these days is more like: It’s fall now.  Don’t worry about it.  Definitely don’t do anything about it.  Maybe put your hoses away.

1. Leave the dried plant stalks.

• It’s prettier this way, with the brown, dried seed heads.
  
• The birds like/need to perch and eat the seeds. 
  
• With native plants, there are often little insects (including solitary bees) sleeping the winter away in the stems, so definitely don’t compost them now.   
  
• It’s recommended to wait until early march to cut plants back, leaving the bottom two feet of the stem intact to provide habitat for a new year of stem-nesting solitary bees

These days, some garden designers really think of “winter interest” first, when choosing plants.  Winter interest includes things like the form and colors of dried grasses, choosing plants with seed heads that will be long-lasting, choosing trees and bushes with interesting bark, and arranging plants with winter in mind.  For example, placing dark seed heads in front of a lighter dried grass for contrast.  The new interest in garden design for winter is definitely a good thing, considering the garden is in its winter form for at least 5 months in the midwest and that many little insects really need these plants left in place for shelter. 

2. Leave as many leaves in your yard as you can manage. 

There are a number of great ways to do this and simultaneously build your garden.  

•  Letting leaves just lie where they fall, and not chopping them up with the mower (that’s what I do, or not-do). When leaves are chopped up, cocoons, caterpillars, and eggs are also chopped up. Additionally, chopped up leaves degrade faster, leaving less available food for the leaf pile food chain in the spring.
• But if you are especially concerned for the welfare of your grass, as some people I know are, then you could find another spot for them in your yard.  Three to four inches of leaves makes a great weed suppressing mulch in existing garden beds, while improving soil as they break down, and a few inches of leaves won’t smother emerging perennials in the spring.  (But a note of caution: a very thick layer of leaves may lead to some smothering).
• If there is a mature tree in your yard where you find you are always raking away the leaves to save the grass, well, you could consider turning the area under the tree into a perennial bed that the tree will simply mulch for you. 
• In any spot you want, you can use a thick layer of your leaves to create garden beds, smother grass, and shelter many wonderful insects.  Creating a new garden bed, along a fence line, next to the deck, etc.  is a great use for leaves.  Sprinkling some wood chips on top will help keep them in place over winter.   

For the Love of Fireflies

About 5 years ago, I started doing nothing with the leaves.  The primary reason was because I was trying to encourage fireflies in my backyard, and after a little research, it seemed like that “leaving the leaves” was a top suggestion for firefly conservation.  The leaves feed the slugs, snails, and worms that are the main food for firefly larvae (not to mention countless millipedes, roly-polies, spiders, mites, and billions of soil organisms that depend on fallen leaves). 

Now it may have been a coincidence, but the summer after we left our leaves (and did not mow them), we had an amazing summer of fireflies.  As far as I could tell, we went from sparse fireflies, to the craziest number of fireflies I’d ever seen.  Now was it all down to leaving the leaves?  Probably not entirely, but no doubt all those fireflies did benefit from the extra snails and slugs, who had benefited from the leaves.  And as you can imagine, from then on, I have left the leaves.  

What’s good for the fireflies is good for the other guys

Bumblebee queens often overwinter in little burrows a couple inches underground, and it’s thought a thick layer of leaves can provide extra protection from some of the harshest winter weather.  

Butterflies and moths use leaves for overwintering habitat for different life stages. 

• Caterpillars: The great spangled fritillary, woolly bear caterpillars (aka Isabella tiger moths), tawny emperor butterflies, and Baltimore checkerspots all wrap themselves in leaves and spend the winter in leaf litter
• Eggs: Red-banded hairstreaks on lay eggs on fallen oak leaves which become the first food of their caterpillars.
• Cocoons: Luna moths disguise their cocoons as dried leaves to blend in to leaf litter.

There are so many good, beautiful, and fun reasons to not rake up your leaves (almost nothing is more fun for little kids than catching plump toads and fireflies). So give yourself a break this year and all the years to come. Just watch the leaves fall and don’t do a thing about it.

Have any other non-rakers out there seen the benefits of doing nothing? Let me know!

