The earliest fruit in my yard is the wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana . Following the white blooms, I start checking my patch regularly starting on Mother’s Day. If the strawberries have yellow flowers, they are a non-native mock strawberry, Potentilla indica . The mock strawberry fruits don’t have as much flavor so I pull them out to make space for the native. Wild strawberries are small but sweet. The fragrance of the ripe fruit can lead you to them. Strawberries are the first edible fruit to ripen in May and are usually fruiting heavily in June. Collecting strawberries can be a lot of stooping and looking under leaves. Sometimes the rabbits and turtles beat me too them as they have more patience than I do. Native Americans call strawberries "oteagh-minick" (heart berry) due to their heart-shaped appearance. In 1794 Loskiel wrote that “Strawberries grow so large and in such abundance that whole plains are covered with them as with a fine scarlet cloth.” The scientific name Fragaria refers to the fragrance of the plant. Thoreau compares the smell to the “sweet scent of the earth”, the essence of spring. Wild strawberry can be used as a fast-spreading ground cover. It grows prolifically in part shade with rich soil, growing quickly with big leaves. Although the plant seems healthy, shade growth produced less flowers and fruit. To get earlier and better fruits give the plant full sun and well drained soil. These plants will have smaller leaves and spread more slowly but fruit better. When looking for strawberry to harvest in nature, check in sandy rocky areas with good sun exposure. I find them often along gravel roads that have been cut into a sandy hillside. They also grow well along the edge of driveways, roads, sidewalks, and foundations.  Wild strawberry is a rapidly spreading groundcover that grows by rhizomes. It is easy to propagate the plants by cutting off the runners and planting them into freshly cleared soil. Wild strawberry leaves are green through the winter and young strawberry leaves turn red in fall through winter. It is not often that I find enough strawberries to have a supply to cook with. Usually, I eat them all while collecting. When I do have a small abundance, I like to eat them on my cereal. If I have a large abundance, which has only happened once, I make jam. I love strawberry jam! I would like to some day make dehydrated strawberries, maybe this spring I will give it a try.

There are two species of golden Alexander commonly found in garden centers. The common golden Alexander, Zizia aurea , and the less common heart leaved golden Alexander, Zizia aptera . The difference between the two is that aptera has compound leaves at the base while aurea has simple basal leaves. Aurea also prefers drier soils. Zizia is in the carrot family which includes dill, parsley, carrot, celery, fennel, and cilantro.   Shade gardens are a common place to find golden Alexander. In the wild they are common in moist rich woodlands, bottomland forests, mesic upland forests, upland prairies, glades, savannas, banks of streams, rivers, and spring, ledges, tops of bluffs, fens, but also along roadsides. Moist rich soil is best but they are very resilient and can survive harsh conditions. In ideal conditions their 2 foot tall and wide dome of foliage is green all summer long even in drought.   They bloom yellow in spring April–June. Seeds ripen in mid summer when the seeds turn brown and easily shatter from the stalk. They and are easy to collect to share with friends. Collected seeds need to be stored in the fridge in moist soil for a minimum of two months or directly sown outside over the winter. Seeds not collected or eaten by birds are highly likely to germinate nearby. Populations of golden Alexander can spread quickly and fill in a new garden. Golden Alexander is a good choice for woodland restoration after invasive removal because of it’s prolific spread by seed and hardy nature.   The flat-topped flower clusters are visited by many bees, flies, butterflies, and other insects. Zizia is the host plant for the black swallowtail butterfly, papilo polyxenes , and for the specialist mining bee, Andrena ziziae . The golden Alexander mining bee is a tiny native bee that digs out a burrow in the soil. Look for pencil size holes in bare soil near the Zizia plant to find these fuzzy native bees provisioning their nests.   The Black Swallowtail is a large black butterfly with yellow, blue, and red markings and swallow tails. They only lay their eggs on members of the carrot family of which golden Alexander is our native representative. Females can lay 400 eggs but only about 4 of them will survive predation. Young caterpillars are black with orange spots and bumpy. Older caterpillars are black and yellow with green stripes. In Missouri black swallow tails have two generations per year in April-June and in late summer. They overwinter as a chrysalis attached to a stem. Bringing the chrysalis inside may cause it to emerge early before there is any nectar available to eat.   Golden Alexander is a great addition to any shade garden. If it becomes too aggressive, it is easy to rip out. Control it’s spread by collecting the seeds and spreading them in the back alley. I love having this plant in my yard for the beautiful flowers that attract so many pollinators and the dancing swallowtail butterflies that grow on it. It is a great plant for a beginner garden or a neglected corner.

