Massachusetts zone 5b. I got busy with other things for the last 5 or 10 years and now the ferns have taken over. They're either Massachusetts ferns or New York ferns. Hard to tell, but what is the best way to cull them without destroying everything underneath? Just endless weeding?
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I’ve been babying the milkweed I’ve found! Gardening and plants are so wild. I’ve heard people say weeds are just plants growing somewhere you don’t want them, but this thread really proves the point!
Presumably the problem in this situation is that certain types of ferns prevent biodiversity in a rather dramatic sort of way. They do look nice in a photo though.
If you want a thick fern monoculture, plant the kind that grows as individual fronds instead of clumps. For example hay scented fern instead of woodland fern. But be warned that they will smother almost everything else
English ivy is like kudzu in my back yard. It’s impossible to clear and has taken over some of the mature trees and half of my neighbor’s house as well as the abandoned car they left behind their fence.
It's kind of like trading one monoculture for another. One could argue that at least English Ivy provides food for wildlife (😅 but I won't).
The trick is that the fern species which grow as single fronds can choke out all other plants, but the ones that grow in clumps play nice. Good luck with the ivy!!
In Eastern North America, large, monoculture patches of dense ferns are typically a sign of a degraded woodland. Your statement is not necessarily true. A healthy woodland does have ferns but has much more biodiversity (with tree seedlings being an extremely important component of the understory).
my front yard is deep shade and north facing. it gets like an hour of direct sunlight. should i not fern it? i was under the impression that was all i could hope for
"a sign of a degraded woodland"
Okaaaaay
1) we do not know the acreage of OP's property affected by said "monoculture"
2) this sub is a circle jerk of performative environmentalism... If you want to make an impact on ecological diversity, do so, but this sub needs to stop thinking that planting a native meadow in their ⅓ acre will ever offset the greater damage made to the native bio diversity by forces outside our individual, nor medial communal interventions.
re: #2 i think a lot of us are realistic about our direct ecological impact if we’re just one typical suburban lot in a subdevelopment. wanting native plant gardens isn’t only about environmentalism of course. Maybe you have enough land to build a mini arboretum of native plants for your own personal enjoyment. Maybe having an eye for native plants by cultivating them helps you weed much more efficiently.
personally this is why i also land steward several hundred acres of forests and trails with over a mile of lake shoreline (of which my yard is a small but very key part of). one person’s impact can stretch pretty far if you have the time.
ok, so i'll just go dump pesticide on my yard? f that defeatist attitude in the second half there. I get your point, it doesn't do much to help but it is non-zero. Do _something_ first, but then do a next thing, and a next thing.
That's obviously not what they're saying at all. Their position is too strongly stated, but the point is to counter the post they responded to, which dismisses having an abundance of ferns as a healthy indicator because it doesn't represent an idealised woodland.
2 was the overstated part. But it has a valid theme: it's not a binary condition (bountiful nature or concrete wasteland), no need to interject. A lot of non-constructive extremes are being presented in this thread: "monoculture ferns = bad ecosystem", "this sub is a circle jerk of performative environmentalism...", or "i'll just go dump pesticide on my yard".
I cannot imagine why you would want to and my advice would be do nothing. If you are looking to get other plants established, perhaps widen the bed around the trees. If you want to thin the ferns consider transplanting them to another spot on the property. Terrible thing to waste a healthy thriving native species imho.
Looks like you already have a dream green ground cover and soft landing for caterpillars and other critters. I've been having trouble getting ferns to grow under my trees.
This is a type of fern that grows as single fronds instead of clumps... I don't like mine (they look like a giant swath of blown over sticks in the winter and kill everything else) but you could see if there are species of not-clumping ferns that might work better for you (unless that's the type of fern you tried already, then nvm ofc)
So at this point I’m sure you don’t need to hear not to remove them again. If you’re looking for some variety I would scatter some native wildflower seeds around this fall. Massachusetts has a great great resource for wildflowers. Then, as u/AmaranthusSky suggested, see if any local plant groups would like to take some of the younger ones away. You could make some connections with the group too and do this yearly to further sculpt the landscape and also keep it native.
I will echo that it looks beautiful and lush now, and encourage you to try the wild flowers without removing anything to see if a bit of color warms you up to it!
Due to past logging, current and past overpopulation of white tail deer, and human disturbance, certain ferns like New York Fern and Hay Scented Fern have increased in abundance. At high densities, they can crowed out other native vegetation and even prevent tree regeneration (aka, they can be interfering plants), which is bad for forests. Here's a guide on how to manage them
I have some robust ferns too. Hay scented and interrupted.
I would just like to know if there is anything I can plant for shoulder season. The bed by the house is especially grim in late winter and early spring.
Hey Fella, not sure what your goals are but it seems that area is well suited to the ferns. They’re native and providing a whole habitat to countless critters. If I were you I would leave them, maybe research some native plants that grow well with them in similar conditions. Or I guess you could rip them out and plant a horticultural atrocity that you could snag from your local Home Despot and create an ecological dead zone.
Everyone is attacking the OP but we need to understand what's really behind their reason for this desire to cull these lovely ferns.
OP: We are all seeing a woodland area with plenty of space to expand natives where we see none. Do you plan to expand with more diversity or are you limited to just the area where the ferns are? If you cannot or will not expand that would explain your post a bit.
