We SMOTHERED This GRASS. You Won't Believe the RESULTS — Ep. 320

The view from our cottage used to be, well, forgettable. Just a sea of reed canary grass for as far as the eye could see. So we decided to do something bold. What if we could turn that monoculture into a vibrant, wildflower-filled meadow buzzing with birds and pollinators? Over the last 22 months, we took on that challenge. And in this video, we'll show you exactly how we did it, what worked, what we're going to do differently, and what's growing there now. So stick around, because the transformation might surprise you. on the meadow right here. And this is just two 14-foot by 40-foot plots that we started to smother and solarize last year for about 10 to 11 months. So if you recall, we took these black tarps here that you could see that we've started to smother and solarize back on these two 14 by 40 parts. And we just really wanted to kill the reed canary grass. So that's basically this grass that we're now keeping mowed. It's probably an invasive phenotype of reed canary grass that was used for grazing. So this area a long time ago was probably old grazing land for cattle or whatnot. And that grass has really persisted and became a monoculture. Now, this is our little meadow house or cottage house that we have here. And I always love being able to sit on the back porch. I really wanted to see pollinators and birds and just beautiful flowers. And so our goal and our experiment was basically smother this lawn. This looks like it got fried pretty good. And, you know, there may still be seed in the seed bank. You don't know. My hope is that after 10 months, there's not much seed. So to give you context of what we're going to do, we're gonna remove this today, pull this up, assess the situation. And then you'll notice that we have quite a bit of Espoma bags here. These are part of the delivery that they sent that are Espoma seconds. You know, maybe the bags are ripped open or they were outside too long. So we're really grateful for them for that. Now, you wouldn't necessarily need to put organic matter in here because we're planting meadow plants, which we'll talk about like our meadow planting and what types of seeds we're gonna be planting in here. Meadow plants don't need real heavy organic matter, but I'm still gonna add some. Cause if you could see here, it's kind of rocky. You know, there's some good soil in here, but it's a lot of rock. And, you know, maybe even just adding like a half an inch or an inch would be great. And I am going to plant a seed in here as well. So it'll be nice to just have substrate for those seeds to land on. So I'm gonna pull this back and then we're gonna kill this part of the lawn. This is the first thing that you see out of the meadow house. And so you wanna have something that's really nice. So hopefully the planting plan that we have in mind will work. Yeah, this looks pretty dang good. Let's give it a little rake just to see what's underneath. We're gonna probably be taking this up in I would say another couple months. We can see the progress of what it looks like. Ooh, a big snake. Oh man. They're really loving the fact that this is being solarized as well. Slow their way. Those are a bunch of garter snakes. Try not to step on them. Always full of surprises when you take this out. So if you recall, we prepared this 10 or 11 months ago. We had some extra bags of Espoma seconds. We actually added a thin layer of soil on top. And then we both seeded in and used plugs of native and native adjacent plants in here. Primarily I seeded in some poppies and things along those lines as well. And then I put a straw over the top because just to protect the soil since there was like no more grass. Now I did go in here and plug and seed some grass in as well and most of those are gonna be late season grasses. But I had to take you out here because it's starting to look really good. Obviously there's other plants that have moved in here. I've had to selectively weed in some cases. But in other cases, I'm really happy with the results that I see. Earlier in the season, we had the penstemon in bloom. So this was penstemon hirsutis. We have quite a bit of penstemon digitalis already in our meadow. And we also had seeded in in here and it was very prolific this spring. But this provided a really nice tube shape, early purple flower for some of our pollinators. But you could see like the pollinators are exceptionally active right now on the bergamot. And then we have the rudbeckia coming up or black eyed Susans. The coreopsis was just in bloom. I don't see any, oh, yep, here they are. They were in bloom a little earlier, but you could see some late season ones. And then we also have some sunflowers, some yellow ones in the distance. And the tall purple and white spikes you could see are liatris, one of my favorite plants. And this is liatris spicata. And then we have the florist in white and the regular purple. It's a very beautiful plant that has lots of different florets and it blooms from the top down. You have delphinium right here. This is coming up, which is a nice bluish purple flower. And we also have some liatris that's coming up here that has yet to bloom. It'll bloom in a late summer. You could see it's just starting to color up. And this is our native one that's actually threatened called, it's a variation called newlandii. So you could see that it has kind of like these individual florets that come out. And then I even had a chance to plant in some of our giant native agostachy, with the bumblebee kind of sipping away there. And then also mountain mint, pycnanthemum mudicum. These are examples of other flowers that have moved in, like dowcus corota, a wild carrot, and then some bull thistle and things like that, especially along the edge. It's kind of hard to control some of the plants, but for the most part, this could provide a really nice seed bank for the rest of the meadow. So if we just kind of start here and maybe keep on maybe doing this over the course of three years. So again, just solarizing and smothering. I mean, you could see it starts to get a little less effective because the voles will start to eat holes in this. And then you'll see like this solidago or goldenrod coming up through the hole. So those are some things that we'll have to kind of combat with. Also the edge species pushing in. I left this pokeweed here. This is our native pokeweed. It's a nice kind of tall, airy, ungainly shrub. But this is one that I think I would leave. And here is some of our native aster. And this is a native erigeron as well. So not everything on the edge is bad. Here's a wild lettuce that actually was just in bloom today. And you could see where the blooms are. They already started to put out seed. But I have been looking out the window or sitting on the front porch of the meadow house. And I can look out and I can see so many amazing butterflies and bumblebees. And it is exactly the feel I wanted to experience in looking out at the meadow, as opposed to looking out at a monoculture. So in the coming months, we're gonna experiment with a different technique in this area, which is gonna be really exciting. And then we could compare notes. I mean, obviously this is gonna be put in a year later after this. So it may not be that impressive, but maybe next year we'll be able to compare results. But for right now, I'm pretty pleased with this. Like I said, I had to come out here a few times to just selectively weed, maybe take out like mugwort or some of the seeds that kind of came in, I think came in with the seed mix that I had planted in. I don't always love going with the seed mix because I'm not quite sure of the provenance of all the seeds. This is a great example. I'd never seen this in the landscape before. It's a little past its prime now, but this is a multi-headed daisy. I'm gonna have to find the scientific name for you to let you know what it is, but a beautiful plant nonetheless. So I chose not to pull it out because the pollinators seemed to like it. And I think it worked well with the mix. So you have to make the decisions. Like if you do something like this, you have to make the decisions on what you wanna pull and what you'll keep. But for the most part, I'm pleased with this. And we'll continue to give you updates throughout the year and maybe tune in in September, October, when we start to do a different process on the area that we're smothering and solarizing now. We'll be revealing the next stages of this project over the next few months. So stay tuned here for more updates. In the meantime, you could help our channel grow by liking, subscribing, or becoming a channel member. See you in the next episode.