Tag Archives: gardening

May 2020 in Review

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You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.

 

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!

Most hopeful story:

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.

native plant and pollinator gardening in Pennsylvania

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This post has a ton of information on gardening with native plants and gardening for pollinators in Pennsylvania – sources of plants and seeds, recommended species and combinations of species for various conditions, and links to a variety of government and non-profit organizations that can provide even more information.

December 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:

Most hopeful story:

  • Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

2019 garden retrospective

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A retrospective on my 2019 garden may not be of great interest to anyone but me, but here it is for my future reference.

My gardening philosophy is basically to try to design a diverse ecosystem that can take care of itself with just a little nudging from me. Every plant should be useful to me in some way, useful to wildlife in some way (which generally means natives), or preferably both. Aesthetics come last, but I find that a diverse array of useful plants arranged in a gently guided ecosystem tends to be interesting at a minimum, and beautiful at best. Sterile, ornamental plants are pretty boring to me. I’ve been influenced by the permaculture and native plant movements, among other things. Anyway, here we go…

what did well this year:

  • My 4-year-old Asian pear tree grew a pretty impressive crop of fruit. The final score? Squirrels – 20 or so, humans – 0. But nonetheless, the tree seems to be doing well. My 3-year-old Asian persimmon tree grew its first persimmon. The final score? Squirrels – 1, humans 0.
  • Spring color – violets, dandelions, chives. These are all common plants that a lot of my neighbors probably consider weeds. But they add up to some nice color right when you need it in the spring. I also have a nice carpet of green and gold, a nursery-grown cultivar of a native species listed as threatened in Pennsylvania. All but the green and gold are edible if I am so inclined, and all are tough competitors that can hold their own against the urban weeds.
  • Milkweeds are everywhere. Particularly butterfly milkweed, which has some really cool orange flowers. But also common milkweed, which I don’t plant on purpose but leave alone whenever and wherever it decides to crop up. And the monarchs did indeed make an appearance.
  • Anise hyssop, beebalm, and mountain mint all are doing well without getting completely out of control. These are attracting a ton of pollinators, particularly bumblebees.
monarch butterfly, Black-eyed Susan and butterfly milkweed

too much of a good thing?

  • fennel – When I planted a few fennel plants from the farmer’s market a few years ago, I didn’t really understand that it was a different thing than dill, specifically a perennial that comes back year after year from the root, spreads aggressively by seed, and is hard to dig up. Don’t get me wrong – it’s an attractive plant, looks and smells nice for most of the year, attracts a ton of pollinators and caterpillars, and is edible from root to stem to leaf although I haven’t availed myself of it much. It’s just becoming a thicket that I will need to start limiting next year.
  • lemon balm – This is attractive, out-competes weeds and is nice in tea. It’s tough enough that it is starting to invade a lot of my ground covers and out-compete other desirable plants, however. I may have to start limiting it.
  • Black-eyed Susans – These are in two big clumps and looked absolutely fantastic in mid- to late-summer. They are expanding and aggressively out-competing other plants so I may need to limit them if I don’t want a garden of nothing but Black-eyed Susans. Pollinators love them, but so, surprisingly, do mice. After gorging themselves on Black-eyed Susan seeds, sure enough the mice came in at the first sign of frost to hang out in my nice warm kitchen.
  • garlic (Chinese) chives – These are nice-looking, grassy, edible, beloved of pollinators and also spiders and predatory insects that like to eat pollinators. They are aggressive enough that they are spreading into groundcovers in the front of the garden, and I kind of wish I had planted them in the back.
  • Sunchokes – planted four little raisin-sized tubers in a desperate bid to block a neighbor’s plants from invading. They took a long time to sprout, but just when I had written them off as either DOA or eaten by the squirrels – boom! in the space of a week or two my living fence popped up. They did exactly what they were supposed to do, creating a biological moat that nothing could cross, and attracting lots of bees and butterflies. I didn’t try digging up and eating any but I know that is a possibility. I have seen them get aggressive elsewhere so I will have to keep an eye on them.
caterpillars munching on the fennel thicket – probably black swallowtails although I’m not sure why these two look different
black swallowtail hanging out on the neighbor’s ornamental grass, persimmon leaves in the foreground

