Native Habitat Landscaping Project

 Nope, this is not about birds or butterflies. This blog has migrated to Native Front Yard .

I cut these slices of logs with the intention of cutting a hollow in the middle, making a ring to go around my fragile saplings. However, this oakwood is freaking hard. Even with a baby chainsaw, it was taking a lot of time and effort just to slice. Then I remembered that several of my logs are hollow. I cut a few slices much more easily of those. After I got the rings in place, though, I realized that the hollowness might be due to a disease that I am now passing on to my American plums and my button bush. I really hope not. I hope it was oak specific.

When I sprayed a grass selective herbicide Clethodim earlier, I missed a few spots. I also purposely avoided the area that was inside the dog fence at the time. I am going to go back and tidy up the missed spots when I spray the areas that had been obscured by logs and branches. But I think I will leave this patch of turf grass for Sophie. She really does like nice soft grass to roll around in. I just mowed it and it took less than 5 minutes. There won't be any spraying for at least the next 4 days, since we are still having thunderstorms. It needs to be reasonably dry without a chance of rain within the next hour or two after spraying.

I went outside to do a little mowing and weed eating instead of moving my daily 5 logs. But I got aesthetically distracted and wound up moving many more than 5 logs. And not doing either of the other things. Why do logs look so much better standing up than lying down? Anyway, I straightened up the Little Free Library area, giving it more structure. The plan is to put vining or screening plants alongside the tall stump to help screen this area from the house. Some LFL patrons have reported feeling like they are being watched from the host's house and I don't want that. People should take all the time they want choosing a book. People should be free to sit down and read awhile. Two of the logs are about right for sitting on. They lean, though, so I've placed them to lean together. I may want to more firmly attach them, but so far they don't even wiggle.

I think of these as hedge skeletons. When I started pulling the Asian plants out of the yard, I wasn't able to remove the hedges. At the time I didn't have any saws equal to the task. So I pruned them down as far as I could with the yard tools I had. And that left skeletons. I rather like them. They're creepy. A few of them continue to sprout so I have to keep pruning the new leaves off. But most of them are truly dead now.

The yard grows gradually tidier as I continue moving five logs per day. I thought this log was crooked enough to not roll down the grade along the side of the house. I was wrong. Fortunately there is enough debris that I could wedge something under it. Rainwater pouring off my roof likes to dig gouges in the ground. Yet another job for logs.

It's common for people to confuse invasive with aggressive. It makes sense: if something is assaulting your landscaping and just taking it right over, It feels like an invasion. But an invasive plant is a one that's from an entirely different ecosystem. An aggressive plant is one that takes over and outcompetes its neighbors. This is spotted spurge. It's entirely native, but it's also wildly aggressive, and I want to be able to grow other things. So I'll be putting this into the weed classification and removing it from the landscaping.

I have a hard time telling the difference between clover and oxalis. This is probably oxalis. Luckily I don't need to tell the difference because neither one of them belong in my project. It's kind of a popular thing these days to replace lawns with clover fields to nourish pollinators. The problem with that is that the only class of pollinators who enjoy clover fields are European honey bees. Our native species don't benefit. If you do YouTube or TikTok, it's not hard to find videos of people who replaced their yards with clover and are now ready to replace them again with something native. So we'll just skip that step then. I did consider it, before I found out.

I'm not good at tree identification yet, so this is how I find out that there must be an elm tree around here. I used an app to identify this potential weed. This is winged elm. I don't want it in my flower bed obviously.

Here's the dog fennel that I was talking about. It looks like a fun plant. It's very bright and soft and feathery. But it grows like wildfire. And when it gets older it turns darker and the stem becomes woody and difficult to cut. The roots get deeper and it becomes difficult to pull as well. Also, it's not edible. Best to pull these anytime I see them.

  Why "bluespiderwort" in the web address? I really like spiderwort and around here, it's all over the place in the springtime. For some reason these in the picture look more purple than blue, but they really were blue. When I signed up for Blogger, "spiderwort" was taken already.

If you ask somebody what a weed is, you may get a pretty emotional answer. A lot of us think of weeds as noxious killers that take our food away from us. A pestilence. At its essence, weed just means a plant that is growing where it's not wanted. In my project, Asian and European plants are weeds. I may later expand the category to native plants that grow too much or too fast, keeping the other plants from thriving. What amuses me right now is that tree saplings are weeds for the moment. I'm pulling up a ridiculous number of tree saplings. I'm not very good at tree identification, so I don't know who these are. But I suspect they are children of the oak. I also found a little dog fennel today, which pisses me right off. Dog fennel is also not native. And it grows at a crazy rate. If you don't pull it when it's small and tender, it turns woody and really difficult to get rid of. I found four of these where the hedges had been. I was too mad to remember to get a p

My roommates and I have had a rough time working out the yard chores because obviously they don't want to mess up my project. And I'm not always great at explaining what needs to be done where. The main purpose of the log border is to define an area that conforms to all the expectations of ordinary lawn care. It makes a space between my native project and the neighbors' lawns. But it also makes very clear what needs to be done where. I can ask my roommates to maintain the area outside the border. Because that's where the standard rules apply.

Clethodim is a grass selective herbicide I'm using to eradicate the turf grass in the project. When I mowed this whole section, I applied Clethodim everywhere except in the dog fence area. Now I've moved the fence to mow more and complete the application. While it will take several weeks for the sprayed grass to completely die, you can see it's definitely not growing. Already my Virginia buttons are starting to creep into the dying grass. This is a very good thing. The dirt pile in the foreground has nothing to do with the spraying. That's where one of my mother's planters broke and I just left the dirt there.

.  These babies are American plum trees. You need two in order to get fruit. I planted these last fall. The second one was run over by a lawn mower but came back beautifully this spring.

Let's talk a minute about wild strawberries. These are not wild strawberries. When I was a kid, by the time grown-ups got around to telling me that these are poisonous, I knew that wasn't true. My friends and cousins and I had been eating these for years. They have virtually no flavor. But if you put a bunch of sugar and milk on them, they're fine. We all thought these were wild strawberries. I was in my 50s when I learned that actual wild strawberries do have flavor. They have more flavor than store-bought strawberries do. Wild strawberries are native to the US. These things in the picture are mock strawberries. And they are not native. I may try to cultivate wild strawberries in this project.