Resources:

Leave the leaves!, Xerces Society

Fall cleanup with ecology in mind, with Doug Tallamy, A Way to Garden, by Margaret Roach

Firefly.org, Conservation and Research

Wildlife Connections: Leaf Habitat, University of Kentucky

Bewitching Butterflies and Moths with Fall and Winter Habitat, Maryland Department of Natural Resources

Brown Gold: The Gift of Fall Leaves, Backyards for Nature, Valley Forge Audubon Society

All year long in the garden, I have stood on the deck, looked out, and thought, “Hmm, I need more flowers.”  This is what I always think, and it’s as true now as ever.  More New England aster!  It seems like it only makes sense to have purple stretching back as far as the eye can see -all the way to the back of my backyard.  So I’ve begun taking notes where I will move transplants next spring.  Luckily, New England asters divide easily and readily self seed in my garden, and each year there are plenty of new plants to move around. 

New England Aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) is one of the last blooming flowers in the fall, filling the garden with lovely, bountiful, purple flowers.  The flowers attract many, many pollinators, from the last monarchs passing through, to so many different kinds of bees.

Beyond feeding multitudes of pollinators, asters in general, are what Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home, refers to as “keystone plants.” Asters are known to be host plants for 112 species of moths and butterflies -that’s a lot of caterpillars eating asters! They are definitely a species you, your family, many bees, butterflies, moths, bugs, and birds can all enjoy having in the garden.

A Big Floppy Plant/How to Prune New England Asters

New England asters have an interesting growth form…  Ok, the truth is, if left to their own devices, they often get a bit lanky and scraggly and flop over, and then they frequently lose the leaves from the bottom half of the plant, which looks totally crazy!  But really, all this can be worked with!  And New England asters are worth it, just wonderful, big, purple plants that buzz with life in the fall.

One way some gardeners like to deal with scraggly New England asters is to cut them back.  For plants that are a few years old and doing well, cutting them back results in shorter, bushier plants with more branching, less flopping, and often more flowers. After some research, it seems like the best method is to prune them twice, as described on Pat Sutton’s Wildlife Garden. Once near Memorial day and then again near July 4th. 

The memorial day cut should be about ½ to ⅔ the length of the plant, or 1 to 2 feet from the top.  The second July 4th cut isn’t as extreme, but just cutting back some of the new growth that resulted from the first cut. In fact, the second cut can prune selectively (for example cutting the front of the plant shorter than the back of the plant) to influence the eventual height of the blooms. (Make sure to leave the clippings under the plant so any caterpillars on those stems can climb back on the plant.)

On some plants, ones that might have stayed a bit shorter, you can even skip the second cut, and those plants will likely bloom earlier than the plants pruned twice. And like this, you can extend the bloom time of New England aster. Imagine: a garden with un-pruned, once pruned and twice pruned plants. I wonder how much that would extend the bloom time? I’m going to try this next year, and I’ll let you know.

If you do not have time or energy for cutting back asters on holiday weekends, I understand. All the same, an un-pruned aster can be a great plant at the back of a border (my crazy un-pruned plants often reach six foot plus), and it can intermix well with short and tall species, in a more meadow-like garden.  It does great when grown behind or mixed with a stalwart plant that can hide its stem and lend it a bit of support. 

E Pluribus Unum

With asters, what we think of as the flower, is actually made up of many, many tiny flowers, which is why they are sometimes referred to as the composite family. The edge of the inflorescence is made up of “ray” flowers, which, in this case, carry the purple petals (one petal per ray flower), and interior “disc” flowers, which are tiny tubular flowers, in the disc-like center.  In New England aster, these little disc flowers open from the outside in, and they look like little cups, holding the nectar that so many pollinators come to drink.  

At first, New England aster, with its sometimes scrappy demeanor, might not strike a gardener as particularly delicate. But something especially beautiful happens with this flower: they close their flowers at night, and open them again in the morning.  I don’t know why, but I love flowers that open and close.

Although it’s not a subject that has been studied much, the prevailing thought is that plants that close their flowers at night (and on cold and rainy days) are protecting their pollen from moisture.  In some species, uncontrolled rehydration of pollen grains, from dew or rain, ultimately reduces the viability of the pollen, so you gotta keep that pollen dry!