desirable species still there but not competing well

  • white clover – Surprisingly, it is there but unobtrusive. This is okay with me, and I don’t plan to add or subtract any, just let it do what it is going to do.
  • chicory – I think it is there, but it wasn’t distinguishable from the dandelions this year and didn’t put up any flower stalks. Perhaps it has a biennial habit and will be back next year. Most people consider this a weed but I think it is cool, and another plant that I don’t get around to eating but take some pleasure in knowing I could.
  • miner’s lettuce – I left this for dead seasons ago but one sad little plant did pop up. It disappeared again shortly due to whatever animal it is that likes to dig at night in that particular part of the garden.
  • wild strawberries and garden strawberries – The problem here is not animals, but friendly, well-intentioned human neighbors who keep pulling what they are certain are “weeds”. Well, they never get all the roots and the strawberries will be back. They are in a losing battle with the Black-eyed Susans however and may need some help even if I can get the neighbors to leave them alone.

what didn’t make it

  • French sorrel – I had a healthy clump of this for several years and it was just nowhere to be found this year. I’m not sure I will miss it.
  • prairie smoke – This was something I was enticed to plant by a nursery catalog. It didn’t survive the digging animals.
  • cucumbers – They are supposed to be easy, but I planted some and they either didn’t sprout or withered and died before I could even be sure they were there. They were hard to distinguish from the pumpkins.

problem species

  • ornamental ground covers and grasses. The neighbors tend to like these, or in some cases neighbors from years or decades gone by liked them. It’s a forever war.
  • general urban weeds – the trick is keeping them under control March-June. If you do this, your desired plants can take over and out-compete them by mid-summer on.
  • mosquitoes – I use bacillus thuringiensis and try to avoid all standing water. It doesn’t matter. By June on they are out there and just vicious. I don’t want to use harsher chemicals so we rely on insect repellant.

notable sitings

  • monarchs, as I mentioned earlier. Other butterflies too, particularly black swallowtails which love the fennel, parsely and celery, and yellow swallowtails which like some of the neighbors bushes. These last two aren’t rare but give no end of pleasure to kids and the young-at-heart.
  • praying mantises, both the native Carolina mantis and the introduced (but still cool) Chinese mantis. The native mantis liked to hang out on my introduced Chinese chives, so go figure. But when the Chinese chives flowered, they attracted a ton of little flies and wasps which were probably easy pickings. The Chinese mantis liked to climb my house. I can’t explain that one, unless it was for the warmth of the bricks.
Carolina mantis hanging out upside down on garlic chives
Chinese mantis climbing my house

the pots

  • Asian yard-long beans – these are prolific, interesting, and delicious.
  • Thai sweet basil and holy basil – these are beautiful, delicious and tough. We cook with them all summer. Leave italian basil alone in the sun for one mid-summer weekend and it is done, but the Thai version can handle the heat no problem and bounce back from a dry spell within reason.

interesting volunteers and self-seeders

  • Virginia creeper – it’s native so I let it go
  • Thai chillis – didn’t plant them but got lots of them, probably from the compost. They are so spicy they grew more than we could ever practically eat.
  • sweet peppers – didn’t plant these but got some, most likely just from last year’s kitchen scraps thrown in the compost. They were good, and there was no sign of cross pollination with the hot peppers.
  • pumpkins – probably because I tossed the previous year’s Halloween pumpkin in the compost. I thinned to just one per half barrel out front, but still they got massive. They flowered but didn’t set any fruit.
  • celery – planted last year because I mistook them for flat-leafed parsley. Self-seeded. The black swallowtails like them.
  • parsley – the curly-leaf kind. Survives the winter and self-seeds. A surprisingly tough competitor in the urban garden.

So that is the gardening year that was. Kind of sad when everything is so brown and lifeless now. But that is how the seasons, and eventually years and decades, go by. I mulched the trees with a summer’s worth of coffee grounds, kitchen scraps and garden trimmings today, and the kids helped me sweep up the leaves and put them in the compost for next year’s garden.

I’ll give some thought to new things I want to try in the 2020 garden sometime soon.

May 2019 in Review

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This wasn’t my most prolific writing (or reading) month ever. In fact, it my have been my worst. But here are a few highlights of what I did get around to.

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.

Most hopeful story:

  • Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.