Plant growth habits can sometimes come as a surprise. Plants may start to spread more than there is space for. How can unwanted spread be prevented? What should be mowed around, what blows in the wind, what needs competition, what will move downhill. With the numbers of native plants available in stores today, it would be impossible to list each one here but I will describe a few of the frequent offenders.   Ashy sunflower spreads into large colonies using underground runners. Since the plant is tall, it can over shadow smaller plants while also crowding them out underground. To keep this plant in check, plant it next to barriers like sidewalks or walls. Or be prepared to trench around it each year. Many sunflowers like plants in helianthus, silphium, and heliopsis have this characteristic of forming colonies by expanding their root system. Because of the spreading issue I like to add these plants after other plants have become established and staked out their own turf. The sunflowers also make nice prairie plantings when mixed in with other equally aggressive species.   Wild plum really wants to be a shrubbery. As the roots spread out, they form root sprouts that can come up over 10 feet away from the parent plant. Cutting off these sprouts often leads to even more sprouts coming up. Digging up the sprouts can damage the roots system and they often do not transplant successfully. Plant shrubs like plum, dogwood, hazelnut, willow, and sumac in areas where their root system will not be disturbed so they are less likely to produce suckers. Shrubby garden borders are great places for this type of plant.   Asters and goldenrods spread not only by spreading their roots but also by seeds. Aromatic aster is great at expanding its colony by roots while Drumund aster is better at spreading it’s seeds far and wide. Field goldenrod will send out long rope like roots and pop up a new plant every foot along it. When pulling up asters and goldenrods, make sure to dig down and get the whole root out. Seed spread can be limited by collecting the stalks before they ripen. Seeds need bare soil to germinate so minimizing bare soil near seedy plants can give them less spots to sprout. Asters and goldenrods look great in large clumps and are necessary for fall pollinators.   Joe pye makes a lot of seeds. Since it is such a tall plant, most gardeners can not work with the random volunteers of this giant plant all over the garden. Although seeds are important for birds, this is one of the plants that I dead head to prevent hours of work later weeding out the babies. After the flowers fade there is a window of time to get out in the garden and cut the seed heads off. Other plants that need their seeds clipped are rattlesnake master, and culvers roots. I like to plant these three together so I can maintain them together. Germinating seedlings should be pulled as soon as you can before they develop a deep tap root.   Blue lobelia makes thousands of dust like seeds that float on water. This means that baby blue lobelias will pop up anywhere downstream from their parent plant. The water dispersal technique is also used by many of the sedges. To prevent the spread, place these plants at the lowest point in the yard or block seed flow with a small dam. Planning for these water loving plants to move downstream can be used to your advantage by planting them upstream from where you want to planting to be densest.   Understanding how a plant will spread can be used to the gardener’s advantage when planning a garden. Plants that form colonies quickly can be given the amount of space they will need and use less plants to do it. Plants that are tall and aggressive can be paired with likeminded plants so they can keep each other in check. Very aggressive plants can be given firm borders, like sidewalks. Avoid using fertilizer on native plant beds to limit weedy growth. While this information might require some extra research, it is worth it in effort saved fighting the natural tendencies of a species with wanderlust.

