Over the last week, I’ve planted about fifty 3-1/2″ pots with seeds! Most of them are natives, with just a few alien ornamentals thrown in because I already had the seeds. I mixed organic potting soil with some grit as a seedling mix. Many types of seed require a stratification period of cold before warm weather will wake them up. I’ve decided to take a hopeful approach of starting them in warm weather first and then if they don’t germinate in a month, I’ll refrigerate them for a few weeks and bring them out again. Some of them may not come up until next year. Honestly, that might be a blessing. If all of them come up right away, that’s going to be a thousand seedlings that need care and potting on all at the same time.
The most interesting seeds I’m trying are of Castilleja miniata, which is a semi-parasitc red paintbrush. I tried planting the seeds in and around some grass plants to see if they will grow there and parasitize the roots. I have lots more of those seeds to try in other scenarios and combinations.
I’m going to refrigerate the leftover seeds (there are still quite a few) and possibly start a second round of germination in early summer. My goal with all this seed starting is to not only add plants to my own garden but to get starts I can share with neighbors and friends.
Leon laid the rest of the bricks today around the border and I went out and raked the bark so it looked a little less bumpy. I started to worry about it not looking just so, but then I realized that in nature, nothing looks just so. Nature’s beauty is chaotic and uncontrolled. So is my bark-spreading. So, I’m calling it good for now.
There is a LOT of barked area with no plants. I’m growing a bunch from seed and cuttings that will eventually fill in this area and may purchase a few more choice items, as well. I plant to put a willow in this area, and I posted an inquiry to the Pacific Northwest Native Plants Facebook group if the have any suggestions on what species might be best for a small-ish front yard.
Some of the plants from Seattle Native Plants are already flowering, which is a nice touch.
There are also a few natives that I already had in the garden that are about to make statements around the yard.
Camassia leichtlinii
Vancouveria hexandra
Lewisia–not native to Seattle, likely, but to Washington State.
I planted seeds of native plants yesterday, as well, and left them out in the weather to get rain and cool and hopefully all they want for germination. The seeds included Solidago, Anemone, Delphinium, Asclepias, Aquilegia, Mimulus, Linum, and Penstemon. I also ordered some new seeds yesterday from Northwest Meadowscapes that included Aquilegia, Collomia, Camassia, Castilleja, Elymus, Deschampsia, Sidalcea, Lupinus, and Lomatium.
The giant bark mountain was mostly distributed around the native plant garden today. Shoveling all that bark was a good workout! I plan to finish spreading it all tomorrow. Leon added a bunch of bricks along the garden’s border, too.
All the plants that I put in last weekend look really good and healthy. The rains we’ve had have helped them settle in nicely.
Pacific Topsoils arrived this afternoon with six yards of their medium bark. It looks great–just what I needed. Leon and I spread about two yards already when the rain chased us back in the house. The bark will be spread deeply on the bare grass area and less deeply on the areas that already have soil covering the grass. The goal of the bark is to kill the underlying grass and to keep any weeds from growing in the garden before the native plants take hold.
The other good thing about the bark is that it will add some organic matter as it decomposes and start building up a layer of litter for critters to hide and hunt in.
My unbounded enthusiasm for native plant restoration saw me purchasing a bunch of packets of seeds earlier this year. I tried chilling some and not chilling some and to be honest, I haven’t been all that successful so far. I did get many Mimulus guttatus seedlings and a few Polemonium pulcherrimum, about four Asclepias speciosa and a few tiny Chamaenerion angustifolium. I potted the seedlings on and they are slowly growing. Mimulus seedlings are in the top photo and one Polemonium is in the front pot in the photo below.
Some seedlings not shown here are those of Allium cernuum which are germinating in a pot outdoors. My goal is to build up some real numbers of the simpler native perennials, so I will plant a bunch more seeds this weekend to see if I can get more to germinate and grow on. I’m usually pretty good at this seed game, but the natives are proving trickier. It is possible the seeds aren’t the best, too, since it is tough to find many of the local species. The Trillium ovatum seeds I ordered through Amazon.com arrived and they were rice hulls–not Trillium seeds!
I ordered six yards of a medium bark mulch that is made up of fir and hemlock to be delivered tomorrow from Pacific Topsoil. My intention is to spread it this weekend in between rain showers. We’ll see if I get it done!
The rain stopped falling by around noon today and I headed out to get my native plants into the soil. It only took a couple of hours, which was good news. My process was to dig holes in the new soil with a trowel, put organic fertilizer powder in and mix it with the bottom soil, drop a Jobes organic fertilizer spike in the hole after breaking it in half, setting the plant in and making sure I got soil back around and over the root ball. A few of the plants needed to have their roots broken up, as well. I was happy they all seem vigorous!
