I really wish the Natural Garden Inc., in St. Charles, IL, had a better website. As it stands, I’m looking at tables of their plant lists, trying to figure out what to plant this fall to restore my lawn to prairie. It’s a long, arduous process. On the plus side, Natural Garden is only about twenty-five miles away from me, and claim their native plant nursery stock is from seed collected within a 90 mile radius sometime in the seventies. We’re talking local genome here folks.

Prairie Nursery has always had an informative and well-organized website. I’ve ordered from them before when I was establishing my woodland garden a couple of years ago, and was happy with the result. The only drawbacks were that the plants reeked of smoke when they arrived and the Virginia Wild Rye (Elymus virginicus) was a bit more invasive and weedy than I would have liked.

Prairie Moon Nursery used to have a somewhat dis-functional site, but they recently re-vamped it and it’s now much better and more user friendly. So far, this is the only place I have found that sells native plants bare root (I haven’t been looking very hard…). This Spring I took advantage of their bare-root clearance sale and, though it was a bit late in the season for it, the unpromising looking twigs they sent me all took off quite impressively. This is the way to establish some really impressive stands of Prairie Blazing Star, Prairie Larkspur, and Sweet Joe Pye Weed. I will definitely be making a larger order this Fall and spend a good weekend in October planting. Spring 2010 should be spectacular.

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When I submitted a request for funds for my landscaping project to Prosper, one lender had a very interesting question. I considered it carefully, and then discovered my ultimate answer was far too long for Prosper’s format. I shortened my answer, but the lender who asked decided not to fund the loan request.

I can’t help but think the problem was that I could not fully answer, given Prosper’s constraints.

My loan request:

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Read the rest of Let’s fix up this desperate landscape: My Prosper Loan Request 1 at Suburban Ecology

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