Peace in the Garden

I learned a lot trying, and mostly failing, to get my camera to capture a flower closing, but perhaps the most important thing I learned is how peaceful it can be to just watch videos of evening flowers and bumblebees. Have you heard of Slow TV? Where Norwegians just have a TV show of a train ride in real time, or people knitting a sweater in real time. Very peaceful. But I think they might want to add a slow flower program. This could be the first episode. Watching a bumblebee fall asleep and sleep in a New England aster flower. (If bumblebee bees are out and about at bedtime, they’ll often just find a nice flower to sleep on.) This little bee stretches and gets comfortable on the far left of the plant, the breeze rocks him to sleep, the crickets sing, and all the other little sleepy flower activity goes on.

Do you have New England asters? A favorite pruning technique?

Resources

Asteraceae/Compositae (Aster Family), Ohio Plants

Why Do Flowers in Namaqualand Close? Flower closure in relation to the environment and pollen sensitivity to moisture, by Amrei Von Hase

Pat Sutton’s Wildlife Garden

Bringing Nature Home, by Doug Tallamy

For years now, my heart has grown more and more tender towards crickets.  From the flower beds, the fall field cricket’s sweet little end of summer chirps are so beautiful, and then… fall begins.  So many insects are singing now in the garden, creating such rich layers of trills and chirps. And over the last month, it has been truly so rewarding to learn who exactly is singing a few of these beautiful little insect songs. The world comes alive in a new way, and just like that, there’s another thing to enjoy this time of year, another thing to love. And the songs are fun to learn.  

Some songs in nature we can easily individuate: specific birds sing specific songs, specific frogs, toads, whales, specific children, and so on.  When we think about insects singing, sometimes we might be able to say it’s a cricket or a cicada, but beyond that, insect songs become a bit of a blur.  Who is that singing out there?

The Singing Insects!

Almost all the songs we hear in summer and fall come from only two orders of insects: the orthoptera (crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids) and homoptera (cicadas).

However, within those groups there are many different singers, with each species having their own unique song.  There might be a few too many songs for the home gardener to learn them all, but with a little close listening, it is really pretty easy to learn the handful of loudest singers around your home.

Over the last month, listening to crickets and trying to sneak up on them, has been so enjoyable, such a nice break in my day, I really recommend that you try it. Nothing beats back a rough week like finding a black-legged meadow katydid, after some intense listening (and getting a ladder).  Victory comes in many sizes.  I see you, Katydid!

A Surprising Trig

Little can raise one’s spirits like finding an unexpected and surprising cricket in the yard. This is a true story. Last week, there was a very loud insect in my yard. For this post, I was, of course, trying to identify the loudest crickets around my house. It really sounded to me like the slow tinkling trig (trigs are a type of cricket)(Anaxipha tinnulenta), but the range of that trig was not supposed to extend beyond southern Missouri. I told my husband of my suspicions, perhaps in an excited way. He thought I was crazy. I explained to him about something called Enthusiasm for Crickets.

I ended up sending a couple videos of the song to Dr. Thomas J. Walker and Dr. David H. Funk who had written the paper, Systematics and acoustics of North American Anaxipha (Gryllidae: Trigonidiinae) (from which I gathered they were the experts on this topic). Lucky for curious gardeners, most insect scientists are very approachable, and that was the case here! Dr. Funk quickly confirmed that the song was an exact match for the slow tinkling trig, and Dr. Walker, based on that confirmation, notified me that they would add a point on the Singing Insects of North America‘s range map for this species. (how exciting!)

Apparently, with climate change and warming, this species (among many others) has been expanding its range north. Because it is the northwestern-most observation of the slow tinkling trig, it would be helpful if I could also collect a specimen. I have tried sneaking up on this guy before to get a picture, and was super unsuccessful. But I now have an insect net and have begun doing some “sweeps.” So we shall see!

You might have thought that would be the end of it. Me, too. But then, it continued. This week I heard another really loud cricket in my yard. To me, it really sounded like the jumping bush cricket (Orocharis saltator). But again, this cricket’s range had not yet extended into Iowa. So again, I sent off the songs and pictures to the authorities, Dr. Funk and Dr. Walker, and indeed, it was the jumping bush cricket, in Iowa.

