How natural landscapes impact your mood; plus, finding the guts to get going.

Dear Avant Gardener, If you are growing a garden in the Northeast, what native vegetables can you grow? — Hungry in NY

Ramps and ostrich ferns are native vegetables easily integrated among other perennials in shade or part shade. Ramps (Allium tricocum) are wild leeks and ostrich ferns (Matteuccia struthiopteris) are the source of fiddleheads. Both are highly sought after by chefs — so much that ramps are now over-foraged in the wild. Follow these links for how to harvest and prepare ramps and fiddleheads.

Many, many native plants are edible and were eaten by indigenous people before Europeans arrived. Reading Elizabeth Toms and James Wesson’s Compendium of Potable, Edible, and Medicinal Florida Native Plants, I was shocked to discover most of what we’ve planted in Florida and Rhode Island is edible. I guess if it’s good for wildlife, chances are it’s good for us. Unless it’s poisonous. Don’t assume.

Unfortunately, Toms and Wesson’s booklet also showed most native edibles either require a lot of work (e.g., leaching tannins from acorns) or sugar (e.g., making jelly) or both to make them palatable. There’s a reason most plants we eat today are the result of millennia of breeding for taste and productivity. Those native species we still eat today tend to be fruits like blueberries and raspberries, not vegetables. (OK, I admit I had to look this up: Vegetables are parts of plants we eat that do not have seeds — e.g., stalks. leaves, and tubers. Nuts are fruits.)

I might try some violets or pepperweed from my front yard in a salad someday, but it’s not likely I’ll eat them regularly. I plan to plant mostly heritage varieties in my vegetable plot — ones bred before shelf life and Roundup readiness became a cultivation priority. They’ll be part of the thirty percent of my landscape that’s not for the birds. In the meantime, the diverse ecosystem in my yard will be feeding my gut in invisible ways — more below.

Dear Avant Gardener, [In response to last week’s In & Out list:] Does composting fit in here? — Peter, Tokyo

Not really. In an ecological landscape, composting happens naturally, as fallen leaves, twigs and spent stalks decompose into the soil.

If you have a newly built house, your soil is probably poor quality backfill. It will benefit from a top dressing of compost. A new installation of woodland plants will also benefit from a dressing of compost. Adding compost to a meadow installation can favor weeds and cause plants to flop over. 

When growing food, on the other hand, adding compost replenishes necessary nutrients that harvesting removes from the ecosystem. Research shows that compost enriches the soil microbiome far better than pure urea fertilizer.

We found that a single application of compost, compared to urea or control, resulted in a persistent improved plant biomass response and led to sustained changes in the soil microbial community throughout the duration of the 227-day study. Compost altered the structure of both the fungal and prokaryotic microbial communities, introduced new microorganisms that persisted in the resident soil system, and altered soil microbial correlation network structure and hub taxa. — Frontiers in Soil Science

The environmental benefit of diverting food waste from landfill is a separate, substantial benefit of composting. Food in landfill decomposes anaerobically, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas about 30 times more effective at trapping heat than the carbon dioxide released aerobically from a compost pile. If you don’t need compost for your garden but want to keep your food waste out of landfill, check out the Green Cone Solar Food Digester.

Dear Avant Gardener, I have a garden at my new home and am at a total loss of what to do. I guess my question would be, where do I start? The knowledge gap seems huge to me so I’ve just stuck to growing things in pots since I don’t know what to plant in the ground! — Alexander, Pawtucket, RI

Start planting! Yes, it takes guts, but spending time amid diverse plants will benefit your health and your mood (see “Why?” below). Pick one of these easy ways to begin:

1. Find a corner of your lot where you’d like to sit for a cup of coffee or a cocktail, put a chair or two there, and plant flowering perennials around them. Or, 

2. Plant a small garden of flowering perennials that you’ll see each time you’ll return home — e.g., on either side of your front door or the path from your car to your door.

Buy roughly one plug per square foot of your little plot. To plant, dig a hole the size of the plug, unpot it and loosen the roots a bit, and put it into the ground, pressing down so there are no gaps between the plug and your soil, making sure to leave the crown — where the roots meet the stalk — just at soil level. Voila.

Want more guidance? See my columns on 5 Steps to Order Your Plants and How to Enliven Your Entrance with a Vibrant Palette of 9 Native Plants. If you’re lucky enough to have one of Pawtucket’s colonial era homes, check out the historically appropriate ornamentals in Plants of Colonial Days. (Of course, focus on the native ones, for their much greater value to native insects and birds.)

Prepare to be flexible; as I’ve said before, availability is often the main constraint in ecological landscaping. You’re lucky because Prickly Ed’s, within an easy drive, carries a wide variety of deep-rooted native plant plugs. They can advise on a community of, say, six plants for your conditions (sun, moisture level). And make sure to sign up for their excellent newsletter.

— The Avant Gardener

Why, How, Wow!

Why?

A recent article by Selwa Calderbank introduced me to yet another reason to include diverse native plants in our home landscapes: our microbiome.

In what is known as ‘the old friends hypothesis’, scientists believe that our symbiotic relationship with the microbiome comes from our intimate connection with the rest of the living world as hunter-gathers. We absorbed beneficial microbes from our environment and they became a part of us, living in our gut and supporting our health. — Selwa Calderbank, Radicle

In an Australian study, healthy soil from a biodiverse natural environment had an incredible effect on mice. They were exposed to trace levels of soil — some from low and some from high areas of biodiversity. Those exposed to the more biodiverse soil showed clear reductions in anxiety. The more biodiverse soil contained bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids, in particular one called Butyrage, which regulates inflammation in our bodies. This in turn is thought to impact mental health. — Selwa Calderbank, Radicle

How

Spend time in your biodiverse backyard! You don’t have to eat plants — or soil — to benefit from diverse natural environments:

Just being in a natural environment that is biodiverse means that we are constantly being coated with microbes from the air. There’s a continuous exchange, with each of us emitting a million biological particles an hour from our bodies, as well as breathing in and ingesting millions of microbes. — Selwa Calderbank, Radicle

‘When you increase the complexity of vegetation so it’s more like a natural habitat…then the aerobiome, the different microbes in the air, will be much more diverse compared to say a monoculture habitat or a sports field . The air around that habitat is really low in diversity”, says [microbiologist Jake] Robinson. — Selwa Calderbank, Radicle

Wow!

I’m a sucker for a cedar Adirondack chair like this one. Can’t you imagine that having your morning coffee here would elevate your mood — even without visualizing the millions of beneficial microbes you’ll inhale?

Related Resources

• Want to learn more about how microbes shape your life? Read Jake Robinson’s brand new book Invisible Friends: How Microbes Shape our Lives and the World around Us.

• Plan to do some foraging — even in your backyard? This handy book is well organized and comprehensive, with photographs and preparation instructions: Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide to Over 200 Natural Foods.

• If you’re in the southeast, I recommend ordering A Compendium of Potable, Edible, and Medicinal Florida Native Plants. Just email elizabeth@rewildnursery.com.

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