Growing & Maintaining A Native Plant Border

The Flower Farmer Show: Growing & Maintaining A Native Plant Border

Lisa Mason Ziegler discusses the importance of native borders for flower farming and growing flowers for personal use. This video highlights the changes that took place around her farm that led to her decision to create a native plant border and the process she went through to get it started and established. Lisa explains the many benefits of native plantings and offers maintenance tips. Native borders now encase the entire property, providing the foundation for Lisa’s natural gardening practices.

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Lisa Ziegler

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Whether you dream of being a flower farmer or you just want to grow flowers for your kitchen table I’m Lisa Mason Ziggler I’m glad you’re here let’s jump In so welcome to my farm the way it looked probably about two decades ago um and this is what it looked like up till about 5 years ago I was totally surrounded by a horse boarding Farm we’re we’re right in the middle of the city um and we had amazing wildlife and

Birds and pollinators and it was like we were in the country right in the middle of the city and we really benefited from that on our farm and our practices I mean not to mention working in the presence of the neighbors horses was pretty dreamy and even our customers

Loved bringing their kids to see them and this is what we have now that horse boarding Farm um about 5 years ago was sold and is now 90 houses that mound of soil that you’re seeing was the first of the destruction um we knew that we had to

Install a wind break as well as a visual break around our farm but more importantly an organic Homebase um Native plantings um to create the home for um all of the creatures that were at the B basis of my organic practices that I realized live

Next door in all those hedge RS so we planted um this native border we actually had a native landscape designer come and we walked those HED RS before they were destroyed next door and we mimicked them and we planted them and as you can see we just used tons of leaves

Um and mulched them and Through the Years um in addition to what you just saw over the next 5 years each fall I would add a little bit more the initial was about a 500t run um now our complete property is surrounded however I’m not all about

Natives you can um see that I am in the hydrangea patch hydrangeas are not native um so I’m not a purist but native plants have a place on every farm and in every Garden if we want native birds and Native insects um they have to have home

Base so when I make decisions to add to my garden we always consider natives first um and something I think that I didn’t understand is a native border is not a landscaped well manicured border um that’s why we use tons of leaves to mulch but it’s not like you’re trying to

Keep it weed free because those weeds popping up many many of them are native plants so the goal is to plant at such spacing that within just a few years they start to crowd out the stuff you don’t want um and it’s kind of you just edit this this border you know about

Twice a year I go in with a small chainsaw and a saw and my clippers and try to get under control anything that’s really getting out of its bounds but we aren’t really weeding and taking care of that area and we just keep adding more

And more now this is a new area that looks like a bit of a mesh right now in fact my husband just asked recently is it supposed to look like that when it’s first starting it is going to be weedy and you are it’s going to kind of make

You crazy but as it grows you can see what’s on my right doesn’t really have that the plants are big enough now that they shade out those aggressive weeds um I cannot tell you the bird life that is on our farm in insects eating birds as

Well as um we in our border we do a lot of things like we leave brush land when we cut it you can see logs laying around and piles of brush um those are all for insects and the birds that we want eat those insects and then we love having

Our native Island which um is full of it doesn’t look like much now but in the summer this native island is 6 to 8 ft tall with lots of native flowers in there that we cut from but they also support the organic or the The Beneficial creatures on our farm um and

We’ve had some of the trees you see actually grew them there themselves from acorns oak trees which are some of the best heroes and then that was my rock pile which is really a great place for some of the reptiles on our farm um and we do still fight some invasives um but

We love that we have Mountain mint which isn’t invasive but but it is a very beneficial invasive that smells really really great it’s the number one plant that we feel like we grow for pollinators um and so it’s just a real mix of native trees and shrubs along

With some native perennials um it is not a neat well-kept border it is a screen from our neighbors it has some invasives in there there’s an invasive honeysuckle it blocks the wind it provides home base it provides a place for birth birds and beneficial creatures to have babies to

Live to hide to Winter over and we just don’t do much tendon to it this time of the year that you’re seeing this the leaves are off of a lot of stuff normally you can’t see my neighbors homes and white fences um but it’s beneficial and you can just see my

Entire property is pretty much encased now with Native borders um and those native borders just really are the backbone foundation of the way that I Garden because we encourage the beneficial creatures to come and stay on the farm and we just walked into what I’ve called Tucker’s it’s our dog yard

It’s just an area of our farm that’s sectioned off that Tucker is okay to be loosened there safely meaning um he’s not really going to escape there’s um nothing in there he can really mess up and I can put him in there that’s where he is when I’m working down in the

Garden when I can’t supervise him and in here is one of our hydrangea Groves which again hydrangeas are not natives but they’re underst story to Native Hol native Southern wax myrtles which are just so very very huge there’s Linton roses in here which are not natives so I

Mix them up but the foundation of this entire area of our farm that surrounds our farm is native plants because our goal is for birds and beneficials to come in and feel like they never want to leave they can find everything they need here and that’s what supports my organic

Growing practices here on my farm um without that farm next door I got really scared and jumped into action and I want to just say you can do it and you can do it quickly um 5 years ago is how old that big border we just walked by is and

Times flew and here is our old dead tree that is just so full of insects and the woodpeckers Feast here so we um love living with all of the wildlife and having it help us um and now we’re exiting Tucker’s dog yard into the bigger fenced in area which is my flower farm