Apologies for being absent these past weeks, I have been hella busy getting ready for market season. By way of apology here are some smol herbs I potted up for our friends’ shop
What’s growing on with you all?
I recently visited The Garden In the Woods, near Framingham, MA - it’s a combination botanical garden and native plant store. Wonderful place, I highly recommend it to anyone in the area. I came home with a Serviceberry bush that I planted where one of the hedge/tree conifer things on the edge of my yard had died.
In the annual garden my flour corn is coming up - planted it a bit late, so hopefully it’ll have enough time. I’m a little behind on everything except the peas this year, tbh, but it’s nice to see things finally start to take off.
My native garden is still very much a work in progress. I think the birds always get to the seeds, because I’ve never had a problem with growing plants until I decided to grow a native garden. Luckily, there are some already native pre annual plants on my property. My goldenrods have came back, and my dogwood tree is growing back shoots after a fungus killed the mature parts of the tree.
I sprinkled some Joe Pye Weed and Black Eyed Susan seeds and I think they may have sprouted this time? 🤞🏾 Pic below is where I think planted them 😅.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. To me, that looks more like lemon balm than Joe Pye. For comparison, from our gardens:
Lemon balm:
Joe Pye:
Ah man. I wonder why my seeds never seem to sprout outdoors. I should sprout them indoors first next time.
Don’t beat yourself up! It can be very difficult to sprout seeds in spaces that aren’t cultivated or prepped for them, and planting them in competitive spaces, while rewarding, ups the difficulty. If there’s a garden center that you like, go and ask them if they’re willing to give you some of their plug trays. Some distributors take those back but not many, so they might be more than willing to give you some for your starts. Then you can transplant those plugs of yours and get a leg up on your garden plans 💕
We finally got a lot of rain after a month of sunny days.
I got an order of 100 ladybug larvae in, but only counted about 30 that hatched and were alive. I put them out in jute bags and coffee filters because my small cherry tree is absolutely infested with aphids this year. It also grew like 50 cherries instead of its normal 3 or so, but they are all very tiny and ripening and a few are blackening.
Maybe next year…
I’ve unfortunately been busy this year and haven’t been as productive as I wish I had.
That being said, I have a decent sized patch of various lettuces, and the artichoke I planted last year is producing!
I just got a bunch of other things in the ground like beans and pepper starts, we’ll see how they do!
My sage is doing great, everything else is ok except my rose bush that died on me very suddenly :(
Most everything on my property is perennial. So, not planting anything lately. Just trying to reduce the amount of lawn mowing by laying down landscaping fabric and covering that with bark mulch. I’ll come back next year and plant more perennials in those areas. Probably fruit-bearing bushes like gooseberries and elderberries.
I hate to spoil your plan but gooseberries are a listed invasive here in Maine due to them being a vector for white pine blister rust. That’s not to say you can’t get them, but you won’t get them from someone playing by the rules. The rest of the plan sounds great!
I wasn’t aware of that and thanks for letting me know. I’ll steer clear of the gooseberries.
When you’re ready I’ve got some other berry producing plants to suggest for you, but if you’re set on hurting yourself harvesting there’s always blackberries. ‘Nelson’ is a particularly thorny cultivar
Suggest everything please…I’m all ears.
For another exotic cane fruit, consider Goji Berry (Lyceum barbarum). It has purple flowers instead of the pale yellow gooseberry flowers, no thorns, and it does admirably where we are in Maine. I think the berries taste better when they’re dried.
A different exotic fruit bush would be Haskaps (Lonicera caeruleae). Pale yellow flowers give way to long-ish sweet/tart blue berries that ripen around the time of early strawberries, before blueberries ripen. Bumblebees and mason bees seem to love the flowers, and the birds in our area haven’t caught on to how tasty they are yet. Another exotic worth considering is Goumi berry (Eleagnus multiflora), which will perform anywhere that autumn olive does. I keep expecting the state to call it invasive but it seems to behave better than its cousins.
For rarer native fruits, I’d probably recommend looking at Amelanchier and Viburnum family plants. A. laevis is more tree shaped, but A. alnifolia is more bush-y. A. canadensis is sort of in between, being a multi stemmed shrub that can get up around 26 feet tall if you let it. V. lentago (nannyberry), V. cassinoides (wild northern raisin), and V. trilobum (highbush cranberry) are each wonderful in their own right.
If delicious and decorative is the goal, we always get comments about our purple flowering raspberries (Rubus oderatus) and they’re naturally thornless. They will send up new plants in a radius from their original spot - I’ve seen some coming up some six feet away - but I wouldn’t consider them aggressive spreaders. They just like to make sure the space gets filled
Wow! Thank you so much for all of this. I’ll save all of it for future reference.
Always happy to help!
The weather has slowly been warming up so the most I’ve been able to do is prep the gardens with compost and used mulch from the mushroom farm nearby.
I am trying to start my seeds with some compressed soil blocks I made. I used some backyard soil, compose, mulch and a bunch of crushed eggshells from my parents. I managed to get a couple peas and beans started with my first attempt before remaking the remainder to be less soil dense. We’ll see how it goes the second time around.
My collard green from last year survived this long winter. Happy to see it thriving.
I can’t wait for a stretch of warm weather. I’m too lazy to properly compost so I’ve been burying all the veggie scraps in my garden beds all winter and spring. I know once it’s warm it’ll break down real quick but for now it’s just kinda there…
I feel that - we’re finally (??) to the point where I don’t have to spend time covering everything to protect from the overnight lows.
What did you end up using to increase your block porosity? Did you happen to treat your eggshells before incorporating them? Letting them sit for a day or two in apple cider vinegar helps to release the bonds between the carbon and calcium to make the nutrients more plant available.
I’m too lazy to properly compost
Good news! What you’re doing is the textbook definition for correctly performing trench composting and it’s a great way to go about turning food scraps into healthier gardens - great job!
I pretty much just went crazy with the egg shells and added a bit more mulch to balance it out. My parents eat eggs every morning and just put them in an uncovered container to dry out.
I didn’t think to treat the egg shells but I will keep that in mind for the next time. All I really did was spend some time with my pestle and mortor in the sun and grind them down.
Over the last couple years, I just sort of threw all the trimmings back into the garden, especially the tomato plants. Then I just started throwing all my food scraps in there because why not. I’m sure all the bugs appreciate it and their poop is good for the plants too.
I also covered the garden bed with leaves last year to protect the soil, and when that breaks down it should add more nutrients to the soil too. Trying to copy what a forest does with their leaves for the winter.
I think you’re doing a great job; sometimes it just takes a while for those biological systems you’re augmenting to catch up to the nutrient cycle you’re fostering
