Spring's First Flowers While Hiking the Louisville Swamp

Pasque flowers are blooming in this transition to spring. I’m out hiking with Scout along the Minnesota River on federal land at the Louisville Swamp, narrating what we see as the prairie wakes up. You’ll hear why those fuzzy, pale purple native wildflowers matter, how quickly bees find them, and what the first blooms of the year teach us about building real habitat, not just pretty landscaping.

As the trail shifts from open prairie to woodland edge, the conversation gets more practical and more opinionated. I share why Minnesota Gardening became A Better Yard, and why my focus has moved toward sustainable landscaping: reducing chemical use, saving water, feeding native pollinators, supporting songbirds, and storing carbon in ways homeowners can actually pull off. We also dig into buckthorn, the invasive shrub that leafs out early and steals sunlight from spring ephemerals. I talk about what large-scale buckthorn removal looks like in the real world, including the trade-offs and the frustrating “collateral damage” when helpful natives get hit too.

Then we zoom out to the bigger stressors showing up on the trail, especially declining burr oaks and how hotter, wetter nights can accelerate fungi and disease. That leads to a key takeaway for climate-resilient yards: genetic diversity matters. If we fill our landscapes with cloned, named varieties, we limit adaptation right when conditions are changing fast. Choosing seed-grown native plants and regionally appropriate genetics gives nature more options.

If you like this kind of on-the-ground yard advice, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it. What’s the first sign of spring you look for every year?