The sad truth is that most stream banks in this city are dominated by bush honeysuckle. Honeysuckle is an opportunistic invader. Stream banks suffer disturbance more often with flash flooding events exacerbated by urban sprawl. After the water recedes, the honeysuckle arrives first on the scene to claim the disturbed area. The first step in removing honeysuckle is often making a path through it. Cut back branches to remove eye gougers and tripping hazards. The trees that are too big to pull out by hand, about an inch or more, can be trimmed back to a central leader. Don’t cut the big ones all the way to the ground yet, leave a sturdy trunk to help with pulling them out later. All smaller trees can be pulled out by hand. Cut enough honeysuckle to open the light to the soil. Killing all the honeysuckle first can increase erosion issues as the honeysuckle is the only thing keeping the bank in place. So next, we seed native bank stabilizing plants. If the area is shady, I recommend beak grass, river oats, and sensitive fern. These are plants that will spread rapidly to form a colony. If the area is sunny try mountain mint, fox sedge, and aromatic aster. Keep removing any baby honeysuckle that pops up for the next year or two. When the ground cover plants have established across the area, it is time to kill the big honeysuckle. The big honeysuckles can be root docked or cut and poisoned. Root docking can disturb the soil so try to keep the disturbance to a minimum and keep a continues eye out for erosion problems. The poison used for honeysuckle can have negative impacts on the stream ecosystem. Minimize any chemicals contaminating the banks by only painting the living portions of the cut with chemical and working when rain is not a threat. Once the big honeysuckle is out, it can be replaced with a native shrub. Great native plants for stream banks are gray dogwood, hazelnut, elderberry, willow, and sumac. Plant the new shrubs as soon as possible after removing the big honeysuckle. The roots from the shrubs will help control erosion by working with the groundcover to make a dense network of roots. Continue monitoring the stream bank several times a year. Baby honeysuckle will need to be pulled. Sometimes, all the disturbance from the replanting may bring in new invasives like Japanese hops or stilt grass. Stop invasives before they crowed out the natives. Soil erosion may happen and needs to be corrected right away. Checking the stream bank after every big rain is a good way to keep on top of soil washing away.

I’m excited to share that one of my clients decided to document her project clear application experience from start to finish in order help others through the grant application process. https://sites.google.com/view/bancroftgarden/   This project was designed to be a low maintenance, native plant garden in full sun. Native plants are planted to replace turf and a large rain barrel will be used to water the garden during summer droughts. This rainscaping project was fully funded by project clear because native plants absorb more rain than turf and rain barrels delay stormwater surges.   Sue’s garden is a model for an easy to install and maintain garden.  The plan is straight forward and easy to translate into another garden space. Sue would like her website resource to help others have success with their own project clear application.   I’m looking forward to following this website as the garden matures and fills in. I hope that in the future her garden will expand and she will also share that on the website.

Pemmican is a survival food used by native people and is probably the predecessor of the granola bar. The pemmican was made into bite size morsels for quick, on the trail consumption. Since people didn’t have refrigerators or microwaves it was made to be shelf stable. The main ingredients were dried meat and fat but many other ingredients were added such as dried fruits, nuts, grains, and dried herbs. I prefer my granola bars to be made of oats and chocolate so I’m glad to live in the modern age. The pemmican ingredients contained all the necessary fuel for long journeys where fats, calories, proteins, and sugars fueled the body. Unlike our current granola bar, flavor was not the main priority. If you are curious about what this fuel source tastes like, you can make some out of ingredients easily found in the back 40. If you do make this recipe, let me know how it went. I don’t hunt so I haven’t given it a try. I have heard it is not something that is easy to develop a taste for.   Pemmican recipe: Obtain 4 cups of lean deer meat, double ground. Spread it out very thin on a cookie sheet and dry at 180 degrees F for at least 8 hours or until sinewy and crispy. Pound the meat into a nearly powder consistency using a blender or other tool. Dry 3 cups of buckbrush and hackberries. Grind the dried fruit but leave a little bit lumpy for fun texture. Heat 2 cups of rendered deer fat on your stove at medium until liquid. Add liquid fat to dried meat and dried fruit, mix in 1 cup walnuts and a spoon of honey. Mix everything by hand. Let cool and store. Pemmican can keep and be consumed for several years.

