From ace gardener and photographer Ozark Hillbilly:
Last year I was able to catch a number of my DiL’s 5K runs. Mostly I stand around waiting for her at the finish line (maybe even catch the beginning of the race!) and be a familiar face when she crosses the finish line (she only competes with herself).
Then we sit and visit for 15 or 30 mins and she heads for home to her family and I wander the back roads to our place.
The bonus is I get to see some places I would otherwise never go to. These pics are from a St Charles County park that is heavily invested in prairie restoration. (Sorry, I have forgotten which one and when I searched their website, nothing rang a bell — they have some really nice parks to visit!)
The grasses were glorious.
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What’s going on in your garden (planning / prep / memories), this weekend?
sab
Weirdly warm February here. Snowdrops bloomed. 19° tonight so they and the daffodil and the scyilla buds and the rhododendrons will all freeze.
Global warming is fun but unpredictible.
satby
The prairie restorations really are glorious, aren’t they? Thanks OH!
Probably not today because I’ve been awake since 1:30 this morning and I’ll need a nap; but tomorrow will be warm enough to unearth the daffodils I want to move. Last week during the nice days the ground was still frozen, but I think it’s thawed by now. They’re just barely above ground now, so if I move quickly this week they’ll be snug in a new place a month or more before bloom time.
satby
@sab: we had rain followed by snow Friday night into Saturday, mostly melted away. But it flattened my rhododendron bush from the weight, and I hope it survives.
sab
I need to order my Meyer lemon replacement tree, plus the spring planted perrennials.
CCL
Beautiful photos. So tranquil.
Princess
Maybe someone covered this last night but: Canadian radio was in SC yesterday and couldn’t find one person who’d say they were voting Haley. And yet Trump couldn’t break 60%. I know it’s her state but still. Warren got schmucked in MA last time round. He’s dominant in one sense but he’s also weak. Also too, all the people they interviewed sounded over 70. My guess is her voters were younger and from the map, they were definitely more urban. And they’re too scared or something of Trump voters to say publicly that they support her. Even though they are close to half the state.
ETA: oops! I did not realize/remember this was the garden thread. Apologies for polluting it with idiots.
R-Jud
While I was reorganizing my shed today I discovered a big bag of daffodil bulbs I forgot to plant. Some are sprouting. Should I just stick them in the ground and not expect much?
OzarkHillbilly
@R-Jud: Yes. Even if they don’t bloom this year, next year they will.
JPL
Beautiful photos!
Van Buren
I’m done with tulips. The GD rabbits decimate them. I need to borrow a pack of coyotes for a few weeks.
mrmoshpotato
@Van Buren: Thumper stew?
Silly rabbits. Piss off and go eat some Trix?
ryk
Could be Quail Ridge park or Indian Camp Creek park. I live nearby, play disc golf at both of those
Dorothy A. Winsor
I love prairie restoration projects. Where we lived in Iowa, John Deere even replaced a gigantic front lawn with prairie. It was gorgeous.
OzarkHillbilly
IIRC, they had a course there too. We have one up at the Sullivan fairgrounds/city park.
As do I.
swiftfox
My guess is the rural Missoura counties don’t do prairie restoration. In my experience only the urban counties have the money for conservation parks.
OzarkHillbilly
@swiftfox: Lots of prairie restoration in rural MO, undertaken by many different agencies. I suspect there is a fair amount of federal money behind these projects, probably some state money too. The Department of Conservation is much loved here and they do a lot of work for endangered species and habitat restoration. The same for the Dept of Natural Resources who are responsible for state parks.
RevRick
@sab: After today, we will experience a swing of temperatures 15+ degrees above normal for much of the next ten days. This is the upside of climate change from a human comfort standpoint. Now. Come summertime I suspect it will mean added misery.
Meanwhile, in the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s still summer, the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is showing signs of great stress, heading towards collapse. (Scientists have determined that in the last interglacial warming period Antarctica lost two and a half football fields of ice pack thickness in just 200 years.) Bad things can happen rapidly, and Thwaites itself could cause a two foot rise in sea levels. But Thwaites acts as a plug holding back an ice shelf that could add another eight feet of sea level rise.
It’ll suck to be South Florida…or Shanghai… or Bangladesh.
Raven
Trigger, Woody Allen Diane Keaton
https://youtu.be/DHLlM8Z7fAc?feature=shared
Spanky
@RevRick: On the bright side, with a 10 foot rise in sea level, this will be waterfront!
Just don’t ask about the septic.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: Heh.
