Initial Planting and Weed Pressure
When I planted dozens of native seeds back in December, I knew that I’d have to battle it out with weeds, practice patience, and steel myself for whatever surprises or disappointments may come! Two months ago I started to see just how much weed pressure there still is in these beds because all I could see was Ornithogalum umbellatum, or the star-of-bethlehem. It’s a shitty, aggressive, and incredibly persistent grassy perennial that spreads through bulbs. Breaking the bulbs or damaging them causes it to form new plants, so digging them out is basically impossible. If you try to rip them out, the grassy leaves break free of the bulb leaving you with a handful of defeat. So in the face of this enormous weed pressure early on, and not seeing much germination occur yet, I already had to fight those thoughts and feelings of failure. Plus, I know in the summer I’ll have to deal with the next flush of weeds, Cyperus esculentus, or yellow nutsedge.
Site Preparation and Solarization
When researching site preparation, routine herbicide over a season was mentioned in all of the native plant and meadow establishing resources I considered, but I chose the slower and poison-free route of solarization instead. Besides Permethrin to control ticks, I don’t use herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, or any of the like. So I waited for those weeds to form their flowers and then chopped them all down with the string trimmer. But over the next weeks, as temperatures rose and the soil warmed, something incredible happened: a flush of newly germinated seeds appeared and the faster-growing perennials went through a growth spurt!
Early June Progress
Now in early June, I’m seeing that it’s all going according to plan, and I’m having a lot of fun opening iNaturalist and ID’ing everything I see and crossing it off my checklist.