When you look at the fruit of Missouri’s most common cactus, you might not think “that looks tasty”. With all the spines, cactus are well protected. But what are they so eager to protect? The red fruits of the cactus are edible, once you get past the spines. To avoid the spines, pull off the fruit with tongs. Use a skewer to hold the fruit over a flame to burn the spines off the fruit, ideally, use a campfire. When the skin is blackened and even the small hairs have burnt off, peel off the burnt skin. Now the fruit is ready to eat. I found the experience to be somewhat like eating overcooked okra because the seeds are very slimly. The fruit turns your fingers pink. It has a very sweet taste at first but with an after taste of green beans. Cactus fruit is easy to prepare if you are outdoors camping with a fire. It is kind of a mess indoors. Knowing how to eat Opuntia would be a nice survival skill. I know some people have developed a taste for Opuntia and enjoy eating it. I imagine with the right other ingredients it could be part of a delicious meal. The cactus fruits are often used to make jams and jellies. Opuntia humifusa , also known as the Eastern Prickly Pear, has large yellow flowers that bloom from May to July. The purple/red fruits ripen in late summer. The hardiness of the plant and beauty of the flowers make Opuntia a popular garden plant. It grows best in full sun and well-drained soil. This cactus is happy in a gravel filled pot growing amongst decorative rocks on a sunny front porch. It will also grow well in the gravely base of a south facing retaining wall. The cactus will remain evergreen through the winter and put on new growth in the spring. I recommend keeping it away from sidewalks or any place that children or pets play to prevent tears. The cactus has two types of prickles. The easily visible long sharp spines, but also tufts of tiny, barbed hairs called glochids. The glochids are more problematic because they are much harder to pull out of your skin and can irritate for days. Weeding around prickly pear is a dangerous chore. Plucking weeds early with long tongs is the best method I have found. Planting cactus in an area where it is less likely to be invaded by incoming seeds will prevent a lot of cursing in the future. Prickly pear is an important pollinator plant for many native bees. It is also the host plant for a few moths that need the cactus to reproduce. It is also deer resistant with those big spines. I hope we can all find a special space in our gardens for this plant or find time to pause and apricate it in the wild.

If you are ready to try something different than maple syrup and you really like that hickory smoke flavor here is a recipe for you. Shagbark Hickory Syrup is easy to make, simply collect some shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) bark chunks. Get some right off the tree so they aren’t dirty. Rinse your bark well to remove any bugs and debris. Bake the bark until it releases a smokey scent (350 degree oven for 20 mins). Put a few chunks of bark in a pot and cover with water. Simmer for 30 mins, then strain out the bark. Add sugar and dissolve it in the boiling water. Keep stirring until it has reduced by 20%. Allow to cool a little and poor the liquid into syrup jars to let it finish cooling. Hickory bark syrup can be used as a sweetener for dishes that could use a more sweet smoky flavor. It tastes great on baked squash. It can also be mixed into drinks as a simple syrup to remind you of sitting around the campfire.

One of my family’s winter traditions is to sit around a big bowl of popcorn and string garlands. Naturally, I eat about as much popcorn as I string but over eating it what the holiday is all about. I remember stringing long popcorn strands as a child and decorating the dogwood tree in the front yard. The tree looked very festive with white garlands and birds sitting in the branches. Now, I do this activity with the younger generation in our family, passing on this festive way to feed the birds.   To make the garlands you just need popcorn, needle, thread, and be ready to clean up a mess. Unseasoned plain popped corn is stabbed with a needle and thread and strung up in rows. I like to add a fresh cranberry every 10 or so popcorns just to make it pretty. This year I’m also dehydrating some orange slices to string up with the garland. The birds and squirrels really appreciate our efforts as we drape our garlands out on the tree branches outside the kitchen window. The birds appreciate a good holiday cranberry just as much as we do.   Peanut butter pinecones are also a festive art project that can be hung outside to benefit birds. What you need is a pinecone, peanut butter, small spatula, and a wet washcloth to clean up. This project can make an even bigger mess including peanut butter fingerprints everywhere. For less mess use an icing bag to squeeze the peanut butter between the scales. After you cram the peanut butter into the cracks of the pinecone you can sprinkle it with bird seed for extra razzle dazzle. Use a string or wire to hang the peanut butter pinecones outside in the tree. Woodpecker and nuthatches love the treats they find when they probe their beak into the pinecones.   Around this time of year, gingerbread houses are popular to make but not suitable to feed wildlife. However, kids can make small houses out of crackers for the birds. Use unsalted crackers and glue them together with peanut butter. The houses can be decorated with birdseeds, nuts, and fruit. A dried orange slice makes a lovely window. It is ok to use sticks in the house construction, the wildlife doesn’t mind. Set out the tiny village where you can watch it from the window. The birds and squirrels will be grateful to destroy it in no time.   Like most holiday food, popcorn, peanut butter, and crackers are not a healthy food for the birds. These craft projects a just a little holiday treat and then the birds must get back to eating healthy seeds, berries, and caterpillars again. This time of year, there is so much feasting. It is nice to be able to look out the window and see the garden creatures feasting too. For children, this activity can also be a reminder to share with others. Giving, is what the holiday spirit is all about.

