Lucas House

With the early end to winter, it seems spring has taken a long time to get going. That feels especially true to impatient old me at ​Lucas House​, Grounded’s native plant demonstration garden in Haliburton village. But things are happening. And they’ll ramp up as we go through May. It’s a nail-biting time in the…

As you’ll see from the images, I planted the matrix grasses in a grid pattern. This will make it easier to see what is grass and what is weeds. Then I planted the forbs in the gaps. You’ll see some of the grasses are starting to go into dormancy by late September. Fingers crossed they’ll…

I rented my good friend Ryan, the sod-cutting machine, again. I didn’t need it as long this time as the areas is smaller, less bumpy and I know what I am doing. I was able to remove the grass and stack it up in a couple of days.

Planting in the fall can work too, so I decided to go ahead with planting the rest of the garden: the part-shaded part to the north of the building. I did things a little differently: primarily, I planted more densely by creating a matrix on 12-inch centres of three types of grasses. Within this matrix,…

August was a month of weeding. The crabgrass started to flower, which made it easy to get rid of it. I think I’m keeping the weeds under control – enough. Highlights as of September 1:

There’s little bluestem and there’s big bluestem. Big bluestem would be too big for the garden. So little bluestem it is. As a warm-season grass, it gets going slowly. But now it’s flowing, sending out gorgeous spikes, some up to three feet tall.

A day of weeding in the garden yesterday. Mostly crabgrass – but it’s getting easier to spot now it’s flowering because the flowers (and I use the term loosely because it’s a grass) lay flat to the ground, rather than erect, like the little bluestem. Some weeds have fibrous roots, which spread out. Others have…

I was delighted to see this Monarch butterfly caterpillar on one of the Swamp milkweeds this morning. (Takes away some of the disappointment of the deer and rabbits nibbling off the aster buds.)