SEEDS & PLANT PLUGS in the Meadow House Gardens — Ep. 277

We're continuing planting in the meadow house backyard and you can see that we have created quite a number of beds here. Quite large beds. And it's going to take a lot of plants to fill in space. But I went ahead and got a number of plugs which I've covered on an earlier video all about plugs. So these are deep plugs or landscape plugs. So DPs or LPs. Went and got a number of native and I would say native adjacent plants. What I mean by that is native adjacent means that they're native to the U.S. but it's native maybe to a neighboring state or some state that might be a bit more in the Midwest or south of us. So these two right here are Dahlias, not Dahlias but Dahlias, D-A-L-E-A. And one is Candida which is the white version. I think this one is the white version, yes, right here. Which has I think a little bit more of a thicker leaf. And then this is the purpurea which is the purple version. Both of these as I shared are not native to New York but they're native to adjacent states. When I look at leaves like this it immediately makes me think it's a nitrogen fixer and this is a nitrogen fixing plant. In the family of Fabaceae or clovers, just has that kind of clover-like leaf. You could see that it has the leaf and the leaflets even in trees. So I'm thinking about like a locust which is also in the Fabaceae family. It just reminds me of one of those plants that would be a nitrogen fixer. These don't get too high, roughly around two feet tall is where they max out. And they kind of have like these beautiful like little cleaning brush style. Almost like a plantain flower but a bit showier. And I've planted quite a lot in those other gardens which I'll show you and take you over but I'm going to plant some more in here. And because they're closer to around two feet, I'm going to plant them a little bit more closer to the edge because a lot of these plants are in the four to five foot range and they'll kind of get lost within it. Which is totally fine too because I just want all of these plants to billow out and basically rub elbows with one another. But I also want to be able to see the flowers. And of course if it's a nitrogen fixer, you can see that there's one here, it's a little dry so I'm going to water these in. If it's a nitrogen fixer, even if you don't see it visibly, at least it's also doing something where it's fixing nitrogen for the other plants. So plugs are generally pretty much ready to go. You can see that these are well rooted. Eventually what I'm going to do is after I plant all the plugs, I'm going to spread some seed mainly like violet seeds and a number of others that could be like a really good understory herbaceous plant. And if you recall, some of those violets serve as the host plant for our fritillary butterflies. It's kind of expensive to buy violets, so buying it by seed I feel like is the most economical option. But here we go, I have a bird's foot violet which I think is really beautiful. Typically our violets will have a more chordate or heart shaped leaf and this one has a bit more that looks like fingers and has this little purple flower here. So I thought like that would be a beautiful plant for the understory of this relatively kind of big, it's like a hefty garden. You can't really see it now, I think we'll have to just have exhibit patience and see this garden in full maturity maybe next spring, summer, and fall. I probably won't seed until another maybe couple weeks or so. So right now I'm doing this in August and I would like to start seeding maybe in September when it's getting a little bit more towards fall. That way a lot of these plants will need some type of cold stratification which just means that their seed needs to experience winter for it to successfully germinate. Which seems counterintuitive but in an area that has evolved with winter a lot of our seeds need that just to kind of break the seed coat sometimes. Now I've planted these plants in our pollinator garden and to be honest with you I haven't seen them come up. So it'll be interesting to see them here, I mean I didn't plant that many so because I'm planting a lot more in here I think it'll be more easily recognizable. The pollinator garden got really big really fast. All right so I'll show you some of the other plants that I've been planting. This one is a type of aster and this is called Synthiotrichum ooletogens, something like that. It is one of our endangered varieties of aster. So it doesn't look like much, you know I understand because they come in and they're kind of crushed and they don't have any flowers on but I'll tell you what these grow very fast. And this is again, we have lots of asters here, very important plant in the fall but I really wanted to focus especially in this garden and a little bit in this garden some of our endangered and threatened plants. And I have one of our liatrises here which is our Liatris scariosa variation Newlandii which is also an endangered plant. And so I focused on planting that in here as well. So that's something that I wanted to keep top of mind. Here's another liatris. This is not one that's endangered. I actually don't even think that it's native to New York so this might be native adjacent. And this one's Liatris cylindraceae. The reason why I chose this one is it's a lot of our liatrises are quite tall so they get pretty beefy three feet four feet even five feet tall. This one is very modest in size. So I wanted this kind of for front of border because again if I plant it towards the middle it'll get lost. But if I planted a bit more front of border or in