Here’s the scene: You got really excited this spring and found us, and bought a bunch of lovely native plants for your garden that you aren’t completely sure what to do with them. You put in them the ground and now the summer is beating them up a bit. You don’t want to lose any precious plants, but it can feel like one thing after another is trying to sabotage your efforts! Here are a few simple tips to help get your garden through the heat of the summer and safe from hungry

Monarch butterflies have officially returned to New England from their incredible journey from Mexico. We had a confirmed sighting at Blue Stem Natives yesterday! Luckily we have common milkweed ( Asclepias syriaca ) growing all around the back of the greenhouse and the Monarch butterfly laid egg after egg on these plants. Monarch butterflies know to lay their eggs on milkweeds* as it's the only genus of plant that their caterpillars can eat. See the egg if you zoom in on th

I spent my afternoon sexing Morella pensylvanica , Northern Bayberry. That sounds cheeky, but it really just means determining which plant is male, and which is female. In sciencey terms, this is called dioecious , where a species’ flowers are either male or female. Sometimes on plants this is fairly easy to determine, but for certain species, the flowers are very inconspicuous, or they don’t look much like flowers at all! Willows come to mind, as do Bayberry. As for what t

When we think about planting for pollinators, we rarely consider anything outside of pollen and nectar. These two components are super important, of course, but there is a huge piece of the puzzle that is often missing from ornamental “butterfly gardens.” If you want the butterflies, and bees, and songbirds, you need to be ready to support the larval stage, namely, caterpillars ! Lots of pollinators can and will visit just about any flower containing pollen and/or nectar, b

SPACE INVADERS! You've likely seen this one in your yard, your neighbors' yards, in the woods, on the side of the road, and so on. Garlic mustard ( Alliaria petiolata ) produces copious amounts of seeds and is "allelopathic", changing the soil with biochemicals to prohibit the germination and growth of other plants. It's a "biennial", living two years and generally producing flowers and seeds in the second year. But its "offspring", from those copious seeds (we weren't kiddin

Got burning bush ( Euonymus Alatus) in your yard? Let’s talk! Perfection isn't the goal Our goal here at Blue Stem Natives is not perfection and that includes not guilting our customers into having yards that are perfectly 100% native. Perfection, after all, is the enemy of good. Customers often come in to talk about native plants and tell us sheepishly that they have non-native plants in their yards. Hey, we do too! Peonies remind me of my wedding, tulips give some nice, ear