About

In the fall I started looking for a new home and ordered dozens of native seeds to start plants for a future yard. Since the seeds take a couple seasons to flower I hoped to have enough time to find a place to plant them, but I figured I could find homes for them with friends and family if not.

I moved to a small property near town with an established garden and quickly began using the Seek app to determine what was planted. Unfortunately, all of the bushes turned out to be severely invasive. Many of the plants that had filled in the gardens were not considered invasive but were clearly aggressive. I spent this first season removing these plants and creating larger garden beds to reduce the lawn in front. And what about all those plants I started? Well, many of them survived the first year of me as a new homeowner, but some were lost in the fray of late planting and being generally overwhelmed!

The following year I had a full season to work on the yard and I continued expanding and creating new garden beds. I was able to work on the design I had in mind the previous year, but could not fully finish before winter. Removing existing plants was quite an effort! This was the first year I went to a local native plant sale and started bringing home more plants.

I spent most of this year scaling up the plant varieties and quantities. In the fall I had some trees removed that were too close to the house and this dramatically changed the light conditions on the property more than I expected. I knew the next season would likely bring a surge in vegetation filling in areas that had previously been in shade and considered options for controlling those species.

Without significant removal projects, I increased the size of the front garden and rearranged most of the plants to better accommodate snow piling in the winter. This season is still going, but I created three additional garden beds and I’m cultivating two woodland areas and a low-lying drainage area. Most of this is requiring multiple passes to remove invasive species, such as Japanese Stiltgrass.