a garden such as this you'll be able to see it a lot more. So I don't think I don't think this is a liatris that's coming up right now. So this one might be our our variation Newlandii that's coming up. So I have a couple plugs that I've plugged in here and this one looks like it had flowered already. So it's nice that they're flowering at different times. I had chatted with somebody who's who basically collects native plant seeds and the fact that they have germination at different times slightly different times actually is great because if there is a pollinator or an insect that relies on it as a host plant if it happens if that insect happens to emerge at a later time because maybe the weather was less favorable or whatnot then that's a positive thing. So having different germination rates is actually considered positive not always blooming at once essentially. And you'll notice I've planted a couple other plants which I'll feature in a second. And basically we've built up all of these beds. So we've added cardboard and then we added some of the soil seconds that we got from Espoma and essentially these were bags of soil that maybe had been opened or whatever and they couldn't sell. So we ended up taking them and without that we probably couldn't have built up all these beds. Now look I tried to pull this up by the leaves and I broke it off but the corms should still be under there. So hopefully I'll plant this and it'll come up next year. But generally these are fairly resilient plants if that happens. It may not have green in the first year but maybe next year it'll come up. So it's probably better to put your finger down here or if you have a chopstick or a stick and just kind of push it up so that you're not pulling on the tops of those greens because then you risk taking them out. Here's the corms. That's where they put all the sugars and the nutrients to grow back next year. All right so this one is another kind of aster but it's in a genus that I had never heard of but this is Ionactis linnerifolia and this one seems to be quite hardy. It has a really thickened leaf. It makes me think about like the penstemon pinefolius I think it is the pine-leaved penstemon and it's in like a more rocky environment. So I got this primarily for the gardens over there which are facing the south and so we'll take those this three and plant it over there and I'll show you what we've been planting over there as well. I went and planted a number of corms for the liatris and it's just starting to come up. You can see that this one's starting to get a flower head on it a flower stalk and there's that one over there that is also getting a flower stalk. These are still kind of making their way up and I started planting some of the smaller liatrises which I just showed you throughout here as well and this will be another bed where we're really under planting with violets. So again I'll probably end up doing that in a couple weeks. Now here in the middle I planted a lot of those dahlias so that's the clovers I talked about and I planted some in here as well as this one which I've done all the planting of so I can't show you but it did come in plugs and this is also a symphiotrichum this is also an aster but look at that glaucus leaf very pretty it's called silky aster so it's a symphiotrichum sericea and that doesn't grow too high again this bed I wanted this fringe tree and this vitex to be kind of the big bushy plants in here and I wanted some lower herbaceous plants and you can see I've done a fairly good job with filling this up so I'll have these last three that I'm going to put in here and again this is all amended soil so this is cardboard and just beautiful espoma raised bed mix or compost on top so it's very easy to work with I'll plant the other two down here now these are egyptian walking onions coming up as well I want I took these from the memorial garden and I planted them in here because they seem similar to this tradescantia ohioensis and so I thought like I like planting like plants together but that are from completely different families or genera so I thought I'd you know try that out and again these asters won't get too big but asters late in the season really beautiful flowers and they're in the asteraceae family and they are incredible for our pollinating insects so that's what I'm doing here for now and I'll tune back in in like maybe two weeks and we'll finish the under planting here for the season and then we'll have to wait for spring summer fall next year to see how these gardens fill out all right folks so we're here at the meadow house and we are starting to under plant the gardens here it's funny every time I come out there's always like a little plant that has popped out like this one right here and eaten so one of the things is we've built up all of this soil with some of espoma's seconds like these the soil that they couldn't sell anymore and so it's very soft and pliable so oftentimes we'll get like a skunk or a raccoon and they'll come in here in the morning I'll see like a plant that is pulled up but anyway I have a number of plants that are still coming in that I'm going to be planting into these gardens and this is going to be the last hurrah for planting this year in the fall and you can see that this bed is pretty much planted up but as you probably saw from a of my other videos I've been wanting to under plant this with violas which are our native violets and I have a number of them here from prairie moon nursery I have the common blue violet the bi-colored form violet I have the cream violet I also have some yellow violets in here there you go