No, this is not the start of an Eric Carle children’s book. It’s the start of a blog post all about gregarious feeders! Unlike the lone green caterpillar of the book that goes chomping through fruits and cakes and slices of salami, some caterpillars can be seen feeding and living in large groups, and as […]
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Kansas summers can discourage even the hardiest gardeners. However, taking time to manage your garden now will help your garden later. Here’s my Summer Garden Checklist for the Kansas gardener. Control Warm Season Weeds Summer brings with it a new set of weeds to control. Hot weather germinates summer annuals like crabgrass, foxtail. Nutsedge and other weeds […]
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Portions of this article can also be found in our Summer 2023 issue of the Prairie Window Newsletter. Having a summer intern here at the Arboretum is a lot of fun. Not only because I have someone to commiserate with when the temperatures are unbearable, or someone to laugh with when everything goes wrong, but […]
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One of the most iconic prairie wildflowers is Asclepias tuberosa, commonly referred to as butterfly weed or butterfly milkweed. From May to July, its bright orange flowers dot the prairie landscape. These attractive flowers are a magnet for many different pollinators, including the monarch butterfly. Butterfly weed can be found in dry fields, meadows, prairies, open […]
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I’m a part of the Nature Book Club through the Dyck Arboretum. One of the books we read this last month was Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201 mile journey following the Monarch Migration by Sara Dykman. I loved this book and we had a great discussion on it. A young woman rides her bike from the monarch refuges in […]
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This time of year, yellow nutsedge (Cyperus esculentus) and purple nutsedge (Cyperus rotundus) become problematic in the landscape. These problem weeds have triangular grass-like leaves and form colonies if left unchecked. It is not a grass, but rather a sedge. The key identifying feature is the triangular stem in cross section, as opposed to a […]
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It’s a plant all gardeners know well: the infamous bindweed. Thought to have been accidentally introduced from Europe by crop seed contamination in the 1700s, it has established itself all over the North American continent. But I recently found a native relative to this terrible pest, and upon further research, learned some fascinating facts about […]
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Over the 26 years that I have been at the Arboretum, I have made my share of mistakes. Some examples include planting prairie dock in a formal garden design, starting a garden too fast, and/or not knowing my site. I had book knowledge about horticulture, but I had not learned much about native plants. Through […]
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Ten years ago, my spouse and I purchased our first home in Central Kansas. The backyard was dominated by a large American Elm tree that had miraculously, and with a lot of help from a local arborist, survived the bout of Dutch Elm Disease that had taken nearly all of the American Elms in town […]
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One of the hardships of being a gardener is the loss of a long established tree. It is no different here at the Arboretum. We have lost a few trees that were planted at the founding of the Arboretum. The loss of these large specimen trees leave a huge hole in the landscape that will […]
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