The Best-Laid Plans...
Seeing plants come back is energizing. I wanted to get out and do all sorts of stuff. I would add new planting beds! I would map out my entire yard! I would weed whole areas, and remove grass! I would do soil-tests in every square yard! I would define some paths, move some rocks, etc., etc.
I had forgotten how much work this all is.
Now, maybe if I was half-my-age, it wouldn't be an issue. Maybe if I had ideal health, I'd have all the energy I needed. But I am who I am, and when i started doing some things, I remembered exactly how much effort is required.
Listen, First of All
My wife saw my efforts, and mentioned a couple of things.
First, she suggested using the potato fork to loosen the grassy and weedy areas; it would make it easier to remove the offending plants, so I could expose a planting bed more easily.
Second, she said: "Why not just lay down newspaper and wood mulch on the areas you want to plant later?"
She is brilliant. I should have listened to her before I started.
So here's the basis of the idea: If you can wait a growing season before using a new bed, you can cover the area with five or more layers of wet newspaper, or a layer or two of wet cardboard (remove any tape or staples), and then put a few inches of shredded wood mulch on top of the paper. If you do that now, in the early spring, then it can bake those weeds and unwanted grasses throughout the summer. It will look nicer than a patch of weeds, too. And next spring, you can remove all that and have a fairly decent planting bed to work on.
If you need or want to plant something sooner, you can cut a hole in the paper products after removing a small circle of mulch, weed out anything under there, and put in your plant. So it is possible to do this in incremental steps.
(Much thanks to Tumblr-user-from-Iowa, systlin, who wrote a post on her approach -- CAUTION: language not for children -- last year.)
Inhale, Exhale, Plan
So, with that thought in mind, I took a pause.
I can still map out the yard and work on my plans. I can still clear the one new planting bed I started -- it's fairly small -- and weed out the bed I planted last year. But for everything else, I'll cover the areas with paper-and-mulch. I'll let them cook for a year, and when I'm able to, I will either open a whole section up, or just add some plants in particular spots.
Essentially, I'm lowering my bar; redefining my measure of success for this year so that it is achievable. It is better to aim low, and be able to do more, than to aim high and get discouraged, stopping altogether. Dream big, by all means; but allow yourself time for success.
That time may take years.
A Final Point on Planning: It is Bigger than you Think
Just like my eyes were bigger than my stamina, or available time to do yardwork and a full-time job (remotely), it is also quite easy to under-estimate how much you need of other resources. Take mulch for an example.
One thing I did achieve this past weekend was laying down some cardboard and mulch around my Apple Serviceberry, with a fence to deter some critters who nibbled on the bark over the winter. Thankfully, the buds are progressing, so it survived. But here is how it looked last spring when I first started excavating the area where it was to go.
And here is where it was on the end-of-the-day, Saturday, May 3rd.
So, that circle of mulch extends roughly a yard from the trunk of the tree. Covering the cardboard barely enough took six cubic feet of shredded cypress bark mulch, bought in three, two-cubic-foot bags from the local hardware store.
You might be tempted to think that is only two cubic yards, but remember how exponents work:
What Came Back?
I planted a number of things last year, and I couldn't wait to see what would come back.
The problem, I found, is that I did a poor job of documenting my plantings. I took pictures to show friends, but not to document what was where. I'd used the plastic plant markers that come with the plants, but I hadn't put one per plant, just one in an area (for wildlife, it helps to have multiple plants of the same species together), and over the winter some had been pulled out, and some were broken. So I really didn't know what should have been someplace, or whether or not something green growing out of the ground was something important to me.
Label, Label, Label
The labeling was easy to fix. I bought some metal plant markers from Kincaid Plant Markers. Even during a pandemic, they were able to get a shipment to me.
But what to use to write on the metal labels? I tried Sharpie marker; it fades in sunlight. It also requires a dry-erase marker to soak into the markings, so you can wipe them off. I then cleaned the plant label with rubbing alcohol, a little bit goes a long way to remove oils.
I ended up ordering Decocolor Paint Markers from Dick Blick. Fine-tip markers give me plenty of room to write information on the metal tag, and when the paint dries, it is waterproof and UV-light proof. You need kerosene to clean the paint off the metal markers, but that does work very effectively. Use kerosene only in a well-ventilated area!
The resulting tags look very good. They aren't as fragile as the plastic ones, and I can reuse them if I get rid of plants later.
The Identification Game
I was still left with identifying what I had where. I ended up looking at all the different photos I took at different times, and reviewing messages I'd sent to friends and family, in order to get a sense of what I had put into the ground. I also got a reasonable idea of where those things were.
The next trick was to identify the new plants popping up, some from roots, some from seed. The USDA produced a seedling identification guide for the central region, that focuses on native prairie plants. It covers most of the native plants I put in the ground last year, and it has excellent photographs of flowers, leaves, seedlings, and even the seeds themselves. A Google search for "usda seedling id guide" reveals that they published ones for other regions, so take a look if you aren't in the Midwest.
What I Found
This stuff, planted last year, appears to have returned:
My Childhood
Growing up, my mom always had something growing outside, and my dad was hanging houseplants from a beam he installed. While we lived in the Chicago area, we always had some kind of yard. My dad's parents always had a huge flower garden and a huge vegetable garden...at least, to my eyes. My wife's father also routinely had a vegetable garden going.
Our Own Home
When my wife and I bought our own home in Saint Paul, Minnesota, we got a standalone home in the city, with a double-sized lot. The previous owners had planted a number of hostas and other perennials hardy for our zone 4a location. There were mature trees -- Colorado Blue Spruce, maples, crabapples, a plum tree of some sort, a mountain ash, and many others I didn't recognize -- and it was a nice place to be. It even has a Concord grape vine!
We had to remove some trees because of their location. One was right by the house wall near the kitchen window, for instance, and another was crowding a post with a yard light on it and knocking it over. Some severe weather, like winter air temperatures below -30°F (not wind-chill!) and wind storms, killed some others.
My wife started doing some vegetable gardening. She canned tomatoes, pickled some bell peppers, and even made grape jelly from our own grapes.
But then we started having kids, and we didn't do much with the garden except plant tomatoes, and sometimes some herbs. We didn't have a plan.
What Happened in 2019
I was with my daughters at an orienteering event in a park. At the visitor's center, they had bird feeders with a tally sheet for Project Feederwatch. This is a bird-counting project for bird feeders done during the fall and winter; it is citizen-science, where regular people do the observations and make notes on what they see.
This intrigued me, so I signed up for it. The last counting weekend just happened, so we would have to wait until the fall to start our own counts. In the meantime, there were a number of things I could do.
Birdscaping
One of the things I learned was that you should "birdscape" your yard to encourage birds to come visit. Just putting out a feeder wasn't enough. Birdscaping entails:
