Most weeds are fast-growing annuals; you combat them by crowding them out by having vigorous, healthy plants in your garden. This is where green mulch comes in.
Category: Newsletters and Member Articles
Winter Sowing
Winter sowing is the “natural” alternative to scarification and stratification. If you have seeds that call for either or both, winter sowing is a great alternative, particularly if you do not have the space or money to have a rack of plant grow lights set up in your home or a temperature and moisture-controlled greenhouse. When we scarify seed coats, we mimic the natural weakening of the seed coat that happens out in nature due to the freeze-thaw cycle of winter. Stratification mimics the chill days of winter. So, why not let the real winter do the work? If you are working with native seeds from the southeast, they already have built into their DNA the naturally cool, warm, cold, freezing, warm fluctuations of the southeast winter weather. Do not worry that they will sprout; then a freeze will kill them. These are NOT non-native tropical plants fooled by Mother…
Pioneer Species: Part 1 – Wildflowers
1/3/22 “Pioneer Species,” now doesn’t that sound very American? Don’t you picture flowers hitching a ride in a covered wagon going over the Oregon Trail? No? They don’t have thumbs! Sorry for the 6th-grade humor, but that visual was how the term struck me many, many, many years ago when I first heard it in my college ecology class. Now, a zillion years later, I come back across it reading a book, Garden Revolution (highly recommended) by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher in their discussion of cardinal flowers. Larry Weaner’s Garden Revolution and How Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change – Garden Collage Magazine The thing about pioneer species is that they go through their life cycle quickly, a few years, then die. If you don’t know that about a plant, you can’t see why it failed; you think that either you killed it or that it can’t…