Month: December 2019

Last weekend, 14 of us convened at Squash Blossom Farm to start about 7,000 native plants that we will use to create new pollinator gardens next summer.

First we filled the trays with a mix of compost, pine fines, pearlite, and vermiculite.

Then we added seeds. We mapped out eight different tray designs for different environmental conditions (sunny/shady and wet/medium/dry), with 10 species in each 50-cell tray. This will let us have a ready-to-plant “garden” in each tray. Some of the seeds are seeds we collected in the neighborhood and some are seeds we bought from Prairie Moon Nursery.

We put the filled trays outside to stratify for the winter. We will bring them back into the greenhouse in the early spring to give the plants a little head start to hopefully grow big enough to transplant by June.

Thanks so much to everyone who came! And to Laura G. for boss soil mixing and photo-taking and Susan W. and Roger N. for donating the space and making us lunch!