The first time that I was the first official person to find a northernmost cricket, it was super exciting. The second time… it was exciting, don’t get me wrong, but I kind of got this feeling like: Wait a second, what is going on here? Surely I’m not the only one in Iowa listening to crickets. Where-the-crickets are the avid amateur grigologists (cricket scientists)? Or maybe even the department of natural resources people who might be keeping track of these things? Well, I don’t know. Perhaps there are not as many people carefully listening to crickets as we might have thought.

But you could become one! And who knows, if you live north of me, I think you could probably easily nab the northernmost cricket observation title for both of those little crickets.

Learning A Few Insect Songs

“We encourage you to take part in the development of a new aesthetic… where the cacophony of confusing insect sounds magically transforms into a delicate concert of creatures dear to the heart.”

Wil Hershberger and Lang Elliot, Songs of Insects

Songs of Insects, A Guide to the Voices of Crickets, Katydids, and Cicadas is an amazing online resource for identifying the singing insects of central and eastern North America by song or by sight, and also learning more about each species.

To begin, I would recommend finding one song you can clearly hear in your yard, and trying to sneak up on the singer. Get a picture if you can, or if not, a video that records the song, or maybe you are just so close that the song reverberates itself into your brain. Then go to the Songs of Insects thumbnail guide to species to check out which one it might be.

• If the song is kind of raspy and dry, look to the katydids.
• If it has a chirp or tone, look to the crickets.
• Try to pay special attention to rhythms of songs, as that can really help in identification.

Once you really begin to listen for individual songs, after a bit, this chirping trilling language does become clearer. The songs come into focus and you will probably be able to hear that there is a much greater diversity of orthoptera in your life than you realized. 

Right now, the following species are some of the most singing guys around my home in southern Iowa. The names link to the Songs of Insects ID pages.

A very big thank you to Dr. Funk and Dr. Walker for all their help and communication on insect identification and other cricket topics -I very much appreciate it!

And another big thank you to the Songs of Insects. What an amazing website!

Are there many insect songs around your home? What species is the loudest right now? I would love to know!

Resources:

Songs of Insects, A Guide to the Voices of Crickets, Katydids & Cicadas, by Wil Hershberger and Lang Elliot

Singing Insects in North America (SINA), edited by Dr. Thomas Walker

The Orthopterist’s Society

Systematics and acoustics of North American Anaxipha (Gryllidae: Trigonidiinae), by Thomas J. Walker and David H. Funk. Journal of Orthoptera Research 23(1): 1-38. 2014

Crickets of the genus Gryllus in the United States (Orthoptera: Gryllidae: Gryllinae). WEISSMAN, D., & GRAY, D. (2019). Zootaxa, 4705(1), 1–277

Listening in Nature, When you Listen to Katydids, Listen to the Rhythm, by Lisa Rainsong

Katydids, by University of Wisconsin Master Gardener Program

Prairie dock!  Silphium terebinthinaceum (what a word)!  When I first saw a picture of prairie dock,  I thought, “WHAT?!  How have I never seen this plant?!”  I was about to bust right open, sitting on my couch, looking at my plant catalog. “Where has this plant been all my life?!” I shouted internally. 

Appreciation of Life’s More Spectacular Foliage

Prairie dock has enormous leaves, as rough as sandpaper, with beautifully scalloped edges.  The biggest leaf in the garden this year is 17 inches across and 28 inches long!  These are the sort of leaves that inspire a gardener to measure leaves.  When the sun shines through and other flowers become silhouettes, it can stop time; stop a cricket mid-chirp; the toad holds his breath; the gardener stands still. Prairie dock leaves can do that.

The roughness of the leaves makes them deer and rabbit resistant, and the deep reaching taproot (up to14 ft) makes prairie dock resistant to drought, and to being moved. It sounds like it will just keep coming back (for a long time!), so make sure to plant it where you want it.