you can see that and you'll see on here refrigerated seed and what that means is when you get these if you don't plant them right away you need to refrigerate them and these are the types of seeds that if you don't refrigerate them they're pretty much not viable anymore so once I got these in the mail I put them right back into the refrigerator because I wasn't ready to plant them and hopefully today and what we'll you know find out maybe next year is were they viable are they coming up and my hope is that when I under plant with violas that the violas will eventually move into the regular lawn and I've had some folks write in and say oh I never really liked violas I was always taking them out of my lawn but here at least and I know in a number of other places they serve as the host plant for our fritillary butterflies and that's important because I've talked about different host plants for butterflies and moths specifically the caterpillars in their larval stage that's something that we'd like to actually promote here in our gardens so you can see this is what the seeds look like they're quite small nothing like sedge seed or anything like that where it's just basically dust but what I'm going to do is drop them into this pail of sand and the reason for that is when I start to spread the violas I want to see where I've spread it and the sand helps to disperse the seed as well as allows you to see where you've dropped it into the soil so that's what I'm going to be doing today here and then if you stick with me I'll share with you some of the other plants that I've decided to plant in some of these beds because some of these beds are a little bit weedier than others and I want to kind of get them planted in with certain plants so that I don't have to deal with the weeds and my hope is that if I plant a lot of plants and plant densely that it's going to suppress them here we go you can see the seeds now I just dropped one in the in the lawn here but you can see these seeds are a little tanner by nature than the ones that I just put in there and those are the yellow violets let's see what the purple ones look like oh this is the bird's foot violet so this is viola padada and I have planted that one that's one that's that one right there so you can see actually what it looks like I think those are really beautiful because typically you know the viola leaves are chordate they're a little more heart-shaped and this one has one that's called like well it's called bird's foot violet because the leaves kind of look a bit more like bird's feet so this is quite tiny you can see and they have this caramel color yeah those look pretty similar to the the ones that I had shared before a bit browner kind of a that taupey color yeah so that's what I'm going to do I'm going to open up all these mix it around and then toss them into here and then I'll be planting some other plants up as well I have all the violets in here you can see I haven't mixed them up yet I wanted to try to buy them in bulk but they didn't have them in bulk so I had to buy them package by package but there's about 50 seeds per package in there which is not bad because violets tend to be pretty good seeders what I'm going to do now is just toss it in and some may land on the leaves of the plants and some may go into the grass but that's okay because my ultimate goal is just to get an understory in this garden bed but mind you I've just planted these plants in June nothing looked like this I just planted these plants probably like four or five months ago and so each of these plants are probably going to get a lot larger they'll start to shade the rest of the ground out but some of the violets really like to be in shade so that's a plus now here's some of the bird's foot violet so you can see that's actually out now and normally these will flower in the springtime but it's not unusual for violets to bloom again in the fall all right so I have some left over so what I'm going to do is start in this bed and I already know that this bed is going to be a bit of a problem for me the one thing that we didn't hear that we didn't do in a lot of the other beds is that when we started to edge we took the edge and we turned it around and then we put cardboard on top and I shared this in an earlier video when I talked about it but I might as well mention it again here the challenge with that is that there's roots still living in that soil and even though you turn it around I didn't plant right into it I put cardboard over it but if you don't get a perfect edge then when you flip it around it's a little bumpy you put the cardboard over that and because it's bumpy the cardboard doesn't really sit flat to the ground and the grass starts to come right back up so you can see this this is all grass like this needs to be pulled out and if you don't get all the little white roots then it's just going to constantly come back so it is a bit of a problem in this bed which is why I want to get some more plants planted in here because the denser you plant the less likely you're going to have to deal with the grass or you're not going to even even see the grass but over here you can see it's a lot of dandelions that moved in a lot of the lawn grass from underneath I'm just gonna seed these violets so I'm going to do one last fertilize in this whole bed and my plan is to get all of these in here this is amsonia hubrictii this is not a native plant but it's native to the United States and it's an incredible plant you may remember that I planted this in the four season garden that's up towards the common house and they get about hip high eventually