Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Ellen Sousa gardens, farms, writes and teaches from Turkey Hill Brook Farm, a small horse farm in the Worcester Hills of central Massachusetts. Author of The Green Garden: The New England Guide to Planning, Planting and Maintaining an Eco-Friendly Habitat Garden, published by Bunker Hill Publishing in summer 2011. She also blogs about habitat and earth-friendly gardening in New England and is on the team at Beautiful Wildlife Garden. Follow @THBfarm on twitter.
The small south-central Massachusetts town of Monson (population 3,800) is home to a native plant and wildlife lover’s dreamland, Norcross Wildlife Sanctuary. Free and open to the public — Norcross has over 1000 acres of fields and woodland trails (April to November), beautiful vistas and an education center that offers free classes, tours and lectures throughout the [...]
Part 2 of my series Tales of a Farm Pond - lessons on pond-scaping with native New England plants If you garden on a freshwater pond or lake, you’re probably already aware that gardening in the high moisture and biodiversity of a natural pond is challenging. A lot of very aggressive plants want to live in and [...]
Just over a year ago, this was the scene near our farm pond and stream after Hurricane Irene’s path of destruction swept through: Large areas of gardens were washed away entirely, or covered with 3-6″ of sand and gravel from the floodwaters. Right afterwards, I wrote the article “Irene-Proof Native Plants” naming the plants that [...]
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do. ~Michel de Montaigne When we moved to our small farm in Massachusetts, one of the huge draws was a farm pond at the bottom of the pasture. I had big plans for “restoring” this area. Horses had destroyed part of [...]
Happy Independence Day to the USA! As it’s vacation week and my mind is currently on all things outdoors, I’m going to keep today’s posting short and simply highlight some native plants that are buzzing right now with pollinator activity on our small farm in central Massachusetts. Right now, the most popular place for pollinators [...]
What are Down Under flowers? Nope, not plants from Australia, although those are worthy of an article too. Down Under flowers are those native plants with flowers that hang underneath their foliage and point towards the ground. These are the flowers that you sometimes have to get right down to ground level to actually see… [...]
Front yard gardens, balcony veggie gardens, community gardens, victory gardens… growing your own food is making an enormous resurgence these days – as the economy and fuel prices makes fresh food flown in from other places prohibitively expensive. Most traditional vegetable crops grown in New England are native to other parts of the world, but [...]
Were you aware that USDA is sponsoring research at the University of Connecticut to develop sterile varieties of Winged Burning Bush (Euonymus alatus) and Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii) — both non-native plants spreading aggressively into natural and agricultural areas in many parts of the USA. Sounds like a good idea, right? After all, if the plant [...]
‘Tis the season to be berry! Winterberry, that is… There are some native plants that you grow, not for their flowers, or foliage, but for the blazing color of their berries. This is the time of year, in late autumn when the landscape is brown and gray, that the winterberries come alive in the wetlands [...]
In the northeast, we’re in the midst of cleaning up after Hurricane Irene, which caused major washouts of roads and dams across the region. On our small farm in the hills of central MA, we received more than 5″ of rain within a 12-hour period, enough to cause our farm pond to burst over its [...]
