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The Deep Middle


Gardening & writing in the prairie echo

Still Seeing Mulch Years Later? Plant More.

7/30/2020

4 Comments

 
If you planted a garden 2-3 years ago and you still see lots of wood mulch, then you need more plants. You're probably still seeing a decent number of weeds at this point, too (mulch isn't a magic weed bullet and, if too thick, often creates an ideal seed bed). So, you know, more plants. More layers. More density.

And if you are planting a garden today think about where you do AND don't want to be in 2-3 years:

1) Only put down 1" of mulch if you're using it. More mulch = less plant sowing while generally inhibiting forb and grass growth.

2) Put plants on 12" centers (12" apart) and no more.

3) Consider mixing potted plants and seeds to increase coverage. In spring sow grasses and annuals among what you planted. In mid to late fall consider a dormant seeding of perennial forbs among what you planted. (Maybe what you plant is the highly designed part, or plants that need a head start because they work on roots first like Baptisia and Amorpha and Silphium).

What do you do if you're on a constrained budget?

1) See #3 above. The best advice is to plant the architectural plants -- trees, shrubs, and perennial flowers -- that take longer to establish and serve as the backbone for the design. You may also want to plant aggressive species and let them start to self so or run asap.

2) Get plugs. Most landscapers and nurseries get their plant material from wholesalers, and that requires a business license. But you can also get them (if you're east of the Great Plains) via Izel Native Plants which works as a middleman for wholesalers to sell to the public. That means if you need plants in quantities of 32 and 50 you can get them for a much better per-plant cost.

4 Comments

Milkweed and Flowers, Habitat and Design

7/22/2020

10 Comments

 
I struggle with finding the middle ground for advocacy. On the one hand are folks concerned primarily about plants as being hosts for insect larvae, yet not paying enough attention to the designed community of plants and how that creates the needed habitat for egg laying to even occur. And then on the other hand are folks who focus on the designed plant community while privileging flowers as being critical for adult pollinators, yet not paying enough attention to producing more insect young via host plants.

These two groups can broadly be labeled as wildlife enthusiasts and landscape designers, respectively. They both "get it" but from different ends of the spectrum that are essentially the same. The former group tends to eschew tenets of design -- succession, community, form, texture -- while the latter tends to eschew wildlife reproduction in favor of color and ambience. (These are broad generalizations, so forgive me if you don't agree or fit in neatly on one end of the spectrum -- I'm just making partially unfair blanket observations to get to a point.)

My new book will attempt to better align these two perspectives, as both are critical for the success of urban gardens that both appeal to and involve people and wildlife together. It is critical that people find nature-inspired gardens beautiful, while it is just as critical that wildlife find them beautiful as well. Just because one has host plants does not mean the garden is beautiful to wildlife, and just because one has a diversity of flowers doesn't mean the garden is beautiful to wildlife.

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Take monarch butterflies who must have milkweed to reproduce -- especially in spring and summer. They also must have a community of plants that both provide habitat for other species in the same food web as well as providing ecosystem services year round (cleaning water, amending soil, cooling the air, preventing erosion, creating winter habitat for hibernating insects and bugs, etc). And a critical part of that plant community is nectar plants for adult migrating monarchs come later summer and into fall, especially a diversity of aster and goldenrod species among others (late boneset, ironweed, blue sage, sunflowers, etc). However, growing certain milkweed species will result in plants that may spread too aggressively or become too tall, or otherwise might need selective thinning to maintain a design that isn't a threat to the mow and blow crowd.

Sure, plant Asclepias syriaca, but it tends to work better aesthetically in a larger landscape or as a few individual stems in the back or middle of a border. Shorter, more clumping-like species such as A, tuberosa may work, or even those that are short yet also seem to self sow around like A. verticillata. And among these milkweed ensure you have layers of diverse native plants that provide flowers (and host larvae of other insect species) from April to October, along with an intermix of sedge and grass -- and even a clump of shrubs and trees -- that mutually support one another and even more wildlife than just one butterfly species all year round.

