The seedlings keep popping up in my native seed pots. It seems clear that the germination guides I found online for each species were accurate, and the extra effort to follow those guides was well worth it. Here are some of the seedlings, looking healthy and strong:
Seedlings here include a year-old cascara tree, western buttercup, fringecup, Douglas aster, madrone, vine maple, Oregon grapes (2 pots), osoberry, ocean spray, and pacific crab apple.
There are hundreds of other seedlings, too, including western hemlock, western red cedar, and western columbine.
There are some lovely native blooms around the garden this month, so I will drop some photos here for you to share their amazing beauty.
Our yard, the ecosystem we live in, is full of birds lately. Likely, many are breeding in our yard or very nearby. Here are a few photos from the yard this week.
Having a wild and native-planted yard really does bring the birds in. I always find birds like the bushtit above in the madrone tree that sprang up under our Douglas fir. While I walk Rafa every day, I see which yards have birds and which ones have few/none. It seems so simple. The yards with big native trees have birds. The yards with native shrubs and perennials have birds. And the messier yards, the ones with thickets and brambles, have many birds. The yards with perfect lawns and few/well-clipped shrubs and trees, have few birds.
When I see the local merlins, they are in the tallest Douglas fir trees, along with band-tailed pigeons. The Douglas fir trees in the neighborhood are always atwitter with chickadees, kinglets, and nuthatches. And the American robin male sings from the top of the western red cedar across the street. They all have other trees they can choose, but they are drawn to the trees they know best, the ones they evolved alongside.