My vision for the front of Tony & Leon’s Homegrown National Park is for it to have grasses and meadow/prairie plants. Today, I planted the beginnings of that meadow with about sixteen Elymus glaucus (blue wildrye), ten Deschampsia cespitosa (tufted hairgrass), seven Sidalcea malviflora (pink checker mallow), fifteen Achillea millefolium (yarrow), and five Asclepias speciosa (showy milkweed). All of these were grown from seed sown this spring or later.
This was the first rainy day in a while and there is more precipitation coming, which seemed like the right time to plant. Some of the seedlings are puny. I think with the rain and sun and cool nights they will see in the next few weeks, they will get stocky and ready for a long winter rest before coming back as wonderful food web ingredients next spring. Most of them are partial to moist soil, so I will have to watch that. I expect some butterflies and other pollinators will find the flowering plants delicious, while woodland skipper caterpillars will hopefully make a meal of the grasses.
It likely wasn’t ideal to plant these plants into an area with bark-mulch, but I feel like the only way I can keep weeds down while they get established is with mulch. We’ll see if they can adapt to it, since this obviously isn’t a typical meadow environment.
In addition to this miniature meadow, I planted out the one snowberry seedling I have. This is about two years old and not healthy looking at all. It can only do better in the ground. I believe it is Symphiocarpos albus and I gave it plenty of room. These plants can get tall and wide. They make ideal scrub for birds to hide in and the berries provide a snack for very hungry birds late in winter (when they’ve already eaten all the more tasty berries).
I also planted out two other seedlings–Anemone multifida. I put them on the shadier side by the maidenhair fern and the trilliums. They grew pretty well from seed–maybe they will bloom in the spring.
More seedling news–the Geum macrophyllum seeds that I pulled off my one plant are sprouting madly It will be fun to have these mixed in among the other native plants and shrubs. I’ve read they can be a bit aggressive, but I think I can control them pretty well in my tiny garden with all that mulch.
My next project for the IfYouPlantItTheyWillCome website is to add a roster and gallery of all the species I’ve seen here in the yard the last 25 years. It will be fun to see how the numbers increase in the next few years as Homegrown National Park evolves.