Gvg
I. Eyed to come see some prairie restorations. I have been reading about them for decades. Maybe when I retire. It’s spring here and I don’t have enough time. Relatives visiting parents and I am expected to come over today. I hope I can slip away after a few hours. Had hoped to finish planting my creole garlic today. Yesterday, I separated the growing roots of 5 pots of dwarf mondo grass and sprigged an area where grass has been shaded out to prevent erosion on my sloping lot where I need to walk. It’s a boring planting but will be very low maintenance as I age. Ever since I moved in, I have been trying to build a beautiful garden that will need very little work when I am older. In my childhood I saw my grandmother be overwhelmed as she aged and tried to stay in her home. Now my parents need my help, while I am still working. I never married, so I need to plan carefully. The garden is my joy. Retirement communities are very limited. I want to have an easy to live in house. It’s quite hard on a budget. A big thing is plant shrubs that get to the right size and don’t need trimming. Reduce the size of the lawn. I try to grow shrubs that also flower and plant perennials. I use annuals to fill in while the permanent stuff grows up. I am good at seeds and rooting cuttings. Some of the shrubs I rooted from my last garden or my mother.
The azaleas have started. Lots of fragrant things starting, Osmanthus (tea olive) and Banana shrub (Michelia or magnolia) smell wonderful. Ferns are sending up new shoots and I need to trim the old ones. Wild violets are blooming. It’s time to trim the old winter killed stuff off all kinds of things. The oak trees are shedding their leaves and I will be collecting the leaves other silly people discard to compost and mulch my beds for this year for the next several weeks. Non gardeners don’t know what they are wasting. Perfect weather almost. We have even had some regular rain this year. Most springs are rather dry. I do hope the El Niño ends before summer.
I have on order a new mist timer. Old one bit the dust. Such a nuisance not having one. Even my mother is impatient. She had gotten to expect she could have me root things for her anytime.
stinger
Oh, how beautiful. Thank you!
Raven
@Gvg: I saw my grandmother be overwhelmed as she aged and tried to stay in her home.
we are right there , I’m basically useless in the yard and my wife’s back problems have us in a pickle. She’s tried hiring help and is never happy with them.
Chief Oshkosh
Thanks for the photos, OzarkHillbilly. They remind me of the fields I grew up in. They have a beauty that I hadn’t thought about for a long time.
OzarkHillbilly
The jet stream has gone rogue. The high today: 76. Tomorrow: 78. Tuesday: 82. Then February returns for a few days with rain (snow?) and highs in the 40s and 50s. Then it’s April again.
While winter hits me a lot harder than it did just a decade ago, I am not liking this new normal. Still, it’s nice to see the daffs and bluebells poking up thru the leaves.
Kristine
Thanks for the photos, Ozark. I can hear the breeze rustling through the grasses.
Nodding along as others note the roller coaster temperatures. It was 60F here in far NE Illinois a couple of days ago. Then came below freezing chill and a coating of snow. Now that melting as it warms back up to the 50s today. Could have thunderstorms later in the week.
The USDA kicked up the lakefront area to Zone 6 as part of the latest zone reassessment. Twenty-some years ago, it was Zone 5.
OzarkHillbilly
@Chief Oshkosh: When I was a kid, my parents took us all on great journeys of discovery in the great American West. I was never bored by the endless expanses of grasses in KS, NE, SD, ND, etc etc and their far away horizons. I still feel the same.
HinTN
@Raven: I can see it coming. Mrs H and I were very industrious and expansive in our shaping of this landscape in our 50s. Then the 60s hit, with attendant knee and hip replacements and for the last 10 years Mother Nature had her way with it. I got lucky because a young man who hunts our property was agreeable to working with me on weekends and we’ve been sailing against the entropy tide. My hope is to get things to where we can enjoy them in future years with the same neglect of recent past. I admire Ozark’s work and what I’ve seen of yours. “Getting old ain’t for the faint of heart.”
SkyBluePink
Lovely photos of a different beauty.
HinTN
@OzarkHillbilly: Do y’all have Johnson Grass in Misery? It’s the scourge of the south and I’m afraid to let the fields go natural because of it.
Gvg
@Raven: Good help in the garden is hard to find, except for pure brute labor. They can’t weed because beyond lawn chemicals, they don’t know a weed seedling from a flower. My mother loves the wildflower self sown meadow look, but is finally admitting she can’t maintain that because she can’t weed effectively now she needs a walker. I am trying to simplify her garden. Some of her plants like to sucker. I am thinking about making collars from big pots and burying it around her runners, so I don’t have to dig up new sprouting bushes every few months. Not sure it will work. Also thinking of burying pots of annuals inside another slightly larger pot, so she could just change them out with the season very easily. Then she could redo the planter at a table or potting bench, and I could just walk over (she can’t lift much weight) and drop the redone pot in.
It has made a big difference that she now recognizes she needs to cut back. She is having me remove plants that never bloomed and didn’t live up to garden book promises. That has simplified things a lot, and what is left looks much better and clean. I could never get her to shovel prune things before. I have to do it for myself too. Now, while I can.
delphinium
Wonderful photos! Love the play of sunlight on the various grasses.
