I knew that I wanted something super simple for Redbud Orchard but had not been able to nail down a design until recently. The natural rounded heart shape of the Eastern Redbud leaf and an earthy green did the trick! It combines my love of community and this project all in one. I’m toying with the idea of selling merch to support buying more plants, so if you’re down with that you’ll see this in the future!
I am also happy to report that many of our plants show signs that they are already supporting wildlife. Our cardinal flowers were the first to bloom followed by swamp milkweed and we’ve got a great blue lobelia on the way! Considering that these are just 1st year plugs, I couldn't be happier. Buuuut, I do have tons of weeds I need to pull. Any volunteers for that? haha.
All of our trees and plants survived our most recent storms but we had a lot of bark and dead branches to clean up. I used some of them to lightly mulch an American Hazelnut I got (thanks Brett Bloom!) as well as some tender milkweed plugs. I’m also open to any other native plants you’d like to share with me.
With all this rain we’ve gotten, I finally noticed some mosquito larvae swimming in the bird bath. The birds get pretty crazy in there, so in order to make sure the mosquito bits stay in place I put them in a mesh bag and secured them with a rock. Bye bye skeeters.
If you follow me on other social media channels you’ll know that someone broke a few of our pavers. Because we had most of the pieces, I decided to just glue them together and use them anyways.
Another neighbor came down and introduced themselves to us this past week and said that should we run out of water while working we could come down and get some from their spigot. So sweet right?
My New Jersey Tea shrub has gone to seed! I believe that the black ones are ready to harvest but I’m not sure yet. When fully ripe, the seeds make an audible pop and rocket themselves to a new location. Because we are still actively mowing this section I need to be able to harvest the seeds so I can grow some on my own. New Jersey Tea is a great native alternative for the potentially invasive Butterfly Bush, plus its edible! So this is one that I’d love to be able to share with others.
