Neighborhood Plants

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  • Let The Cold Stratification Begin!

    The lifecycle of native plants is pretty amazing.  Most native wild flowers are Herbaceous Perennials, meaning they are non-woody plants that die back to the ground every winter and re-sprout every spring from deep roots.  Incidentally this is one of the reasons why high grass prairie is one of the best ways to store carbon to fight global warming.

    Wild flower seeds are also fascinating,  most of them require what is called stratification, either warm or cold or both.  To prevent the seeds from germinating too early and then being killed by a late frost the seeds have germination inhibitors in them that are slowly degraded by cold, or a combination of warm and cold.  Most wild flower seeds require 4-8 weeks of being cold and damp before the seeds will germinate.  In nature this would be accomplished by the seeds falling to the ground in fall, and just hanging out getting cold and snowed on all winter.

    Some plants have taken this to extreme lengths, plants like Ramps require 18 months of stratification, 60 days of warm and damp followed by 90+ days of cold and damp stratification.  Ramps don’t even go to seed until they are 7+ years old, and then their seeds can stay in the ground for over a year in order to get the required amount of warm and cold stratification.

    So if you want to grow your own wild flowers, you will either need to spread the seeds upon the bare earth in fall and hope for the best, or you will have to stratify them yourself.  Luckily almost all of us have the perfect cold damp environment in our homes, our refrigerator.

    Every year around this time I start putting little baggies of damp sand and seeds into the back of my fridge in a march towards spring.  First the 8 week seeds, then the 6 week, then 5 then 4…etc.  Then sometime in march they all come out and get planted under some grow lights.  In this way when spring rolls around I have hundreds of wild flower ready to go.   If you want to do this yourself here are some tips, use sand instead of soil as sand has less of a chance of growing mold.  Use only enough water to gently dampen the sand, too much water will also cause mold.  Be sure to label everything!  The seeds are so tiny that you can barely see them let along remember which is which.  When it comes time to plant just sprinkle the sand on top of the soil, most of these seeds do not want to be buried, and need light to germinate, the sand will allow the light to shine through it.

    Or if you don’t want to go through all that trouble you can make an appointment to visit Neighborhood Plants Nursery.

  • Winter Delights, Crab Apples In The Snow

    Winter is a time to process and store, crack and roast, leech and grind.  A time to take all your bounty from the fall and turn it into food and pantry items for next year.  But there are still things to find even in the most frozen parts of the year.

    In the fall this little decorative crab apple had rock hard fruits that were so sour they would cause your mouth to invert, but after a few frosts the fruits have softened and are now only slightly tart with a lovely hint of sweetness (this is often called bletting) .  I took a handful home and made a little pan jelly with them.

    Recipe:
    Sort out the dried ones, add to a pan and add water to just barely cover the fruit.
    Cook until soft then mash up the fruit, strain the solid bits out and pour the liquid into a measuring cup.  Measure out the same amount of sugar as liquid and return both to the pan, heat until thick.  Crab apples are full of pectin so you wont need to add any.

    I only made about a 1/4 cup of this just to test its flavor and it was really good.  I already have a bunch of crab apple jelly in the pantry, but this tree has a really nice tart flavor so when I run out I might make it from this tree next time.  I will probably grab some more to make apple cider vinegar though.  In the mean time I left all these lovely slightly sweet fruits for others, including the birds who will feast on them in February when other food is scarce.

  • Needle Ice In Middlesex Fells

    While out walking in the fells I found a bunch of Needle Ice, it was everywhere!  You can still find a lot of interesting things in the woods, even in December.

  • Welcome to Neighborhood Plants!

    Years ago as I walked past barren lawn after barren lawn, I got an idea.  I wanted to turn my yard into something that would serve as a home not just for a mono-culture of a single grass, but for native plants, insects, and birds.  I missed hearing the buzz of tiny solitary bees, and seeing big beautiful butterflies floating around.  I missed the birds, and the flowers.  Grass just wasn’t doing it for me.

    The first thing I did was get some wild flower seed mixes, buried them in the yard and waited….and waited…and nothing happened.  I did a little research and realized I had done just about everything wrong.  I planted the seeds at the wrong time, I planted them at the wrong depth, I hadn’t cleared the grass away, and a host of other issues.  Instead of giving up I purchased more seeds, this time instead of a mix I selected plants I think would look nice (and some that were edible), and followed instructions online for how to cold stratify the seeds, when to plant them and to my great surprise not only did they grow, they GREW!  I had way way more seedlings than I could fit in my yard, so I put out a sign on the fence “plants for sale” and to my even further surprise people actually wanted to buy them, then they started asking for more varieties, and then they asked for native shrubs and trees…fast forward a few years and here I am opening a website and growing hundreds of native plants every year from seed.

    At the same time I was learning how to grow native plants, I was also expanding my garden, and my foraging practice.  I am constantly meeting new plants and thinking “can I eat this?”  It turns out that a great way to to get into plants is through your stomach!  There are so many delicious and edible plants and mushrooms growing all around us, and the more I got into harvesting, processing, preserving, and eating edible plants the more I also got into protecting and propagating them.  My relationship to my food, and my environment was changing.  I learned about indigenous cultures, food histories, colonial racism, environmental systems and so much more.  It was a wild ride, and one that isn’t done yet!  There is so much to learn about nature, and food, and history, and science that one can never run out of new things to explore.

    This website is home to both the Neighborhood Native Nursery and the Urban Tree Collective.  The UTC is a group for people interested in eating good food, but also in caring for and learning about the world we share with so many amazing living things.  You can learn more about the Urban Tree Collective here or join the mailing list to stay up to date on events, here.