Native Plant Gardening

I'm currently hunting down pawpaw trees, Blueberry bushes, black raspberry, and other native fruits for my garden.

Looking for suggestions.

I looked into black cherries, but they get too large and too easily wind damaged for the proximity I'd have to plant them to my house.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/20277540

I'm in the Piedmont (South-east US) region with a hardiness zone of 8a. I have a large area of turf grass, and I want to plant native plants, attract butterflies, native insects, fireflies, all of it. I'm looking for trees, shrubs, small plants, anything would be nice to plant.

Where do I start? I see a lot of different species online, but where can I get seeds for them to plant? Is planting from seeds a viable option for a beginner?

Any help would be appreciated!

I've been waiting so patiently all year, hoping the plant in my backyard was butterfly weed. It probably isn't, but I found this little guy in my front yard a couple days ago!

We’ve noticed we don’t find monarch caterpillars on milkweed plants that have ants on them. We’ve also noticed if ants start coming on a plant with a caterpillar on it, the caterpillar disappears. It doesn’t seem to show up on a neighboring milkweed plant either.

I’m wondering if anyone has a way they keep ants off these plants so the caterpillars can continue their life cycle in peace.

There was a conversation about lupine seed collection in the comment section of a post a little while back, and now that my lupine is going to seed I thought I'd follow up on what that looks like.

From left to right, we have immature seed pods (still green, still developing), maturing seed pods (brown, with black seeds inside), pods just about to pop (you can see them starting to split open with the round black seeds poking through), old pods most of which have popped open and dispelled their seeds, and finally a branch with all four stages present (generally seed pods develop from the bottom up, however this can be affected by variables like sun exposure).

The seed pods are apparently heat-activated; we've been getting a major heat wave here in the Pacific Northwest and the pods have been exploding open like crazy during midday when the sun hits them and the ambient temperature is at its peak. The seeds are propelled out when the pods burst open, and I've witnessed them fly well over ten feet.

If you want to harvest lupine seeds, the key is to grab them when they're mature but not yet expelled; you can do this by harvesting the pods by hand as they mature, but usually I prune the branches off the lupine once the pods on the branch start opening and put the entire branch in a bucket to break open at their leisure. While this pruning is generally unnecessary if you're not interested in seed saving, it does prevent thousands of volunteer lupine from popping up all over the garden (it's nearly impossible to keep all the seeds from spreading so I usually get a few dozen every fall and spring, but it's super easy to remove any that aren't wanted). One year I pruned the spent flowers before seeds could develop, and while that did produce a small second round of blooming I think it overly stressed the plant. Many lupine species are fairly short-lived perennials (with a few annuals sprinkled in), so it may be worth stressing them for more blooms if it's likely to die soon after anyway.

Some general disclaimers about lupine: due to their prolific seed generation and speedy life cycles, lupine are highly invasive outside their native range. There are also many species of lupine out there, so before planting make sure to source species from your area! There are some more "domesticated" ornamental species out there, but I'd really recommend sourcing a native variety if you can. They are really wonderful plants that require little care once established, have unique and showy foliage, and native bumblebees absolutely adore their gorgeous flowers.

I hope this was informative!

How do y'all decide the balance between dead heading for more blooms or letting flowers go to seed for the benefit of local birds?

I have one of the few flower gardens on my block and the only native garden, so pretty much all of my flowers produce beneficial seeds and I want to support the birds, but it would also be nice to get more blooms.

I've been hoping all year that this plant was going to be a huge, beautiful butterfly weed bunch, but after seeing actual butterfly weed on a field trip for my field botany class, this doesn't appear to be butterfly weed after all.

Any ideas what it is?

I posted a couple days ago, but in the interim my yarrow, black-eyed susans, and wild bergamot went wild!

The excess allowed me to make a bouquet for my wife with some stragglers.

Inspired by a comment reply I made in another thread, I thought it would be fun to share what plants native to your region you've had easy success with growing from seed, either in pots or direct-sowing. Please mention your country/region when commenting!

I got pollinator seed packs from the Tennessee Environmental Council a while back, they seem to be doing the trick now.

I need to figure out how to trim them effectively, to keep them from toppling over, but aside from that I think this is a great first year!

Disclaimer: data only available for the lower 48 United States, although Southern Canada and Northern Mexico should be able to extrapolate

The Xerces Society is an insect conservation nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon. They engage in a variety of work to protect native insects, including publishing resources for the general public.

