Showtime 5.0 in the Micro-Prairie
Its Showtime in the micro-prairie! For the fifth year the Butterfly Boulevard is an exuberance of color — all without watering, fertilizing or using toxic weed or bug sprays! It is nature unchained — in an urban lot with sidewalks kind of way. Diversity is the key to exuberance which I will talk about later. But first, a tour of the micro-prairie.
In the top photo, phlox, yellow coneflowers, milkweed and wild rye grass flourish in the Butterfly Boulevard. Even though this area was covered by five feet of snow all winter, then three inches of soggy leaves in spring and was dug up by the cable guy a month ago and now is in drought mode, it is going strong. We all need to be that resilient!
This is another photo of the Butterfly Boulevard with flowers as well as little bluestem and side-oats grama (you can’t see it but it is there) grasses. It is hard to tell all the yellow flowers apart but there are black-eyed susans and probably coreopsis. Milkweed and beebalm are also abundant.
Here is a new patch of exuberance on the north side of the house. Last fall I spent hours digging out lily of the valley, vinca and European bellflower roots from this area. Then I broadcast a woodland seed mix over it in the fall. This spring, I raked excess stems out of the boulevard and spread them in this area. The stems had seeds that were stratified by being on the plant all winter and those seeds sprouted as well. So now I have a colorful new addition to the micro-prairie where before there was boring and invasive ground cover.
This is a close up picture of the new planting. When all these blooms first opened up the coneflower looked just like a purple black-eyed susan. But now the cone in the coneflower is bigger and it has more petals so it is easy to distinguish it thus dispelling the thought that I had a rare purple black-eyed susan.
Between the foliage in the previous two photos and the north wall of the house is a patch of ferns that has been there since I moved in 35 years ago. There are also three or four New Jersey tea bushes next to the ferns. You might think that all this extra vegetation might stress the ferns but not so. The ferns benefit from the additional shade and the lack of competition from the invasive ground covers that were there. More diversity is more better! (My apologies those of you who speak the language properly).
The shade garden under the linden tree continues to expand. The wild ginger is filling in bare spots and the transplanted ferns are adapting to a new home. You can see dried up ferns at the bottom of the picture. These plants are near the sidewalk and get more sun in the afternoon which causes them to shrivel up. The ferns in the deeper shade still look good.
OK. Not everything is colorful exuberance in the Micro-Prairie. This is a picture of the boulevard I planted last fall. It is an example of how things don’t always go as planned. I spent a month digging European bellflower roots from the soil and then planted two types of seed after the first snow. The plan was for natives to come up and be great like the other boulevard. That didn’t happen. First, the good news — I don’t see any European bellflower anymore so that is a big win. The bad news is that I see mostly common weeds in the planting. Now the native plant suppliers say that if you keep the area mowed the natives will establish roots and show up next year. I have whacked the foliage down several times with my hedge trimmer (my mower would cut it too short) and I pulled a large stand of weeds in early spring. So are any natives showing up?
Maybe. Here is s clump of columbine in the planting but it could be left over from a previous planting and not from the seed. I see other leaves in the mix that look like some form of rudbeckia but I will have to wait until next year to know for sure. If no natives show up next year then it is time for cardboard, mulch and a big tray of plants.
When I do these showtime posts I not only want to have colorful photos but I also to want to impart knowledge that I have gained getting to this point. So showing you photos of a struggling micro-prairie is part of that. If you plant natives, you may not get a nice stand of natives right out of the gate. But you can avoid my mistakes. Digging out the bellflower wasn’t a mistake because bellflower is very invasive and the roots give off a substance that inhibits other plants from growing. It needed to go but all the digging brought up other weed seeds that then grew this spring. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to put down cardboard and mulch after the digging and the ground froze and spread the seed over that. The seed would have a chance to sprout in the spring before the weeds forced their way through the cardboard (the cardboard would deteriorate quickly in the spring).
Finally, I have mentioned diversity quite a bit as being important to getting a nice stand of native plants and that is correct. But, density may be important as well. We have been taught to pull everything around plants that we want to grow. The idea being that nearby plants use moisture and nutrients that you want to go to the selected plant. However, in natural settings symbiosis between plants growing close together may be more important. One plant may provide shade for nearby plants or it may pull nutrients out of the soil that nearby plants can use. Some plants may also provide habitat for pollinators or beneficial insects that will benefit its neighbors. Density of plants like we see in the micro-prairie therefore seems to benefit the entire ecosystem. The rose bush that bloomed beautifully this year is thriving even though it is crowded by rye grass and beebalm. So, if trying to keep up a monoculture lawn is grinding you down, this is your justification to try a new approach using diversity and density.
Enjoy the rest of the summer and keep doing what you can to build a strong community.
