Reply to Balu's 1 April post

Balu posted a comment on 1 April that I didn't notice until Mary pointed it out to me.

Here is his question:

I study landscape architecture not horticulture, so I'm interested in the whole area close to your garden.
Can you write some words about how you in the county take care of the natural fauna? (Regulations-for example in horticulture, conservation, rehabilitation of the natural state-using native species.......)
Are there any National Park or other areas under other kind of protection etc.?

I know that its a big topic, and I would be satisfied if you can post some links where I can find some information.

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The conservation situation in Wisconsin is quite fragmented, just as it is on the National level. The US is a patchwork of overlapping administrative districts: Federal (National), State, County, City, Township. Each has its own set of regulations and there are different rules regarding whose regulations are in force where.

At the State level there are a few protected species of plants and the regulations concerning them are weak on private lands.

Here is a link to one of the State agencies responsible for environmental protection:

http://www.datcp.state.wi.us/core/environment/environment.jsp

Basically the State tells us what we can't have on our property rather than what we must leave on our property. There are a number of invasive species that we are supposed to control, but enforcement is sporadic. See my post "Weeds and more weeds," below.

Many people attempt to rehabilitate native prairie areas, with varying success. We are doing a bit of that in the area around our garden. We plant native species and control invasive and non-native plants, but a project like this is endless. Here's a photo of part of our 'no-mow' area taken on 30 July last year:



It looks a bit 'weedy,' yes? (The resolution of the posted image is poor, so you may have to use your imagination to see the items I'm talking about.) Most of the plants are pasture grasses - orchard grass, perennial rye and brome - that are non-native but well established. Others are native plants that we have planted over the years - the yellow flowers on the left and center right are a form of prairie dock while the orange flowers on the right are called butterfly weed. The bush near the birdbath is a non-native plant that we put in several years ago to provide cover for birds visiting the birdbath. The tall green plant to the right of the birdbath is a native yellow coneflower that blooms in late summer. The nastiest plant in the photo is hard to see. It's in the lower center, to the right of the dead tree and below the orange flowers. It is birdsfoot trefoil, a yellow flowering creeper planted on many highway rights-of-way to control erosion. It can take over a field in a decade, strangling native plants and forming a mat several feet deep. We pull it out when we see it (we must not have been looking very hard in late July!) but the roots are deep. Constant vigilance is the price of prairie restoration (not that we are restoring a prairie here - just putting in nice flowers).

Still, we have made some progress in 10 years - here's a photo of the same area taken in July 1999:



This photo was taken looking in the opposite direction - the house and trees in the background are located were our present deck is now, but the foreground area is almost exactly where the birdbath is located in the photo above. The plants are mostly giant ragweed with some burdock, fleabane daisy, bladderpod and others thrown in.


Part of our property is enrolled in a State of Wisconsin program intended to manage forest lands for timber production, with a (very) secondary goal of plant management. This program is called Managed Forest Law (MFL) and is incredibly complicated (what government program isn't?). Here's a link to the MFL site:

http://dnr.wi.gov/forestry/feeds/faqsFull.asp?s1=ForestTax&s2=MFL&inc=ftax

The MFL program is designed to encourage timber production through property tax abatement. Each MFL project has an associated land use plan, with a (very small) part devoted to faunal protections. Since each MFL project is specific to the landowner and property, there is an incredible patchwork of regulation and practices on different sites.



Regarding parks, there aren't any National Parks in Wisconsin, but the US National Park System (NPS) is perhaps different than the one in Hungary. The big NPS parks are mostly in the American West, with few east of the Rocky Mountains. Here's a link to a US National Park Service website that has an interactive map of the various parks - http://www.nps.gov/

This doesn't mean there aren't any parks in Wisconsin, they are just at a lower administrative level. Wisconsin has State parks and County parks. Here is a map of the State parks in Wisconsin:



It came from this site:http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/land/parks/specific/findapark.html

The State Park nearest to our farm is Wildcat Mountain, about 16 km away.

http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/land/parks/specific/wildcat/

I could talk about this forever, so I will quit while I'm ahead...

wb

Back again

Hello Everybody,

It has been a while since I put anything new here.

The portulaca seedlings are doing well.



And the strawberries also.



The garden doesn't look much different but we have planted peas, lettuce(s), spinach, beets, shallots and carrots. The garlic is coming up but it's still very small.

Progressive Sprouting

The strawberries and portulaca are moving along.

The strawberries have developed full secondary leaves.



