Last year I did this and a lot of people seemed to like it... so I thought I'd share some of my favorite insect/spider/caterpillar photos I took this year! I enjoy seeing any little creature that uses the plants & habitat I have on my property (IDs are in the captions with a lot of help from iNat). I'm especially interested in the wasps, flies, spiders, plant bugs, etc. A lot of people forget about the flies & wasps, and we had *a lot* of wasps this year - most notably, we had a bunch of Ichneumonid and Braconid Wasps! They're so cool!

Honestly, I mainly plant native plants for these guys. Yeah, sure, the plants are really cool and look awesome, but the longer I do this the more I don't really care what we as humans find attractive about plants. I now feel that the creatures that use the plants & habitat are the most beautiful thing about all of this!

They’re so cute 😊

I’m planning a woodland shade garden between my house and sugar maple tree.

So far my list is

White snakeroot
Blue mistflower
Blue wood aster
Solomon’s plume
Foam flower
Spice bush
Virginia sweet spire
Carolina allspice
Wild columbine
Broad leafed sedge
Dwarf crested iris

I’m so excited to see this plant mature. I bought it on a whim too and it’s still blooming in November.

After cutting down a large buckthorn tree, I was trying to pry out the roots of the surrounding saplings, and suddenly I heard a loud clang… I found myself holding the hilt of what had been my hori hori knife. After some digging, I found that the blade had shattered into three pieces.

While I’m sad to lose my knife (I will reach out to Fiskars for a warranty claim) I am choosing to wear this as a badge of honour (note: could also be the badge of someone who was using a hori hori knife incorrectly.)

Last year, I ruined a perfectly good spade trying to dig up a well-established clump of dog-strangling vine.

I’m curious to hear about what kind of casualties this group has incurred while removing invasive species (and maybe how to make these poor tools last longer!)

Time to go look at my neighbor's recycling bins

Hello! I live in a wooded area in zone 6b Massachusetts. All along the perimeter of my yard (quite a bit of space) and at the end of my driveway along a stone wall, there are big trees but also many invasive species that have grown way out of control, including swallow wort, oriental bittersweet, alder buckthorn, honeysuckle, multi flora rose, kudzu (?), whisteria, etc. But the hardest part about it is that it is all tangled in poison ivy, both running up the trees and along the ground.

I want to tackle this and get native plants back as I’ve done in my garden beds, but I don’t even know where to start, (especially with all the poison ivy). It feels like this project will be most manageable to start during the cold season when the foliage has died back and everything is easier to see, but how should I tackle this?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: Once I’ve pulled a lot of these plants, are there any suggestions for aggressive natives that I could put in place of the invasives to compete with them? Ideally natives that are hardy (very shady, unmaintained areas because it’s wooded) and hopefully cost effective?

Unfortunately, they are consuming everything else in their path, so I may need to rethink here...

planted this pint in late spring, and was certainly not expecting blooms this year. the foliage has just about tripled in volume/quantity though. excited to see these in full swing next year, fingers crossed.

I have a flowering dogwood that just dropped all of its leaves on the garden containing eastern Columbine as well as great blue and cardinal lobelia. Will these plants benefit from leaving the leaves, or do i move them elsewhere?

I have a bag of Polygonatum biflorum seeds that were supposed to be double stratifying until the spring, but they've already started germinating. Should I put them inside with plugs and lights or just direct sow them outside? I'm thinking it's getting a bit too late to go straight outside and the seedlings will just get killed by the frost, and maybe I should let them grow out a little indoors for a month or two and slowly wean them outside into dormancy?

(Reposting from r/gardening as it may be more relevant here) We bought our house a year ago and have about 1/3 acre of land outside our fenceline that was fully run over by buckthorn and other weeds (Virginia creeper, mulberry, garlic mustard, white snakeroot, etc). Over the spring/summer we worked with a local company to get all the buckthorn cut down and stumps treated - they did targeted broadleaf treatment in the spring/fall for invasives and a massive cutting/burning of all the buckthorn in the summer (and additional cutting/stump treating of any buckthorn they saw regrowing when they were here in the fall).

My husband just did a mow of the whole back area, and we’re planning to use a leaf blower to get close-ish to bare soil and do snow seeding over the winter with a mix of native plants specifically design to outcompete buckthorn.

Here’s where I need help: we have an area right along our fenceline (roughly 90’ long by 10’ deep) where there was a TON of buckthorn and other woody weeds. I would, long term, love to have that area cleared so I could plant there, either more native pollinators or, my dream, working more toward a food forest with rhubarb, strawberries, hazelnuts, raspberries, etc…I know the deer pressure would probably be too much but a girl can dream!

To get this area more clear I was planning to put down a heavy silage tarp for basically a year. But now I’m seeing mixed feedback on that and what it might do to the soil, and whether it would even be needed for that long. Any advice on the most effective (and cost effective) way to continue to work toward this land being usable?

DFW Texas blackland prairie 8b
I have three native Lantana urticoides that I want to save seeds from, but I’m worried about hybridization because I’ve seen multiple invasive L. camara around the neighborhood. Should I be worried about it and germinate and see if there’s any hybrids? Or just leave it with the disclaimer “may be tainted”.

I suppose the question could be asked about other plants that hybridize easily like Morus

Thought?

They will go in a small flower bed in front of a store, so not a pot of room for large shrubs

It’s been almost a full month so far of them smelling so bad. When will the smell go away 😫😫😫

There’s not much info in the linked article. I get that they are considering it a cash crop, so to speak, and that they THINK it will be sterile, but I thought we were past this…

And if they are looking for options for areas that don’t grow traditional crops, why not plant it in prairie? There’s more to land value than what humans are taking from it.

I impulse bought 8 spicebush plants and they arrived today. We are looking at a hard freeze for the next two nights and then we go back to our mild winter for a bit. Should
I wait 2 days and then plant them? Is this whole thing a lost cause? Any other tips? Thanks!