OzarkHillbilly
@HinTN: Oh yeah, but I don’t have to worry about it with my clay/chert top”soil”. It gets bad in the river bottoms.
HinTN
@OzarkHillbilly: How do those who restore those prairies deal with it? I get that maybe it’s just got to be a part of the veldt but I can’t get beyond wanting it GONE.
JAM
Thanks for the photos, OzarkHillbilly. This reminds me I want to visit the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County this spring.
JAM
@HinTN: I think the most common method to clear ground for prairie restorations like that (especially with lots of invasive species) is to use several rounds of Roundup to kill everything first.
HinTN
@JAM: Copy that, but the seeds are resident in the soil and over time it comes back, first as a small patch and then boom. Maybe topical application to the small patch…?
Glidwrith
@OzarkHillbilly: In Southern California we keep getting rain that had been drought. I can look at wind patterns out in the Pacific and we have a continuous cyclone (there’s actually three out there) that keeps spinning rain bands off of it. I have no idea how long it’s been there or how stable the formation will be, but yeesh.
satby
@JAM: ok, so you made me look, and depending on what’s already growing they may use herbicides or controlled burns.
JAM
I’m sure it would be an ongoing problem, choosing aggressive prairie species that establish quickly would help. I keep wishing for weedkillers tailored only to one plant species but no one will invent them.
TerryC
This week I was locating and cutting scionwood (pears, apples, crabapples) for some grafting later this spring. I had never done that before and realize now how difficult it is to just go do it randomly. I got lots of pear and crabs but the Winter Banana Apple tree I had targeted appeared to be diseased. I’ll do better next year. Ordering lots of mulberry and stone fruit scionwood. Looks like I will be getting Baldwin apples this year from my first successful grafted fruit onto a crab two years ago.
Seems like winter is over here, with only 2-3 weeks of decently cold weather. A lot of the trees, especially oaks and hickories, I have been planting for ten years as I reforest 14 previously tilled acres are ordered from more southern locations because I expect their genetics to be more adaptable to the upcoming climate changes here in SE Michigan.
JAM
On Tuesday, we’re supposed to get up to 84, then drop to 29 that night. It’s definitely springtime in Oklahoma.
TaMara
@Van Buren: Or a nice Red-Tail Hawk, who seemed to lower the population of squirrels and rabbits in my neighborhood, while eyeing my ducks until I send the dogs outside to discourage her.
TaMara
Beautiful photos. I love, love, love grasses.
TaMara
@TerryC: This is so great. Love seeing it.
I’m sad that my beautiful plum tree has developed peach borers and after a good trim and a pretty harsh treatment this fall by our arborist, seems to still be succumbing to it and I’ll have to look at a replacement tree (probably another honey locust to match the one I planted a few years ago) in the near future. I have also transplanted two volunteer acorn trees into the backyard. Thanks squirrels!
JAM
@HinTN: I replied without hitting reply. If I were trying to do that, I would spray or burn (whichever works best) for a whole spring and summer every time the johnsongrass was visibly growing, then in autumn use a seed drill or some no-till method to put the seeds in the thatch without removing it. I don’t know what seeds you would choose in your area, but it would need to be aggressively rooting perennials mixed with fast growing annuals that will cover the soil quickly and crowd out johnsongrass seedlings. Then I would still have to spot-spray or burn the johnsongrass for at least a few years.
Unfortunately, I am actually too lazy to do any of that. I guess I should have said you would do it ;)
JAM
If you live in Tennessee, I think woods would take over if you just stopped mowing, though.
raven
thanks everyone
kalakal
Great photos, love to see grasses as they should.
Pleasant here in on the west coast of Central Florida sunny, slightly cool. Garden definitely showing signs of life. Amaryllis beginning to perk up
Albatrossity
Prairie restorations are wonderful. Native tall-grass prairie is even more so. Come to Konza Prairie or Tallgrass Prairie National Prairie Preserve here and see for yourself!
StringOnAStick
@raven: Love the grasses, I always use some native grasses in the landscaping I’ve done. Our front yard was planted in two kinds of local native bunchgrasses (Idaho fescue and Crested wheatgrass) last spring, with perennials and shrubs mixed in to replicate the native Ponderosa woodlands around here. It’s a bit of a shock in the evergreen chemlawn suburbia; heh!
I appreciate hearing from people being honest about what they can handle with aging, and my planning reflects that in what and how I plant. I decided a few days ago that every year I will do a project that has that in mind. The landscape transformation is mostly complete here, but the garage floor was polished for some stupid reason and is treacherous when wet, so this summer I will do the do it yourself floor coating. We are extremely active 65 year olds and I don’t want a stupid slip on a slick floor to screw that up.