A Cultivated Art Inc.

As some of you have already noticed, the plant store is open for the second round of orders.

There are around 170 species available as of the start of this sale.

For those concerned about some of the species still not on offer, there are around 300 Orange Butterfly W**d, 150 Prairie Smoke, a few hundred Field P***y Toes, around 100 bloodroot, over 100 Wood Poppies and many others still coming along.

For those who miss out on the current offering of Wood Phlox, Columbines, Cardinal Flower and Foam Flower, there are between 100 and 250 of each of those which will be available a bit later in the season.

In the mean time, here are some of the lovely plants blooming over the last week in my gardens.

Nursery update:

The store will be opening as scheduled Tuesday evening at 7:30pm but I want to give you all a heads-up that, with the later start to the warm weather than the last couple of years (i.e. a nearly historically average spring) the seedlings and divisions that have been started early in the unheated greenhouse aren't quite ready to make their debut, so the first round of sales will exclusively be plants that have overwintered and spent their spring outdoors.

There will be around 120 species available and they are perfectly in synch with this season and won't require any hardening off.

I'll start moving the plants out from the greenhouse next week and they will be hardened off and ready to go for the next round of sales, starting on May 26th.

Some late emerging species, like all of the Milkweeds and Swamp Rose Mallow, will be ready to go by then as well.

Based on the germination so far, I expect to offer even more species this year than last year, so please don't worry if a species you have been waiting for isn't available right away, there are lots more coming along.

On an unrelated note, I took these photos in my Vanier yard this evening. Plant names with the photos.

For anyone itching to get planting, I'll be offering a limited selection of native plant seedlings this Saturday at the Just Food Farm Seedling Saturday event from 10:00 until 2:00.

Prices are the same as they will be online when the store opens on Tuesday, except (for the sake of making it easier to make change 😆) the prices will include the tax tomorrow for this one in-person sale event of the year.

In addition to $3 and $5 plugs of various species, I'll have several pots of Bloodroot and Wild Ginger available for $5 to $12.50ea

If you can't make it tomorrow, don't worry, the online store will open on Tuesday evening at 7:30pm and even more species will be available later in the month.

I took a short walk through the Perth gardens and a longer walk through the Perth woods yesterday afternoon.
Plant names with photos

The Bloodroot in my Vanier backyard started to bloom this week 🥰
Photo from Monday evening

Nursery update:

I haven't been online much lately but that doesn't mean that the nursery hasn't been busy, quite the opposite in fact.

Pots of winter sown seeds came into the unheated greenhouse on March 30th and are already germinating and being transplanted into their own spaces in plug trays.

Nitrogen fixing species have been scarified, inoculated with their partnering bacteria and sown.

Warm germination species will be sown next week.

Potting up divisions has been going full tilt, with around 800 Pennsylvania Sedge, 250 Blue Wood Phlox, multiple flats of Woolly Blue Violets, Wild Strawberries, Narrowleaf Evening Primroses, Great Blue Lobelia, and Silver Wormwood prepared, as well as several pots of Bloodroot, Canadian Wild Ginger and Sensitive Fern.

We pulled a lot of the mulch off of the over wintering plants in the nursery last week and I started moving the trays back up onto pallets yesterday.

It looks like the survival rates have been really high this year, even for some of the species that don't always make it through the winter in pots, including Cardinal Flower and Scarlet Beebalm.

I'll be at the Just Food Seedling Saturday with some of these, and many others, on Saturday, May 9th from 10:00 to 2:00 and the online store will open for orders on the evening of Tuesday, May 12th.

Given how well the planted that we potted up in the late summer and early fall have come through the winter, I expect to have a pretty extensive availability list on the 12th.

The sun is shining and the heavy rain this week melted the last of the snow from my yard so it seems that the time has come for my annual garden cleanup PSA.

If you are a winter hibernator like me, try to balance the excitement of getting back to working with the plants and soil with some care for garden-task-specific muscles, joints and ligaments that have been taking it easy for a few months. There is an entire growing season ahead, an injury at this point can put a serious crimp in all those gardening plans and dreams.

Some of us who have long family histories in northern climes have lost what little melanin that we accumulated last summer by the time the snow melts. If you share my pale-green-by-springtime skin tone or are otherwise particularly susceptible to burns, spare a bit of thought for sun protection, especially for areas like upper arms and the back of the neck, ahead of that day-long putter in the garden.

