During my morel hunting last Saturday, I noticed other wild edibles in the woods. There was winter cress, garlic chives (as a kid, we called this onion grass), watercress, and two highly invasive plants – garlic mustard and Japanese knotweed.

Being the somewhat nature-deprived city gal that I am, I took the opportunity of gathering some wild edibles while I was in the woods. I gathered all of the above except the Japanese knotweed. Lindsay took ownership of the garlic chives, and delighted in pulling them up to get the bulbs. We made scrambled eggs with chives that were delicious. The eggs, of course, were from our backyard chickens.

The garlic mustard looked hopelessly wilted by the time I got home, so I put it in a big bowl of cold water hoping to revive it. It seems as though nothing can kill garlic mustard, and it perked up in no time. I made a delicious pesto sauce, using 50% basil leaves and 50% garlic mustard leaves and buds. Now is the time to pick garlic mustard to eat, because after the flowers bloom, the plant becomes too bitter.

In searching online for garlic mustard recipes, I learned more about the plant itself. It is a highly invasive plant that European settlers brought to plant in their kitchen gardens. It is a prolific producer of seeds and will blanket an area in a very short time, choking out all other native plants, including jack-in-the-pulpit, solomon-seal MOREL MUSHROOMS, and others. Wild animals don’t like to eat it, so it grows completely unchecked. And if that weren’t bad enough, the roots send out a chemical compound that makes the soil inhospitable to other plants. A very primitive form of chemical warfare.

There are many groups that host garlic mustard pulls. The amount of bags filled with the weed is astonishing. Unlike other weeds, you can’t pull this one up and just leave it on the ground. The flowers will have enough energy to produce seeds even after the plant has been uprooted. You have to pull it up by it’s roots and bag it.

Here’s a video that talks about the problems with garlic mustard. It helps you identify it and learn how to get rid of it. There’s even an annual Garlic Mustard Challenge, in which you help them log how many bags of garlic mustard have been pulled. Take a peek here.

Garlic Mustard Identification and Control from Barbara Lucas on Vimeo.

Happy first day of spring everyone! We’ve got freezing rain as a way of keeping it real. Here’s a link to some great gardening events around NYC. A couple took place this past weekend, but most of them are still to come.

I’m itching to start some seeds that my mother-in-law gave me this weekend. She took a seed collecting class at Project Native (amazing native plant nursery in the Berkshires) and collected loads of native species. Many of the plants are specific to that area, so do well in moist, rich soil. There were a that I thought might do well in my poor, dry, neutral to alkaline soil.

I chose little blue stem grass (which favors poor, dry soil – wahoo!),
foxglove beard tongue,
ironweed,
and steeple bush.

I also have some veggie seeds coming my way from Territorial Seed Co., so I should have some fun starting all these guys.

This is an interesting video discussing the importance of native plants and the problem with exotic plants becoming invasive. It was made by Texas Parks and Wildlife, so while a lot of the plants are specific to that area, the overall information translates to any area.

The right plants attract birds without feeders | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram.

This is a nice article that describes several native plants that are particularly good to plant in your yard to attract wildlife.

Plano man converts yard to wild prairie of native plants | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Home and Gardening | Dallas Morning News.

This article is about a Texas man who, over two years, turns his yard from the typical St. Augustine grass lawn, to a wildlife oasis using native plants. He chronicles the transformation on his blog, which you can read here. One thing I like about the article is how the neighbors came to appreciate his work, even though initially they worried it “didn’t fit with the neighborhood.”

I can’t stress enough how important it is to plant species native to your area. They are particularly adapted to your climate, which means they don’t need supplemental watering or fertilizing. But even more importantly is how crucial they are to the survival of wildlife. Whenever we build new buildings, we lose more native plants. In their place, we usually plant non-native plants and grassy lawns. The wildlife that used to live there now has nothing to eat, because insects and other critters are often only able to eat one type of plant. Who cares about a bunch of bugs you say? Well the birds do. If the creepy crawlies die out, the birds don’t have anything to eat and they move on. Or they die out too.

People like Michael McDowell in the article above and many others are realizing this and planting native species, which builds islands of native habitats, and can have a great impact on helping wildlife.

