2025 Growing Season summary

It has been a long, dry, warm growing season in Central-Northern Michigan, both in the ground and in the pots of our new greenhouse. In the HES greenhouse we started with two species of tobacco, and shared starts with several people, as well as collected significant amounts of seed pods for future generations.

An inventory of plants grown in the greenhouse in lnclude 45 species of North American plants, both woody and herbaceous, representing Eastern North America flora and Western North America flora. It was decided to purchase nursery grown trees from a https://sequoiatrees.com/California company to experiment with how they grow in Michigan climate, with hopes of future targeted urban plantings where appropriate. For example, one giant sequoia sapling was planted in my front yard easement to test its tolerance of Michigan winter temperatures, snow load, and elevation. This species, Sequoiadendron giganteum, naturally grows in high altitudes of Sierra Nevada mountains, exposed to deep snow loads, high winds, but not interior Zone 4-5 temperatures.

Two pines were selected for bonsai in container, with a learning curve on growing in shallow containers with mineral soils/media. Japanese Black Pine, Pinus thunbergii, and Pinus contorta variety contorta, Shore Pine, were transplanted, tied into shapes appropriate to the art and science of bonsai. https://www.bonsaiempire.com/tree-species/

It’s my hope to take the cork oak or valley oak shown below and bonsai them as they won’t tolerant growing in the Michigan ground year round. Valley Oak is a California white oak species known as largest of white oak species, and cork oak is a Mediterranean oak from Spain, Portugal, southern France that outer bark is harvested from mature plantation trees for natural wine corks.

Tropical trees grew very well and quickly in 2 gallon containers. Mango, avacado, are just a few grown from seed. Back to California plants, my step son and his wife live in the high desert near Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park. I did a dry desert landscape for them at their new home in December, and brought home some locally purchased plants and locally wild harvested seeds.

From that December 2024 trip, I now have two American agave pups from an installed large plant growing. Of the seeds, most were germinated and grown were weeds of western desert, but one https://www.calflora.org/app/taxon?crn=2511Cucurbita palmata, a wild squash or gourd of the western desert is growing in a deep 4 inch pot. I purchased a nursery grown Joshua tree, Yucca brevifolia, also in a 4 inch pot with custom blended desert soil media. Growing them from seed is not simple or easy to accomplish. They got to be one of my favorite plants to visit.

Out in the yard, all the native plants grew well, sweetgrass, milkweeds, asters, goldenrods, blazing star, sunflowers, brambles of several species, and the fruit trees did great with one exception. This year Fire Blight hit our Big Rapids area hard, most notably on non-native Bradford or callery pear, but it also attacked one of my two domestic pear trees. This requires heavy pruning, sanitizing loppers, monitoring and removing more infected wood. I noticed many trees with fire blight around neighborhoods and across campus, due to heavy use of this stinky but pollinator friendly tree .

It is October 22, and still tomatoes are growing against the garage. We had a frost or two, but no hard freeze yet, in fact, my golden raspberries are likely fruiting yet! The rain only returned in the last week or so, after being absent for a good month. I sang a song as it hailed outside as I sat on front porch with my dog Oakey this week. I enjoy the thunder, lightning and rain. It’s in my DNA and spirituality.

I will close with a note on the manoomin season. 2025 had me travel across the state of Michigan to more populations than I can count or remember. It was a good year for wild rice of both species. I was lucky to harvest seed of northern and southern wild rice from diverse populations. More on that in the future. I just wish I had seen more people out in the manoomin gardens of our great mitten state, celebrating the good harvest of the Creator.

How was your 2025 growing season?

My shadow self looking westward at a special Manoomin population I had a hand in seeding in past years. So good to see it thriving again.