A lot of memes going around say not to disturb the garden until temperatures are consistently above 10c. This tends to give the impression that, once that temperature is reached, all the critters overwintering in the decomposing matter have thrown off their covers and are out and about in the garden and all that ‘mess’ can be cleared away without hurting anyone. This isn’t actually the case.

There isn't any specific temperature at which all the hibernators have woken up and everyone has emerged from over wintering cocoons or eggs. They are spread through the season in time with the flowering, leafing or fruiting of their partnered plants. Some beings never come up from among the fallen leaves and stems, relying on them for both home and pantry. They help the plants make the soil and are critical for ecosystem health.

So, with this in mind, what do I do to tend my urban, ecologically focused garden in the spring?

Wait until the soil starts to dry out. If you are leaving footprints, leave it alone. Soil structure is precious, it allows roots to easily move to where they can find water and nutrients. It allows for air exchange (roots breath in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide, aerobic soil bacteria also require oxygen) soil structure allows water to flow in and be held in all the nooks and crannies of the granules that are glued together through slow, small scale biological activity. Walking on wet soil crushes the soil structure and it can take weeks, months or even years to recover. My rule of thumb is that if it is too wet/muddy to garden in running shoes, it is too wet to walk on growing areas or to disturb garden soil.

Pick up all of the garbage that has blown into the yard over the winter and any of the ‘gifts’ left by neighbourhood cats and dogs.

Clear away accumulated leaves and other organic matter off of hard surfaces, like decks, pathways and driveways. If you have a wood deck to scrub, now is also a good time for that.

Remove matted leaves from any of the tiny plants that will suffer from the cover. Don’t dispose of the leaves, just shift them off of the crowns of the emerging plants.

For fallen perennial stems, I manually cut up the stems and drop them to the ground as mulch. I generally use secateurs and chop the stems just short enough to fit them between the plant crowns in the garden. They will soon disappear under the new foliage and they will provide a great habitat layer for lots of critters, while also protecting and feeding the soil life.

I prune any semi woody perennials (Russian sage, lavender, hyssop etc.) and chop and drop those stems as well.

For still standing stems that are likely to topple over in the coming weeks, as they soften and begin to break down, I trim them shorter, usually to around the height of the foliage of the plant they are from, anywhere from 8” to over 2’ tall, to provide nesting habitat for native bees. For short stems (under around 2’), I often just leave them standing, as I do with any particularly rigid stems, like those of Swamp Rose Mallow.

And that’s it. No leaf blowers, shredders or other highly disruptive activities. No organic matter removed from the ecosystem. Lots of habitat space among the chopped stems. Plants that are all set for the next growing season.

In addition to the explosion in population of native pollinators in my little urban yard that came with adding native species and cutting way back on ‘cleaning’ I’ve noticed a couple of other benefits. The first is that all those plant bits provide nesting material. I now regularly see small birds foraging for bits of dry plants each spring, including two pairs of Cardinals. I’ve also had far fewer ‘gifts’ left by the neighbourhood feral cats. They don’t seem to like digging in gardens filled with plants and covered by a layer of old stems and leaves.

For those wondering about transplanting, yes, this is the time to do that for most species. Very early blooming plants and spring ephemerals generally do better with being moved after they finish their seed development in the summer, or when dormant in the fall. For the others, go ahead and move them now. It causes some disturbance but transplanting always does.

Happy Gardening!

p.s. Photos are from another year, the garden isn't quite this far along yet

Do you grow and sell native plants in Ontario or Quebec?

Do you want to let the followers of this page know about your small business?

Then please drop your details, including the region/community you serve, in the comments.

Things have come quite a way in the last few years, with the number of people working with native plants, and the availability of native plants and seeds to the general public, expanding at an impressive rate since 2019.

A Cultivated Art, with a bit less than the equivalent of two full time people from mid-April through October, sent 16,000 seedlings out into the world in 2025 and is set up to send off even more in 2026 but we don't come close to filling the entire need in Ottawa and we only sell locally.

With that in mind, if you grow and sell native plants directly to the public in Ontario or Quebec, please drop your business name and website, or other ways to reach you, and the community/communities that you serve in the comments below.