[Image description: a two panel meme. In the top panel, a person labeled "my customers" asks the question "how do I keep bugs off my plants?" In the bottom panel, a person labeled "me, a native plant nursery owner" says "that's the neat part, you don't"]

My family is visiting for the week, so I have an extra outlet for all these squashes and zucchini. One of our pumpkins is going haam and I'm excited for those to start ripening.

What's growing on with you all?

[Image description: eight raspberry cuttings showing the stages of root development at their growth tips, with the leftmost cutting showing almost no root and progressing to the rightmost which shows a cluster of roots and upward growing leaves]

I'm giving a talk next month about reproducing plants asexually and am working on images for the slide deck. Figured I may as well share some of the images here too as it might help some folks who are interested in doing this. Questions and feedback are encouraged and appreciated, they'll help to make the presentation even more informative.

I harvested a dozen Hungarian Wax peppers this morning and that one (!) plant can now stand under its own weight again. We have a whole slew of tomatoes currently ripening on the vine so hopefully I can make some sauces and salsa this week. We got a food processor recently and I'm dying to try out more modes.

The bees are going crazy in one of our self seeding salad patches. We have four of these now, though two are newer and were planted later to stagger the harvest schedules and provide fresh greens for longer.

Here's a view of the permanent raised bed near the northern boundary of our property. Native Echinacea (purple coneflower) is growing next to a native Rudbeckia (the yellow coneflowers), with black elder, bee balm, and others growing in the background. To the right is the only patch of grass I mow with any regularity, as it's a shared boundary with our neighbor and their kids have been a little too helpful with the mower in the past.

Speaking of seeds, we have a whole bunch of seeds forming on New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus and also my favorite plant) planted all over the place. These plants have a mechanism for seed dispersal that creates pressure behind the seeds as they ripen, which then releases and jettisons the seeds with force. It can be difficult to time seed collection with this kind of adaptation, but luckily a neighbor has some tulle she's looking to offload so I'll be making some small pouches to tie around the seed heads. I collected a ton of seeds from our Russian sages yesterday as well, but those are much easier to time - the flowers will brown and dry, at which point you can gently shake the seeds out into a container.

What's growing on with you all?

Hey folks, here is a video I made detailing some of the ways that we're using "slash" - limbs from trees we've selectively removed - to make some of our forest gardens more productive in various ways. Piped was giving me issues so the canonical youtube is linked

Tl;dw :

Down in our woods there is considerably more light reaching the forest floor this year. Some of that is due to storm damage that took down or killed several large pines, but another part is due to us removing a number of American Beech. The Beech is over represented in our woods and casts a large amount of shade, and many Forest Management Plans in our region begin with removing these to release light to the forest floor.

Because of the abundance of materials from removing these trees, we're able to use the various parts of the limbs to accomplish several important stewardship tasks - mulching, building brush piles, and collecting round poles for infrastructure improvements. This contrasts with chop and drop practices in tropical climates in part due to differences in lignification of trees; another difference is the rate of decomposition, which is greatly influenced by abundant heat and moisture.

Mulching

Mulching with leafy material does a few things: it provides moisture retention for the soil, which helps plants, micro-, and macroorganisms to avoid extreme conditions. It hampers the germination and growth of unwanted plants in the mulched space and allows for the desired plants to have better access to nutrients. And it also provides many of the nutrients necessary for vegetative growth as it breaks down through weathering and biological processes.

When processing these limbs for leafy material (sometimes called green manure) I like to use either two handed loppers or a pair of hand shears made for woody plants. While I could run the smaller side branches through a chipper, that greatly impacts the amount of exposed surface area and will absolutely change the way these materials break down as well as which organisms are acting upon them. There is a trade off between efficiency / speed and the breadth of processes that will occur, and in this case I'd prefer a greater number of biological processes. (Quick note - spring and summer branch wood contains enough nitrogen to hot compost the carbon they contain as long as you have the requisite amount of material for hot composting). Mulching like this tends to be most effective when it is several overlapping layers deep. Because our space is fairly well protected from wind, I cut the leaves with very little of the branch connected; for folks with windier spaces interested in doing this, it's perfectly good to keep more of the branch wood connected to keep your mulch in place.

