Category Archives: native plants

What difference a week makes

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Things are popping up and growing like mad in my little garden. You can almost hear the green shoots popping out of the soil.

I took these photos on May 3rd.

I wish I could share how delicious the crabapple blossoms smell! The lily of the valley are just poking up and the currant bushes look very promising.

This is a week later.

And now the cherry and crabapple tree blossoms are gone. The clematis is getting ready to burst, which means the hydrangea and elderberry bushes aren’t far behind. I love looking out of my kitchen window and seeing green

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Spring Cleaning In the Garden

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We’ve been out enjoying the warmer weather these days. Last weekend we went to buy some new pine chips for the chicken run. Their run was mostly dirt, which might not bother the hens at all, but definitely was ugly and also caused dirty eggs.brooklynfeed-8

What is usually a no-brainer errand turned into a bit more of a challenge. Both Lowe’s and Home Depot seemed well-stocked with wood chips. But on closer inspection, they had dyes embedded in them. All of them! And not only were they colored, but the dyes were guaranteed to last something like a year. This was definitely something that I thought would be an environmental and chicken health nightmare. I finally found undyed chips at Home Depot by a company called Great Gardens that is a part of the Long Island Compost project. I had never heard of them, but if you take a peek at their link, you can see some of the great work they are doing. I was much happier buying organic chips for my chickens to run around in, so it was a win-win.brooklynfeed-6 brooklynfeed-9

The girls were happy because they got to run around the garden wreaking havoc.

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And there were a few plants starting to poke out of the ground..

It was a good day in the garden. I emptied out my compost bin and enriched the soil in my pots and various beds.brooklynfeed-13

 

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Garlic Mustard

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During my morel hunting last Saturday, I noticed other wild edibles in the woods. There was winter cress, garlic chives (as a kid, we called this onion grass), watercress, and two highly invasive plants – garlic mustard and Japanese knotweed.

Being the somewhat nature-deprived city gal that I am, I took the opportunity of gathering some wild edibles while I was in the woods. I gathered all of the above except the Japanese knotweed. Lindsay took ownership of the garlic chives, and delighted in pulling them up to get the bulbs. We made scrambled eggs with chives that were delicious. The eggs, of course, were from our backyard chickens.

The garlic mustard looked hopelessly wilted by the time I got home, so I put it in a big bowl of cold water hoping to revive it. It seems as though nothing can kill garlic mustard, and it perked up in no time. I made a delicious pesto sauce, using 50% basil leaves and 50% garlic mustard leaves and buds. Now is the time to pick garlic mustard to eat, because after the flowers bloom, the plant becomes too bitter.


In searching online for garlic mustard recipes, I learned more about the plant itself. It is a highly invasive plant that European settlers brought to plant in their kitchen gardens. It is a prolific producer of seeds and will blanket an area in a very short time, choking out all other native plants, including jack-in-the-pulpit, solomon-seal MOREL MUSHROOMS, and others. Wild animals don’t like to eat it, so it grows completely unchecked. And if that weren’t bad enough, the roots send out a chemical compound that makes the soil inhospitable to other plants. A very primitive form of chemical warfare.

There are many groups that host garlic mustard pulls. The amount of bags filled with the weed is astonishing. Unlike other weeds, you can’t pull this one up and just leave it on the ground. The flowers will have enough energy to produce seeds even after the plant has been uprooted. You have to pull it up by it’s roots and bag it.

Here’s a video that talks about the problems with garlic mustard. It helps you identify it and learn how to get rid of it. There’s even an annual Garlic Mustard Challenge, in which you help them log how many bags of garlic mustard have been pulled. Take a peek here.

Garlic Mustard Identification and Control from Barbara Lucas on Vimeo.

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Spring Has Sprung

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Happy first day of spring everyone! We’ve got freezing rain as a way of keeping it real. Here’s a link to some great gardening events around NYC. A couple took place this past weekend, but most of them are still to come.

I’m itching to start some seeds that my mother-in-law gave me this weekend. She took a seed collecting class at Project Native (amazing native plant nursery in the Berkshires) and collected loads of native species. Many of the plants are specific to that area, so do well in moist, rich soil. There were a that I thought might do well in my poor, dry, neutral to alkaline soil.

