Native Botany and Horticulture - Gardening for Gigabrains

[ThinkThankThunk]

Rearing native plants has become a nice hobby for me so I thought I'd share it. It's a unique mix of foraging and gardening focusing on going out, identifying local flora, then propagating it. Learning how to germinate and utilize wild plants that have gone totally unnoticed save by often-ignored quacks and hermits is a fun though relatively poorly documented practice. If successful though you'll be rewarded with an inconspicuous and extremely hardy crop of rare flavors and looks all while doing some good for nature.

Plants vary wildly by region so there's not really any great singular resources. Your regional wildlife extension and nearby universities will probably have some kind of catalog online like these, but there's really no better way to learn more than to just wander around until you find something tasty or cool looking and find it in a guide at a local library. Report back with your inevitable cavalcade of clownish fuck ups.

My current big project is growing a new mixed hedge row of wolf willow, saskatoons, and clematis around the property. Seems like as good a place as any to stick something, and I'd like to dissuade the deer from coming in the yard without scaring off the kids around here who like to come and play on it. Fences scary, pretty flowers not.

 

[CHARizard]

My FiL discovered a few years ago that tree services will just give away their excess wood chips. So he constantly has trucks dumping chips on his driveway that then sit there for months. I am talking tons of chips, like dump truck sized loads.

Anyways my question is, wouldnt these need to sit for a while to compost up and degrade to get set for gardening? Wouldnt they be ocvered in whatever the trees themselves were sprayed with?

 

[ThinkThankThunk]

Anyways my question is, wouldn't these need to sit for a while to compost up and degrade to get set for gardening? Wouldn't they be covered in whatever the trees themselves were sprayed with?

It depends on what you want to do with them. As a mulch layer they should be good to go, but if you want completely clean mulch then it'll still have traces of whatever -cides were used on them. Herbicides and pesticides are normally applied as specifically as possible, so it's entirely possible that even with residue in them they won't harm anything. The best way to tell what could be in them is to look at what gets used in your area and seeing what the major problems are and inferring what treatments would remain in the wood.

As an example, there's a lot of American elm and chokecherries used here, and their biggest threats are Dutch elm disease, elm scale and black knot respectively. DED is a virus so it's combated through vaccinations that won't survive without a host virus, plus it hasn't invaded here yet. Elm scale is a product of scale insects that's dealt with via neem oil product being injected into the tree, so it's a natural compound that breaks down fast. Black knot though is a fungus that infiltrates the outer layer of the bark of Prunus plants, so any material needs to be either burned or requires hard chemical sprays. All in all it's probably clean enough to use a bit in a garden, but I wouldn't use a lot or if I had cherries or other plum genus plants around. You could try asking what's in it, but most landscaping services don't keep track of what they prune and mulch.

If you have the space large poplars like cottonwoods and balsams grow fast; 2 or 3 feet a year and make fantastic mulch. It takes some time to set up but for anyone who's serious about keeping their yards and gardens clean it's indespensible for having organic mulch available year round without worrying about what could be in it.

 

[Justa Grata Honoria]

saline agriculture for the poor. Get some shitty land on the cheap there are 3400 species that tolerate salt or marine water . Bam your own refuge filled with food that nobody uses

 

[mold]

can we use this thread to talk about strategies for combating invasives

I am in the middle of my yearly comfrey chop

 

[Justa Grata Honoria]

can we use this thread to talk about strategies for combating invasives

I am in the middle of my yearly comfrey chop

Comfrey is a concentrator and useful medicinal plant. You can use it for fertilizing your crops no joke.

 

[mold]

Comfrey is a concentrator and useful medicinal plant. You can use it for fertilizing your crops no joke.

yes and the little beesieweesies love its flowers

but those big beautiful bioaccumulator leaves also get powdery mildew so around this time of year it's gotta go

it will always come back

 

[Justa Grata Honoria]

yes and the little beesieweesies love its flowers

but those big beautiful bioaccumulator leaves also get powdery mildew so around this time of year it's gotta go

it will always come back

Oh you can bury that in several foot of ground and it will come back . Did you got the sterile ones or the ones that seed?

 

[ThinkThankThunk]

can we use this thread to talk about strategies for combating invasives

I am in the middle of my yearly comfrey chop

Absolutely! I don't have a lot of space where I'm at now so a lot of what I grow I release back into the naturalized and wild spaces nearby after removing the invasive shit I find there. It's not quite as individualistic as "self-sufficiency" suggests so I omitted it from the OP, but homegrown conservation efforts and invasive management is the exact kind of stuff I had in mind since it doesn't quite fit the existing gardening threads. Anyone with more experience in the field is welcome to chime in.