Brush Piles

When a tree falls, many of the branches become entangled and overlapped, which provides protected nesting and foraging spaces for small woodland creatures that are prey for larger animals. We can build this same habitat infrastructure from leafy branches or even just the branch wood if the leaves are needed elsewhere. These sorts of protective spaces reinforce multiple links in the local food web and that stronger ecosystem will cycle more nutrients back to the soil in a positive feedback loop.

A key aspect of these brush piles is the void space between the multiple layers - most guides call for enough layers of material to be several feet high, with each layer laid perpendicular to the previous one, for the most bang for the buck (ecologically speaking). The void space and gaps are where the animals will creat passageways and nesting spaces, so it's good to leave the branches mostly intact. Branches rarely grow perfectly flat, so leaving shoots and side branches attached will create variety in the gaps left after construction, which helps a wider variety of animals as each can find the spaces most suitable to their needs.

Alternatively, using fewer layers to construct small brush piles around plants we're trying to grow can help to deter animal browse and can often be better for young plants than full sun access. When I use the branches in this way, I find benefits to breaking down the previous stick layer (cutting them smaller and increasing surface contact) before adding a new layer of brush. Higher surface contact with increase the rate of breakdown in the older wood, releasing more of the carbon to the soil than if they were left with gaps.

Infrastructure

Remaining trunks and thick branches are resources too - Beech has a great value as firewood and we use our woodstove for heat and some cooking during the colder months. Smaller diameter round poles from smaller trees or thick-ish branches that aren't good firewood size get turned into small fences, tipis, or other trellising structures for our vines or plants that need support. I find that using the more flexible tips of branches can make for some visually interesting patterns. Leftover offcuts from those projects will either be saved for future projects or used for biochar feedstock in our kiln before being added to compost or bird bedding and eventually to new gardens.

Anyway, that's some of what we do with trees we remove when we remove them. Do you do forestry practices like this and have other use cases to suggest? Have trees and want to do this but have more questions? Neither of the above but you're interested? Let's discuss!

Our volunteer cherry tomatoes have gone hard this past week, putting on tons of new growth and starting to fruit as well! Our slicers kind of gave up with the hot spell but are back to flowering and I'm looking forward to some really juicy ones.

This past week has seen me doing more forestry than gardening, though I personally conflate the two (I'm just pruning some rather large plants). I'm in the process of typing a write up to some video I shot which details what I'm doing - I'd like to post the video for you all, but I want to accommodate those of you who don't have the time or desire for ~19 minutes of me talking.

Here is a picture of a bee napping on some Joe Pye weed:

[Image description: an eastern garter snake watches me mow the lawn from a patch of long grass]

Some of our neighbors think I'm weird for using a push mower (battery powered, charged by our solar setup) on our two acre field, but mowing slowly and stopping on a dime enables us to protect the creatures with whom we share this space

[Image description: a spider is nearly invisible on its perch when illuminated by blacklight]

[Image description: a white spider hides in a raspberry flower, clutching its honeybee prey]

It's very hard to spot these guys, I'm glad I managed to catch it and share it with you all.

Two weeks ago I collected seed from a musk mallow (Malva alcea) I noticed growing in a crack in the pavement, soaked them overnight, and scattered them in a pot. There are dozens sending out true leaves already and it's very exciting - there are these tiny emerald sweat bees (Agapostemon) that really seem to adore the flowers of this plant and I would love to grow greater numbers to better support them.

The recent rains after several months with little precipitation has driven a new flush of growth and some wonderful blooms in the gardens as well, and I really appreciate the look of the Queen Anne's Lace, Monarda, Echinacea, and Clethea together

What's growing on with you all?

We finally received actual rain (read: more than a twenty minute spritz) for the first time in a month, and the world smells like pollen. Our "tropical" fruits, hardy kiwi and maypop (passion fruit), have put on feet of new growth as a result and are filling out their support trellis, which is very exciting.

I'm heading out in just a little bit to attend a walk'n'talk at a nearby orchard - our county extension office is hosting the event to discuss some of the climate risk mitigation strategies the orchard has been leveraging for a few years now. This afternoon some folks we know from the library are coming over to harvest flowers to supply an art project for the kids in town.

What's growing on with you all?