Prairie dock is a close relative to compass plant Silphium laciniatum, who has been shown to live to one hundred years, and some suspect that prairie dock is equally long-lived. Before I knew this, I planted about ten plants at our town pump station -and they look great there- but it’s a little funny to think they could be there for the next 100 years, and I hope they are! (Really, I can’t think of anyone in 2115 who wouldn’t want prairie dock there.)

Towering Flowers

In the garden, the first striking feature are the leaves, which reach almost full size by early summer, but in August a tall flower stalk shoots up. This year our tallest prairie dock is 12 feet tall! It’s the tallest plant in our garden, beating out the 9 foot pale Indian plantain (Arnoglossum atriplifolium), and tall coreopsis (Coreopsis tripteris) at 10 feet.

Prairie Dock’s Pollinators

A few years in, and there are many flowers and flower buds. They’re beautiful and very attractive to all sorts of pollinators: bumblebees, small solitary bees, halictine bees (green bees, sweat bees), bee flies, monarchs, and even hummingbirds all like to visit. 

Since I was planting prairie dock at the town pump station (sort of a public place), I was a little more curious than usual how long it might take prairie dock to bloom. I asked the seed company, and was told 7 years!  Now, it might be a function of the regular drought stress in Iowa, but one plant at the pump station (it was the worst drought in decades) bloomed it’s second year, and most of my plants have bloomed by their third summer. 

They can handle medium wet to medium dry, as well as periods of drought.  But if you live in a place with medium-wet conditions, I don’t know, they might just live the good life and take a little longer to bloom.  But the leaves alone are reason enough to have prairie dock in the garden.

As a host plant, Prairie dock sticks to lesser known guests, who specialize on prairie dock and compass plants. It’s home to the silphium beetle (larva and adults), as well as two gall wasp species, who form galls inside the flower stalks. As well as a little specialist aphid, Iowana frisoni.

Do you have any prairie dock in your yard? If you do, how old is it? How long did it take to bloom?

Resources

Iowana frisoni Hottes (Hemiptera: Aphididae) redescribed, with notes on its biology. Favret C., Tooker J.F., Hanks L.M. (2004).  Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington,  106  (1) , pp. 26-34.

Prairie Dock, Illinois Wildflowers

Prairie Dock (Silphium terebinthinaceum), By Christopher David Benda, U.S. Forest Service

Silphium Terebinthinaceum, Prairie Dock, Prairie Moon Nursery

Putting in a pollinator garden is pretty simple, and when getting started there are just a few things to consider:

• deciding where to put the garden
• sun and moisture conditions
• planting native flowers with a succession of bloom times
• including super food flowers
• a couple planting tips
• and last but not least, killing your grass

When putting in a pollinator garden, the first step is usually:

Deciding where to put the garden

For pollinator gardens there are many good options for placement because honestly, most places look better with flowers. But my best advice on garden placement is to make sure you have lots of flowers close to where you spend the most time sitting outside. So this might mean right next to the back patio or deck, or right off the front porch. Really just anywhere very close by the places where you like to sit and relax. That way you are surrounded by beauty and it’s easy to watch butterflies and bumblebees and bugs coming and going.

Other nice garden spots: old, abandoned garden beds are a great option, around a nice little shed, around a terrible shed, in the middle of your yard! (more on this in a future post), Along a front walk or any path, under a fruit tree.  Typically insects prefer visiting a sunny or partially sunny garden, but many pollinator friendly plants love shade, as well, so whatever you got, just work with it.  

Sun and Moisture conditions: What is my garden plot like?

Is the plot full sun (6 or more hours of sun), part sun (3 to 6 hours of sun), or shady (less than 3 hours of sun)?  Does your soil stay wet and soggy?  Is it rocky, sandy and dry?  Or just kind of in between?  These are the main factors that will affect what kinds of plants or seeds you put in.  Native plant nurseries provide sun and moisture requirements for each plant, and usually their catalogs are divided up into categories like:

Many nurseries have searchable online catalogs that can be narrowed down by your site’s factors, which is super handy.  Some great Mid-west nursery websites are listed in the resources below. 

