The native garden starts are in the ground!

2026-06-16T13:00:00Z

The native garden starts are in the ground!

Today on 2026-06-16, I took everything off their shelves and put my seed starts for My Wetland and Pollinator Garden in the ground.

Not much to look at yet, I suppose, but I did manage to keep this plot of the yard mostly free of grass and noxious weeds, I did have to rip out a bunch of morning glory/bindweed this morning before it got too hot.

The seed starts were a mixed bag, the end of February was way too late for some of these to germinate, really they needed to stratify over winter, but it was fun.

overall, I managed to germinate the yarrow, goldenrod, spiria, sagewort, bigleaf lupine, and showy milkweed. My friend Suzi also gave me quite a lot of showy milkweed, rosy checkermallow, and oregon sunshine. Barring one poor desiccated corpse, my checkermallow and sunshine failed to come up, so that was a nice treat and they are going to do really well back there.

I'm going to spread a bunch of seed this fall and start some cold stratifying in fall, but this was a good first experiment in starting to claim back some of that back sunny patch for natives. Next week I'm planning to drive out to Doak Creek Nursery and get an osoberry and oceanspray and red flowering currant to stick along the fences and in the front yard, and some ferns for the wet spots.

As for My Herb Planter, well it didn't take quite so well. I'm probably gonna buy some from Down to Earth when I get back, the only things I managed to keep alive were a shitload of fennel, sage, and rosemary. they'll all be quite happy out in the sun but the spot where i put my germination tent was a bit too sunny and became an open shelf for whatever wetland wildland cedar fungi came through, and they had most of the stuff I was looking forward to for lunch...

The first fruit on my backyard trees are coming in, some varieties of plum, some pears, and the first flush of crabapples. 😄

My Herb Planter and Wetland and Pollinator Garden are starting to germinate :)

2026-03-08T15:35:00Z

My Herb Planter and Wetland and Pollinator Garden are starting to germinate :)

Last week I started a bunch of seeds in my greenhouse for a little bit of an herb garden and native plant corner in the wet part of my backyard. After a week, some things are coming alive:

The western goldenrod has started, the rest of the natives aren't really coming alive and may not given the weather:

the California Poppy is doing well:

some of the other decorative annuals are waking up too

the Thyme is going and the sage just started to germinate:

the dill

and the summer savory

Gardening

The native garden starts are in the ground!