So, year two.  Things are getting established and growing like crazy.  Check it out:

After the snowmelt

Starting to grow

May 29 2010

June 9 Kersplosion

PLANTS!! They’re growing a little crazy.  So, I wanted to thin them out, but they got too big, too fast for me to be able to effectively chop things down to size.  Also, we’ve had a flurry of strong storms come through, you know – the kind that set off tornado alarms and have us holed up in the basement.  They did a good job of knocking things over.  It’s my own fault, really – I haven’t given them any kind of structural support, so they basically create a domino effect.  Oh well.  This fall, I’ll be working on fixing that problem.  Live and learn, I guess.

I know this blog is supposed to be about native plants, but let’s just go on a short tangent for a while, shall we?  I’ve decided to try my hand at vegetable gardening.  Our property is pretty solidly clay, so rather than deal with amending the soil and breaking my back in the process, I decided to try raised beds.  Raised beds offer their own benefits over regular, in ground gardening that, due to my soil situation, were quite attractive to me.  Rather than mess with my soil, you can fill raised beds with whatever soil you’d like.  Also, the soil doesn’t get nearly as compacted since no one is walking on it (hopefully.)  Weeding is gentler on the back as well, since you don’t have to bend down as far.  Also, I just like the look of them – they’re a bit more compact, clean-cut sort of thing.  The goal with vegetable gardening shouldn’t be all about aesthetics, but it’s a plus on occasion.

Ok, so let’s get to some pictures.  Most of these were taken the day that we got our soil, which happened to be on the weekend of one of the last snows of the season.  Silly weather…

As you can see, we have three beds.  We used the design seen here with just a little bit of tweaking.  Due to cost restrictions, cedar would have been twice as expensive as treated lumber.  I wanted to use cedar because it’s better for the environment, it looks nicer, there aren’t any synthetic chemicals that leech into the soil/veggies etc, but it would have been too expensive.  The methods they use to treat lumber nowadays isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be, so I felt a little less bad about it.  Also, we lined the parts of the wood that would be touching soil with some landscaping plastic we found laying around, as seen here:

Also, we laid out hardware cloth on the bottom of the beds to prevent any digging critters from tunneling their way up into the plants.  We don’t actually have moles (one positive thing about having clay), but you know what they say about ounces of prevention versus pounds of cure and all that.

Alright, so next was filling them with soil.  I found some “fertile farm field” soil being sold on craigslist, which was MUCH cheaper than buying from a garden center.  Plus, it was from a local farm, rather than who knows where from a garden center.  I’m sure the soil is full of residual chemicals (last crop grown in it was corn,) but I’m ok with that.  We eat what grows there anyway, and I’ll just make sure to wash my veggies really well.  It’s always a risk buying this type of thing off craigslist, so we’ll see how it does.  Pictured is my very understanding hubby (thanks dear!), and thanks to Job and Val for helping and bringing your wheelbarrow, though sorry you didn’t get a picture!  Also, thanks to our neighbor Mary for letting us use her wheelbarrow too!

For the watering system, we buried a soaker hose about halfway down in each bed.  Watering by spraying the tops of everything tends to use more water than necessary, though I’ll have to use that method until the plants are big enough to get their roots down to the soaker hose.  That shouldn’t take too long, I think.

So, all we had to do at that point is bury the hoses, and we were done!  Oh, I should mention that the PVC hoops in the last two pictures are there so that I can lay bird netting over them to keep the birds off my strawberries.  Either that, or I could use them as cold frames and lay clear plastic over them instead.  Early lettuce, anyone?  I’ll update with more pictures as the season continues.

One neat plant that did really well was Indian grass, or Sorghastrum nutans.  This baby can get up to 6 feet tall, tolerates almost any kind of soil provided it’s not sitting in a pond, and prefers full sun.  It doesn’t even have to have very fertile soil and is perfectly happy just about anywhere.  The plants below are still young, but as they age they’ll send up more stalks which make very pretty, chestnut-colored seed heads.  They make for nice winter interest as well.  I stuck mine where I did, because I’m hoping that they’ll mask the gas meter and other ugly wiring on the side of the house.