May 1-9th is wildflower week in NYC. Click here to see over 45 events taking place in all 5 boroughs. There will be botanical walks, lectures, planting natives, cooking natives (that sounds funny), etc. It looks like a fun and interesting week, which ends with Mother’s day. For the past 3-4 years we’ve gone to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on Mother’s Day. One of my favorite gardens there is the native garden. It’s kind of hidden, which makes it much less crowded. It’s a quiet, hidden spot within the garden. I recommend it over some of the showier gardens.

I just recently planted this little creeping wintergreen plant in a shady spot in my garden. This plant first came to my attention while I was reading Farmer Boy to Lindsay. The character Almonzo and his siblings would dig in the snow for the red, mint-flavored berries. I was reading the book during the period I was getting more and more interested in foraging, native plants and edible plants in particular. Seemed like the perfect plant for me. Plus it is meant to grow in the shade. My tiny, Brookyn garden has several different zones. One of them is pretty deep shade once the neighbor’s mulberry tree fills in with leaves. I had been considering growing mushrooms, but somehow forgot about that endeavor.

In case you aren’t familiar with this beautiful, native plant, it bears bright read, slightly mealy berries in the winter. The foliage turns a lovely red also. What makes it so interesting is that it is the source of oil of wintergreen. All the flavoring for toothpaste, gum, candies, etc. came from this plant before an artificial wintergreen flavor was developed. I squished one of the berries and sure enough it had a very strong wintergreen scent. You can use the leaves to make a tea. The plants grow in the woods and have pretty bell-shaped flowers. Take a look around when you go hiking to see if you find the plant. Here’s a link that gives some more information on growing it and has a photo with the berries.

The plant likes well-drained, acidic soil. Hopefully it will like its spot in my garden and spread all over the place. In the meantime, I’m going to do some research to figure out what I can make with the natural wintergreen flavor.

In case you haven’t noticed, I am very interested in native plants as an (easy) way to help out wildlife. There’s a really nice article in Oregon Live by Ruth Mullen about an exhibit at the Oregon Zoo. They have a “before” section which looks like the typical suburban lawn right next to an “after” section. The “after” section has native plants, a birdbath, a bugbath (itty bitty water source in a concave rock) and less lawn. The native section is teeming with wildlife compared to the sterile suburban lawn. Take a peek at the whole article here.

Here are some great links to give you tips on creating backyard habitats and landscaping to attract birds, butterflies, frogs (less mosquitoes!) and other animals.

I just stumbled upon a nice site that gives information about planting gardens to specifically attract bees (native bees as well as honey bees) and offer them a habitat in which they can live. It is fairly specific to California, but a lot of the plants (with an emphasis on natives) grow well in other parts of the country.

The site is called Urban Bee Gardens and is out of Berkeley. And the photo has absolutely nothing to do with their site, but everything to do with my warped sense of humor.

Sideoats Grama Prairie Grass

By CALLIE WHITE

THE DAILY WORLD

OLYMPIA, Wash. — When the Nature Conservancy and The Evergreen State College needed a lot of labor for not a lot of money in order to help preserve a pristine piece of wetland, they ended up turning to Stafford Creek Prison, of all places.

It was quite a meeting, said Nalini Nadkarni, a professor at Evergreen.

“One of the things I see as a stereotype is that prisons are black holes for people, money, resources and effort,” Nadkarni said. Of course, as a scientist, she was used to being pegged with a stereotype herself, as the fuzzy-headed Ivory Tower academic pursuing arcane knowledge of little practical value.

Nadkarni’s pilot project has inmates cultivating endangered prairie grasses and so far, it’s been a success.

In a large greenhouse behind the prison’s campus, offenders plant individual seeds of showy fleabane in hundreds of yellow plastic tubes. Other species of grasses are already starting to grow in starter containers in the back of the greenhouse. Near where the prisoners work, a glassed-in beehive thrums with activity.

Volunteers collected the seeds by hand out in the field. Now, inmates are dusting them over lightly with soil.