 

Bringing Nature Home

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I’m reading Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas Tallamy. It’s a pretty interesting book because he is an entomologist and writes from that perspective. His message is pretty straightforward: most plants have compounds that help them defend against insects, and native plants have evolved for millions of years with insects that specialize in eating them. These insects are overwhelmingly the base of the food chain that supports everything else up to birds and larger animals. Replace the natives with ornamentals from elsewhere, often specifically bred to be unattractive to insects, and there are a lot fewer insects. The ecosystem doesn’t function any more, even if the plants kind of look similar to the way the functioning ecosystem used to look. Add to this the long list of devastating pests and diseases that have been imported along with alien ornamental plants, and ornamental plants that have escaped into the wild to further devastate ecosystem function, and the case is pretty strong.

2017 in Review

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Most frightening stories of 2017:

  • January: The U.S. government may be “planning to roll back or dilute many of the provisions of Dodd-Frank, particularly those that protect consumers from toxic financial products and those that impose restrictions on banks”.
  • February: The Doomsday Clock was moved to 2.5 minutes to midnight. The worst it has ever been was 2 minutes to midnight in the early 1980s. In related news, the idea of a U.S.-China war is looking a bit more plausible. The U.S. military may be considering sending ground troops to Syria.
  • March: La Paz, Bolivia, is in a serious crisis caused by loss of its glacier-fed water supply. At the same time we are losing glaciers and snowpack in important food-growing regions, the global groundwater situation is also looking bleak. And for those of us trying to do our little part for water conservation, investing in a residential graywater system can take around 15 years to break even at current costs and water rates.
  • April: The U.S. health care market is screwed up seemingly beyond repair. Why can’t we have nice things? Oh right, because our politicians represent big business, not voters. Also, we have forgotten the difference between a dialog and an argument.
  • May: We hit 410 ppm at Mauna Loa.
  • June: The Onion shared this uncharacteristically unfunny observation: “MYTH: There is nothing mankind can do to prevent climate change. FACT: There is nothing mankind will do to prevent climate change”. It’s not funny because it’s probably true.
  • July: Long term food security in Asia could be a problem.
  • August: The U.S. construction industry has had negligible productivity gains in the past 40 years.
  • September: During the Vietnam War the United States dropped approximately twice as many tons of bombs in Southeast Asia as the Allied forces combined used against both Germany and Japan in World War II. After the Cold War finally ended, Mikhail Gorbachev made some good suggestions for how to achieve a lasting peace. They were ignored. We may be witnessing the decline of the American Empire as a result.
  • October: It is possible that a catastrophic loss of insects is occurring and that it may lead to ecological collapse. Also, there is new evidence that pollution is harming human health and even the global economy more than previously thought.
  • November: I thought about war and peace in November. Well, mostly war. War is frightening. The United States of America appears to be flailing about militarily all over the world guided by no foreign policy. Big wars of the past have sometimes been started by overconfident leaders thinking they could get a quick military victory, only to find themselves bogged down in something much larger and more intractable than they imagined. But enemies are good to have – the Nazis understood that a scared population will believe what you tell them.
  • December: A lot of people would probably agree that the United States government is becoming increasingly dysfunctional, but I don’t think many would question the long-term stability of our form of government itself. Maybe we should start to do that. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been doing a decent job of protecting consumers and reducing the risk of another financial crisis. The person in charge of it now was put there specifically to ruin it. Something similar may be about to happen at the Census Bureau. A U.S. Constitutional Convention is actually a possibility, and might threaten the stability of the nation.

Most hopeful stories of 2017:

Most interesting stories that weren’t particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • January: Apple, Google, and Facebook may destroy the telecom industry.
  • February: The idea of growing human organs inside a pig, or even a viable human-pig hybrid, is getting very close. Tiny brains can also be grown on a microchip. Bringing back extinct animals is also getting very close.
  • March: Bill Gates has proposed a “robot tax”. The basic idea is that if and when automation starts to increase productivity, you could tax the increase in profits and use the money to help any workers displaced by the automation. In related somewhat boring economic news, there are a variety of theories as to why a raise in the minimum wage does not appear to cause unemployment as classical economic theory would predict.
  • April: I finished reading Rainbow’s End, a fantastic Vernor Vinge novel about augmented reality in the near future, among other things.
  • May: The sex robots are here.
  • June: “Fleur de lawn” is a mix of perennial rye, hard fescue, micro clover, yarrow, Achillea millefolium, sweet alyssum, Lobularia maritima, baby blue eyes, Nemophila menziesi, English daisy, Bellis perennis, and O’Connor’s strawberry clover, Trifolium fragiferum.
  • July: Ecologists have some new ideas for measuring resilience of ecosystems. Technologists have some wild ideas to have robots directly counteract the effects of humans on ecosystems. I like ideas – how do I get a (well-compensated) job where I can just sit around and think up ideas?
  • August: Elon Musk has thrown his energy into deep tunneling technology.
  • September: I learned that the OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook named “ten key emerging technology trends”: The Internet of Things, Big data analytics, Artificial intelligence, Neurotechnologies, Nano/microsatellites, Nanomaterials, Additive manufacturing / 3D printing, Advanced energy storage technologies, Synthetic biology, Blockchain
  • October: Even if autonomous trucks are not ready for tricky urban situations, they could be autonomous on the highway with a small number of remote-control drivers guiding a large number of tricks through tricky urban maneuvers, not unlike the way ports or trainyards are run now. There is also new thinking on how to transition highways gradually through a mix of human and computer-controlled vehicles, and eventually to full computer control. New research shows that even a small number of autonomous vehicles mixed in with human drivers will be safer for everyone. While some reports predict autonomous taxis will be available in the 2020s, Google says that number is more like 2017.
  • November: It’s possible that the kind of ideal planned economy envisioned by early Soviet economists (which never came to pass) could be realized with the computing power and algorithms just beginning to be available now.
  • December: Microsoft is trying to one-up Google Scholar, which is good for researchers. More computing firepower is being focused on making sense of all the scientific papers out there.

I’ll keep this on the short side. Here are a few trends I see:

Risk of War. I think I said about a year ago that if we could through the next four years without a world war or nuclear detonation, we will be doing well. Well, one year down and three to go. That’s the bright side. The dark side is that it is time to acknowledge there is a regional war going on in the Middle East. It could escalate, it could go nuclear, and it could result in military confrontation between the United States and Russia. Likewise, the situation in North Korea could turn into a regional conflict, could go nuclear, and could lead to military confrontation between the United States and China.

Decline…and Fall? A question on my mind is whether the United States is a nation in decline, and I think the surprisingly obvious answer is yes. The more important question is whether it is a temporary dip, or the beginning of a decline and fall.

Risk of Financial Crisis. The risk of another serious financial crisis is even scarier that war in some ways, at least a limited, non-nuclear war. Surprisingly, the economic effects can be more severe, more widespread and longer lasting. We are seeing the continued weakening of regulations attempting to limit systemic risk-taking for short-term gain. Without a pickup in long-term productivity growth and with the demographic and ecological headwinds that we face, another crisis equal to or worse than the 2007 one could be the one that we don’t recover from.

Ecological Collapse? The story about vanishing insects was eye-opening to me. Could global ecosystems go into a freefall? Could populous regions of the world face a catastrophic food shortage? It is hard to imagine these things coming to a head in the near term, but the world needs to take these risks seriously since the consequences would be so great.

Technology. With everything else going on, technology just marches forward, of course. One technology I find particularly interesting is new approaches to research that mine and attempt to synthesize large bodies of scientific research.

Can the human species implement good ideas? Solutions exist. I would love to end on a positive note, but at the moment I find myself questioning whether our particular species of hairless ape can implement them.

But – how’s this for ending on a positive note – like I said at the beginning, the one thing about 2017 that definitely didn’t suck was that we didn’t get blown up!

2017 garden retrospective

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Now that there is snow on the ground and any possibility of actual gardening has ground to a halt, I find myself thinking about the growing season that just passed and the next one coming up. This wasn’t a great gardening year for me. A brand new human being sprouted in my household in January and ended up requiring a lot of care and maintenance throughout the growing season, along with the care and feeding of a four-year-old seedling we already had. The actual garden got mostly neglected. Weeds took over around mid-summer and I didn’t put the effort into beating them back that I would like to.

Still, the two trees and various perennials I planted in 2016 just chugged along all season even under and among the weeds. Their roots should be growing and strengthening, the seed bank will gradually shift toward “weeds” I like, and I think there is plenty of hope that the garden I originally envisioned will gradually start to take shape in the next few years. It helps that what I envision is only semi-tame to begin with.