But the portulaca are still making do with their original pairs. As I recall it will be a few weeks before they begin to develop a stem and more leaves.

No (well, amost no) snow

The snow is gone, at least for now.




Here is the garden on 22 March. I have just taken off the mulch that covers the rows and put it in the walkways between them. The upper layer (2-3 cm) of soil is frozen but will thaw out in the next few days. At this time of year exposed soil thaws quickly but the upper crust will often re-freeze at night. Very cold weather can drive the frost deeper into the ground. Repeated expansion/relaxation of this layer, called frost heaving, can break plants where the stem and root join. This can be a problem in alfalfa fields, especially if they were cut late in the fall and did not produce enough growth to insulate the soil around the stem.

We don't have anything in our garden that can be damaged by frost heaving. We use mulch to reduces winter frost depth and keep soil organisms active. However, this benefit is somewhat offset by delayed thawing of the upper soil layer.

In past years I have measured soil temperatures during the winter and spring. You can find this information on my personal website (http://warrenbuckles.com/). Look in the section 'Warren and Wendy Garden' and find the article titled 'W & W Garden Soil Temperatures - how hot is our dirt?'

Weeds and more weeds

Vera asked about our weeds and about wild species and/or protected plants we have in the area.

Here is my rather long-winded answer:

First - weeds.

Our Amish neighbor says a weed is a plant that's growing in the wrong place.

By that definition we have a few misplaced plants in our garden. I actually don't know the botanical names of most of them.  

Since we are trying to keep our land in organic certification, we don't usually use herbicides. Still, cutting, digging or mowing in the right season can do a lot to control undesirable plants. Like all gardening/farming, patience is a key part of the strategy. If we don't do it this year, we can do it next year...

We try to keep the open soil in the garden covered with mulch (straw). This keeps light off anything that germinates and keeps the soil moist so weeds are easy to pull. We try to pull things before they are very large so I don't recognize most of the plants I remove, but many are grasses from the nearby pastures and hayfields. This would include various rye grasses, quack grass(Elytrigia repens) and a local rye variant called 'court grass.' 
One of the most common weeds is not a grass but a forb: giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida). The seedling of this weed (weedling?) closely resembles the full grown plant and we often see these in the garden. Fortunately, they are very easy to pull up, even when well along.

We almost never allow a weed to go to seed in the garden, so all the seeds have to come in some other way - wind, birds, on our clothes or in the compost and mulch we use. As a result we don't have an overwhelming number of weeds in the garden itself. Still, we pull quite a few small plants every week.

Outside the garden but close to the house, our biggest problem is with invasive plants (obviously very far from where they belong). These include burdock, white sweet clover (Melilotus alba), birdsfoot trefoil ((Lotus corniculatus) and Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense).  

Burdock (Arctium, family Asteraceae) is an invasive plant that came from Europe. When we first bought the farm the area around the old house was a solid burdock forest, with plants 2 m high in places. We have mostly eliminated it from the area around the garden but a few seeds manage to sneak in. They can be very hard to pull out if I don't catch them quickly - the taproot can go down a meter or more. However, burdock is a biennial and is easy to kill in the second year - I use a sharpened trench shovel and cut diagonally through the taproot about 10 cm below ground level, pulling off the leafy top and leaving the taproot as a feast for insects.  

We spend a lot of time each year controlling non-native invasive plants. We learn more about them each year and the list keeps getting longer.  

A particularly nasty invasive plant is wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa). The sap of this plant is a potent skin irritant - but only after sun exposure. You can handle it all day as long as you are not exposed to sunlight and/or wash the sap off before being in the sun. (But who does gardening in the dark?) Anyway, with sun exposure to affected skin, wild parsnip sap can cause skin irritation that resembles second to third degree burns and can cause permanent scarring.  

Second: wild species and/or protected plants we have in the area.

The 'official' Wisconsin threatened plant list follows:

Dwarf lake iris (Iris lacustris) 
Status:Threatened

Eastern prairie fringed orchid (Platanthera leucophaea)
Status:Threatened

Fassett's locoweed (Oxytropis campestris var. chartacea) 
Status:Threatened 

Mead's milkweed (Asclepias meadii)
Status:Threatened 

Northern wild monkshood (Aconitum noveboracense)
Status:Threatened 

Pitcher's thistle (Cirsium pitcheri) 
Status:Threatened 

Prairie bush-clover (Lespedeza leptostachya)
Status:Threatened


I have to confess that I don't know if any of these grow on our land, but we do have some trillium in the woods. Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum) is a ground- hugging plant that blooms in mid spring. They have lovely three-petaled flowers (hence trillium) and can form a carpet of flowers in a oak forest. Unfortunately, white tailed deer eat trillium, and, just like all of Wisconsin, we have far too many deer on our property.

