Winter Seeding

Our first snowstorm was brewing on top of an inch that had fallen two days prior. Although there was much to do, I paused to get out to the back swale, once wet, now dry, to scatter the seeds I had collected.

The roughly two acre swale, either artificially created by gravel mining just over the property line or an artifact of the terminal moraine on its northern flank, used to dry up each summer, enough so that tree species accustomed to periods of water logged soil could still grow to sixty or seventy feet tall. These trees have now died, the largest within the last three years, because of permanent inundation.

This year, another change had taken place -the swale dried down. The spring tree which drains the area continues to flow and a walk through the swale could still leave you suctioned to its wet bottom, but the hummocky surface is dry, the duckweed a gray mat. With that had come an incredible explosion of canary reed grass, the cool season, hybrid grass created for just this type of environment. In two short months the grass multiplied its square footage by ten and left little room for intervention by this woods gardener.

Canary reed grass or reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea, is terribly hard to remove -more so than garlic mustard, buckthorn, and creeping charlie combined -for its wet soil, its nearly impenetrable mat of fibrous roots, its rhizomes and seeds. Although developed for haying wet ground, wild animals do not care for it. Yet here, it is clipped, but I cannot recall whether I clipped it in preparation for some type of management or it has been grazed by deer this late autumn. If it was deer, that would be unusual.

I will not be able to remove the reed grass, nor do I intend to spray glyphosate on it. I've tried plastic tarps, but there are now too many woody obstructions over a region much too large for that. My plan is to seed this open area, ahead of the advancing grass, in hopes of some species gaining a foothold. Only if the pond does return, to its last maximum, will the open water push the mat of grass back to its edges.

If the pond does not return, this wet meadow may have a limited number of species capable of growing alongside canary reed grass. I've seeded blue vervain, Verbena hastata, common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, various asters and goldenrod, and a bit of big blustem. I had two dozen blue lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, starts remaining from the late summer planting, roots still alive, that I dropped in the hummocks under the snow. And in late September I planted dozens of Spotted Joe Pye, Eutrochium maculatum, more blue lobelia, and several other species I cannot recall at the moment along the more shaded swale edges where the canary reed grass had yet to overtake.

The Month Spring

The Weather

 

The last spring snow melted in the gardener's lot the night of May 10th. It will now be in the nineties.

The Farm(s)

On the ninth, I had a moment to look on the garlic, strike the weeds with a hoe. Never before have I seen the garlic so small so late.

The effervescence of lambsquarter and thistle is contained with mats of semi-wet straw remaining from last fall.

The Greenhouse

Three rows by five of ear leaved brome, Bromus latiglumis, out front of 4 rows of bottle brush grass, Elymus hystrix, and three rows of silky wild rye, Elymus villosus. An ability or want to grow in the shade is a commonality among these monocotyledonous Poaceae. These will likely be established on the culvert embankment, partially collapsed last fall, once restored.

It takes an especially observant person, and some years of experience, to decipher one seedling's visual cues from another. Identification -what is that? Dicotyledonous plants, with pubescent stems and leaf edges, slightly wavy heart-spade shaped leaves, pale green, growing thickly (indicating small seeds to the planter of seeds). This blindness to leaves and stems, the miniature, and impatience allows many undesirable plants to survive the hoe.  Refining possibility by my seed order leaves only Campanula americana, or Tall Bellflower. When I return from Cedar Creek, the tag will tell how experienced I am.

Blue lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, whose seeds are only a fraction of a millimeter, have a stellar germination rate. Competition must be the thinning mechanism.  These seedlings are for the northern edge of the great swamp, that two acre depression of drowned trees, duckweed, and fluctuating water levels toward the back of our woods. On that partly shady slope -weedy garlic mustard, thistle, canary reed grass and me. I've got black plastic on part of the water's edge covering canary reed grass, and been hoeing then planting Iris versicolor, spotted joe pye weed, blue vervain, big blue stem grass, and others. The seed bank of garlic mustard and root network of thistle is deep, while canary reed grass forms dense, fibrous mats that are bears to pull, but there is also a surprising amount of diversity in this highly disturbed site at the edge of a former commercial gravel pit.

Ephemerals

Hepatica, Anemone americana, trailside, Cedar Bog Lake trail, May seventh Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve.

Large flowered bellwort, Uvularia grandiflora, like many ephemerals growing in our woods, had a prolific season. Is this is due to winter weather resembling winters these plants have evolved by? Last year, after yet another overly warm winter, I stumbled upon one, maybe two bellwort. This spring there are possibly dozens of clumps scattered in previously barren understory sites. Our only known patch of trillium, nibbled by the hungry deer this spring, now has peers. A display of randomness that throws off any rational sense of seed distribution and opens us to the potential of seeds storing in ground until conditions are right, to a migration of seeds via ants and mice, and, as is the case with trillium, to the slow process from fruit to flowering plant. A warming climate, should it create a warming winter here, won't be hospitable to these spring ephemerals, more likely favoring the weedy plants that take advantage of disruption and do not have such particular requirements for germination.

Nodding trillium, Trillium cernuum.