There is something about grass flowers that entertain me:

I mean, c’mon, is that not cool?  They are purple and yellow!  PURPLE!  Here is another one:

Pretty.  Very cool plant.

Finally, my computer works!

So, here’s a picture montage of the overall growing season of ‘09:

Brand new, June

Growth as of August

Late September

Late September closeup

To quote the Doctor, “Fantastic!”  I didn’t even expect half that much growth in the first year.  Though I don’t have pictures of it, because the plants did so well I had to split a bunch of them and move them to the dead patch in the pictures, which is my expansion for next year.  I expect I’ll have to do a lot of that this coming season.  I honestly expected a lot more to die off because of overcrowding, not liking the conditions, or whatever other reasons plants die.  Oh well, I’ll just have a nice nursery stock of matured plants to split and move around!

I should also mention, I won’t have to water this spot any more….ever.  MAYBE if there’s a severe drought.  Maybe.  Also, though I don’t have to, the only fertilizer they will get will be compost that I’ll spread on top.  I’ll probably keep doing that for this year and the next because my soil is so terrible (full of clay), but after that, they will be completely on their own.

Last is my planned expansion for ‘10.

'10 expansion

Instead of turning over the entire planting bed and amending the whole thing, I’m just going to do “pocket planting.”  This method is far less labor intensive; instead of tilling and amending it all, you just add what soil amendments you want right where you put a plant.  Just dig a little hole, mix the present dirt with compost and sand, and plant something.  Hopefully this works just as well, since my back and shoulders were very angry with me after the manual tilling I did with the “garden claw.”  Blech.

Hello all!  So, I know I haven’t posted in a long time, and I’m sorry for that.  If you didn’t know, I’m in pharmacy school and that takes up ungodly amounts of time.  Anyway, I finally had time to post some more, but my photo editor decided that it doesn’t want to load properly.  So, until I can manage to fix that, there still won’t be anything new.  If anyone out there knows why GIMP freezes when it hits “fonts” let me know.

Anyway, toodles for now.  Hopefully it won’t be long!

I am thoroughly impressed by this garden.  Look what it decided to do:

New England Asters!

Yeah, this is one of my favorite plants.  The picture really doesn’t do justice to the true color.  This one is at least getting there:

Almost done blooming

I should mention that none of these pictures have been altered other than size.  What you see is exactly what I took, however in my opinion, pictures just aren’t as good as the real thing no matter what you do.

Anyway, these plants are great.  Given enough sun, which they don’t need all day, they’ll grow just about anywhere.  Soil condition isn’t a huge problem – they can handle quite a range of soil types.  They’re also all kinds of gorgeous, and the bees love them!

This pretty green bee is called the Augochlora Sweat Bee, or at least that’s the one that most closely matches it in my NWF Field Guide to Insects and Spiders of North America.  These flowers were constantly covered with bees, mostly this sweat bee and the fuzzy guy (girl?) pictured above.  I believe it’s some sort of carpenter bee.  Anyway, I’ve again read that when planted from seed, this plant won’t bloom until the second or third year.  Ha!  Don’t make me laugh.  This is another less-than-one-year-old, grown-from-seed-this-year plant.

As if that wasn’t good enough, this plant often shows up in a range of colors, from very light purple/lilac color to bright pink.  Most of my plants were deep purple (my favorite, again,) but one ended up slightly pinkish:

Color variation in Aster novae-angliae

Neat.  Normally the flowers are much more dense, so we’ll see what they do next year.  Anyway, I’ll leave you with this last shot showing flower detail:

Well, at least it’s the first butterfly I happened to catch on camera.  Finally after much anticipation, (bite me, I have pharmacy classes to attend ) here are the pictures:

We're getting somewhere...

Any minute now...

There she is!

