Sweet find from yesterday

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dipper

Guest
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Awesome stuff, saw a karner blue last year!!!
Thought the sky was neat, this is primo bedding cover, the elevation drops pretty rapidly, kinda hard to tell with the thick foliage
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This used to be predominantly jack pine that was eliminated. A lot of oak regeneration.
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Pretty cool that you have them. :cool: We had them at our old place in Juneau Co. also, but we were just 5 or so miles south of the Necedah NWR where they do everything in there power to aid their recovery. Just don't let the DNR find out you have them, you will have a bunch of hippie tree huggers and graduate students knocking on your door wanting to see your pretty butterflies!:rolleyes: I love the oak regen!
 
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One other thing dipper, because you have the ultimate ice cream plant for sandy, unamended ground, you might want to keep an eye on those and try and collect the seed and spread it on other parts of your place. It sure wouldn't take to much effort and you seem like the kind of guy who likes "free".
 
One other thing dipper, because you have the ultimate ice cream plant for sandy, unamended ground, you might want to keep an eye on those and try and collect the seed and spread it on other parts of your place. It sure wouldn't take to much effort and you seem like the kind of guy who likes "free".

I will, when does the lupine generally go to seed? Establishing Lupine is one of my habitt goals, and low and behold I find some growing naturally. It really made my day.

It's kinda funny how my habitat plans are transforming into non-deer related tasks. You hit a point where you can only do so much "deer" stuff, and you move onto other things. At least that's what it seems to me.
 
Wild Lupine seed in that part of the state typically drops the last week of June. Ironically we are always on a fishing trip in Hayward when the stuff drops at our place so we usually miss out. It's tough because the pods just explode whenever they decide to so it can be very difficult to get the timing right. Of course ever year is different too.

one thing you can do is you can tie some really fine nets around the plants once the pods form. That way whenever they pop it just goes into the nets, and then you dump your nets whenever you get back to collecting. I know mdweber2 has discussed this technique on the other forum. We have used it for other species like Phlox and it works very well. It's the best way if you can't watch your plants daily.
 
I love that bedding area.....awesome cover!
 
Karner Blue's were pretty common at my folks' place too...cool to see.

On the lupine...Dad used to pick them and put them in a 5 gallon bucket with a piece of aluminum screen and a something heavy to hold it in place. That way when they "popped" the seed stayed in the bucket. A good number of folks from their church were invited to come out and pick as much lupine seed as they wanted over the years. Lupines are cool plants, I really love the Russell Lupines, but I could never get them established on the central sands of WI....here they do pretty well.
I'm not picturing this "popping" thing? When your dad would pick it, he would collect the seed before it was about to fully mature? The seed pod must be really thin, and it shatters easily? That's what you guys are describing as popping?
Thanks outdoorstom, alot of logging, we do it ourselves. We have to kill over 40 does/ year to keep the regeneration going. My neighbors don't shoot does, so it is alot of work. Also alot of fun.
 
You want to get them when they look like this. To have viable seed for any wildflower, obviously waiting as long as possible to ensure it's mature is best. Thats why I recommended the screen method, for us being weekend warrriors it's hard to get it sometimes being 2 hours away. We can't always check it daily. If the seeds look like below, you can put them in a bucket / screen / whatever. Yes, as the seed pod dries out it becomes fragile and eventually pops open and the seeds fall to the ground.

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Thanks ed, that makes sense now. I want to get a good patch going in my garden.
 
Thanks ed, that makes sense now. I want to get a good patch going in my garden.
Thats the way to do it. I have a lot of stuff that I grow at home and then collect seed during the growing season and we just throw bags and bags of the stuff out during the fall. My dad does the same thing. Cuts damn near everything in his yard which is an insane amount of species, and we just dump it all on our land.

At home I can micro manage the heck out of it and watch it daily. This works great on rare species too. Some of these plants just need to be babied. Out on the farm we often can't do that. As we continue to use this method each year we continue to improve our seed bank, diversify our land and improve habitat.
 
Oh by the way Lupine typically does require cold moisture stratification.
 
Very cool. I just did some reading up on the lupine and it looks like most of the lupine we have up in NE MN is not the native kind, it is the large leaved lupine from out west.

Do you guys know a good way to tell them apart if I check some out this weekend? If they have the different colors (white, pink, purple) they are the large leaved ones?
 
You're referring to Russell Lupines I believe. Russell's are huge compared to the native lupine. If they're 30"+ tall....they're Russells. I haven't seen any native lupine in MN, but that doesn't mean they aren't here somewhere. Russells prefer more moisture and heavier soil, the natives grow on nearly pure sand with very low OM

That makes sense. I would say that any in our area are the Russels then, they seem pretty tall and they area growing in ditches and even though there are gravel pockets there isn't anything close to pure sand. Searching online shows that there are some natives in east central MN.
 
I have to get my cousin into this, he has a 2500 square foot patch in the ditch by his driveway. It stuck out like a sore thumb because it is in bloom right now. I remember the state fencing that area off in the 1990s, when there was a local Karner Blue kick. That kind of left my mind until I really started caring about it.
 
I'd anticipate finding the natives in an area like sandbur's or possibly around foggy's.

I love the Russels....Nothing like seeing a huge expanse of them in full bloom :)

I agree. My wife is from Iowa and the first time we went up the north shore in June a few years ago there were quite a few of them. She never realized what wildflowers could look like before.
 
Pinetree Garden Seeds has Wild Lupine seeds for sale.
 
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