The Ditch I'm Digging In...

This is a picture of where I get some of my transplanted plants. Generally I avoid removing wild plants from locations where they are occurring naturally. I'm choosing to move (rescue?) some of these for the following reasons...

1) I own the ditch. Er... strictly speaking my wife owns the ditch. I've been a stay-at-home Dad the past 15 years and she earned the money to buy the ditch along with a small bit of acreage attached.

2) Several colonies of plants growing in the ditch chase the sun out to the very edge of the ditch where new gravel is laid on the berm next to the road. I can't see the sense in letting dwarf larkspur or bloodroot be repetitively mowed and occasionally buried in gravel. I leave plenty of plants existing in the ditch since the road happens to be part of the Buckeye trail and the hikers and bikers probably enjoy seeing larkspur, bloodroot, and some of the other goodies in the ditch.

3) The plants are transported from this location less than 100 miles to the Cincinnati area. This is similar to the designated radius that Shaker Trace uses when collecting seed. I feel like I'm at least mimicking the approach of experts. The only difference being that I'm bringing home plants and not seed.

4) I usually install the plants in a "detox" bed inside my larger woodland garden at home. The detox bed allows me to watch the transplants more carefully to see if any stowaways came along with them in the soil. I'm somewhat fearful of inadvertently transporting something like Japanese Stiltgrass along with the plants from the ditch. Generally speaking Hamilton County has all the invasives that Brown County has. There would be more risk if the plants were moving in the other direction (this is rationalization but it's also largely true).

** I have no formal training in any of this stuff so it's entirely possible that I'm doin' it wrong. If so, let me hear about it. I'm not opposed to buying local, regional, or national genotypes from native plant sales but woodland ephemerals are generally not available there. Worse, these sales occasionally list non-native, ecologically questionable plants as native and by extension ecologically desirable. I view Shaker Trace as the gold standard in this type of work. Hopefully in the future they'll be able to make some seed available to the public. Local genotypes, collected with the most rigid standards and inclusive of woodland ephemerals for those working on at-home restorations.

*** Lately we've been talking about using our vegetable garden beds in winter to try to get some seeds like larkspur and bloodroot to germinate at home. People talk about being successful at this online... might as well give it a shot.

Publicado el 29 de abril de 2023 por stockslager