I chose little blue stem grass (which favors poor, dry soil – wahoo!),
foxglove beard tongue,
ironweed,
and steeple bush.

I also have some veggie seeds coming my way from Territorial Seed Co., so I should have some fun starting all these guys.

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When Plants Attack

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This is an interesting video discussing the importance of native plants and the problem with exotic plants becoming invasive. It was made by Texas Parks and Wildlife, so while a lot of the plants are specific to that area, the overall information translates to any area.

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How to make acorn flour

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When you are interested in foraging, you really have to pay attention to the seasons. If you read about ramps in the winter, you are going to have to wait until spring to find them. Shopping at grocery stores seems to have made us forget that certain things grow at certain times of year. At least locally, that is. I had read about making acorn flour a while ago, but it wasn’t acorn season. I forgot all about it until I saw Stephanie mention it in her blog. I was going up to the Berkshires for the weekend and it was the right time of year for acorns.

We went on a hike and I brought a backpack along to gather nuts. I had no idea how many I would need, so I summoned my inner squirrel and kept gathering and filling my bag. When we got home, I weighed the nuts I had found and had 8lbs. After pulling off the tops and discarding the ones that had worm holes in them I had 6lbs. I read in a couple of places that you place the acorns in water and the ones that float aren’t viable. I tried that and almost all of mine floated. I decided to check inside and see what they looked like. Some were bad, but most were good, so I decided to skip that theory.

Now comes the gross part…grubs! Many of the acorns had grubs. The fat, white, wiggly things totally grossed me out, so I decided to bake the acorns at 170 degrees F to kill them. A dead grub is still gross, but a wiggling one is much worse.

After discarding the acorns that were discolored or had grubs in them I think I was down to about 2-3 lbs. Acorns are full of tannins, so you have to soak them for several days to remove the bitterness. I tried soaking them when they were chopped, but thought that the water wasn’t getting to the inside of the acorn meat. I ran them through a meat grinder to chop them smaller.

Directions for how to make acorn flour:

  • Gather a ridiculous amount of acorns
  • Discard any that have obvious problems (squirrel bites or worm holes)
  • Bake acorns at 170F for 1 hour to kill grubs
  • Shell acorns tossing out any that are discolored or have grubs. It is pretty obvious which ones are good and which ones aren’t
  • Grind acorns in a food processor, or a meat grinder
  • Wrap in several layers of cheesecloth and soak in water. You will need to do this for several days, until the meat isn’t bitter.
  • Lay the acorn flour on a pan and either dry in the sun, or in the oven on the lowest setting. Make sure it’s completely dry or it will mold.

I will post some recipes within the next few days.

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Plano man converts yard to wild prairie of native plants | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Home and Gardening | Dallas Morning News

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Plano man converts yard to wild prairie of native plants | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Home and Gardening | Dallas Morning News.

This article is about a Texas man who, over two years, turns his yard from the typical St. Augustine grass lawn, to a wildlife oasis using native plants. He chronicles the transformation on his blog, which you can read here. One thing I like about the article is how the neighbors came to appreciate his work, even though initially they worried it “didn’t fit with the neighborhood.”

I can’t stress enough how important it is to plant species native to your area. They are particularly adapted to your climate, which means they don’t need supplemental watering or fertilizing. But even more importantly is how crucial they are to the survival of wildlife. Whenever we build new buildings, we lose more native plants. In their place, we usually plant non-native plants and grassy lawns. The wildlife that used to live there now has nothing to eat, because insects and other critters are often only able to eat one type of plant. Who cares about a bunch of bugs you say? Well the birds do. If the creepy crawlies die out, the birds don’t have anything to eat and they move on. Or they die out too.

People like Michael McDowell in the article above and many others are realizing this and planting native species, which builds islands of native habitats, and can have a great impact on helping wildlife.

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NYC Wildflower Week

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May 1-9th is wildflower week in NYC. Click here to see over 45 events taking place in all 5 boroughs. There will be botanical walks, lectures, planting natives, cooking natives (that sounds funny), etc. It looks like a fun and interesting week, which ends with Mother’s day. For the past 3-4 years we’ve gone to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on Mother’s Day. One of my favorite gardens there is the native garden. It’s kind of hidden, which makes it much less crowded. It’s a quiet, hidden spot within the garden. I recommend it over some of the showier gardens.

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