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Transcript

Pasque Flowers And Early Pollinators

Why Minnesota Gardening Became A Better Yard

Buckthorn Control And Sandhill Cranes

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Alright, hello my friends. I am back with a podcast episode. And we have changed a lot since I was around last. We have uh switched everything from Minnesota gardening to a better yard for a variety of reasons that I'll get into in a little bit. But today I'm out for a hike. And the spring peepers and the ducks and the sandhill cranes and all of our friends are out, and it's a gorgeous, gorgeous day here in Minnesota. And I'm gonna take you along for a hike with Scout and me. We are along the Minnesota River in a federal land called the Louisville Swamp. And this is my happy place. It's got prairie, it's got swampland, it's got just a shit ton of old-growth burr oaks that are in fact super suffering now because of burr oak blight and oak wilt and other issues that are hitting our friends. But we're gonna take you on a hike today and let you know what we see. So it is when I'm recording this, it is March 3rd, 2026. Usually when I'm out, I am all by myself. But today, there are quite a few people out because it's a gorgeous day and we're supposed to get six inches of snow later on this week. So I'm glad that folks are out. A dude with a fat bot tire bike just went path. And so this area that I'm in right now is former cropland that was converted back to prairie when the federal government purchased it and put it into reserve, and it's gorgeous now. And I'm on top of a bluff that overlooks the Minnesota River swamp area, so it's kind of a backwater for the Minnesota River, and so this area has a ton of native wildflowers and grasses and trees. So I'm just gonna kind of narrate it as we go along today and see if this turns out. It may be terrible, but we'll see what happens. There are a lot of little friends that are starting to peek out uh and wake up for the spring, including all of our frog friends. A lot of grasses that are starting to wake up. And this area that I'm in right now is a again, a prairie, but I'm kind of on a prairie edge where there's some burr oaks canopy, but also underneath of that, it is just absolutely choked out by buckthorn. And so this buckthorn is a non-native invasive species, and it is really unhelpful to almost everybody. And so talk a little bit more about the buckthorn as we go along. But right now, I am coming up on the reason why I'm taking my hike today before it gets cold again. And turns out in 2014, I found these babies, but I forgot about them. And then last year, oh my gosh, they're blooming! Oh, that's so exciting! Last year I found them again, and there was a prairie burn that they did, and they all got smothered in the prairie burn. And so today I see these happy little babies, and these are native wildflowers on top of the bluff, and they're just getting inundated by bees, which is so cool. But Pasque flower, pasque, P-A-S-Q-U-E flower. It's one of the very first things that you will see flowering every year. And so they've got six petals, no foliage right now. They are just loaded with pollen with bright, bright yellow centers. And these little guys right here are the palest of pale purple, violet. Um, and they're super fuzzy, and they are just awesome. So I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So I will post some pictures of all these babies on Instagram, so you can follow a better yard on Instagram, and this is just so much fun. So these guys, they got just womped by the prairie burn last year, and uh this year they did not do a burn on the prairie. And so they are happy and blooming and great. And so these are really, as you can tell by as many little bees and friends that are on top of these guys right now. They are absolutely awesome. And so, for sorry, I'm taking some pictures. Trying to get the bees in there. I wish I knew my bees better, but I in fact do not. Oh, they're so cool. This makes for just you know, great podcast audio content when I'm just taking pictures of flowers instead of talking to you about them, but it makes me so happy that they are here, and so there are one, two, three, four different clusters of them, and they are just the coolest little guys, and so great to see in the spring because hardly anything has really started growing yet. It's gotten pretty dry here, and uh it's pretty incredible. And so I am overlooking the swamp now, and so usually there are eagles and sandhill cranes and other things that you can find and check out as we are on a hike, and I'll let you know what we find. Oh, that's fun. So I'll continue. I'm not sure if I've said this or not, or if I've said this enough for everybody, but I'm just so excited that they're blooming and that I found them, and that there's a native sand of uh of Pasque Flower that is