Choosing the “right plant for the right place,” as many gardeners will say, means considering the moisture and sun conditions -even if they are tough- and then finding the plants that like it that way. With native plants, the principle of the “right plant for the right place” eliminates many problems and almost all watering.

And that is also why I don’t recommend getting a soil test, because I don’t recommend doing any soil amendments.  Nutrient rich soil can lead to foliage heavy, too tall, floppy native plants. Your terrible soil might not grow a petunia, but I am certain the right native plant is out there.

Plan your pollinator garden so it provides flowers from early spring through late fall.  

One of the easiest ways to ensure 3 seasons of blooming flowers is with a spreadsheet.  Gah! That sounds complicated! Ok, ok. Forget the spreadsheet for now. We will come back to the beautiful spreadsheet in a future post.

Here are 15 easy native flowers for a partial sun to sun pollinator garden, with about medium soil (but can handle a bit of dryness, too). These are all tough, flexible plants and many are really amazing in terms of attracting pollinators: anise hyssop, blanket flower, sweet joe pye weed, meadow blazingstar, swamp milkweed, New England aster, mistflower -these are all hard to beat for attracting many, many pollinators. Together these plants make a great 3 season pollinator garden. (I will also include their spreadsheet to prove it!)

15 Easy Wildflowers for a 3 Season Pollinator Garden

And here’s the garden’s spreadsheet. Below is an adaptation of a great planning technique shown in Planting, A New Perspective by Piet Ouldolf and Noel Kingsbury. It’s a really useful book by two extraordinary gardeners. And I will write more about using this method for pollinator gardening in a future post.  

But here you can see that this garden will have a number of species in bloom throughout the season.  This variety is important because there are a variety of pollinators with different sized bodies (and tongues!) and they can’t all access the same nectar and pollen sources.

Super Food Perennials to include in the garden

In recent years, it’s become more and more clear that not all plants are created equal.  Some perennials feed many more insects than others.  Renowned naturalist, entomologist, University of Delaware professor, and author, Doug Tallamy, has been raising awareness with his books, Bringing Nature Home:How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants and recently, Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard, that certain plants are host plants to many more moth and butterfly species than others.  This is particularly important because moth and butterfly caterpillars are essential food for breeding birds -the chicks need soft, high protein food.  With hungry baby birds in mind, the top 4 types of plants you definitely want to include to support the food chain are: Goldenrods, asters, sunflowers, and Joe Pye weed.

A couple planting tips

When planning where to put each plant in the pollinator garden, try to create groupings of each species -some people say “masses” of plants. So think in terms of groups: 3 butterflyweeds here, 5 butterflyweeds grouped there, seven over there…and so on. This works well for general garden design and it also makes it easier for the pollinators to move from bloom to bloom efficiently. This is simply trying to mimic masses that often occur in nature, where one species might take over a sweep of ground, and can be a highly concentrated food source for pollinators.

My next tip is… for the first year or two, mulch is your friend. If wood mulch is handy, that will work, or straw also makes a great mulch. Mulching around and between newly planted plants will greatly reduce the weeds growing in your garden, and reduce the time you need to spend weeding the garden. Weeds can be intense! And mulching is definitely worth it. (Just try to make sure your mulch is also weed free) (for example, if somehow you have access to free mulch, try to choose the freshest mulch that has not been sitting around a long time gathering weed seeds.)

Killing your grass

I will probably write an entire post on killing grass at some point, because it is such a worthy topic, however, here I’ll just describe my favorite method. But before I get to that, I’d like to emphasize how much you need to kill your grass (in the garden plot area). Truly killing your grass will save you so much time in terms of weeding, watching weeds grow, re-mulching, etc. So I encourage you to really kill your grass!

I like to “sheet mulch,” using layers of newspaper and straw. So a few months before I want to plant, or ideally the previous fall, I will set the border of my new garden bed, and then lay down three sheets of newspaper at a time, significantly overlapping, so generally there’s about 6 sheets of newspaper in any given spot. I weigh it down with straw on top as I go, and at the end, wet the straw and newspaper down, if it’s not going to rain.

