I am making plans to add some new garden beds in my backyard. Starting with a blank slate can be daunting, but there are certain questions I ask myself when considering if a plant makes the cut to go in the garden. Besides matching the growing condition requirements of the plants to the conditions...
Last week I attended the North American Prairie Conference in Altoona, Iowa. Shoutout to the blog readers I met there! As is typical for me, on my drive to the conference I was identifying the plants I could see on the roadsides. One grass in particular was ubiquitous in the landscape – Smooth...
A few weeks ago I was leading a plant identification hike in a restored prairie. Naturally in a prairie system, there are a lot of grasses to identify! We saw some tallgrass species as well as some weedy grasses. We also saw one of the 30+ species of Panic grasses that we have in Illinois, ...
Last week while leading a guided hike through a prairie restoration, I was able to observe numerous species of grasses – both those that are desirable in a restoration, and those that are remnants of previous land uses. While I saw native Prairie Dropseed, Switchgrass, Big Bluestem, and Indiangrass...
As someone who pays close attention to plants, weeding becomes an interesting chore. Instead of just looking for plants that are different than what I am trying to grow, I find it fun to identify all of them (and photograph them!). Talk about making a simple task more complicated!
While weeding a...
As we enter May, many cool-season grasses are beginning to flower, which makes them a bit easier to identify. One such grass is a European pasture and hay grass called Orchard Grass, Dactylis glomerata. This non-native grass has been used in agriculture for centuries and can persist in old...
This time of year, I start getting emails with questions about how to identify grasses that people find growing in their yard. After reviewing pictures, oftentimes the grass they want to know more about actually turns out to be a sedge. Sedges are grass-like plants, but they have some distinct...
When I was a kid, we had guinea pigs as pets, Hershey, Graham, and Tristan. One regular part of their diet was hay. Each pig absolutely loved eating the fluffy little grass pieces included in the hay – it turns out those favorite pieces were Timothy.
Timothy, Phleum pratense, is a popular...
A couple of weeks ago I was working in a food donation garden, prepping raised beds in anticipation of planting early spring crops. Some of the raised beds were covered in weeds that needed to be removed. One of them happened to be Annual Bluegrass, Poa annua. This grass already had an...
It might be difficult to imagine that even in the middle of winter, certain weeds have gotten a jumpstart on growth for the spring. Annual plants complete their life cycle in one year and are often divided into winter annuals and summer annuals. Several grasses fall into each of these categories....
