Tagged: Edible native plants

Carbon Garden / Edible Plants / Ferns / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Larval Host Plants / Native Plants / Permaculture / Propagation / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Fabulous Ferns for Every Garden

Why do gardeners use ferns in their designs?  Ferns form an important layer in the landscape, especially in shady gardens.   Peaceful and calming, they grow lushly, providing both structure and interesting texture.   Some may dismiss ferns as uniformly green, but many varieties provide vibrant color.   Ferns make excellent ground cover, specimen and filler plants.  While some grow as single fronds arising from a rhizome, or in small vase-shaped clusters, many ferns spread to form larger and larger clumps over time.

Ferns are very easy to grow, needing little care. They rarely have any sort of disease or pest, and neither chemicals nor machines are needed to care for them.  All types of ferns are perennials and grow better with the passing years.

Birds / Carbon Garden / Container Gardens / Evergreen Perennials / Ferns / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Native Plants / Perennial Care / Permaculture / Propagation / Soil Conservation / Sustainable Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Unraveling the Mystery of Growing Ferns from Spores

Ferns have successfully propagated themselves in nature, with no human assistance, for millennia. So it shouldn’t be too complicated, right?

Animal repellant products / Container Gardens / Deer / Edible Plants / Flowering Shrubs / Food Forest / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Herbs / Perennial Care / Permaculture / Soil Conservation / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Planting a ‘Food Forest’ at Home for Sustainable Harvests

For most of human history, families relied on gathering foods growing in their environment for some portion of their diet.  And many of these delicious and nutritious foods grow on long-lived trees or shrubs, from persistent perennials, or from plants that readily self-seed.  This very sustainable form of agriculture allows for food production with few inputs of water, fertilizer or labor, once the plants establish.  Perhaps most importantly, there is minimal disturbance to the soil’s ecosystem.

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Edible Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Native Plants / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Bringing Birds to the Garden

  Do you feed the birds? Most of us gardeners do. Unless you are protecting a crop of blueberries or blackberries, you probably enjoy the energy and joy birds bring to the garden with their antics and songs. Birds also vacuum up thousands of flying, crawling, and burrowing insects. Even hummingbirds eat an enormous number of insects as they fly around from blossom to blossom seeking sweet nectar. Birds are an important part of a balanced garden community. We have...