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What will you plant this year?
It's a question I've been asking myself a lot at the beginning of 2022 with snow on the ground and the days getting steadily longer. And with a new yard that needs more plants!
What we plant in our gardens matters. It can have extraordinary impacts not just for ourselves but for the local ecology. Plants clean air. Filter water. Build soil. Support the insects our landscapes depend on. They feed us. Cloth us. Heal us. Plants are magnificent. They inspire growth in us.
There is so much potential in a seed. Seeds hold life and a vision for the future. They hold new beginnings and possibility. Nurturing young plants can also help us nurture our visions for what is possible this year and in the future. Whether it be to grow tomorrow’s forests, orchards, meadows, and gardens or grow into a better versions of ourselves. I once freed a young elm tree from a pot. It had outgrown the pot and and tried to root into the ground but it was being stunted by the plastic container binding and pinching its roots. As I worked, I realized I was a lot like that elm at that time in my life, potbound and kind of stuck, knowing I needed to move but feeling the growing pains associated with a big shift in my life... in this case I was also literally planning a big move. It's funny how plants can teach us things about ourselves. It doesn’t take much to participate in positively changing a landscape or oneself by growing plants.
What would it look like to plant a tree this year (or the seed of one), for instance? Can you envision a place to plant a tree in your backyard or neighborhood? A vacant lot or bare patch of earth nearby? Trees anchor soil, sequester carbon in the soil and in their trunks. They provide habitat for the many creatures that live alongside us. Native species like oaks, cherries, maples, birches, willows can support incredible amounts of insect biomass which in turn feed our birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish… and ultimately us. Insects keep our ecosystems running with the enormous ecosystem services they deliver protecting, pollinating, decomposing, and recycling. And some trees like hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, hackberry, hickory, apples, plums, and juneberry (to name a few) give us a nutrient-dense, edible crops on lands too marginal or difficult to farm. If the world needs more food, well, let us do our part to plant more food for ourselves and our ecosystems.
Meadow flowers can also be powerhouses for supporting insects and providing us with inspiration, medicine, food, and fiber! Milkweed, aster, goldenrod, and other strategic native plants can even bring back endangered pollinators. An inspiring example of this is with Robert Gegear’s lab’s plant list for supporting endangered bumblebees… it all started when Gegear found bumblebees in Massachusetts that were supposed to be extinct from the state. He noticed they seemed to prefer specific plants and began to study them with his research team, including starting a citizen science initiative to collect data (the Beecology Project) on what plants bees and other pollinators gravitated towards. Surprisingly many of these bumbles preferred plants that were disappearing from the landscape, and even more surprisingly, planting those plants appeared to encourage these bee communities to return. These were species thought to be completely gone from the state. It just goes to show how powerful plant choices can be even in one’s backyard. Gegear found it made a huge difference to have a native nectar source throughout the growing season (bees need nectar for energy) as well as a pollen sources (bees need pollen to grow baby bees!). If you live in New England or want to get a sense of what plants supply the most pollen or nectar, check out his plant list here for ideas: https://gegearlab.weebly.com/plant-list.html.
Consider new food crops. Humans today eat a surprisingly small number of crop varieties compared to the thousands upon thousands of edible plants species available in the world. There are SO many edible, nutrient-dense crops around the world and our modern, industrialized culture focuses on only a few, mostly annual plants - plants that need to be planted every year - like rice, corn, soybeans, canola, and wheat. Take some time this year to get to know the native food crops of your area. One of my goals this year is to try and eat at least 5 new foods from the landscape that I’ve never eaten before. Not only is it possible to enhance the nutrient profile of the food you eat, but you can discover fantastic flavors that you’d never find in a grocery store. One plant I recently discovered and have fallen in love with is Spicebush, a native North American shrub that produces edible berries that you can grind up and use as an alternative to Allspice on meats, baking, or in soups. It’s also the host plant for the Spicebush swallowtail butterfly. How many other spices and flavors are in our woods, meadows and deserts that we’ve lost touch with? Planting (or eating!) a few new edibles or garden foods can connect us to the land, feed us, and support the ecosystems around us.
Spicebush, Lindera benzoin
First instar of the Spicebush Swallowtail butterfly disguised as a bird dropping
Older versions of the caterpillar are spectacular!
So what will you plant this year? And where? It might be in your own backyard or perhaps you keep an eye out for what quiet street corner or abandoned planter or curb that needs a nudge towards life with a few extra plants this year!
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