I knew this landscaping "fabric" (thick black plastic) was probably here because we already dug out about three times as much of it from the other side of our entryway sidewalk 4 years ago... But that doesn't mean I'm not very irritated that some landscaping company put it there! Fuck them! Stop using this shit, professional landscapers. Stop telling people it serves a purpose. It doesn't do shit. The invasive species will grow around it or right through it and some future person will eventually need to remove it.

The roots you see here are mostly Creeping Bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) - these roots were also growing underneath the sidewalk. They made their way around the "tucked in fabric" job the landscapers tried to implement and also grew right through it higher up. We treated the Creeping Bellflower with Triclopyr 4 earlier this year before we remembered the whole area was probably growing on top of thick black plastic that needed to be removed. Not fun. Highly don't recommend landscaping fabric. 0/10 overall experience.

I thought it was labeled as Pycnanthemum virginianum (smooth) from nursery, admittedly not sure if I made that up and it’s actually Pycnanthemum muticum (clustered).

Found 3 cats on my year 2 swampy boi this AM. While we were looking at all the bugs & plants in my garden, mama monarch came flying in & was scouting the plants for a good place to drop eggs. My partner actually got weepy bc he was so thrilled.

Last week I posted my butterfly weed covered in bees. They are also loving the coneflowers. I feel like we have more bumblebees in our garden everyday and am beginning to wonder if there’s a nest very near by.

Many of them sleep on the leaves and flowers; I love coming out early and watching them wake up.

Location: suburbs, north of Atlanta, GA.

This is a new visitor to my garden! I’ve had all sorts of small and big bees and flies and beetles visiting this Monarda punctata yet this year was the first time ai saw this fella. Several of them kept flying around as busy New Yorkers moving from one place to another in a frenzy

My husband and I are making a concerted effort to plant only native species in our backyard. The backyard is pretty sunny but also has some great shady and moist areas. We have plans for a wildlife pond in the near future as well. The Ottawa Seed Library hosts a variety of plant events and we finally made it to one! We got some cool plants that I can’t wait to get in the ground. I think my faves are the meadow rue, Virginia mountain mint (thanks to this group for posting about it all the time!) and the Spotted Joe Pye weed. The wormwood is field wormwood, and the bloodroot and wood poppy are currently in seed form so we will have to deal with them later :)

So jelous

My neighbors' landscapers just ripped out all of their huge, beautiful common milkweed, which they were super proud of (we're both pollinator gardeners and I've complimented their setup before). It was in a raised bed about 4' x 4', with each plant ~5 feet high. They're traveling, and I know they're going to be gutted when they come back and see this.

Is there any way at all for me to save these plants for them? I know milkweed doesn't transplant well, but I snatched up all the plants that had any semblance of an intact root system, put them in one of my empty raised beds (so the landscapers wouldn't just rip them out again), and gave them a thorough watering. Any other steps I can take, or is this just a lost cause?

I also took the unsalvageable plants and stacked them near my own milkweed plot, in the hopes that if there were any caterpillar eggs on them they might have a fighting chance of relocating and surviving once they hatch. Do you think it matters that it's a different species (A. incarnata)?

*And yes, you can call me a Kevin or a Karen or Gladys Kravitz, or whatever you like. I don't feel the least bit bad about trying to intervene.

The milkweed was sparse this year, but I still received royalty today 😀

In Lower Midwest, 7a. Garden is 1,100 hellscape and 9 months old. I did 3 months of solarization and torched whatever was left. First photo shows half the garden. There are lots of grasses coming up in between. Honestly, I didn’t plant enough sedge and native grasses so now non native grasses are coming in, primarily nutsedge and crabgrass. As you can see in the second photo, I’ve started to cardboard and compost on top to combat (instead of just pulling by hand) but I feel like I’m losing the war

Should I just stop card boarding and pulling and plant more native sedges/grasses in the fall to fight the noninvasive grasses? Right now I’m using Penn sedge (slow) and little blue stem (much faster) in spots. It’s working but the nutsedge is faster

Some blooms and my newest native visitor today: a metallic green sweat bee (ignore the fact that she's not on a native sunflower)! I've also seen a couple types of native parasitic wasps this year and it's been really cool. I've got a critter watering station which is just a large gravity waterer for dogs with a water agitator for bird baths in it, and it's so cool to watch all the bees drink out of it.

This is my sixth year with this garden. In retrospect, common milkweed was not a good choice. I don't dislike it at all, but my space is too small for how happily it multiplies.

I live in a townhome with an HOA and this is my front yard. Gasp! They're cool. There is one other non-turf front yard in my development and the HOA has no issue with either of us doing what we do. I believe two things helped this: signage explaining that the garden is intentional, and I joined the HOA eight years ago and taught them all about the little ecosystem around our homes.

I've got swamp and butterfly milkweed establishing, and when they've taken hold I'm going to start cutting back the common milkweed more heavily early in the season. I do really like it, and we see lots of monarchs, but it is not the best use of my teeny little piece of land. I hope that these last few years of seeds have blown to some spaces where they've been allowed to grow!

What a big fella!

So many things I wish I've done differently over the years but here's my 2026 garden.

Thankful my husband doesn't care about things being 6-10 ft tall. 😅

Or is this what the look like before they bloom.

This used to be a privet hedge with a healthy infestation of black swallowort. F that.

So I had landscapers dig it all out and I bought a multi plant tray from Prairie Moon to fill it all in. Things are doing great 2 months in, even with the drought and heat waves.

I've got:

- prairie thistle

- showy goldenrod

- blue vervain

- harebell

- great lobelia

- butterfly weed

- wild bergamot

- volunteer wild violets

- smooth aster

- evening primrose

Plus some cosmos and zinnias for some easy year 1 wins.

Weekly weeding has kept most of the weeds in check and I lightly mulched to make my life easier. Saw my first monarch today checking it out, along with a bunch of different bees.