it takes about three years for them to get that and in the early springtime they get these beautiful tiny little baby blue sky blue flowers and they get this uh wispy kind of leaf that looks very similar to vernonia which this is an ironweed this is a cultivated variety so our native vernonia gets very very tall I mean like five six seven feet tall this one is more like 36 inches three feet tall I wanted to get big bushy plants that have like to like like very similar leaves and the amsonia when it's not in bloom actually looks a lot like the vernonia the amsonia blooms early in the season like in spring the vernonia you can see it's just starting to bloom now and again this is a young plant so it's not that impressive so you have different blooming times and then the amsonia when it gets towards the fall gets these bright yellow butterscotch color leaves so it's got that interest kind of all season long but again it takes about I would say two to three years for it to get any sort of height I also got another grass and this is a andropogon tenarius and this again this grass is not native but it is native to the U.S. not too far from here and the seed heads are just so beautiful they get these like white cottony seed heads on these dark red burgundy stems and I've kind of gone all out with uh grass here uh the mullenbergia and that one and then also these aren't looking so great so I'm hoping they'll pull through and this is our native dyschamphia they do better in shade now I kind of pre-planted them in here because I know I'm going to have a shady garden bed here with all of these trees but the trees are small now so I think and I hope that the dyschamphia will survive and kind of grow in with the bed instead of dropping this in every little hole what I'll do is just do a little wash over the whole garden bed we do have a lot of wild animals and this smells a little ripe so it will be interesting to see if there's any animals that kind of dig up in this bed but I want to do one last fertilize especially for those plugs because you want to plug those in usually at least four weeks before you get frost and typically frost around here maybe if you talked to to us 25 years ago the frost would happen in late September now the frost is usually happening sometimes not until November so I don't feel like fearful of planting those but you want to get those roots established almost immediately and it's been very rainy here very overcast this is the first day that's actually partially sunny these are well watered because they've been sitting outside so you can see they're really well watered that's what the roots look like and these are deep plugs dps or landscape plugs lps and that's what you typically want in a situation like this they'll just establish all these roots are like ready to go so these are liatris that's right there it doesn't look like much I mean it is a grass see that so these are the the issues that I have here because a lot of the liatris actually looks like a grass and if you don't get these little white roots like this one I didn't get the right root it's just going to come back so um this is a beauty berry back here it looks like some of it got eaten by a deer deer kind of tasted that so I gotta be careful about that too but these amsonias are actually in the family of aposinaceae and if you are familiar with that family it is the milkweed family so they usually have a type of latex in them that deer do not like so this is a plant that's going to once it's big it's going to protect the other plants around it and it's going to protect itself because it has that nasty latex that the deer don't want to munch on or any other animal for that matter you don't want to plant these too close together because they get quite large it's very tempting okay I'm going to plant some of these andropogons I'm going to plant them kind of in the middle because these get quite large and you'll see that I have some of the mulleinbergia here planted this stuff this wispy stuff I did have some extra plugs that I brought in and I planted that you know pretty much here they're a little lower and more wispy than these so that way you could see through the mulleinbergia and you'll be able to see this grass and I have other types of liatris planted in here so you can see the liatris and I have a number of different symphyotrichums which are our native asters planted in here although some of these asters are cultivated varieties so they grow a little lower to the ground I can't remember how tall this gets but it's at least three feet and you get quite beefy too and typically what I do in the really early springtime is that I'll just cut the grass back pretty much to the ground you know a few inches up and that way all the old leaves kind of go away and it starts to look fresh again that's going to be this is going to be a little too close to this tree because this tree is going to get quite large so I'm going to maybe put it up here this one will also get large but it's going to take a little while and it has a completely different canopy so I'm going to plant this closer to this liatris in this symphyotrichum here and that way if people are looking up from the road they'll be able to see the tulips which I haven't planted yet then the mulleinbergia the wispiness in the mulleinbergia the liatris and then this grass and then of course the canopy of the trees so we'll try this out I think andropogon would do really well in the meadow as well but I didn't choose to plant it in there because it's not really a native grass to this area so I thought maybe I'll just save it for the garden