D Tucholske

I haven't necessarily been working exclusively towards that, just expanding biodiversity in general. I live in NE Ohio, BTW.

But, I did get a few things to work out. It's hard to do trees, unless they're a species that are likely to dwarf, but you can work to identify ares where more sun is reaching the ground, or investigate the edges for opportunities. I've tried wild plums, bladdernut, black cherry, Hackberry, serviceberry- nothing has made it to maturity & begun producing fruit. The one edible tree I added that actually is doing fairly well is a single, solitary Beech.

What it already had in there were tons of hickories & sassafras & a few Hawthorns, as well as tons of Sumac, grape, chokecherry & black raspberry. It also, unfortunately, had a pretty bad multiflora rose infestation, that I'm in the process of slowly taking down. There are a couple Japanese barberry, but as the only thing they seem to actually cause an issue with is stealing the potential environment of a plant I've never seen- Allegheny barberry- I'm not super worried about them. There's only a couple & they aren't very big & don't spread much. There is also a good bit of greenbrier & tons of mayapple, as well as a single Eastern Hemlock. There is a drive in theater backed up to it, with a small Plaza in front of that & the theater is completely surrounded by a vegetation screen that wraps around the whole place & connects to my little forest & I found a single chestnut on the opposite side of that. Across the general neighborhood, there was also Butternuts, hazelnuts, mulberries, crabapple, red cedar, a couple of seemingly very isolated wild roses, blackberries, dewberries, strawberries, cattails, salsify, etc.

Since someone or something ripped up my one Hackberry  seedling, I found an a decent sized clearing with a few younger spicebush trees coming up & since I have plenty of spicebush, I think I'm going to rip those down & add in a couple of Hackberry trees this coming year.

I have had some success with ground cover plants & a little bit of luck with volunteers that I had nothing to do with. I got several Onion & ramp plants to take hold, some wild gooseberries showed up (finally got a chance to try them this year. They were ok), I was able to get Downy Wood Mint to grow & in the last couple of months, I've put out some live partridgeberry, Wintergreen & American Dittany that seem like they're doing OK so far. I think I even got some wild lilies to grow &, despite not knowing how to plant bulbs at the time, it looks like I had some accidental success with a single Indian Potato plant taking hold. I just found some of my hops a month back, too. I might have gotten several plums, black cherry & at least one chokeberry to grow, but none of them have ever made it to fruiting maturity. I definitely got several elderberries, but same issue. Something eats them down to the ground pretty quickly after they come up, but they always come back a little stronger the following year, regardless, so that one is just going to be time consuming.

I'm slowly beginning to work out what a lot of my problems were- blueberries, I tried & tried with no success. Turns out it may have been the soil. The soil quality is extremely good, but they prefer acidic conditions, so while I assumed they would prefer it in the wetter, low lying areas, that is where the loam wants to naturally collect & the more acidic places are counterintuitively the highest points on top of hills. I also tried sweetfern, which love drier conditions. They both died from excess moisture where I put them. They probably would have done best on the outer edges, where they're more exposed to the sun.

I plan to try a couple pawpaw this year on the end of the forest without as much understory growth. I also want to get live plants of sweetfern, Scarlet Bergamot, gaylussacia & serviceberry put in & attempt to wild harvest some Strawberry & dewberry from the general area to see if I can get some to grow in these woods this coming year, but it's among some other things I am working on. I have lowbush Blueberry right now, so we'll try the seed one last time in the acidic areas &, if that doesn't work out, I'll just go for some live highbush plants.

The one thing the increase in biodiversity has done is that is naturally caused a massive, aggressive increase in density & variety of mushroom species. I'm not a mushroom person, but I have had more mushrooms in there than I have ever seen in one place in my entire life.

So far as I am aware, the idea is rehydrating the seed with a little bit of extra energy from the sugar.

Several of the videos I was watching were recommending using a hydrogen peroxide bath, but one guy followed the peroxide bath with a sugar bath.

I tried with just the sugar bath on some wild oats. While it eventually worked, the oats trapped a lot of air & a lot of them didn't want to sink, so after the first few volunteers actually did, I started randomly pressing a few against the bottom to remove air bubbles until the vast majority of them eventually all did. A lot of the seed even turned from brown to green. I put them in two areas- one was a wet area in my woods, the other was an area on the edge of a local park that dried out after they removed a dam a quarter of a mile down the river.

The idea is trying to cause the seed to revert to a state similar to them being fresh on the plant they came from. I'd heard some people saying some species have the best seed viability at that stage & wanted to try this on several species where I just had 0 luck growing- mostly wildflowers, but also a handful of other species.

So, people are aware that there are tech questions to try to increase seed viability, I'm sure. I want to try some to try to help some of the wild plant species I've had the hardest time growing & found a method that seems to work, for the most part- at least, on seed that isn't particularly old. I opted to not use hydrogen peroxide & just gave them a warm sugar water bath for an hour or so before transferring them to paper towels to dry.