Of course, she decided to emerge when I had a full day of classes, so no one was around to document the process.  Ah well, at least we got to see her before she flew off!  As an interesting side note you can determine the sex by looking at the black stripes.  Females have wider stripes on their wings, while the male has thinner stripes with a pair of dots on the hind wings, as seen here.  However, all the pictures I could find for comparison were of butterflies with spread wings, while this one kept its wings closed.  If anyone is a butterfly sexing expert, please correct me if necessary.

As it so happens, there is major concern for the monarch.  It is being threatened by, what else, habitat loss both in its wintering grounds in Mexico and its breeding grounds farther north.  By planting various species of milkweeds and nectar plants around our own homes we help to offset this loss of habitat elsewhere.  For more information, go here.

One last one:

I liked the antennae

Once again, right click the picture and select “view image” to see the full size.  That is, you can do that if you’re on a PC.  If you’re using a MAC, I can’t help you because I know nothing about them.  The last one I used was one of the classic “Bondi Blue” iMacs back in 8th grade.  The mouse was circular.  What’s up with that?

I officially have a butterfly garden!

Yay! Monarch!

Holy crow.  The garden isn’t even a year old, and already it grows butterflies!  Monarchs no less!  Interesting side note: they make that white silk and hang upside down while they undergo metamorphosis.  I’ll try to document its progress if it decides to emerge when I’m around for pictures.

Hanging by its hind feet, upside down

Also, there happens to be a Viburnum trilobum cultivar of some type (a.k.a. shrub) in the front yard that had a visitor of its own.  While Viburnum trilobum is a native, cultivars are still man-made so to speak and don’t help out regular natives like non-cultivars do.  Anyway, here are the pictures:

Gigantic and scary lookin'

But oh so pretty!

That sucker was HUGE!  Literally the biggest spider I’ve seen in Michigan (and that’s saying something, because the rental house we used to be in had a wolf spider infestation.) Including the legs, the thing was about twice the size of a 50 cent piece.  Sorry the pictures are only from one angle, it built its web in an odd spot for picture taking.  Anyway, as scary as this thing looked, it’s actually quite harmless.  It’s called the Yellow Garden Spider, and they’re actually quite common.  It’s always a treat to see predators around because that means that there is enough prey for them to live there.  This is a very good sign when it comes to biological diversity, and that is the goal of native planting!

In natural settings, e.g. prairies and the like, flowers grow right next to the grasses.  So, it’s important to plant grasses along with any flowers that go into a native planting.  Not only do they add variety to a flower bed, they add depth and character as well.  I really could use more grasses, and looking back, I didn’t plant them in the best places.  Even so, they have been thriving and have bloomed and gone to seed as well.  The Switchgrass was the first that I noticed:

Switchgrass flowers

I just wanted to show the really cool grass flowers – bright orange and purple parts.  I should add, if you right click on the picture and select “view image” you can get a close-up shot.  This works for all the pictures on this site.

Also, though i didn’t catch it blossom, the Canada Wild Rye is making seed heads:

One of my favorite grasses

It was windy that day, so the picture is a little blurry.  Sorry!

Grasses are also very important in feeding local wildlife.  Birds in particular like to eat the seeds of lots of different grasses.  I’m hoping to grab these seeds before they get them all so that my brother can plant this grass at his house next year.

Both of these grasses spent a year in pots before being planted in my garden.

More updates on the progress of the Desmodium plants.  This is what it looks like fully open:

Looks like it's stickin' its tongue out at you

This was the second day since it had sent up flowers.  Later that day already, it was being visited by pollinators:

Desmodium open for business

(Sorry the picture is kind of bright.) Nature is so efficient.  Anyway, one week later and it’s already making seed pods:

Quite unique looking, in my opinion.  I still can’t believe it, because this plant isn’t even a year old.  It was grown from seed just this year.  So, that makes it, what, 5 months old-ish?  I just…I don’t know…I mean….friggin’ amazing!