“They’re so small,” inmate Toby Erhart said of the seeds, which he’s trying to put five to 10 of in each tube. Although the work is “tedious, at best,” he added that it’s a privilege to be outdoors.

Edward Turner, an inmate who says he was an organic farmer from Eastern Washington, said he was “from the old school hippies! In the days before it was popular.”

It was nothing new to Turner to plant seeds that would restore soils, but it was clear that it was a task he particularly enjoyed.

“This is real good for me,” Turner said. “We’re helping in some small way to make the planet a better place. It’s good to bring nature back.”

Once the grasses have sprouted and grown, they’ll be taken to Fort Lewis, where they’ll be planted in meadows that are used as artillery ranges.

“Artillery fields are the most pristine areas because nothing goes there,” said Rod Gilbert, a biologist at Ft. Lewis with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. The only creatures that dare to enter are birds, insects and small animals such as frogs and Mazama pocket gophers, he said.

Once the grass patches are established, they can be used for seed collection, so another round of propagation can begin.

Although it is hard to think of grasses as endangered species, it’s a fact, Gilbert said.

“Native Americans used to burn off the meadows with fire once a year,” he said. That both helped the grasses propagate and repressed tree seedlings. But the practice stopped when settlers came to the Oregon Territory and took the land as their own, causing forest to encroach on the grasslands, he said.

This will be the first large-scale restoration project launched from a prison on the West Coast, Gilbert said.

“We’re totally psyched about it,” he added.

This is not the first partnership between the Corrections Department and the Nature Conservancy. Cedar Creek Corrections Center ran a program breeding endangered frogs. One of the offenders who worked on the project became part of the scientific team that published articles in scientific journals about their discoveries, Nadkarni said.

It’s exciting to see the critical thinking and observational skills of scientists develop in inmates, she added.

“For scientists like me, I think it’s important to talk to people beyond academia,” Nadkarni said. “We need to transmit our way of understanding the world.”

The project, which is funded by federal dollars, just couldn’t have been feasible outside of the prison, said Jeff Muse, Evergreen’s sustainable prisons project manager. It takes too much labor, which is extremely expensive on the outside. Offenders make about 45 cents an hour.

More than their wages, the prisoners not only learn the skills of cultivating plants, they learn they can use that skill outside of landscaping and gardening, Muse said.

“It’s green-collar education,” he said.

But Muse, like Nadkarni, sees the program in a much broader light. Making an institution compensate in some way for its use of environmental resources makes a much larger impact than just hoping everyone tries to cut down on creating trash and buys fluorescent lights. He likened institutions such as hospitals, prisons and schools to cargo ships, which don’t turn on a dime, but do gather steam as they head in a new direction.

Julie Vanneste, the Department of Correction’s sustainability coordinator, said Washington is a model state when it comes to sustainability, and Stafford Creek is its model prison for sustainability.

Muse pointed out that sustainability is often cast as a concern of yuppies. He shares Nadkarni’s misson to spread the scientific word to everyone. Global climate change and the rapid loss of species to overdevelopment will ultimately affect everyone, he said. As a scientist, however, he said he realizes the programs may sound great, but he’s hoping to back them up with studies to find out how effective they are.

“None of this will matter unless we figure out how it works or why it works,” Muse said.

Stafford Creek’s sustainability programs don’t start and end with field grasses. The prison composts its food waste and grows its own fruits and vegetables. It has a comprehensive recycling program. And it repurposes old bikes to give to charity.

Reusing and fixing old things isn’t just a skill for the prison, it’s a skill that can start a business. Muse brought Eli Reich, a former Seattle bike messenger who founded Alchemy Goods when he started selling bags made out of old inner tubes, to talk to the inmates about his business. Muse said offenders could do the same once they got out of prison.

“We want them to take what is useless and make it useful,” Muse said.

The same could be said, to a degree, about the inmates. Dan Pacholke, former Stafford Creek superintendent and current facilities administrator for Western Washington, said 97 percent of the state’s 16,000 offenders are headed for release someday, and they need to come out better than they went in. And doing science, which gets inmates to use critical thinking skills and creates a sense of social engagement, is one way to do that.

“I’d like to see science projects in every prison in the state,” Pacholke said.