My pawpaws saplings I planted last fall are still alive!

They have started budding leaves. I know I'm a few years away from fruit production but I am curious if anyone has found good ways to attract pollinators outside of rotting meat. Not sure the city would be very excited about that prospect.

I am considering making a native carion flower plant garden near the trees to make area more attractive to pollinators prior to the pawpaws flowering. Was wondering it anyone else had tried that idea. I've found 3 somewhat promising options in my area of Ohio.

These seem to be an especially symbiotic options https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillium_sessile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillium_erectum

And this could be grown if you have a bog garden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symplocarpus_foetidus

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20534437

Thorn forest once blanketed the Rio Grande Valley. Restoring even a little of it could help the region cope with the impacts of climate change

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 ov

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

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 t

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.