What went well:

  • The Asian pear tree grew like crazy in its second season, and is now about as tall as it was advertised to be. Early in the season, it was swaying alarmingly in high winds, but the bottom seemed stationary so I didn’t stake it. Later in the season, it seemed to strengthen and stiffen, and is now doing well.
  • The Asian persimmon grew a little bit in its first year. Any growth was welcome after my first attempt with an Asian persimmon was dead on arrival. We will see how it does next year.
  • Other perennials did just fine in their second year, including lemon balm and butterfly milkweed. The yarrow the previous owners had, which I moved, continues to do well. My chives and garlic chives both did well and flowered. Violets and green and gold both started to fill in nicely as ground covers. The previous owner’s black-eyed Susans are doing well and even getting a bit aggressive. They have a bunch of bee balm that is doing well, which is good because I think I destroyed all the bee balm I planted myself when trying to pull out some aggressive daisies. It’s not that I hate daisies, but they don’t have much redeeming ecological value and one small clump is enough for me. A couple of the previous owners’ purple coneflowers are still hanging on too.
  • My greatest triumph of the year was getting wild strawberries sprouted and established.
  • My plan to attract black swallowtails with parsley, dill and fennel was a qualified success. Something ate the dill early on, but the parsley survived all year, and the fennel grew like crazy (I didn’t know fennel was such a large perennial, I plan to keep it but may move it elsewhere.)
  • Thai basil and Thai sweet basil did awesome in our big tubs as usual.
  • Maypop – Planted a couple vines as a long-term substitute for clematis and they took off. Will see if I end up regretting this some day.
  • I’m almost embarrassed to say my dandelions and chicory are doing well, but hey, I have had a soft spot for these “weeds” ever since I was a kid and they are always welcome in my garden.
  • I had a pitcher plant and Venus fly trap that were very happy for awhile growing in Sphagnum moss under my air conditioning condensate line. The Venus fly trap petered out sometime in the fall, but I brought the pitcher plant in for the winter and it seems to be bumping along.

What didn’t go well:

  • No luck even sprouting anise hyssop or mountain mint. I have never read anywhere that these seeds are hard to sprout.
  • I made a half-hearted attempt at miner’s lettuce again. A couple anemic seedlings just petered out as soon as it got hot.
  • Surprisingly, no luck with sunflowers, because squirrels just ate them right away.
  • I tried cilantro in window boxes, but it just bolted right away. The flowers were semi-interesting for a few weeks and attracted interesting little pollinators, but then they just died and looked terrible the rest of the year.
  • No luck sprouting Thai chilis.
  • No luck sprouting parsley, but of course it is easy and cheap to buy at almost any farmers market or hardware store.
  • Surprisingly, my white clover petered out in the hot summer and dry fall, which is one thing that allowed so many other weeds to come in. The roots are probably doing fine and we’ll see if it bounces back in the spring.
  • Sunchokes – these came roaring back in one of the big tubs in the spring with no intervention on my part, then gradually started to look really anemic and gross in the summer before dying completely. This doesn’t mean the roots are dead and won’t come back next year, of course.
  • White mulberry – one of these bounced up to small tree height in a matter of weeks in late summer and early fall. I don’t want it and need to do something about it ASAP before doing something requires a chain saw rather than a hack saw.
  • French sorrel looked anemic and weed-covered in the summer, but seemed to perk back up a bit in the fall.

Plans for next year:

  • Sunflowers – just direct seed tons of them, more than the squirrels can eat. Sunflower seeds are cheap. I still like my idea of using them as sort of a biological fence to keep out neighbors’ weeds.
  • Miners lettuce – still want to try to get a stand of this established. I may try a combination of direct seeding and transplants.
  • Sea kale – the one new seed I plan to order this winter.
  • Anise hyssop and mountain mint – I want to take yet another shot at these. Maybe just start a whole bunch of them and try some direct seeding too. And if none of that works, maybe break down and mail-order some plants.
  • Thai basil and Thai sweet basil – I’m excited because I saved seeds from plants last fall. If they don’t sprout, these are easy to buy our local Asian market.
  • Thai chilis – I want to try getting these to sprout again. With all the recalcitrant seeds that don’t want to sprout, I think I will stop being so stingy with seeds, and start putting large numbers of them in plastic bags with moist paper towels on top of a heat mat.
  • Parsley and dill – I like using these to fill in empty spots where I might put perennials in the future, mostly to attract caterpillars. Maybe I’ll put these in the window boxes. I want to try getting parsley to sprout, but if not I’ll just buy some.
  • Fennel – like I said, the one I have is doing fine and I just want to move it.
  • White mulberry – I’m going to try cutting the monster to the ground and “mulching” it with Epsom salts. Supposedly, these can dry out a tree stump without actually being toxic to anything nearby.

So, next steps are to research how early I can set out some of these plants, and start counting back to when I should be starting the seeds. Fun stuff.

