Early SPRING 2024 MEADOW, ORCHARD & WILDLIFE CORRIDOR Tour - Ep. 248 

I love seeing the transformation of your home and surrounding land. Thank you for providing education and inspiration.

Your fence and fences within fence are crucial. You're planting a massive domestic & wild garden of various sorts. The etymology of garden is enclosure. The etymology of gardener is plant-guard. A tour and review at this time of year is vital to think about what's clearly not there and could be. Your focus seems to be on both specimen plantings and scattershot sweeps of growth. The open long fence lines present an opportunity for a third way of forest-like tree corridors, living fences, and/or orchard-like hedges. You can maybe never have too many conifers along boundary lines, also a great place for towering deciduous trees - oaks, maples, black cherry, locusts, and walnuts (baseball-size black walnuts not overhanging any road), including many other trees surely found in your woods. Additionally or alternately colony forming high-bushes like black elderberry, bush cherry (including chokecherry), raspberry, hazelnut, sumac, willow, sunroot (perennial sunflower), beach plum, aronia, and a non-native like seaberry, might quickly fill out long prolific hedges along fence lines. That's the power of colonizing plants. Such food forest runs would amp up your forest & timber, fruit & nut & seed production for both humans and wildlife. Though if you want the edges left open, you want them open. Lots of showy, running, colony type rudbeckia and goldenrod and other bird and insect vital deer-proof plants outside the fence could fight the grass. Yarrow, comfrey. For the long and harsh winter months, border evergreens and a diversity of evergreens are special, I think, and can be vital in ways: red spruce, native holly, arborvitae, magnolia, eastern red cedar, hemlock where wet, pine, juniper, boxwood, etc. Also as hedges, currants & gooseberry can easily be propagated and can quickly grow and be spread. Other most-prized fruits along with cherry and raspberry also make for great hedges - though they may be somewhat more slow to come on - pawpaw, persimmon, blueberry, haskap, juneberry, apple, among others. Great for interactive, hands-on tours near walking paths, seems to me. Some of these can form colonies too. Your individual specimens and scattershot sweeps will awe people and benefit the ecology as they come on, and so to can your currently open fence lines be transformed into tree & bush corridors & hedges & clumps that would provide wind reduction and moisture-enhancement benefits additionally. Outer trail and path creation, mowing or crimping, can shape and control any colony type plants and such corridors or hedges by spacing plantings far enough away from the fence. Stretches of grape might go well there too, on special heavy-duty sections of fence, or interior. The colony-spreading high bushes can also crowd out "invasives." Anywhere you have trouble controlling unwelcome plants or conditions, black elderberry and the other robust and often fruitful colony-forming natives can make a big impact. With early assistance and deer protection, the native colony-type plants, and of course big trees, can rival the growth of "invasives" (which often means "deer-won't-eat" regardless of these plants' ecological impacts good or bad). A number of wonderful and robust highly ecologically beneficial plants and bushes exist that run and spread aggressively - if protected from deer. So in addition to filling out the borders, you can use these where you simply want some quick shade, or erosion control, or grass obliteration, maybe especially black elderberry since it is so fast growing and hardy, malleable and rewarding. If desired and allowed, these colony type plants can cover and recreate a lot of ground on their own over the months and years that you may lack the time or resources to ever get to. Evergreen patches and walls, solid fruit rows and clumps, and nut and seed and fruit tree corridors - there's so much opportunity at those long empty fence edges in ways that would also guard and protect and otherwise benefit the interior prized plantings. Simply put, given the deer fencing, highly beneficial native aggressives exist to make a big impact with relative speed, as you might direct. Species selection and varieties within species can be crucial in regard to both speed and ultimate success, though quality seedling trees can often grow with greater vigor than cloned varieties. Such a big space to transform, in such a relatively harsh climate. A superb growing climate but for only half the year, and so best suited for growing things that expeditiously grow and spread themselves or remain durable over a long period of time. When protected from deer, the wonderful colony type plants can go relatively big quick, if that's desired, somewhat comparable to autumn olive and the like, while less potentially overwhelming. Though some prunus blossoms are very susceptible to frost, others less so, prunus in particular can grow quite fast and some, as mentioned, will sucker. If anyone knows how to speed the rate of growth of amelanchier, I would like to know. My own efforts over the last several years have shown that without adequate fencing or tubing in face of deer, most everything struggles, at best, to grow. With fencing or tubing, I find most rewarding the highly ecologically beneficial plants, as well as some other productive plants perhaps less obviously beneficial, that seem to rapidly help themselves, with only modest outside assistance. That said, what you're attempting is more comprehensive and diverse than that and therefore more daunting and remarkable.