I suppose my greatest concern is this: that we might garden for one species at the exclusion of others while justifying that exclusion with whatever validates our point of view. That can be unkempt wildness without a nod to structural diversity and necessary aesthetics (uber gardening for one butterfly species even), or a focus on flower color and diversity for human appreciation / acceptance that may primarily support adult insect species at the exclusion of a diversity of plants that produce insect young.  Are these ideologically-opposed perspectives? Heck no. But the balance can easily get out of whack as passions grow. Creating gardens that are as beautiful for all species together, at once, is a hard task that requires focus, knowledge, and in many respects a type of gardening that balances the very fine line of too wild and not wild enough. That's the gardener's dilemma in a world of mass extinction and climate change, where one species has privileged itself at the expense of others. How much do we "garden," and what does "gardening" look like in a world we've reshaped in our own image?
10 Comments

Lessons of a Backyard Meadow

7/5/2020

6 Comments

 
We moved to our home in 2007, and for a few years I mowed and fertilized and even watered diligently. Then I just got fed up with spending an hour every week in the heat as I watched an adjacent 1,500ft garden fill in and support wildlife. Until 2015 I neglected the back lawn, some 3,000ft or so, and as a result the tall fescue got a little patchy and weak. It burned bad every August and, in 2013-2014 some prairie grasses began moving in. Ok, I thought, the landscape of benign neglect was telling me something.

So in the fall of 2015 I scalped the back lawn hard, planted a few hundred plugs, and sowed some prairie grass and forb seed.

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2020
In the spring of 2016 I mowed short to try and keep the fescue back and allow sunlight on to the soil surface more for seed germination. About June I stopped. I read somewhere that if you let a fescue lawn go to seed it weakens the grass; I'm not sure if that's true (let me know), but I do know that by the end of the first year I had little bluestem and sideoats grama in almost every square inch. 
In 2017 biennial forbs really came on and totally smothered the lawn. The two workhorses were mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera) and black-eyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta). These guys seemed to do a number on the fescue in the first half of the year, totally shading, outcompeting, and generally smothering -- of course, I did sow them fairly thickly. By the end of the season the warm season grasses had taken over the job, and in all but the shadiest areas where the warm season native grasses did not take as well, the fescue lawn all but vanished. But I still had a dearth of perennial flower younglings from what I could tell, so I kept planting a few dozen plugs here and there every spring and fall -- which I still do as I tweak, replace, augment, etc. 
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2017
In the annual mow that occurs every March, both the thatch layer and what the mower left behind is very thick, so I hand rake all 2,500ft every two years. I want to encourage all the flower seeds I know are out there from the past few years -- as well as the seed I kept throwing out -- and it paid off in two ways. First, in 2019 I had a massive abundance of various aster species and and an increase in slower growing forbs like Baptisia. More and more seedlings seemed to appear throughout the summer, and by fall I had a very showy aster display. However, that aster abundance primarily occurred right at the edge of a shade line from my neighbor's trees on the south side. Out in the full sun area, forbs that like it dry and sunny were growing fuller (while the warm season grasses were thick and lush. 
This year is perhaps the thickest the space has ever been, and that's with a lack of June rain and tons of early heat. Forbs are starting to move in from that southerly shade line and are, surprisingly, affecting the density of little bluestem and sideoats grama around and under them. I want and need that grass layer -- that green mulch -- which is a superb weed barrier and soil moisture regulator, so I'm thinking it might be time for some sedge: Carex radiata or Carex blanda that can grow in the shade of taller forbs. Or, I need to do a June trim of many forbs.

I can say this for certain -- I have too many ironweed (Vernonia spp) seedlings. It really went to town this year germinating, and if I'm not careful I'll be left with an ironweed and indiangrass meadow.
I need to do a more formal survey of species density and diversity. While it's certainly not a prairie reconstruction, it is a garden that needs to mimic some of the attributes of a restoration. The primary plants I've added this year are groundcovers such as wine cups (Callirhoe involucrata) and wild geranium (Geranium maculatum).

I've also added some spreaders like Coreopsis palmata and Pycnanthemum virginanum to provide larger floral masses or drifts at low to mid level heights that match the stature of the shorter warm season grasses.

If I had to do this all over again I'd have killed the lawn in one fell swoop and employed a greater degree of patterns with which the garden could grow from. However, it has been fascinating to watch the plants convert lawn for me in slow motion, and to observe general behaviors in what amounts to a hodgepodge I'm backwards designing as I observe succession and competition. In the end, the ground is covered, the primary weed threat is manageable and woody (red cedar, siberian elm, grey dogwood), and there's always something moving in the plants: snake, rabbit, spider, dragonfly, bee, beetle, bird.
6 Comments

    About

    Benjamin Vogt's thoughts on prairie gardening in Nebraska. With a healthy dose of landscape ethics, ecophilosophy, climate change,  and social justice.

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    In a time of climate change and mass extinction how & for whom we garden matters more than ever.

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prairie inspired  design

Lincoln & Omaha, Nebraska

Monarch Gardens is a prairie-inspired design firm. We specialize in lawn to meadow conversions as well as urban shade gardens.

Employing 95% native plants, our designs are climate resilient, adaptable, and provide numerous ecological benefits while artistically reflecting wilder landscapes.
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