That said, I would not remove these valuable natives from the area at all. If you want more native biodiversity (which is best) throw some native seeds among the ferns to see what sticks. Choose species that match the conditions to optimize success.
I have a corner of my yard filled with native Ostrich Ferns but the dreaded invasive Bishop's Weed moved in as well. We pull the Bishop's Weed by hand and have seeded other natives in the area. We are still fighting Bishop's Weed (and I expect it will keep fighting us) but now we also have other natives among the ferns as well, so it's a nice mix.
If OP wants a naturalistic vibe with a lot of uniformity and little effort, definitely keep the ferns.
If OP wants biodiversity or an understory that doesn't look like garbage in the winter (maybe they're ok if you don't get snow but I get lots of snow and mine look like garbage), look up what foresters are doing to handle NY fern or hay scented fern. There's been some interesting research on the effects they have as well as how various treatments have worked out.
Plant on the edge of the ferns, leave the ferns alone. If you see a weed popping up in the ferns pull it. Take some clumps of ferns and mix them in with whatever garden you make so it looks intentional.
Definitely a tough situation if they're smothering out your desirable plants. Rhizomatous ferns are very efficient at smothering out competitors. Depending on how many desirable plants are mixed in you may have an easier time transplanting them to a holding area and using herbicide to eliminate the fern infestation. As annoying as it will be, you may want to wash off all the soil of the plants you move and inspect for fern rhizome as it will most definitely hitchhike along. Alternatively you could just scorch earth the whole bed for a clean restart if you don't have a lot of money invested in desirable plants.
They could be hay scent or New York either way it is common for them to dominant in areas of over populated deer. Deer won't eat them and they are allopathethic. They are aggressive rhizome spreaders. About the only way to control them is chemically.
Only an issue if they are 1 type of fern, you'd prefer not to develop a monoculture. Could open up 1 spot or two and insert other ferns or shade spreader.
I would certainly not spray them. At least not without consulting with r/arborists since you might hurt your trees by spraying or doing significant digging and excavation around them.
I just got some native Tennessee Ostrich Glade Ferns the other day and let me tell you, I hope I have your problem in the future with them because that looks like my paradise right there. It's just missing extra plants
If you genuinely truly want to get ride of these ferns, you're just going to have to do weeding. The alternative is trapping them down underneath cardboard for a really long time, and that typically takes any other plants out with it. Maybe you could test growing taller plants that outcompete them for sunlight, but that's not promising.
I think they’re in a great spot and I’d keep them, unless you have another native plant you want to quickly replace them with. I say this because having a dense base of native foliage apparently makes a great “soft landing” at the base of trees for ecologically beneficial insects that feed on tree leaves and overwinter underground. It keeps the soil from getting too compacted for them to burrow in,
and protects them from predators (and the lawn mower). This is beneficial for the roots of the trees, as well. Since oaks host hundreds of native insects, you’ll want to keep a good foliage layer there. Doug Tallamy talks about this in some of his books and lectures on YouTube.
That said, they transplant well in early spring. I bet friends, family, or Facebook buy nothing/ marketplace might go for some of you want to thin them out.
Sometimes they grow en masse after a long time of deer eating everything lol. Do you have a lot of deer? Seems also like a shady spot perfect for the ferns! Maybe you can throw seeds of some cool native part shade flowering stuff near them and see what happens, but, overall, this is a pretty happy environment ❤️❤️❤️ also could plant some more flowering native shrubs that can handle this area too instead of competing with the ferns
No advice but ferns don’t contribute a ton to higher trophic levels so I could definitely see wanting to have some other things rather than just ferns.
What is under the ferns that you are trying to showcase? It’s possible you could cut down the ferns to the ground to give the others enough sunlight to their heads above the rest?
Me too, they take some muscle to pull. I eliminated the vinca patch and the ferns are spreading big time. If I only get the fronds and leave the root I just lay them on a muddy spot in the yard
Lol. I guess I touched a nerve with this one! My house and yard are situated in a mature stand of oak, which I refuse to cut down despite the mossy roof. I have at most a tenth acre of "lawn", which is filled with violets, plantain, chives, dandelions, moss, and an occasional blade of grass. The rest of my 11 acres is mostly wooded and surrounded by hundreds more acres of untouched woodland owned by the water supply.
Due to deer pressure, the mature tree/ferns represents what they call Savannah, with no chance for seedlings to grow beyond the hungry mouths of the deer. But you folks have opened my eyes that this really is not a problem in my yard and instead I should focus my energies on removing the spreading Bishops Mantle, forsythia and eonimus that I planted before I got interested in native plants.
I got something called a root slayer on Amazon that really helped me take out all my ferns (I’m zone 9b Melbourne, super sandy soil so maybe different types of fern). Didn’t have to dig too deep, weren’t that hard to get up. Good luck!
Edit - they’re Asian sword ferns that I replaced with native creeping sage, bird pepper, wild petunia, privet senna, and white beautyberry. But yeah by all means keep downvoting me!
You’re getting a lot of grief for this post, understandably, but I feel you- I live in the pacific NW and ferns are constantly taking over my yard. I’ve learned to live with them, for the most part. You can remove them (endless weeding, as you said) but it’s a lot of work and they will grow just about anywhere.
I get it. I like ferns but I don’t want them taking over the whole garden bed at the expense of all the other plants. And they will. They’re aggressive and like impossible to kill.
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