One such resource are their Native Plants for Pollinators and Beneficial Insects guides, which are curated illustrated lists of plants broken down by geographic region. The lists include basic growing conditions info for each species, as well as some info on how the plants benefit insects. They even have separate lists specifically for supporting the endangered monarch butterfly.

If you're a native plant fanatic like me you can cross-reference their lists with the USDA Plants Database (I wrote about that other great resource in this post here) to verify if the Xerces-recommended plants are native to your county, however the Xerces lists are broken up into relatively small regions so you're unlikely to cause damage or introduce problematic species even if it's not technically native to your specific county.

I hope y'all find these lists as useful/inspiring as I have!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16289348

Matilija Poppy liked the wet winter

Hi, Reddit refugee lurker here, missing r/Ceanothus. It would be great if more people start posting content here since the niche communities are what’s really missing here. To that end, here’s my Coulter’s Matilija Poppy! I planted it as a 1 gallon from a CNPS sale last October, and it has had amazing growth over the past 8 months!

Identifying what plants are actually native to your area can be surprisingly tricky. A lot of info out there is state- (or even less helpfully, region-) specific, but if you live in a large and/or geographically diverse state what's native in one corner may be completely foreign in another. There's also a lot of information out there that's too vague or straight-up incorrect, especially for any plant with numerous common names or multiple sub-species.

Enter the USDA Plants Database! While far from perfect, it is hands-down the best tool I have encountered for verifying what plants are native to an area of the US down to the county level.

I often use the database to cross-reference plant guides and recommendations, such as relating to pollinator-friendly gardening. For instance, you would be really surprised how often plants that are not actually native to your area will slip into "native" seed mixes! On the flip side there are also lots of plants that are native to large regions that are often overlooked because they're not a regional specialty, such as selfheal (Prunella vulgaris), which is native to much of the northern hemisphere.

Many of the more common plants, such as selfheal, have two-page writeups in the Plants Database that have an admittedly agricultural bent to them, but can still be quite helpful for home gardeners too (continuing with the previous example, here's selfheal's). I highly recommend giving them a read, especially if you want to grow your plants from seed or propagate them.

Unfortunately the database is not fully populated (some entries are more info-rich than others), and things can get a little confusing when all you have is the common or even scientific name for a plant that has many subspecies (or even worse, if the scientific name has changed at some point), but that's more an issue with taxonomy than the database. If in doubt, checking the images tab can be quite helpful in verifying you have the correct plant entry. Still, I have yet to find any source as comprehensive and accurate as this one.

I got these as bare-root saplings a couple years old, and planted them last year. One actually bloomed and produced some berries the same year I planted it! These things sure are prolific. This year, they're all already blooming.

I tried a couple things with the handful of berries from last year, i.e. just eating them raw, making juice, jam, etc. Raw was (somewhat predictably) not very good, but the juice and jelly were great. Also, while I don't at all mind supplementing the diets of local fauna, it was nice that the birds actually left us some! Unlike my elderberries, which they picked clean so fast we didn't get a single one lol.

Pic from a fen restoration I help with. Prettiest one I've seen.

I'm in southeast Michigan, hardiness zone 6b, and I'd like to add a small or mid size evergreen to my yard for some winter interest, any suggestions?

I also have a large yew I'd like to replace with something comparable to maintain a little porch privacy, I'm thinking either a smoke bush or witch hazel, any others I should consider?

I own this 1 ft wide, 30 ft long strip between my driveway and the neighbor's property. It's steeply angled the whole length due to my pavement being higher than the neighbor's yard. Grass turf would be difficult and awkward to trim in this location. I would prefer to plant something native and perennial that won't invade the neighbor's lawn. Ideas so far is dwarf ornamental grasses (likely not native), sun tolerant hostas (not native), maybe coneflower. Any ideas?? Midwest US Zone 5, dryish soil and sunny with some late afternoon shade.

No hurricanes this year means that my swamp sunflowers didn't get knocked over! Also something about the lighting made this bee look silver even though it's really metallic green. Florida, Zone 9b

I post a lot of edible plants native to (roughly) the Northeast U.S. on my Pixelfed account.

Most of my experience is in temperate climates in Northern/Western Europe (for specific plant species info), but I'm happy to help answer management questions in general.

I'm also happy to help put together resources for the community if there's any plans for that.