 

Peach Blossom Spring

Things move slowly, we know, but still we expect change to come quickly. Yet quickly comes change, not often the kind we anticipate.

I am now, roughly a year, working in education at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Here stands the red barn, a relic of an old farm since annexed. The tracks lead you to the Tashjian Bee and Pollinator Center, where we hold classes for adults in a variety of subjects connected to the institutional mission and serve thousands of school children every year. My focus is the advancement and deepening of photography education. I develop classes, hire teachers, and offer insight wherever I have more than two cents to offer. This satellite of the main campus is in development around agriculture, home grown produce, cooking and methods for preservation. It soon will not be the quiet place it appears to be, but occupied by new buildings, agriculture extension staff, visitors, chefs, meals, and fields of produce. Change here will come quickly.

At home, winter is still thick as the lake ice under trucks and shacks. Two years ago this area was cleared to put up the new shop and studio. In 2016 I fall-planted milkweed and transplanted goldenrod, then winter-seeded a mix of savanna seeds in early 2017. By summer we had five foot tall goldenrod, the quickly germinating black-eyed susan, and the beginnings of a more complex blend of plants. I weeded to keep out the Canada thistle, canary reed grass and other more mysterious upstarts.

The winter snow has been permanent, cold as it has been, sheltering the seeds of milkweed, golderod, rudbeckia, and monarda fistulosa. It is one way to plant, if you can give it over to the plants and their fecundity or lack of it. If you want to get plants going with an efficient use of a dollar, avoid buying plants, bare roots, or the daunting germination codes M, E, F, G, or ?, stay off wet soils, weed when needed, and let the plants do the work.

The tiny seeds of eastern forest native Lobelia siphilitica, great blue lobelia, collected from the garden last fall. Despite having enough of these self-seeding, locally native plants to start new colonies, I am seeding it in trays this April because it will do well in sunny, wet soils and shady, mesic zones, is untouched by deer, is competitive with weeds and, with luck, garlic mustard and thistle. These seeds have the germination code C(60) and D, meaning that they will require cold stratification (as in nature) of at least 60 days, they are quite small and may require light to germinate. I will regret mixing these with damp silica sand, as they are... quite small. Next time, all code D seeds will be put on damp, white coffee filters for stratification.

In addition to the fifteen or so species collected, bagged and stratifying as I write, another twenty species has arrived from the local native seed supplier, Prairie Moon, yesterday. My first season I concentrated on milkweeds, last year on forbs and grasses, and this upcoming season on forbs and sedges. All are intended for woods, savanna, or wetland edge gardening as I make small dents in the garlic mustard and buckthorn. Come April, these seeds will be greenhouse trayed for sprouting, then moved outside. Most won't be planted until late summer or early fall in locations previously cleared of weeds.

I will end this rambling with a bit of a poem by Tao Yuanming -the 4th century writer of The Peach Blossom Spring, a tale of utopia in a time of political disunity.

The myriad transformations

unravel one another

And human life

how should it not be hard?

From ancient times

there was none but had to die,

Remembering this

scorches my very heart.

What is there I can do

to assuage this mood?

Only enjoy myself

drinking my unstrained wine.

I do not know

about a thousand years,

Rather let me make

this morning last forever.

Stratify This

This winter I've proposed a landscape project for Franconia Sculpture Park's program. Materially, the artwork will be made of milkweed, Asclepias species, sourced from the northern tier. I don't want to say too much more about the form this planting will take as the jury is still out. I do, however want to share with you the process for stratifying milkweed seeds. It's an easy and fun thing to do should you want to get a jump on milkweed for your yard. You may, of course, plant seeds in fall and the damp, cold climate will do all the work for you, but what fun is that?

It's important to source your milkweed seeds regionally because they will be best adapted to your climate extremes. My project's seeds were purchased from Prairie Moon Nursery, a Minnesota based native seed company. Like many perennials (plants that come back each year), Milkweed requires a period of cold and damp to break dormancy of its seed. This process is known as stratification. 

First you will need sand. It's possible that any sand will do, but I bought this very fine, washed sand at the big box. The fifty pound paper sack (which leaks all over, keep it outside) was under five dollars and I used only a fraction of it.

You must dampen the sand and the first thing you will notice is how the water percolates through it just as it does at the beach. If you'd rather go to the beach than the box store, I recommend bringing a coffee can with you for your seed stratification needs. 

You'll also need some kind of sealable bag, ziplock type or even a baggie. There shouldn't be any free water in the bag after dropping in the sand. Add the seeds and label. I wrote the start date, how long they should be stratified, and the quantity of seeds. And since it is easy to forget about them, I put an alert on my phone to remind me to check in 28 and 30 days.

Here they are -seven varieties of milkweed ready for the refrigerator. If all goes according to plan, I will be potting these seeds in deep cell trays come late March. Afterward, the trays will go into the greenhouse, ahem, the as yet unbuilt greenhouse leaning against an oak tree in the back yard. All in good time. By May they should be ready to plant in our Monarch Park over the drain field and quite possibly at the sculpture park forty five minutes to our north and east.