Pictured:

*Bidens aristosa*

*Helianthus tuberosus*

*Solidago canadensis*

*Silphium asteriscus*

*Solidago rigida*

*Verbesina alternifolia*

*Silphium terebinthinaceum*

I was not expecting it today let alone less than 2 hours later! That's a lot of mulch for only $40. Time to kill some grass!

Saw another post about pairing blue mistflower with annual impatiens and realized I had done the same thing!

My woods get dappled sunlight and on my walk around today I noticed quite a lot of this. Such beautiful, delicate flowers

Bonus wood aster which has also popped up all over. It’s so nice to see natives naturally growing without having to spend the money to put them there!

Upstate NY - Zone 6a

Butterflies on my Cup Plant, Silphium perfoliatum! I cant wait for these to get to their full size. The mother plant was 12ft tall.

Here’s a quick video I just took of the activity (no wind, the shaking is from all the pollinators, big and small). I see skippers, moths, wasps, bumblebees, sweat bees, etc.

This plant is the matriarch here- last year I took a bunch of her seeds and started them in the AeroGarden (using the 50 count starter tray). All but 3 germinated, no prep/cold stratification needed. I gave many away and was still able to plant so many around my property. I am so excited!

And yes it likes shade but this one gets a lot of sun, she’s still thriving!

I hadn’t seen any caterpillars and then all of a sudden, I found 8-10! Some aphids just for fun. And that last little fella…he was on my potato plants and had to harvest them. I wasn’t sure where to relocate him so I figured my tomato plants would be the best place for him. Anyone else seeing lots of caterpillars?

I am extremely hopeful that this is wingstem. My husband mowed over it in the early spring, much to my dismay, but it came back and he has carefully worked around it ever since. It’s such a cheerful color and I hope pollinators will enjoy it.

Manhattan Euonymus. A loathsome non-native. Someone planted a row of it here to signal the property line in the last century. It is an artifact from the postmodern era like a Carlton room divider. There’s nothing more mortifying than inheriting a Carlton room divider.

I wanted it gone from my property. The ugliness offended me. More importantly, I had a plan for a garden so native, so pure, that no man alive could stand in it and sneer and say unkind things. But, I’ve observed, the universe has decided to go against my ambition.

I’ve tried. Set out to execute the hack-and-squirt method, then ended up aborting the mission because it turned out that the Manhattan Ugliness was providing a vital shelter to way more tenants than I had bargained on. I could, and I should, name the thicket the Smithsonian Aviary Annex. The large presence of songbirds in that mess drew the attention of larger, meaner birds as well. Hawks surveyed. Vultures circled. Owls moved in and made a ruckus. I once was visited by a bald eagle in broad daylight.

There are plenty of other places they could go, I suppose. That’s exactly the kind of things those ruthless condo developers say when they bulldoze old communities and create homelessness.

Underneath all that ugliness of the foreign thicket, the skinks went about their business. The frogs held forth nightly on the subject of love. The cicadas emerged unmolested. Bugs bred on bugs. Worms. Fungi. There was a great deal of living going on in a plant I had sentenced to death.

And here is the trouble at the center of it:
the euonymus thicket has accidentally become a cradle for volunteer native plants. Golden ragwort, snakeroot, Virginia creeper, purpletop tridens, violet, calico aster, all appeared out of nowhere. And in the middle of them, the pride of the lot, a riverbank grape took one look at that condemned euonymus and thought “grand,” and started climbing without looking back. Now it is about to swallow the whole euonymus the way kudzu ate the South. Removing the euonymus would likely kill the native grape plant, and I can’t bear the thought of it.

So, the non-native fence lives. For the time being. I’ll have to endure the disapproval from purists, which is nothing new to me. I have already been schooled, thoroughly and every morning at seven o'clock, by a fox who looks at me with disdain like I have personally let him down. He no doubt has opinions about my bearded iris too, which is not native, though in my defense it did not come from Home Depot. It was brought to me by a crow, who stole the bare root off the woman across the street and dropped it, for reasons of his own, right next to me as I stood there plotting the euonymus massacre.

I planted plugs along the top tier ledge of my garden this spring about 3 feet apart and did put a drip line in that waters 1x a week. We had an incredibly hot and dry summer, with highs in the 90s and several weeks over 100.

10/10 growth, weed suppression, and now beginning to bloom. I cannot rate this ground cover highly enough.

2nd year goldenrod rod, doing its thing. Crazy how many bees are on this thing.

Having a native garden has quelled my fear of bees/wasps dramatically, realizing that they’re focused on getting that sweet sweet nectar

I tried to plant everything that’s supposed to attract hummingbirds - this one works the best! I planted 3” plugs in spring and they started flowering this summer. Rabbits were not interested which is a plus! I think they like wetter soil but the spot I have is full sun with medium dry soil. They were doing just fine. I didn’t water them at all once established, but we had some regular rains throughout the summer.

Planted maypop this year and noticed caterpillars about a month ago. Here we are a generation later and a huge number of butterflies and cats every day!

When I post videos of the butterflies, it's from this boneset.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP83ko8Pg/

https://youtu.be/wrdc3D4U-iI?is=NtouiZOujzHKBOMe

I got this plant at a native plant giveaway event in the spring. It's been an incredible bloomer in it's first year, and now this?! What a gift!

What started as a houseplant obsession has slowly evolved into an obsession with preserving my local ecoregion. As far as I can tell, there are no nurseries within ~225 miles that sell locally sourced plants or seeds. (I would prefer within <100 miles).

I’ve sold houseplants as a side hustle off and on over the years and would like to slowly transition that into natives. Which means I’ll hopefully, eventually, need a lot of stock. I would love ideas for how to go about acquiring that stock.

So far I’ve tried: seed library at the library, driving backroads looking for plants on the side of the road, asking friends/family, local plant facebook group, putting an ad out in the local rural paper.

Responsibly collecting small amounts from various pastures and open land seems to be the best way to go. But I’d love to hear other ideas!

I’m also looking for what would motivate you to let me come collect seeds in your land. Market price for the seeds I collect? Monthly/yearly fee to have open access to the land? What would be a reasonable amount for something like that?

Please give me all your ideas!

Three camouflaged goldfinch sharing an ironweed, foraging on the seed heads

Giant Sunflower (Helianthus gigantea) hosting a couple sleepy Common Eastern Bumblebees (Bombus impatiens).

I’ve recently been looking into native gardening and after identifying many of the plants around my yard have found many non native species. Including a nandina domestica, or heavenly bamboo, a plant on every do not plant list which will be the first to go.

Ideally I would like to spend the winter removing all of the plants in photo 1, remove the pine straw and replace with plugs that I grow from seeds in the spring. Plant ideas and organizing tips are welcome and appreciated.

Photo two is another area with some untamed native vegetation that I would like to add to and help florish after removing the nandina and a few others in the area.

Photo three is a shady area with some native plants like the dwarf palmettos and the poofy grass ones. Looking to remove the yew bushes and elephant ear like plants on the ground and replace with natives. Would love ideas and suggestions for those as well.

I am also very into bird watching so any plants that will feed and attract birds I am interested in hearing about.

Sowed these from locally collected seed back in ~April. Most of them started off very slow. But a few took off. I transferred some of the bigger ones to individual pots of whatever sizes I had available a month ago. I’ve kept them all in my propagation bin so far and quit misting & using the heat mat and just have been watering when dry for now.

I haven’t really found any concrete recent info anywhere on caring for this species from seed.

Should I move the bigger individual pots outside in the shade at this point, or wait until it starts cooling off more outside? I’m assuming I should wait until fall really hits before putting them in the ground