here. And so the vast majority of the prairie area through here is all little blue stem and big blue stem and Indian grass. There's some leatris through here, and it as I come, I try to come here every other week or so at least to see who is blooming and what's going on. So, most of my native flower plants that you see, pictures you see at abetteryard.org and online, many of them are from here. And so it's also fun to see this time of year where all the seed heads that are still up and all the birds that are flitting around, there are a ton of song sparrows that are through here, and um yeah, it's just a really, really cool thing. I am now walking through the prairie area and will let me know a little bit about Better Yard. And so we have moved from Minnesota Gardening to a Better Yard, and the website is a betteryard.org. And there are a couple different reasons for that. The first one is that we started Minnesota gardening during COVID when everyone was very focused and rightfully so on hobbies and activities. And a bunch of my friends had asked me, kept asking me questions. They're like, hey Brad, we should pay you for this. And so we started uh Minnesota Gardening, and it grew from there. And we targeted uh folks who wanted to grow tomatoes and grow cucumbers and uh a lot of home gardening type things for flowers and vegetables and that kind of thing. But as we grew and changed, it became very clear to me that my passions were much more in ways that we can reduce chemical use and feed native bees and pollinators and other friends and songbirds, as well as saving water and storing carbon to mitigate climate change that is happening all around us. And so, with this, we no longer were focused on gardening, and it was confusing, and we're no longer focused simply on Minnesota, continuing to be confusing. So, after a lot of thought and a lot of changes, we switched to a better yard. And the goal at a better yard is still the same as we were at with the latter days of Minnesota gardening, which is we are working together to make sure that homeowners are able to grow and have safe lawns that are less dependent on chemical use and using less water and making sure that we are supporting our local ecosystems so that we can have a better world and a better place, and we can all do this together. So we are working on this and making sure that this is moving forward, and it's really exciting, and people are responding and reacting, and it's great. So you can join a better yard at abetteryard.org if you haven't currently joined. And so when you do join, it is a growing, awesome community. It's$37 a month, and you can join a better yard. It'll be in the show notes for uh the link for everything, and there'll be a coupon code for you there, which will uh reduce your first month's cost to just$7. So you can check us out for$7 and have a lot of fun. Meet a lot of new people from the upper Midwest and people who care about the same things as you do, about making sure that we have uh food for monarchs and making sure that we are not poisoning our lawns with chemicals and we are reducing that as much as humanly possible. And so it's really, really great. And we'll go from there. I'll talk a little bit more as we continue on. But right now, I'm gonna tell you that the federal government is doing uh a really cool project out here, and it's really hard for me, as you know, to say that the federal government is doing anything right right now, but the feds are doing a great job of trying to reduce the impact of buckthorn on our woodlands, and so they have uh for three years straight now come through and mowed down all the buckthorn. It was a definitely a hatchet, not a scalpel, in the way they did this. Wait, everybody, a sandhill crane. Hi, honey. I doubt you'll be able to hear the sandhill crane, but there are two of them, and those are the first ones that I've seen this year. They're flying overhead, and sandhill cranes pair off, and they are one of my favorite, favorite birds. So there's a pair of them that are flying around and circling. Again, makes for great, great audio when Brad is taking pictures of his Sand Hill Crane friends. Um, so yeah, they're circling and they hang out here a bunch, and there will often be massive flocks of them with uh hundreds of Sand Hill cranes. Hi! First ones I've seen this year.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Yeah, they just they're new arrivals. They haven't been here too long.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Yeah, uh. I heard them when I was here two weeks ago, but I never saw them. Uh so they've been around for a little bit now, but it uh yeah, it's fun to see them.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Especially doing that, I'm not sure what they're doing. Sometimes I'll other springs. I do see them walking around out here, but not so common, I don't think, to see them discount.

Dying Burr Oaks And Climate Stress

Why Genetic Diversity Beats Cultivars

Feedback Request And How To Join

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Circling like that, yeah. Right. They're looking for something. Have a good day. Okay, back to our uh previously scheduled nerdiness about Buckthorn and not my uh Sandhill Cranes. A uh side note, there are Ray Gun, which is a t-shirt shop from Iowa that I love and adore. They have Rebel Loon um t-shirts, and so they have also, and mine just shipped today, they also have rebel sandhill crane shirts as well, that's supposed to arrive in a couple days. So I'll definitely take a picture of that for you when it arrives as well. So uh back to buckthorn. So buckthorn is an invasive plant that is highly detrimental to our local ecosystems, and it doesn't have any natural predators here or many at all. And so it chokes out the biggest thing that invasive, so everything evolves and changes, and we have to really watch how we use our language around non-native and invasive and those kinds of things. But buckthorn, I think, is one of those that we can absolutely say is unhelpful in our local ecosystems, and so they are cutting it back, but in cutting it back, they also cut back a lot of other uh plants as well. So they tried to identify a few that were helpful trees that would be here, but they also cut down a ton of my friends that uh I would look for and watch throughout the year, and so a ton of hazelnuts are gone that were native, are native here and very, very helpful in our local ecosystem. And they're getting uh so they're cutting back all this buckthorn, and we'll see what happens with it. Uh, buckthorn is really difficult to manage if you don't stay on top of it a lot, and so it is a tough one. And so buckthorn is a really successful and non-native species because it leaves out early. And so all of our oaks and maples and all of those friends, they don't end up leafing out until uh, you know, the end of April is when they start to have canopy or so. But buckthorn will leaf out really, really early in the spring. So they'll be one of the first things you see leaves start to emerge on, which is a great way to help identify buckthorn. And so, with that early emergence of the buckthorn, they end up shading out all of our native plants, like our pasque flower and like our jack in the pulpit, and all these woodland ephemeral. Ephemeral is uh obnoxious horticultural word that means they come up for a little bit and then they die back. And so spring ephemerals, E-P-H-E-M-E-R-A-L-S, are plants that uh you see for just a couple weeks, and that's their entire yearly life cycle, is they they grow for a couple weeks and then they die back, and um that then they hang out underground uh for the rest of the year, and they do that because they have access to sunshine in those early months of the year, and uh the trees aren't shading them, and so they get everything that they need and they take all that energy back into the root system. But when you have buckthorn that leaves out really early, then they end up shading out all of our woodland plants, and they aren't able to fulfill their life cycle the way they need to in order to keep going. And so there are a lot of really great new ways to combat buckthorn in our woodlands, and so we'll talk more about that on a different podcast episode. But they are the feds are doing a good job of trying, and so we'll see what happens here. But it looks like a uh just an absolute wasteland in between all of these trees that are here, and so I'll post the pictures of all of this stuff so you guys can see again at a better yard on Instagram and blue sky, we're on now. So um I decided I really can't stand Facebook. It's highly problematic for a variety of reasons, and all social media is, but I want to make sure to get it there, and we'll post them as well for all of our members at A Better Yard. So, as we're walking through here, this is the area where my uh hazelnut friends used to live, and they are no longer, which is a bummer, and they're uh uh I don't know, collateral damage, I guess you would say, from the buckthorn annihilation, and we could put a lot of uh a lot of analogies in comparison to our current geopolitical issues, but I'll save that for later or never because we're talking plants today. So, this is the area where a bunch of our burr oaks are not making it anymore, they are dying back, and so I would say about a quarter of these old uh 200-year-old oaks are starting to die, and so we are losing a lot of oaks and a lot of trees due to climate change, and so climate change is allowing a lot of funguses and viruses to really change and become more prevalent in our communities because that we for a variety of reasons. One is that they thrive in hotter temperatures, which we're having consistently hotter temperatures and hotter nights and those kinds of things, and so the hotter nights are very problematic because they are generally hotter and wetter nights. So humidity allows funguses to grow a lot faster, oftentimes, it's not everywhere, but oftentimes, and so they are really thriving. And so these diseases, which are hurting our long-standing, hundreds of years long-standing native plants, are struggling, and so they obviously cannot get up and move somewhere else, and they are used to things the way that they are used to them, and so hopefully, as they are dropping acorns and this life cycle is continuing, that we are able to find ones that are newer and and more happy growing in our current climate that is changing dramatically from when all of these hundreds of year-old trees sprouted, um, and we're just in a different place right now for many, many reasons. And so it's also important to note that we should not be buying named plants. And so, as you go to a nursery, you will find uh uh there's a purple cone flower called Kim's knee high. And so you look at those plants at the nursery and you see that they are all exactly the same. They're all blooming at the same time, they're all the same height, they're all look exactly the same. And that's what they need in order to have varieties that are uh consistent, and everyone knows how they handle the landscape, everybody knows how they grow, and then from there, however, there is zero variety in that genetic material. And so those plants are all clippings uh of the same plant, and so that's how they propagate those, is they continue to grow with the exact same genetic material, and so evolution is impossible in those plants. And so we, as folks that care about our local ecosystems, need to make sure that we are planting new varieties of things. And you do that by having seed diversity, and so you have diversity in the genetics, which means that you have purple cone flowers that are all different heights, they're all different shades of purple and those kinds of things, but still the same basic plant. And so it is really important that in general, at least 80% of your landscape, we want to work toward having them be plants that are native to your area and are not necessarily plants that are named, because what happens is if you get a burr oak that is named that is not started from an acorn, you are not getting any genetic diversity with those oak trees. And so when we have climate change happening, we're not able to see, okay, this species is really thriving and being successful in these new conditions that we are living through. And so you don't get any of that because if they are all a type of burroak, then those, all those burroaks will suffer nearly equally when our climate, as our climate changes and continues to change, because we are very clearly in a much more volatile, different climatological world than we were just 20 years ago. And so we need to make sure that we are allowing for those kinds of things to happen and having that genetic diversity for everything from the smallest of past flowers to verbicone flowers to the biggest of the Baroques and the sugar maples and all those kinds of friends that we need and want and that we uh are critical to our landscapes and ecosystems being successful. So I think that we'll see how this turns out with the audio. So would love to get your feedback. Let me know what you think about this kind of thing of Brad's little ramblings about the importance of our local ecosystems and genetic diversity and making sure that we are doing the right things in our home landscapes, as well as why we have switched from Minnesota gardening to a better yard. And so you can check out a better yard, a betteryard.org. If you go in the show notes, I'll have a coupon code for you there that you can just check out our first month for just$7. You can cancel it anytime, you can leave it at any time, whatever works best for you. But we are really, really working and hoping that you'll join us to make sure that we are a community of homeowners who are working to reduce and eliminate chemical use, that we are working to save that clean water, make sure we're feeding pollinators and songbirds and storing carbon to help mitigate this climate change that is causing major, major problems. So head over to betteryard.org and join us there. And I really appreciate you being here. And uh, we'll talk to you again soon.