beds all right let me take you through the last plant that we'll be planting in here at least for today totally forgot I have two more plants we have lots of lobelia that are growing in the landscape lobelia cardinalis it's also a great hummingbird plant recently featured that lobelia sylphidica which is also growing in some of our gardens in around Half Lake which is also a great hummingbird plant I found lobelia inflata which is an intense herbal and then I thought well let's do the pale spiked lobelia which is lobelia spicata and this grows to be about two feet tall and I wanted to plant it in here because we have a lot of very kind of candelabra shaped flowers in here we have some digitalis which is our foxglove so I can't wait to see what this garden is going to look like in you know one to two years from now and these of course don't look like much you see this little basil rosette but as you can see from this it'll get this really tall wispy white spike so I thought let's try that out and then this does like a pretty medium wet habitat to basically medium dry so it's not always necessarily wet so I would like to actually plant I have six of these you can see I only have four here but I'm going to plant two up towards Half Lake and see if it would establish around there with the other lobelias and I like to plant plants in different places because if I ever happen to lose one or if an animal digs it up well then you know what I have some others on the side but I'm going to just give it a little bit of fertilizer just to help establish those roots really quickly and it's a good move that if you're not going to get rain soon which we are we're going to get it tomorrow but it's a good move to also water them in I'm not going to remember what these plants are until they start flowering again it's a pretty diverse bed already soil is so soft and easy to work with unlike some of our native soils here so it's a pleasure to actually be able to plant this you can see some echinacea right here I don't know if that's going to flower but it looks like it is and because these are two feet tall I'm kind of planting them a bit like back from here because this is about the height of these so I have the shorter plants in the front and it kind of gets to the higher in the back so that's why I'm kind of just working my way around this this area here okay all right so second to last plant is a special one this is salvia lyrata this is one of our native salvias and I can't recall if this is threatened or endangered I think it's threatened in our state and whenever I see growers growing a rare threatened endangered or even an extirpated which means essentially it's extinct plant that used to be in New York even if it wasn't from this county it's one of those plants that I usually try to seek out and plant here I know some folks really focus on bioregional plants but we can't always get that lucky of finding seeds and my sentiment is I'd rather try to re-establish it here from the beginning and and as quickly as possible and see if we could up the population levels of that plant so salvia lyrata doesn't grow that tall this is pretty much maybe the height that it is it's already flowered for this year so it already had gone to seed and I figured this is going to be a really nice bed to plant it in because this bed is quite small eventually this birch and this spruce is going to kind of take over and then kind of the sub canopy layers if the deer stop eating them will be these rose bushes and then I have a little bit more of these herbaceous plants around here so I have some dianthus which you could see is in bloom there's one that's in bloom right here that dark burgundy red bloom and then this is the achillea which you can see has gone to seed and this is moonshine so yeah I figured this would be a nice little plant to plant in here and see how it goes this is a bed that animals like to dig in so I'm constantly fighting with them and coming down in the morning and seeing that like there might be a plant that's been dug up but again once their roots established by next year I don't think many animals will be digging them up see I don't want to put too close to the roses because I'm afraid if I do that the rose will eventually take over the plant this is this is meant to be kind of a low growing bush but this is kind of rosa scotch pink and actually I should probably give them and I will likely give them some rose tone before the before the fall is out just to give them a nice boost of roots and then I'll come up here and mulch them very well for the for the winter months as well so this is a cupid's dart really pretty dried seed head you could see and then we have the moonshine then you have some viola right here so already this diversity of planting and you can see that I don't shy away from planting plants that are a little bit closer together this is scabiosa great plant that basically blooms from May to almost November if you're lucky so I love these plants and I the butterflies and the bees tend to love them too all right that's going to be it for now I'm going to plant the rest of those amsonias in there try to get some of that weeding done and then we'll continue on with some of the gardens here at the meadow house and beyond at Falk. We'll be sharing how the gardens and wildscaped areas mature as the seasons progress so if you enjoy videos like this be sure to like subscribe and hit the notifications button to help us grow and share these videos to more folks in the meantime we'll be cracking away at more of the gardens and renovations here at Flock. We'll see you in the next video.