Sowing density effects and patterns of colonization

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That’s plant colonization, in case you were wondering what kind of colonization I am talking about. This study has a fairly simple premise – that in restoration you can sow the seeds that have the most trouble establishing at the highest densities, and seeds of plants that germinate and spread easily at lower densities, or even not at all.

Sowing density effects and patterns of colonization in a prairie restoration

A cost-effective approach in plant restorations could be to increase sowing density for species known to be challenging to establish, while reducing sowing density for species that easily colonize on their own. Sowing need not occur evenly across the site for rapidly dispersing species. We explored these issues using a prairie restoration experiment on a high-school campus with three treatments: plots sown only to grasses (G plots), to grasses and forbs (GF1), and to grasses and forbs with forbs sown at twice the density (GF2). In year 2, GF1 and GF2 plots had higher diversity than G plots, as expected, but GF2 treatments did not have twice the sown forb cover. However, high forb sowing density increased forb richness, probably by reducing stochastic factors in establishment. Cover of nonsown species was highest in G plots and lowest in GF2 plots, suggesting suppressive effects of native forbs on weedy species. Colonization of G plots by two sown forbs (Coreopsis tinctoria and Rudbeckia hirta) was apparent after 2.5 years, providing evidence that these species are self-sustaining. Colonization was greater in edges than in the central areas of G plots. Through construction of establishment kernels, we infer that the mean establishment distance was shorter for R. hirta (6.7 m) compared to C. tinctoria (21.1 m). Our results lead us to advocate for restoration practices that consider not only seed sowing but also subsequent dispersal of sown species. Furthermore, we conclude that restoration research is particularly amenable for outdoor education and university-high school collaborations.

Swale

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Swale is a public food forest on a barge in New York City. Here’s what they’re growing:

Swale’s plant community is made up of perennial native fruit trees and shrubs, leafy self-seeding annuals and salt loving grasses. Our model for landscape design is inspired by edible forestry,  permaculture, and salt-tolerant estuary ecosystems. Our plants have come from many generous donations from Greenbelt Native Plant Center, the New York City Parks Department and Visitors onboard! Our plant list is always expanding. Want to bring a plant onboard Swale? Let us know!

Here’s what’s currently onboard:

Canopy
Beach Plum, Black Chokeberry, Black Tupelo, Black willow, ‘Enterprise’ Apple, ‘Goldrush’ Apple, Fuyu Persimmon, Goji Berry, Hawthorn, Italian Alder, Newtown Pippin Apple (native to Queens NY!), Liberty Apple, ‘Northern Spy’ Apple, Northline Serviceberry, Pitch pine, Red Chokeberry, Sweetbay Magnolia

Shrub
American Red Raspberry, Arkansas Blackberry, Blue Ridge Blueberry, Dogbane, Eastern Juniper, False Indigo, Flame Willow, Golden Curls Willow, Gooseberry, Missouri River Willow, Northern Highbush Blueberry, Pennsylvania Blackberry, Red Stem Dogwood, Rosemary, Sassafras, Triple Crown Blackberry, Winterberry

Herbaceous
Asparagus, American, Blackgrass, Black eyed Susan, Buck’s Horn Plantain, Bugleweed, Anise Hyssop, Aster (New England), Bee Balm, Black Eyed Susan, Borage, Comfrey, Dandelion, Daylily, Echinacea, Evening primrose, French Sorrel, Garlic Chives, Goldenrod, Ground Cherry, Hopi Red Dye Amaranth, Lavender, Lemon Balm, Lettuce, Lovage, Meadowsweet, Milkweed, Miners Lettuce, Oregano, Peppermint, Perpetual Swiss Chard, Red Mustard, Red Russian Kale, Roman Chamomile, Rosemallow, Scallion, Saltgrass, Saltmeadow rush, Sea pea, Shore little bluestem, Spotted Joe Pye Weed, Stinging Nettle, Swamp Goldenrod, Sylvetta Arugula, Tansy, Virginia mountain mint, White Avens, Wild leek, Whorled mountain mint, Yarrow

Ground Cover
Creeping Thyme, Creeping raspberry, Golden oregano, Purslane, Strawberries, White Clover, Wild Low bush blueberry

Rhizosphere
Adam’s yucca, Groundnut, Jerusalem Artichoke, Walking Onion, Wild Yam

Vertical Layer
Clematis, Grapes, Hardy Kiwi, Hops, Scarlet runner beans