The question I have is, I prefer sowing in winter, as this keeps most animals from eating the seed. If I do this, should I expect a lot of this seed to attempt to sprout during winter & die, get dehydrated back to square 1 again before its time for them to grow by the conditions or will it be fine?

Found one online seller called Quackin Grass Nursery, from Connecticut, but the plant is not currently for sale & this will allegedly be their final year before closing their business.

Some non-natives are a problem & some aren't.

Generally, you have some that grow too aggressively or poison the soil for other plants around them & those are serious issues. But, you can clearly have others that don't harm much of anything. In Ohio. While Callery pear can escape into the wild in certain areas & is annoying & intrusive, it isn't seriously problematic. Regular, edible pear trees, I have seen confirmation that you can literally put them into our Native woods & they do perfectly fine.

Others can spread aggressively, only in certain situations. If nothing else is taking up the space, Chicory will get out of control, but it doesn't take over completely if the space is being used by other plants. Prickly Pear Cactus, legally treated as a Native in Ohio, even though it absolutely isn't, is not very likely to get out of hand here, but if you put it in a sandy flowerbed outside, it will take over the entire flowerbed very quickly. But, it's very unlikely to act invasively in sandy riverbanks (too wet), or regular soil, which it can grow in.

That being said, it's not doing all that much for biodiversity if nothing that lives there wants to or can eat it.

Two things of note: the "ginger sprout" I posted in my last is actually False Hellbore, aka Corn Lily. I didn't plant them. I noticed they were growing a lot more vertically than I was expecting & was a little confused. A couple weeks ago, I decided to check out a decent sized hunting preserve behind a Walmart down the road &, while there isn't a whole lot to see there, there are sizable patches of them grown in well enough to tell that they are. That must have been where they spread in from. I can't figure out for sure why I haven't seen any ginger come up, but if the ants like the seeds, the biggest anthill back there is surrounded by a thick patch of multiflora Rose, so maybe that's the reason? Or, for all I know, some is back there, I just haven't found it yet.

The second is I definitely found a nice sized hop vine coming in around chest height. Only bad thing is that it's growing where all the other vines are, too- Japanese knotweed, grapes & Virginia creeper, right on the edge of the woods, by the parking lot. It was small enough & the leaves weren't divided, so I initially mistook it for a small tree.

But in researching & trying to work out how & why mine looked so different than I was expecting, I did learn that Humulus Lupulus is divided into four subspecies- two from the US, one from Mexico & one from Europe & the European varieties do come in at an invasive level if they escape into the wild. So, for anyone looking into it for restoration rather than brewing, I suggest trying to look into Humulus Lupulus Pubsecens, or Humulus Lupulus Lupuloides specifically. I'm pretty sure mine is one of the right ones, because it's not going crazy & parts of the stems are particularly hairy & I thankfully did not make a huge mistake.

I'd say that we're at a point where we can't afford for it to matter to that specific of a degree if we want to restore environments, now. There's only a few plants that seem to have such an extreme subspecies biodiversity that I worry about buying seeds for. But, if I find out about subspecies, I always do try to source the correct one, if possible. If it's too overcomplicated, for whatever reason, I don't bother buying it.

I'm also not going to drive myself insane trying to remove every single individual non-native plant- just the big ones that are harmful to other Native species. So, I'm mostly just worried about Trees of Heaven, Japanese Knotweed & Multiflora Rose/ Dog Rose at the moment, with buckthorn, privets & burning bush only being considered issues if there's way too many of them crowding other things out.

I wish I knew how to control phragmites without heavy machinery, though. My brother accidentally did an amazing job with a combination of mowing & letting chickens free range in the field where they were at his house. After a couple of years, they're almost completely gone.

Literally any Native grass species will work fine. If anything, mix several together for a stronger habitat. The trick is just working on the phragmites until the Native grass legitimately starts outcompeting it.

I was attempting to get rid of some for a long time. Takes at least 3 years of constant work.

Year 1- strip all the bark off the tree in a ring near the bottom. Do not cut tree down. Everything above the cut will slowly die, but leaving it attached to the rest of the tree will cause it to get infections & will exhaust it over time.

Year 2- rip up all seedings that come up. Out of desperation, the tree will super-seed for its last autumn before everything above the cut dies. All that will be dead by the second fall & seedlings will not longer be a problem, so long as you continue with the final step of cutting down any new growth that tries to sprout below the cut or any suckered that try to come off the roots.

Year 3- this seems to be the last effort for the tree. The trunk will have actually shrunk down considerably from severe dehydration & its regrowth attempts will be weaker. After you go a whole year without seeing any new growth, you can cut it down for good.

In my area (ne Ohio), I know sweetfern & wintergreen are options, as well as certain species of wood sorrel. But, I don't know what regions you're in, so its hard for me to give a great deal of clarity.