This method also works really well with newspaper and wood mulch. If you use wood mulch, it’s very important that when digging holes for your new plants that no mulch slip into the hole. If the wood gets buried it will suck up all the nitrogen as it decomposes and your plant will not do well. That is why straw is an advantage, you still want to keep it out of the hole, but it’s not as big a deal as with wood chips.

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As you get started down the pollinator garden path, there’s no doubt you will see other plants that grab a hold of your brain and won’t let go. Don’t worry, that is normal. Native plants do that to people. Lying awake at night, thinking about plants? Normal. My recommendation is to just go with it, definitely get more plants, expand your pollinator garden a little bit, put in a new bed over there, one by the shed, maybe one at city hall. Why stop?

Resources:

How to Build A Pollinator Garden, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Prairie Moon Nursery

Prairie Nursery

Native Flowers and Seeds from Ion Exchange

Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants, By Doug Tallamy

The Native Plant Podcast

If you are thinking about ordering native plants for your garden (and if you are like me), the price tag for a plant may seem a bit high. Especially when you compare it to The Seed Packet. So much potential held within a $2.50 packet of seeds!  So the choice is: 50 to 100 or more plants for $2.50, or 1 plant for $4?  You see the situation.  Why would anyone choose the plant? But most people do. I am not sure why, but something about growing plants from seed stops people in their tracks.  Looking at it, I see two hurdles that may make even an otherwise avid gardener (I’m looking at you, Stan) turn away.

1 The seed often needs something called a “cold treatment”

2 Figuring out the lighting to grow the plants indoors before they go outside

There are a few ways to do a cold treatment for seeds, and a future post will discuss very thoroughly how to do a cold treatment, but just nuts and bolts here:  for a cold treatment you get a little bag, label it, put some damp sand or vermiculite in the bag, mix your seeds with the sand, and then refrigerate it for typically 1 to 3 months.  Then you get it out and plant your seeds.

The cold treatment mimics winter, seeds absorb moisture, chemicals in the seed coat break down, and being cold for a certain number of days breaks the dormancy of the seed so they are ready to germinate.  Different species have different requirements.  But enough about cold treatments and who needs what!  

Today we are talking about those beautiful, unfussy seeds that do not need a cold treatment!  Seeds for procrastinators, or perhaps just normal people who did not realize some seeds get started in January.  So, there are a number of seeds that you can still order now, Late April/early May, start them when they arrive, and there you go!  Plants!  

10 Good garden plants that don’t need a cold treatment:

When the seeds arrive, my sincere advice would be to start them in flats or old planters, with some potting mix.  I would not seed them directly into the garden. The reason is because once you start watering a clear spot in the garden, a lot of weed seeds will also start to grow.  It can be really difficult to tell a weed seedling from a flower seedling, and so then you let everything grow, and most of these flowers don’t flower the first year, so the whole year who can tell the weeds from the plants?!  Next year the same! Gah!  Especially if you haven’t grown them before.  And then, you’re In A Mess.  Believe it or not, this has happened to me, in my optimistic, just seed things out, rake them in days -before weeds had Beaten Me Down.  These days, I definitely recommend weed free potting soil in flats or old planters for starting them out.  It will let you see your true seedlings, you can learn to recognize them for next year, and then you can just plant them out in the garden, right where you want them.  

If you have any no cold treatment garden favorites that were left off the list (or ones you know that can kind of sneak by with no cold treatment), please let me know!

Resources:

Illinois Wildflowers

Prairie Moon Nursery, and their wonderful, searchable seed database

Squash Bees:

Every summer morning, somewhere in North America, a little squash bee crawls into a squash flower and falls asleep.  Around mid-day, the blossom closes, making a safe little golden chamber for the little bee. If you ever need reassurance that life can be beautiful and good, remember the squash bee, Peponapsis pruinosa. 

The squash bee is a solitary bee that is a specialist pollinator: for their food and their offspring’s food they only use pollen and nectar from squash plants: pumpkins, summer squash, winter squash, butternut squash, zucchini, really most plants in the genus Cucurbita (with the exception of melons and cucumbers -for some reason, that’s where they draw the line).