I LOVE THESE

I suggest thinking about taking up the tarps for a week in the mid-summer. Get any remaining roots to think it's time to grow again, before covering them again. Great way to get some water back in the soil to germinate weed seeds, too.

thank you for sharing updates on how everything progresses. i look forward to your updates. :)

In Madison County, our lupines are up. Coreopis is breaking through the ground. Serviceberry and fruit trees are blooming. Thanks for sharing your garden.

Here in my part of Scotland we have a local lochan where the owner has planted red dogwoods as a marginal around one side, in the snow & ice of winter this band of red looks amazing against the white. Great to see the progress you are making and your honesty over the setbacks that you’ve suffered.

A particular deer section can be good for harvesting. If you like venison.

I really enjoy seeing your progress and love the plant information.

Ya I struggle with deer also but like to see them so after I put up my fence I planted on the outside with all the stuff they like, especially Hosta's, they love those and a bunch of berries on the inside of the fence so they can nibble on one side of the bush that grows through and I get the rest for my fresh berries throughout the season and jams for late harvests. I'm on my second set of fruit trees as they killed the dozen or so from over eating and they just couldn't recover. Love the wild meadow in bloom shot, nice job.

Where did you buy your black tarp to kill the grass?

"WTYP" (a podcast...) posted an episode last year about the death of the Eastern forests, and the forester who they had on was effectively inspiring the audience to become deer hunters, because deer, in not having any natural predators now, are doing GREAT damage to any and all restoration projects across the eastern seaboard. This episode of yours reminded me of this. Kudos to you attempting your own restoration project there. Keep those deer out, indeed!

Thanks You very much

Bees benefit the most from huge trees that have flowers, like willow, red maple, linden, there's many options. Those give them the most nectar and pollen.

Bars open! Lmao! I'm so happy you're back!❤

Hello! Good episode, thank you! What about your forest regeneration program? Are you planning to cut some of the dead trees again this year? Will there be an episode about it?

Thank you Summer!

Yes you have to protect your yard your land. .I am a conservationist not a preservationist..you must control the deer pressure.

Idk about cutting down your stems. Baltimore Checkerspots overwinter as chrysalises likely on those penstemon stems.

Do you think wood chips would would choke out that grass...I've never had any luck with the black plastic..maybe I didn't leave on long enough

Maybe on a rainy day, over some coffee and home made carrot cake you and your partner, could share your love story please beloved Summer. I know it’s probably not your thing and none of our business but, a bit of romance never hurt. Sending you so much gratitude for instilling so much love in me for plants and an appreciation for indoor plants.

I love penstemon ❤

I’m curious what happens to the trees once they have been decapitated? Is it worth just leaving them or should you just replace it with a new tree/shrub?

❤❤❤

Do you have any Monarda in the meadow? Perhaps my favorite native genus

Geese are beautiful but loud

I have deer on my property every day. I have a stream that they visit. They eat everything.

In zone 4b around Moscow (Russia), lupin is very aggressive and overtook large areas of native meadows. Is it safe to plant in mass in your area?

We consider lupines to be a very harmful plant - mostly because of the invasive quality of it here in Finland. It's also been found that the pollen large-leaved lupine has a detrimental effect on bumblebees. They start to produce less offspring as they gather from them. They are beautiful tho.

Sorry to say but in my experience solarization doesn’t work in just a year.

Do you contend with poison ivy?

Thank you Ms. Summer and Sander. I really enjoy seeing how things are doing at Flocks. 💐💚🙃 Do you eat venison? If you do this fall might be a nice time to fill your freezer. I’m thinking the ones that managed to breech your fence line ? 💐💚🙃

Even if you kill everything under the tarp (solarization is done with transparente plastic?) Its to small of an area inside a big wild meadow. There s still seeds there, and new seeds will blow in. Weeding is a forever task...

Oh I forgot to say solarization also kills your soil microbes.

in my experience nature will reclaim the areas you try to replant - unless you spend an enormous amount of time and money trying to stop it - is it worth it? btw - thistle is an incredible edible!!!

adopt a carnivore

Can someone educate me, why are thistles so bad?

Tell camera person no talking lol. Great video otherwise!

Lack of hunting, lack of natural predators. Their overpopulation is not natural.