I've been dealing with the Canada thistle around town and replacing it with what I can. Vetch and milkweed seem to be aggressive enough to outpace and suffocate the plants I miss, but this my first year really putting a lot of work into not just pulling but actively replacing weedy growths so I have no idea if it'll work long term.

 

[mold]

Oh you can bury that in several foot of ground and it will come back . Did you got the sterile ones or the ones that seed?

it's invasive it just came along

invasive management is the exact kind of stuff I had in mind since it doesn't quite fit the existing gardening threads.

my biggest issues are comfrey and blackberries, next down is morning glory, nipplewort and *fucking walnut*

no english ivy at least

 

[MS-09 DOM]

Check out your local universities, they may have a botany portal for all the native plants in your area. Learning plant morphology is pretty easy, it's just math for general families (number of leaves, shape of steam, number of stamens etc etc), and helps differentiate in the field.

To quote above, your local tree surgeons / arborists love when you ask for a dump of chips, it saves us some cash at the dump (yes all our wood chips end up at the dump)

And if you can handle it go hiking with some hippies / mushroom people. Learning the lay of lands and where plants go gangbusters helps you take that knowledge and figure out how to guerilla garden your local area. I will forever throw dead nettle at rose bushes to hopefully kill them slowly

A YouTuber who helped me understand plants was Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't. Here's a clip on families:

 

[NoReturn]

Shout out to Native Habitat Project on YouTube. He's a cool dude.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nn9-9CjuTOc

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/btlJJsdRS28

In the first video he mentions where to find native wildflowers. Believe it or not, I once found some plants I was searching for in a gravel parking lot. No luck in the actual park nearby, but the parking lot itself had the flowers I wanted. No idea what the backstory must have been there.

 

[Just Hamsters]

no english ivy at least

Do you mean Glechoma hederacea? I call it ground ivy and I love that stuff haha.

I started a pot of it from my relative's yard recently since it can come inside in winter but tolerates direct sun in the summer on my patio. That shit lives up to the mint-gang aggression lol.

I like making tea from it and throwing it in salads. Supposed to be high in potassium and vitamin C after all.

 

[mold]

Do you mean Glechoma hederacea?

no, Hedera helix

​

 

[lumberjackcowboy1822]

I just want to say that Bradford pear can die and burn in tree hell

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

Tumbleweeds? Burr clover? Scotch Thistle?

The old world isn't sending their best.

 

[IdiotPlusPlus]

Check out your local universities, they may have a botany portal for all the native plants in your area.

I was thinking of doing a cross-over with the fermenters thread and planting native berry/fruit plants to make cider/wine/mead with, when I found our State Govt has the Dept of Environment providing resources including grants for local groups, a list of groups dedicated to native flora in their area, and City Councils that provide advice on local Flora for their area.

Turns out my local Council will even send out a 'consultant' to advise on what plants would be best placed where in your garden 'based on what you want to achieve with native flora'(only available Monday afternoons and Thursday mornings of course xD )

So State Enviro departments are also a good idea to check out to see what they can point you towards, I guess local mileage may vary tho lol

 

[Emo Supremo]

i wish there was a field guide to gathering seeds complete with pictures because i have a habit of snipping seed heads too early. unless you're used to working with plants you don't naturally intuit that the dead brown stems hold anything useful.

(quick tangent but putting aside some species' invasiveness risk because duh, anyone who spends money on ultra normie home & gardens tier species like burning bush, hostas, day lilies, boxwood, crape myrtles, and leyland cypresses instead of learning how to stick a cutting in the ground or gather seed heads deserves a solid beating. it's much cheaper and it's not like you're going to struggle finding a healthy parent plant. i'm probably never going to stumble across a nursery who sells carolina silverbell saplings but i can definitely go to the local walmart in april and get half an orchard of bradford pears.)

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

Apart from being non native, what's bad about crape myrtles? They're very pretty. I would need to see a picture of a landscape beset with them to believe they're invasive.

 

[Emo Supremo]

Apart from being non native, what's bad about crape myrtles? They're very pretty. I would need to see a picture of a landscape beset with them to believe they're invasive.

they're not noxious invaders or anything, it's just my personal grievances about how overused they are as a landscaping tree where i live. i'm not kidding when i say you can't go fifteen feet in a residential area without seeing at least one crape myrtle, so they've lost all their charm to me, and to be honest i don't know how more people aren't burnt out on them too. but at least bees like their flowers so they have a little practical value instead of only existing as a sterile, bland ass space filler.