Their specialization has resulted in a few fitting adaptations.  Since squash flowers release their pollen at 48F, the pollen often becomes available before dawn.  Because of this, squash bees evolved larger eyes to see in the dark and the ability to fly at cooler temperatures.  Squash bees actually look a lot like honey bees, and one of the main ways to identify them is simply that they are flying so early in the morning.  So if you’re out at 6am, and you see what looks to be a chubby honey bee flying around your squash plants, there’s a good chance you have found a squash bee.

Female squash bees also have long hairs on their rear legs that make it easier to grab onto large, spiky squash pollen grains for transport.  Males didn’t evolve these hairs because they don’t collect any pollen. Now why are the females the only ones to collect the pollen?! Because being a female solitary bee is no joke.

All by herself, she collects pollen and nectar, digs her tunnels and nesting chambers, lays the eggs, and provisions them with a nectar and pollen loaf for the larva to eat. The males spend most of their time hanging out in flowers, waiting for females, sometimes mating. I’m not kidding! Now is this unequal? Clearly, yes. Is it unfair? Hmm… I don’t know. Seems like a complex philosophical question to me! I’ll spare you my thoughts here, but maybe add them below the Actual Information someday.

Squash bees are ground nesting solitary bees, meaning that the females mate with males, and then dig tunnels and chambers underground usually 6 to 18 inches below the surface.  They start creating brood cells, and in each cell they lay a fertilized egg.  For each egg they have gathered squash pollen and nectar, and made a little pollen loaf, for the larvae to eat when they hatch.  This is all the food the young will need as they mature over the next year into adult bees. 

Important Conservation Note for Squash Gardeners:

Squash bees typically dig their nest right under the squash plants that they love, and so the little growing squash bees are in your soil, under your squash plants.  Say What! So it is important to not till a current year’s squash patch until next year’s squash bees have emerged. In the Midwest or New England the bees should definitely have emerged by the following August.  So in terms of garden planning, it would be good to follow a squash bed one year with a no till vegetable the next year, like kale, rather than carrots or potatoes, if you see what I’m saying.

Squash:

There are about 20 species of squash and gourd bees, almost entirely centered in Mexico.  The only squash bee to come further north was Peponapsis pruinosa.  This bee originally pollinated a wild squash Cucurbita foetidissima, also known as the buffalo gourd, stinking gourd, or my favorite, the Wild Pumpkin.  But the squash bee was also happy to follow another squash, Curcubita pepo, as it was cultivated and traveled with native American peoples, in two distinct domestication events.  10,000 years ago, pumpkins and zucchini were cultivated in Mexico and began to move northwest, and 5,000 years ago in Missouri (I’m from Missouri, too!), another squash domestication event developed acorn, crookneck, and scallop squashes that began to move east. Ultimately the cultivation and movement of squash has led to P. pruinosa’s range extending far beyond the geographical range of its original host plant, from Mexico to Canada, and from coast to coast.

If you are a vegetable gardener, you know squash takes a little space, but other than that, it is pretty simple to grow.  And if you’ve already got squash in the garden, I would recommend setting your alarm for early morning to try to catch these beautiful squash bees in action.  Wouldn’t that be something. But beyond the vegetable garden, what an amazing native plant! This year I will be planting some squash in my flower beds to see how it might perform as a ground cover. I’m thinking almost all the flowers in my border will rise above the squashy fronds.  

But here is the real, native plant deal:  from what I’ve seen, the stinking gourd, or wild pumpkin, is beautiful, drought tolerant, and perennial to zone 4!  What?! So I will be trying this interesting plant in among my flowers, and see how it does. I am looking forward to seeing how much it stinks.

Resources:

Squash and Gourd Bees (Peponapis, Xenoglossa) and the Origin of the Cultivated Cucurbita. Hurd, P., Linsley, E., & Whitaker, T. (1971). Evolution,25(1), 218-234.

Squash Bees, U.S. Forest Service

Squash Bees in the Home Garden, NC State Extension 

Crop Domestication Facilitated Rapid Geographical Expansion of a Specialist Pollinator, the Squash Bee Peponapis pruinosa.  Lopez-Uribe MM, Cane JH, Minckley RL, Danforth BN. 2016 Proc. R. Soc. B283:20160443.