Fallen leaves are a soft blanket that covers our winter garden. Let the garden rest, leave the leaves. Butterflies and moths roll leaves around themselves into over wintering shelters. Amphibians burrow into the leaves to sleep through the winter protected by this thick layer of insulation. On warm spring days, just watch what emerges from the leafy blankets. Sometimes I can find a sleepy spring bumble bee and hold it in my hand while it warms up enough to begin a day of pollinating my flowers.   Some of the insects and animals dependent on fallen leaves: American bumble bee Checkerspot butterfly Fritillary butterfly Luna moth Promethea moth Wood frog American toad Spotted salamander Ring neck snake Box turtle Red bat

The Solidago family, the goldenrods, get a lot of bad press. The antihistamine companies vilify goldenrods in their adds even though it is usually ragweed that they should be complaining about. Ragweed has tiny pollen that floats on the breeze and straight up a nostril. Goldenrod pollen is much larger and is picked up by bees to be transported between flowers. I once had a neighbor that told me my front yard goldenrods were causing her allergies, her doctor told her. I explained to her that the doctor probably meant ragweed but she insisted. So, I dug up my goldenrod and moved it to the backyard where she couldn’t see it. Sometimes it is best to just make the neighbors happy.   My favorite goldenrod for sun is the cliff goldenrod, Solidago drummondii . Cliff golden rod had stems that grow about 2 ft long but they arch over so it is a much shorter plant then the other goldenrods. Because of the arching, a single plant can get to be quite large around. As their name says, cliff goldenrod is happy growing off the side of a cliff. They also enjoy growing at the top of retaining walls and along the edge of driveways, anywhere with full sun and dry to average soil moisture. Bloom time is early fall.   In the shade garden, try bluestem goldenrod, Solidago caesia . Graceful arching stems have a bluish-purple tint. The 1-3 ft tall stems provide attractive habitat in winter for birds and insects. Blooming yellow August through October attracts lots of bees, wasps, butterflies, etc. Grows best in full to partial shade in Medium to dry soil. Bluestem goldenrod makes a nice border along a shady path.   Some goldenrods can be weedy and aggressive like old filed goldenrod, Solidago nemoralis . However, when it is in the right place, such as an old field or abandoned driveway, it is beneficial. Fast growing native weeds can help repair damaged soil and provide habitat for insects. Once the damaged area is left to repair for long enough, more permeant species can grow and create a more stable ecosystem.   The goldenrods are very important to the pollinators because they bloom in fall when many bees are provisioning their nests with food for the next spring’s generation. Goldenrods are golden yellow and a field of goldenrod is a beautiful sign of fall. Goldenrods and Asters look great together with the blue and yellow complimenting colors. Because goldenrods bloom in fall they can be kept shorter by trimming them back in the summer before the flowers begin to form without compromising the bloom.

“Phenology is the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors.”   Notable biologist like Edgar Denison and Aldo Leopold kept phenological records of the natural occurrences they saw around them. Leopold had decades of journals where he noted the first arrival of spring birds, fall migrations of ducks and the first bloom of wildflowers. Keeping a notebook of when flowers bloom each year is a practice of phenology. The bloom dates can be compared over the years to see if plants may be blooming earlier due to climate change or perhaps disappearing all together.   If plants are blooming earlier, are their pollinators around when they bloom? If the pollinators are not in sync with the flowers, then seeds will not be fertilized. If the plant blooms too early, could it be damaged by a late frost? I saw spring beauties booming in mid-February this year only to be covered by several inches of snow. Dose blooming too early decrease the populations of these plants or their pollinators?   Botanical journals such as Denison’s and Leopold’s contain valuable data that we can compare to notes today to see how life has changed over time. From year-to-year, changes are small and may have their ups and downs, but when we have enough data, we can see a big picture of long-term trends. The graphs from all this data show that plants are blooming earlier and sometimes not at the same time as their pollinators leading to declining populations.   Today, instead of writing in paper journals we can record our sightings into databases like i-naturalist. Allowing so many data points to be recorded in one space where scientist have access to them has made big phenology projects less tedious. Of course, we can still record data from our yards into a garden journal. This age-old practice is a way of keeping in touch with our gardens over the years. Each of our gardens is unique, filled with one of kind individual plants that we can get to know intimately.   Recording phenology is a way of connecting to nature, of being present and attentive. Each of us can study the biological life cycles around us in our own back yards. Keeping a record of birds, blooms, insects, and weather patterns can help us become better gardeners. A garden journal can become a keepsake or just a way to jog the memory the following year. What is happening in your garden today?