Planting a Meadow

The title is not a metaphor - I am actually planting an actual meadow. Well, attempting to plant an actual meadow. OK, attempting to plant a small meadow-like area.

Part of our backyard is a swath of land with a utilities easement on it - we own the land, but the gas company has access rights and nothing can be built there. Previous owners planted grass back there and, so I've heard, kept it mowed like a lawn. I haven't continued this practice since 1) I have no desire to spend the time and energy to mow more lawn, and 2) I like my yard to provide as many natural habitats as possible (and a mowed lawn ain't much of a natural habitat). I would love to naturalize this entire back lawn, but it is a pretty big space and would require more time/effort/money to remove the existing grass than I am willing/able to give. So this summer I decided to start small.

I chose a small (~400 ft²) area to work with, figuring I can expand things in subsequent years if this preliminary work goes well. I started this project back in June, when, after mowing the grass short, I covered the area with some nylon tarps. I kept these tarps in place from June until this weekend. By keeping the area covered during the entire growing season, keeping the sun out and the temperature up, I was hoping to kill both the existing grass and a decent percentage of the grass/weed seeds lying dormant in the soil.


I pulled the tarps up this weekend and, sure enough, all vegetation was dead:


After some raking and hoeing up of dead grass tussocks, the area was ready to be sown:


By sowing seeds now, in November, in New England, I am accomplishing a couple of things. First, the wildflower and grass seeds I sow now will already be in place in the spring, ready to germinate as soon as conditions are right - this should give them a leg up (or at least an even footing) with any weed seeds out there now and I won't have to worry about working around my schedule or the unpredictable spring weather to plant. Second, some native wildflower seeds require a period of cold dormancy before they will germinate - I could have put the seeds in the fridge for the next few months, but why bother when winter can do a better job for me?

I wanted to plant a meadow, not just a wildflower garden, so I ordered both wildflower and grass seeds. I also wanted to use as many native plants as I could. After some online research, I ended up with a native wildflower seed mix from American Meadows and a short prairie grass mix from Prairie Frontiers. I augmented these with some additional native wildflower seeds. I bought enough seed for approximately 1,000 ft², figuring I'd use half of it this year and the other half for next year's expansion.


Following a technique I found online, I split the seed I was going to use this year into two parts and mixed each part with approximately 10 parts of clean sand, which makes sowing the light, small wildflower seeds much easier. After thoroughly mixing the seed and sand, I sowed 1 part over the entire plot moving east-west and then sowed the 2nd part going north-south, thereby minimizing bare/sparse areas. The last thing to do, which is oh so important (so I've read), was to compact the seeds into the soil to ensure good seed-soil contact. Since I don't own a grass roller, I spent a half hour or so stomping around the sown plot, making sure my footprints covered every square inch of the ground.


Now I just sit back, enjoy the rest of the fall and winter, hope the birds don't eat too many of the newly sown seeds, and keep my fingers crossed for successful germination. I'll keep everyone posted.

Wildflowers sown:
Aquilegia canadensis (Eastern Red Columbine)
Asclepias incarnata (Red Milkweed)
Asclepias tuberosa (Butterfly Weed)
Aster novae-angliae (New England Aster)
Baptisia australis (Wild/False Blue Indigo)
Chamaecrista fasciculata (Partridge Pea)
Coreopsis lanceolata (Lance Leaf Coreopsis)
Eupatorium fistulosum (Joe Pye Weed)
Eupatorium maculatum (Spotted Joe Pye Weed)
Gaillardia pulchella (Indian Blanket)
Heliopsis helianthoides (Ox-Eye Sunflower)
Liatris spicata (Blazing Star)
Lobelia cardinalis (Cardinal Flower)
Lupinus perennis (Wild Perennial Lupine)
Monarda fistulosa (Wild Bergamot)
Oenothera biennis (Evening primrose)
Penstemon digitalis (Beard Tongue)
Rudbeckia hirta (Black-eyed Susan)
Rudbeckia submentosa (Sweet Coneflower)
Rudbeckia triloba (Brown-eyed Susan)
Salvia azurea (Tall Blue Pitcher Sage)
Solidago rigida (Rigid Goldenrod)
Solidago speciosa (Showy Goldenrod)

