January 2025
January is the perfect time to take stock of your garden and make plans. The new year offers lots of opportunities to read books, watch videos and listen to podcasts about gardening, in general, and native plants specifically. It is also the best time to think about your goals for your garden and yard as well as consider what you will do in the new year.
Think about what worked in 2024? What didn’t? What would you like to add? What issues developed as climate change continues to make the weather more unstable?
For example, climate change has made our springs drier and our summers wetter. We lost an old black cherry tree as our soil is drier overall. We also lost many of our elderberries in the rain garden because the soil is primarily clay and the dryness combined with the shallow roots of the elderberry plant impacts its ability to thrive in that area.
Would you like to add new beds? The lasagna-method of creating garden beds works as well in the spring as it does in the fall. Decide shape of the garden bed, how big you’d like it to be and consider the sun, soil, moisture conditions. Layer newspaper/cardboard, quality organic soil/compost, and mulch. Over time this will kill the grass and begin to break up the soil underneath.
Do you want a wetter spot for a rain garden - build up the sides and make it slightly lower than the rest of the surrounding soil. Or add a sprinkler system to the area and turn it on during drier periods. I added a pond to the wet bed I added to my own yard in Wheatfield.
Do you want a drier spot you make a raised bed. If the spot is higher than the surrounding area it will perfect for drought tolerant plants.
Of course, adding compost to an area can only do so much for the soil. You should always consider the composition of the planting area before you plant. Blueberries, for example, love acid. You can only add so much acid to the soil and it will regress to a less acidic soil over time. Native roots go deep so adding compost and drainage to an area won’t be enough to plant lupine in a heavy clay yard. However, it never hurts to add good stuff to the soil to help break up clay. The soil may not turn out to be loam but it will be better than solid clay.
If you are considering a pollinator garden and adding caterpillar host plants then consider prevailing wisdom. Host plants are best added in groups of three and 6’ apart. Especially milkweed as monarch caterpillars are ferocious eaters. Caterpillars need close by hosts to live out their life, however, loading up the area with one type of caterpillar host plants together can attract predators such as stink bugs.
There are pre-planned pollinator gardens on my website to give you some ideas but those garden plans only go so far given that they do not consider soil type in their plan. www.cwnativeplantfarm.com/ The CW Native Plant Farm has also partnered with Daughter Earth https://www.daughterearthart.com/ to deliver native plant gardens to your door in May and June of 2025.
We have native gardening books in our store. You can also meet with me at our store to go over ideas for a native plant garden. Consider winter sowing or one of the many ways to grow from seed. The Orleans County Master Gardener Program has scheduled a whole series of educational classes on seed sowing in 2025 call Seeds to Splendor https://orleans.cce.cornell.edu/events/2024/11/20/seeds-to-splendor-class-series as well as their Master your Garden educational classes https://orleans.cce.cornell.edu/events/2021/04/03/master-your-garden-educational-series. Finally, don’t ignore the many wonderful nurseries in your backyard that have lots of information and resources.
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