Other wild species that I am familiar with include hepatica, pasque flowers and many species of berries (blackberry, red and black raspberry and elderberries). The blackberries and black raspberries are native and very good eating. The red raspberries are a mix of native and imports. We also cultivate raspberries - there is a 100 m long row of summer and fall bearing raspberry plants along our south fence. 

An interesting wild species of mushroom grows in our forest. These are called morels and resemble truffles in that they grow around trees (in the case of morels, elm trees) and are earthy in taste. We are on the edge of the morel season right now - they show up in mid spring. I put them on my grill along with a piece of steak - very good...

Warren

A little less snow

There was a little less snow on the garden last Thursday (12 March):

Sprouting seeds inside

Hello All:

We have been sprouting seeds inside since 16 February.

Here are some photos of our setup. We use a shelving unit equipped with ordinary 4 x 40 W fluorescent light fixtures. We set this up in our guest apartment and keep the temperature at 20-21C. Here is the shelving unit and lights:



We start the seeds in 5 x 5 x 5 cm plastic containers. These come in interconnected sets of 36 containers and are supported by water tight plastic trays about 3 cm deep. Each container has a small slot in the bottom to allow water to flow in or out. They are filled with a 'sterile' growing medium. It is about 50% ground sphagnum moss and 50% vermiculite buffered to neutral pH with lime. This medium has no added fertilizer/nutrients. I wet the medium to the consistency of a damp sponge before filling the containers.

Then we put seeds in the containers - pushing them into the medium to the requied depth or, in the case of very fine seed, sprinkling them over the surface.

Once the seeds are in the containers we cover the surface with plastic film and newspaper and wait for them to sprout. Here are some trays we put up on Sunday, 15 March. They contain flower seeds: portulaca, hybrid lupines (dwarf red) and some hybrid morning glory varietals:



Once the seeds germinate I take off the plastic film and newspaper and place the tray under the light units. The lights are left on 24 hours a day - no rest allowed! The first few days after germination are critical - the seedlings are very small and have very little root to absorb water. During this period we use a water sprayer to 'mist' the trays several times a day as well as adding water to the trays to keep the growing medium damp (but not too wet or the roots will rot).

About a week after germination we start fertilizing the plants with a 25% diluted fish emulsion (1-0-0), increasing the strength of the fertilizer over the next weeks to 100% in four steps.

I started some wild lupine and lobelia seeds on 16 February. The lobelia haven't shown much action (they are 'erratic' but average - 21-28 days to sprouting, according to the package) but the lupines are beginning to germinate. I scratched their very hard seed coats with Wendy's diamond nail file and, clearly, did a better job on some than others.

Here is a closeup of the wild lupines - one seedling is doing well, while another is just emerging:



(BTW, the growing medium in this photo is ordinary potting soil, not the stuff I described above - hence the large white chunks of pearlite)

On 3 and 4 March I started some alpine strawberries and parsley. I soaked the parsley seeds in water overnight to encourage germination. These are in the tray on the shelving unit in the upper photo and, if you look closely, you can see the parsley seedlings in the right center (the lupines are just beyond them, in a separate tray).

Here is a closeup of some alpine strawberry seedlings:



Pretty small, yes?

The position of the light unit is critical for good growth - it should be as close as possible without touching the leaves. During the first few days after germination of the strawberry seeds I had the light unit set too high above them and some of the seedlings show the result. They were on the window side of the shelving unit and got a trifle 'leggy' trying to get closer to the sunny window...



Notice how long the stems are and how the seedlings are tilted to the right. I have since corrected this problem and they should turn out OK.

The alpine strawberries are a 'hobby' plant - we put them on the edges of our flower beds and they yield tiny but extremely flavorful berries. They are perennials but tend to fade after several seasons. I last started these in 2003, I think, and the plants from that batch were starting to fade last year. We should have plenty of new ones by May...

We will add seed trays over the next six weeks until the shelving unit is completely filled with plants.

We have an 11 day trip to Arizona and New Mexico coming up, leaving 26 March and returning 5 April. I hope these seeds germinate before then - otherwise I will have to rely on my tenants to do all the fussy business of watching for germination, misting, etc. We shall see...

wb