Grasses sown:
Andropogon scoparius (Little Bluestem)
Bouteloua curtipendula (Side Oats Gramma)
Bouteloua gracillis (Blue Gramma)
Koeleria cristata (Prairie June Grass)
Sporobolus heterolepis (Prairie Dropseed)

Home grown

Our second (and last) "Sugar Baby" watermelon from the garden. The first was picked too early. This one was excellent even though it could have ripened another couple of days I think - except for the fact that some critter (squirrel? chipmunk?) was starting to nibble on the rind. Better to eat it a bit early than risk losing it completely!

In the garden

Inspired by the wonderful photos by Kathy over at Skippy's Vegetable Garden, here are a few pics of what's growing over here. (Oh, and for you marine-only types who may not otherwise be interested in my terrestrial biota, check out the first two pics and notice the shells of Mytilus edulis from the Coast of Maine compost I used this year.)

Winter Garden

A cold front bringing a "wintery mix" came through here this past weekend, leaving a coating of ice on everything. I grabbed these shots this morning before work before everything could melt away. Compare to the shots of the garden a few weeks ago.

Fall Garden

Even without the flowers, our perennial garden is looking rather nice.

That'll teach you to mess with my heirloom tomato!

One of the joys of my summer is growing our own tomatoes (actually, growing our own tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce,...). This year, my dad bought us an heirloom 'Brandywine' tomato. We planted it along with the rest of our vegetables and have watched it flower and start to produce a number of robust fruit. It looked like many more flowers were on the way and so I was anticipating a bumper crop. But now, it looks like I'll be lucky to salvage the four fruits currently on the vine.

We have a tomato worm in our midst. Or at least, we did.

I hadn't been outside to check on the garden in the past few days, so I didn't know we had a Manduca quinquemaculata larvae munching away on our prized tomato plant. When I went out this evening to water, here's what I saw:


The entire top half of our 'Brandywine' was completely defoliated. I'd seen tomato worms before, so I knew what to look for - a large, green, and, admittedly, cool-looking caterpillar - so large and cool in fact that people's first reaction to them is usually, "Wow". Well, sure enough, there it was hanging onto a leaf just at the base of the damaged area - the bugger was working its way down the plant, towards the ripening fruit.

But, actually, this one wasn't really moving. In fact, it wasn't really doing anything. Just hanging there underneath a leaf. Not only that, but it looked different than the ones I've seen before. What are all those white things?


On closer examination, I had a pretty good idea what it was, at least in general. I'd run across this kind of thing in grad school, studying yucca moths (a tale for another day). Looks like our tomato worm had a bad case of the parasitoids. If I had to guess, I'd say some female wasp came by and laid her eggs inside the caterpillar. Once the eggs hatched, the wasp larvae ate their way out of the caterpillar to pupate, forming these white cocoons. Gross? Sure, but cool too.


A quick search on Google confirms it. Specifically, some species of braconid wasp appears to have parasitized (parasitoidized? parasitoided?) the moth larvae (or perhaps, even cooler, the moth eggs). The tomato worm is decidedly dead now - nothing more than a tomato plant ornament. An ornament housing hundreds of developing wasps that is.


So what do I do now? Well, I could remove the offending caterpillar carcass. But the caterpillar is no longer threatening my heirloom crop. So, I think I'll leave it be and wait for the wasps to emerge. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to get some photos. At the very least, I've got my very own biological pest control system in place. Tomato worms beware!

addendum: August 6th - After a weekend away, I went outside today to check if the wasps were emerging and found that the entire tomato worm carcass had disappeared. It, and the wasp cocoons, were just gone. I checked the ground around the tomato plant, thinking the caterpillar and passengers had succumbed to the force of gravity, but, alas, it was no where to be found. Not sure what could have happened to it - could some other critter have eaten it? In any case, there will be no photos of emerging Hymenoptera. :(