We are having a chilly ending to this middle week of May, 2011.  Last year, the chill came a little earlier — we recall a chilly, breezy birthday party in a Shawnee, KS play park. This year, the birthday was on a hot spring day.

Now, that hot spring weather was great, because a couple days of it warmed the ground and the plants that are set out will benefit from ‘good light’ and cooler temperatures.  A neighboring nursery, Wolf Creek Nursery,  with generations of experience gardening in the Ozarks gave me the expression for the chill — Blackberry Winter.

We have a few of the larger tomato plants in the ground waiting for the warm-up that the weatherman promises.  They are not ‘shocking’ from the transplant because of the cooler, cloudy weather.  Some potatoes are coming up from an earlier planting and the second rotation of potatoes and onions are in the warm soil.

Most of the rest of my gardening has been the flowering planters that decorate our yard, porch and deck.   We have some young peach and apple trees looking good and the pear tree was loaded with blooms again.

I’m tolerating one wild blackberry invasion in a lower garden patch, close to the woods.  It is small and full of the thorns we all dread. I will have big time bird competition for berries.  We haven’t gotten any berries set out for ourselves, but the Ouachita Blackberry cultivar available in the Nature Hills Nursery catalog looks tempting.  Thornless, nice.

Do you have berry tales to share?  We invite you to do just that in the comments

We have three forsythia bushes at our place and I will try to get more going this year.  One is purely decorative, perched on a high point at one corner of the house.  It happily reaches for drips when we fill a bucket at the outside hydrant or attach a hose. Sometimes we have to trim the longer sweeps back so we can work.

Another marks a corner at the drive and makes a pretty greeting mark for our guests or for when we come home. 

The third is the hardest working. It is huge.  I clip at it to encourage that huge-ness.  It sits between my house and a gravel road, stopping an incredible amount of dust.  If I have any success with the new starts that I have awaiting spring,  I will have more of these bushes out there between me and the dust.

You can read more about forsythia culture and history, plus see a few more pictures back at The Legacy Gardens page for Forsythia.

             Thank you for coming by to read my post.  These posts and the articles are being written as part of a community service assignment through the Master Gardener program.  JudyAnn Lorenz

I have been nursing baby trees salvaged from the yard and from special seeding situations.

For example, I never saw a redbud or baby oak that I didn’t believe should be transplanted in a safe place. I have several that were set out last summer and more in pots for this year. But, we didn’t get to cover some of the best practices for maintaining these Ozarks natives. I will have to dig deeper and expand the pages about these trees that will be on this website. We salvaged a dogwood and received another from the conservation trees to add to our yard. For all of the shrubs that had been planted ahead of us, there was no dogwood. We anticipate the development of our little dogwood friends.

We, at our house, are especially taken with the Silk Mimosa trees that also seem to be either native or escapees from long ago. For several years I closing watched little nooks in the yard looking for babies. A neighbor said we were mowing them off, but I don’t agree. That debate didn’t get me the trees, though. In the winter of 2006-2007, I put some mimosa seeds in a pot where they could endure the elements, but where I could find them if they did germinate. During the summer of 2006, we had exceptional pollination activity in the mimosa tree from hummingbirds.

I was so happy, when the warm weather came to summer of 2007, to find little bitty mimosa sprouts in my pot. They look just like their parents. Since we had similar pollination from the hummingbirds in 2007 as in 2006, I have another pot of seeds set out to see if I can get some more.

I have almost a dozen mimosa trees in pots resting under deep layers of Oak leaves waiting for spring. I so want them to survive and thrive.

I wonder if putting them out in the yard with the redbuds will qualify them all as native planting!

The past few years in Missouri have seen weather extremes that can tax even plants that have spend centuries adapting to the Ozark climate. The weather has been nothing if not drought. Yet, there are times of flooding, added to ice storms and winter rain. The winter moisture is traumatic even though not enough to sustain many of the typical landscaping choices offered.

When there is not enough rain or snow to maintain the landscape, then its preservation becomes dependent upon artificial sources — a big term for irrigation. Irrigation is expensive in terms of both money and activity put forth by the gardener. The method of watering is not preferable to rain and often doesn’t do the job. Although there is little that is as gratifying as observing a thirsty planting respond to any type of water delivery and come back to life.

New plantings, under almost any circumstances, are going to require the extra watering and nurturing. But native plants have been put to the test of too much and too little in terms of all facets of climate — wet, dry, hot, cold, cloudy, sunny and everything in between.

Because we are often production gardeners as well as beauty growers, we’ve come into conflict with many native plant species because market production isn’t one of their finest points. We are inclined to clump the native plant species into a nuisance category and trot on down to the local garden center and put down our hard earned money for something that should be planted in the desert or on a tropical island.

Without dissolving the conversation into an argument about which is best to grow — native or production — every grower and garden spot can benefit from the research and information available at the Missouri Conservation/Grow Native website and in printed brochures about native species that can join the ‘immigrant’ plants in your garden.

Combining is one option. Combining over a specified plot to make something that is dedicated to the propagation and preservation of native plants Is an element of grow native that lets the gardener really experience the impact of native plants working together to benefit the land, keep some green going to produce oxygen and social enrichment, and provide resources for wildlife to thrive upon. A small plot of the native grasses that attracted grazing wildlife and adventurous cattlemen in our history can give us a connection with what they experienced. No, those grasses don’t have the commercial productivity of a plant that provides several cuttings of hay, but Grow Native isn’t promoting the entire, foolish replacement of productivity. Rather the promotion, again, is for preservation and acknowledgement of the value of adapted plants — an enriching effort to keep them from becoming only a memory.

You can learn more about Missouri’s Grow Native program at http://www.grownative.org You can check with your local Missouri Conservation offices or Extension offices for printed materials about the Grow Native program. Both resources will have information about the native species and places where you can get the ones that you would like to try.

This article was written as a part of a Master Gardening program offered in Wright County Missouri in 2007 and represents one hour of an assignment to offer 30 hours of community service.

Thank you for stopping by to read our Post. Richard and JudyAnn Lorenz