Placing them was tricky. Thinking of planting in layers, rather than just in two dimensions is pretty different. knowing that the trees will get tall, so shrubs can be under them and herbaceous perennials can fit right up under the shrubs. I tried to be a bit more random in my groupings and spacing, the way things might look in nature. We’ll see if I succeeded.
Some significant and much-needed rain hit my north Seattle garden today, so I am holding off on planting all my native plants until it subsides. I’m glad they are getting a good soaking prior to planting, and the soil will be nice and moist and settled.
Smithsonian Magazine has an April article on my hero Doug Tallamy and his efforts to save species through restoration. Find the article HERE.
While I am waiting for the rain to finish freshening up the garden, I’m designing a yard sign to put at the corner of the yard where people pass frequently that briefly describes the native garden project and gives people a link to this blog and to Doug Tallamy’s videos. We have a LOT of traffic going past the house during the stay-at-home order, so now seems the perfect time to pop a sign out there.
Here is where I’ve landed with the sign. We’ll see if it generates any interest.
I decided to use my stimulus payment to buy the native plants and the mulch/bark that I need for my Homegrown National Park project. I placed an order with Seattle Native Plants and I had an excellent experience. Mark Tomkiewicz communicated quickly and clearly with me, delivered the plants in excellent shape, and included a bunch of free plants as a generous gift! I ended up with an extra Trillium ovatum, extra evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum), extra salal (Gaultheria shallow), and an extra thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus). Mark also up-sized several of the plants at no cost. This was in addition to the one Trillium, three salads, one thimbleberry and three huckleberries that I purchased.
The other plants that I purchased included one each of different native rose species (R. gymnocarpa, nutkana, and pisocarpa), three red currants (Ribes sanguineum), a Western azalea (Rhododendron occidentale), serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia), an Indian plum (Oemleria cerasiformis), one each of the three native Mahonias (aquifolium, nervosa, repens), three Douglas asters (Aster subspicatus), three fringecups (Telima grandiflora), one piggyback plant (Tolmiea menziesii), three bleeding hearts (Dicentra formosa), one wild ginger (Asarum caudatum), one large maidenhair fern (Adiantum pedatum), one western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), a beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta), a vine maple (Acer circinatum), one Kinnick Kinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), and one honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa).
Here is what they all looked like after delivery.
It has been torture working from home this week while these plants were waiting to be planted. I was so tempted to put my video camera off on one of those long GotoMeetings and run out and start planting!
After work today, I did go out and place the plants loosely based on my earlier plans and adding in the extra plants, as well.
This last photo gies a sense of how tiny the new plants are compared to the established Douglas fir, the cornerstone of this garden. That tree is about seventy years old and about seventy feet tall. The bushy shrub you see to the left of the fir trunk is a Madrona volunteer that I’ve been pruning every year to keep it small.
Another volunteer plant that I’ve been coddling along and not removing was a shrub with colored twigs that popped up about five years ago. I thought it was a Virburnum at first, but as I’ve learned more about native plants I wondered it it wasn’t maybe a red-twig dogwood (Cornus sericea). Today I reached out to the great FaceBook group Pacific Northwest Native Plants and posted a few photos and they confirmed–this is the native dogwood!
Placing native plants is a challenge. I want to leave enough space for them to fill in later, but I also don’t want to leave consistent spaces between the plants, since that isn’t how nature does things. My accounting brain is looking for symmetry and balance and that just isn’t going to work here. So, I will revisit the layout tomorrow and see if I can randomize it a bit and make it look more realistic.
I’ll update more tomorrow after I get these in the ground! I can’t wait!
Here is another photo of the pile of dirt that was delivered on Tuesday. And this was AFTER Leon and I had each take a turn at spreading it around where we intended it to go.
And then, after three more hours yesterday, the pile and garden looked like this:
It is tough work moving this soil one shovelful at a time, but it was just what we needed during this challenging time of stay-at-home orders and the stresses the coronavirus has forced on us. Spring is a wonderful time to be outside, too, with lots of birds around and flowers and plants to distract me on my breaks from shoveling. The bushtits, amazing, tiny little busybody birds, spent some time in the Madrone tree that is one cornerstone of the native plant garden. I heard chickadees, juncos, stellar jays, wrens, and the ever-present American crows. It felt like they were cheering me on in my efforts to improve their food webs.
We woke up still able to walk and the weather was perfect for more soil movement. And low and behold, here is where we ended up:
The next step is to order a chip deliver from Chip Drop, but I may wait a week or so while our bodies recover! There is more brick work to be done, as well. We’re pretty excited to have something wonderful coming out of this difficult time.
In order to make the new native garden work, we realized we need to blend the height of the raised Douglas fir bed with the rest of the native plant garden. To that end, I ordered twelve cubic yards of three-part topsoil from Pacific Topsoils. The order was delivered Tuesday on the lawn and I plan to move it around as needed today. Here’s what I’m faced with:
