Rick:

Hello and welcome to Northwest Philly Neighbors. I'm Rick Mohr and my guest is John Janick. He's completely transformed his front and back yards with native plants, and he tells about all the butterflies, caterpillars, birds and frogs that come to visit him now. He heard the wake-up call that we're losing pollinators like bees and butterflies that we need, and that our lawn and garden habits are a big part of the problem. He's on a mission to do something about it here in Philly. His nursery Good Host Plants is helping more and more people put native plants in their yards or even in outdoor pots.

They get to enjoy the wildlife that shows up and help the bigger goal of restoring pollinators and saving our food supply. I found John pretty inspiring and I think you will too. Stay tuned.

So a lot of what you've done fits the idea of think globally, act locally. Could you talk a little bit about ideas that have motivated you?

John Janick:

Yeah, there's a lot of things in the world I'd like to change. There's easily like 20 causes out there that I could kind of jump behind and invest my time in, but when I really discovered this, I just felt there weren't enough people kind of spreading the word about it.

I have my bachelor's in biology and I didn't know about the benefits of native plants. So once I kind of went down the rabbit hole, I knew that this was kind of my calling. I was born in Northeast PA, small town. I was outside a lot. So and I always had access to either mountains, rivers, streams, ponds, meadows, woods, you name it. As a kid I really liked catching insects, going to ponds, catching frogs, toads.

Just ponds always fascinated me. A kid growing up in the outdoors, I mean I just loved it. Got older, kind of lost touch with it. Moved to Philly after college.

This is about 23 years ago. First big city, kind of lost touch with nature a little bit. How I kind of got back to it was when we got our house in Mount Airy. Fixer upper, needed a lot of work. At that point I hadn't had a yard in 15 years or so, so not a huge yard here, but I was looking forward to planting things and doing some vegetable gardening, getting into a little landscaping.

One day I was outside removing some final siding from the garage. I found this caterpillar, it was a Sphinx moth caterpillar. It was like four or five inches long. It was huge. I hadn't seen anything like that in 30 years back when I actually used to look for bugs and be fascinated by bugs.

Something about that just triggered that fascination with me again. That was around the time that we finished up the inside. So about to finally jump on the outside and I was kind of ready to just do what anyone would do, go to Lowe's and buy some flowers and shrubs and whatever looked good and was green. But I was on a local forum for Northwest Philly, I forget the name, but someone on the forum posted that Audubon Society was doing home audits called Audubon at Home. So I contacted them and they came out, ended up being a few days before my firstborn arrived. So it was early summer, a group of ten folks showed up, just kind of went over my yard and all the potential it had for planting native and I didn't really know much about native plants at that time.

I had a biology degree, but it was more of like a pre-med track. I thought English Ivy was good and if it's green it's good. But they turned me on a native plants, gave me a bunch of literature, probably the most important thing they gave me was a copy of Bringing Nature Home by Douglas Thalamy, he's a professor of entomology at University of Delaware. I read that book, it's pretty quick read and there was really no turning back after reading that.

Rick:

What was the main idea that motivated you?

John Janick:

He just really drove home the importance of native plants, the loss of habitat, from development, lawns, just making the connection between plants and insects. So plants basically develop defense mechanisms, whether it be like toxic chemicals because they don't want to be eaten and insects need to eat plants. So they adapt over years and years and years to these plants and eventually some insects can eat them.

I mean everyone knows about the monarch, I saw some of those when I was a kid now, not so common. And they could only eat milkweed. That plant is toxic, it's got the milky white substance, poisonous to a lot of animals and insects, but it's the only plant that the monarch caterpillar can eat. It can't just jump to an oak tree and eat an oak leaf, like you could only eat milkweed. So no milkweed, no monarchs, milkweed used to be common along the borders of like farms before we got into spraying pesticides and planted like GMO crops that were resistant to round up. Now they spray the whole thing and there used to be milkweed on the border, now it's all gone. Plus with development populations growing and growing, more natural spaces are being converted into houses or shopping centers or roads. And then the houses we do have use lawns and so the milkweed plant isn't as common as it used to be and therefore the species is in decline.

Rick:

I saw monarch butterflies everywhere when I was growing up.

John Janick:

Yeah, and they usually come this time of year, I mean 4th of July is when I really start seeing them. I've only seen two or three so far this season and I usually have caterpillars on all my milkweed outside, probably have 100 milkweed plants at my home, more than that at the nursery and I have not seen any caterpillars yet. So not a great sign, but hoping they're just a little behind schedule.

Rick:

I think people don't necessarily, I certainly didn't think about pollinators much. Could you talk about what pollinators do for us and how that fits into this?

John Janick:

If we lose the pollinators we're in really rough shape because 90% of plants require insect pollination and that includes our food crops and everything else. The supermarkets will be pretty empty as the pollinators decline.

Rick:

And pollinators are bees?

John Janick:

Yeah, I mean pollinators are actually a lot of things. Bees are one of them. They're not even the top pollinator if we think globally. It actually goes beetles, then wasps, and ants, then bees, then actually wind, butterflies and moths, and then flies. There was a province in China, they suffered like pollinator collapse and they were known for the apple production. They had pollinator collapse from a lot of things, from development and also monocultures.

So when it's just one crop, one plant, not a lot of food for other things and they had the resort to using human labor to pollinate the apples, apple trees. And that's not too efficient. They can't do nearly the amount of work that bees can. And bees can do a lot, especially our native bees. I mean what we hear a lot about are the European honeybees, the ones they see everywhere. They're valuable in agriculture, they're brought here for agriculture, but the native solitary bees, mason bees are actually much more efficient. There's a crazy statistic that to pollinate an acre of apple trees, it would take 40,000 European honeybees, whereas the native mason bees, 250 of them can do the work of 40,000. So I forget how many species of native bees there are, like 4,000 maybe. The bees are very important, but so are like all the other insects.

Rick:

So you read that book and thought the ideas?

John Janick:

Yeah, I just couldn't believe the negative impact we're making from how we've always done things. Think of like a lawn for an example, like why do we have lawns? Because our neighbor has one. We want to be good neighbors, we want to keep things nice and neat. We don't want to leave it go and I forget the amount of space in the country that's taken up by lawns, but it's like a staggering amount. And when you think of everything that goes into taking care of a lawn, like not just money and time, but gas, oil, kill the weeds, you know, and dump this fertilizer slash pesticide on there, herbicides, bring your lawn back to life. Because lawns do nothing to absorb rainfall, all that washes into the watersheds, the fertilizer's best side is going into the watershed. Most lawns have root systems that are like couple inches deep at best, that's why we need to constantly water them because they'll die. Whereas a native plant, native wildflowers, prairie grasses, they have root systems that go 10, 15 feet deep in the soil.

They could handle these when we get stretches of 95 degree weather and no rain for two, three weeks. I mean, their root systems are so deep, it just doesn't matter. They're not completely maintenance free, but really you just plant them and watch them as they establish. But once they go through a winter and develop those deep root systems, I mean, they're pretty much drought resistant because they're used to this climate before there were hoses and irrigation systems. They didn't need people fertilizing and they did perfectly fine on their own. But lawns, that's a whole different story.

To me, they just seem bizarre. I think there's a lot of good alternatives like wood chips, I mean, that's what we have at our preschool. But that's a big thing if we could really look to reduce our lawns if we have the opportunity.

I hear everything you're saying and it's pleasant to sit on the lawn or walk or throw a ball or something like that. And it seems like that's one place where we're giving up something that is hard to duplicate with natives.

Rick:

Well, yeah.

John Janick:

I'd also say that like, a meadow is a very serene experience. So it was walking through the woods.

Rick:

I was just hoping you were going to say, well, you know, there's this one kind of native plant that doesn't grow very tall and you can still have your picnic on it.

John Janick:

Yeah, I mean, there are some native lawn alternatives out there, different like Carrick species and everything, like a low use lawn. And there's definitely options. But I mean, one great example is one of my brothers still lives in Northeast PA and he lives in like an older suburban development in the mountains, probably 150 units. And some of these houses, like everyone there has an acre of land, some too. An older community, 70, 80% empty nesters have been there for a long time. And driving through there, you'll literally see like these houses with like two football fields worth of lawn, like no kids, but the amount of money and time and to keep that so trimmed, like it really boggles my mind. And what we've been doing in his property is like the complete opposite. I mean, planted a meadow or planted native trees.

We're about three, four years into the process now. And at first he kind of got some looks like what's this guy doing with the weeds. But now that everything's really dialed in, we got the plants right.

We use something to keep the deer off, which is a real problem, but people stop there now. And you know, you got a woman come up taking pictures and everything's like, I've never seen so many butterflies. Like this is amazing. And he's got like signage. There's the National Wildlife Federation's certified backyard habitat certification that you go through. And when you do like at the plaque, which I have about six or seven of them on my property and it makes a good conversation starter, gets people thinking.

And yeah, it looks amazing. It's a great alternative to yards that have the, you know, the Bradford Pairs, the boxwoods, the burning bushes, the Japanese Barberry. I mean, not only do some of these things not support any insects, but Japanese Barberry, it's known to harbor ticks.

Deer ticks are a huge problem. So aside from the lawns, the other things that are planted, the ornamental shrubs and trees, they look nice. And that's like what we've known for generations, like a garden is meant to look nice. But to me, like beauty without the function, like these are plants that aren't fulfilling a role in the ecosystem. I mean, once you get on the rabbit hole of native plants, it's just like without function, like there is no beauty. If we don't change the culture with that, I mean, it's not going to be good. Yeah.

Rick:

So you started to change some things on your property with those ideas?

John Janick:

Yeah. So we moved in in 2007, 2008. It's not a huge yard. I think it's like a sixteenth of an acre. It's right across from Carpenter's Woods, which is, you know, designated as an important bird area by Audubon Society. It's got a lot of like old growth trees and oaks.

It's a big stopover point for bird migration. Big reason for that is because of the trees that support insects, especially the oaks. The oak tree can support over 500 different types of lepidopter, caterpillars, larvae of butterflies and moths. And why they are so important is for birds. Birds that eat your seeds from your bird feeders, 90% of those need insects to raise their young. And when you're talking a caterpillar, that's like a steak.

That big sphinx moth caterpillar, four or five inches long that I found that one day, removing the sighting from my garage. I mean, that's like a tomahawk steak. You know, you could feed a whole clutch of babies. And you know, some of these birds, like a chickadee, I think they need like six, seven thousand caterpillars to raise their young. And so that's a lot of caterpillars. And if you don't have the trees and plants that those caterpillars can eat, you're not going to have those birds because they wouldn't be able to eat.

So the oak tree supports over 500 of those caterpillars. So that's what I live across from. And once I had that visit from Audubon at home, I wanted to basically extend the habitat of Carpenter's Woods. I felt I'm right across the street from it.

I want to expand Carpenter's Woods by planting the same things that are in there because I want wildlife to visit my yard. So, you know, the house was built in 1920 and it was basically designed to accommodate a vehicle or two. There was a driveway extending the length of the house from the street back to a paved carport into a garage.

There were some open areas, but it was all pretty much weeds. I looked on Craigslist. I found a guy who had a jackhammer, a dump truck and a couple high school age sons. And three days later, my yard was completely depaved and gave me a blank slate in which to work. Previous owner, there was like some oak trees. One was a white oak, one of the most valuable trees in the forest.

Under 50 years old, got chopped down. We had zero shade. It was super hot. We needed some shade right away. So the first thing I did was plant trees. I think I planted about 14, 15. And then I just planted some shrubs. I planted wildflowers, grasses.

I mean, this is over the course of a few years. And what made it difficult was, you know, to get the good stuff, the natives, you can't go to the big box stores to get the straight species natives and not the cultivars. You had to go, you know, an hour outside of the city. There really wasn't a good native plant resource.

Rick:

What do you mean by the straight species versus the cultivars?

John Janick:

So cultivars are really popular in the nursery trade. I think like coneflower could go to some nurseries and there'll be like 20 different color varieties of purple coneflower. Whereas a straight species is purple. So they find characteristics and then, you know, duplicate those characteristics. Some could be like dwarf species or like bred for a certain color. You basically get a plant that you know exactly, but you lose a lot of the genetic diversity that comes with open pollination. When you collect seed from the wild and you grow like little starters, you'll notice like with like little blue stem, for example, it's a prairie grass. And once those are ready to transfer into pots, some will be taller, some will be shorter, some will have different colors. That's from like that genetic variation of using open pollinated seed sources. Whereas when you're buying a cultivar, you know exactly what you're getting and you lose a lot of that diversity.

And with that could be like disease resistance or things like that that, you know, could be getting filtered out or edited out to get this particular look. I'm not totally against cultivars. I mean the Mount Cuba Center is doing a lot of trials with cultivars and they're finding out things like Manarta, there are certain cultivars that outperform the straight species aren't susceptible to like powdery mildew and they're actually studying, you know, do they still attract the pollinators. Because for some, you change the color in the flower and it becomes unrecognizable to them.

So it loses its kind of purpose in the food web. But yeah, to find those nurseries, first you had to know who they were and you had to travel a good hour outside the city to find them. And so I had to make a lot of trips. Once I had my yard saturated with native plants, which took a few years, I wanted to keep it going. I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of friends and neighbors who saw what I was doing, knew my obsession, kind of said I'd like to do that too. And so I started doing neighbors yards and friends yards and it just got really tough to travel all the time. So I mean that eventually led me to start the nursery and grow them myself.

Rick:

How many friends and neighbors yards have you done? Roughly. Roughly? Roughly.

John Janick:

Well, pretty much all of my neighbors that are connected to me. A few more up the block, a few more a few blocks away. Put in ponds for neighbors. There's probably a good can or so around here and then more outside of the city. Yeah. It definitely kept me busy.

Rick:

So if you plant it, will they come?

John Janick:

They will and that's why this really resonated with me is because there's a lot of things you want to change and say for example you back someone's political campaign and you invest all your energy into that and they end up losing. But with this, it's like if you want spice bush swallowtail caterpillar, you plant a spice bush that's one of the first shrubs that I planted and sure enough that first season I got the spice bush swallowtail to really meet caterpillar. It has these like false eyes on it that it's adapted as like a defense mechanism so that they kind of curl themselves up in the leaf of the spice bush and when a bird or a predator looks in there they see these eyes looking back at them and they think that's a snake danger and they live to eat another leaf and eventually turn into a butterfly. So that was like a really cool caterpillar that I wanted. I planted spice bush and that first year I got spice bush swallowtail caterpillars. The monarchs, my next door neighbor, Big Birder, knew about the decline of the monarch.

We went a few years without seeing any monarch butterflies and then about three or four years into planting natives at my home we got our first batch of caterpillars. That was right around the time when she wanted me to start planting her yard. So I took out some ornamental shrubs and one of the things I planted was swamp milkweed and I planted from tiny plugs so these are like less than a foot tall plants. Within a week a monarch butterfly went through laid eggs and she had monarch caterpillars. Just from plants that weren't even in the ground, two weeks, tiny, not-yemmature plants had monarch caterpillars. So it was like if you plant it they'll come and that's just the caterpillars you could see.

Not to mention when the caterpillars come it's no coincidence that you hear more birds outside and that you get to you know, wrens nesting in your bird boxes and things like that because they have the food they need to raise their young. It definitely works. The proof is there. If you plant it you'll see. Like you'll definitely get them.

Rick:

What other insects and animals were you excited to see?

John Janick:

Sure, I've seen the yellow, the gold finches flying around in like late summer, early fall. If you have purple coneflower once those seed heads dry up you'll just see the gold finches in there eating the seeds of the coneflower. Yeah, that was really neat. Tons and tons of cool insects. I mean they're mostly caterpillars just because there's so much variation.

Like some of the species just look so alien. There's one called a saddleback caterpillar which is just really bizarre looking and you know I knew that the host plant was some of the trees that I planted. It wasn't until last year I was out doing some maintenance in the garden that I inadvertently grabbed one and I saw why you don't want to touch them really quick. It'll burn for a good 10 minutes but they're really neat looking caterpillar.

So that was one I wanted to attract. About five, six years ago I put in what's called a wildlife pond. So it's basically a small pond meant for like amphibians, reptiles, beneficial insects.

So what that means is no fish and if you don't have fish you don't necessarily need pumps or filters. There are marginal plants, aquatic plants that like oxygenate the water, regulate the pond and I put that in and that was probably really the biggest surprise of what it attracted. So I put it in in the fall about five, six years ago and then that spring I got toads mating because the toads were already here.

They hibernate under the leaf litter in the winter. Since I already had all these native plants that bring tons of insects, beneficial insects, food for higher organisms like birds, reptiles, amphibians, I already had plenty of toads there. So when I had a water source now they had a place to breed. So March, April, toad calling, found egg masses in the water, had tadpoles first year. It took about two years until a green frog found the pond. It was a male, he called all summer in vain. Overwintered in the pond, it's about in the deepest section, it's almost three feet deep.

I made like an overwintering hole that's filled with sand that they could go under the ice and kind of spend the winter under there. You had a green frog came back, female came, had green frog tadpoles, toad tadpoles. And then I should take a step back because at this point we have the preschool.

And the last thing the parents want to hear is pond. The first thing I want to know about mosquitoes, they're obviously a problem. That first spring the mosquito larva came as soon as it warmed up.

I used the dunks, like the little donuts you could get at the co-op, BTI at the larva side. Really just targets mosquito larva. There's a few beneficial flies that unfortunately targets too, but it's about the best thing you could do in terms of controlling mosquitoes if you have standing water. Aside from going around and making sure that you don't have any pots or old tires or clogged gutters because if there's standing water mosquitoes will find it.

Rick:

I rallied my block.

John Janick:

Really that's the most important thing you could do because a lot of people ask, I heard this plant is good for keeping mosquitoes away. One plant isn't going to do anything, but when you have predators that's a keep some mosquitoes away. Actually in that first spring I used dunks for about two months until I got the toads and until I started seeing the dragonflies show up. When you see the old dragonflies come they'll fly in this kind of circular dipping pattern and they'll dab the water.

That's called like ovipositing, they'll lay their eggs in there. When I saw that I said, alright my mosquito problem is going to be solved because the dragonfly is I believe the most efficient predator on earth. They could live from like six months to a few years and they devour mosquitoes throughout their life cycle. When they're a larvae I'm not sure if you've ever seen it, they're like a really cool, they get to be like an inch or two big and they just devour things. They also eat tadpoles but they love to eat mosquito larvae. Yeah.

With the preschool, I was constantly checking the water, scooping it every day. Is it mosquito larva? Mosquito larva. Phased out the dunks when I started scooping up dragonfly larvae and mosquito larvae were gone and I haven't used dunk since. That was five, six years ago.

Rick:

And it probably has the same effect as putting out a bucket with a dunk in that, here's this big pond that all the mosquitoes are going to just love to come and lay their eggs in. Yeah. And then there's the dragonfly, so just gobble.

John Janick:

Exactly. They have, I think, a 95% efficiency rate when it comes to prey. It's like twice as good as a great white shark. They're most efficient predator on earth. They could see a mosquito at 30 miles an hour.

I mean, they're your best friend when it comes to mosquito control. My nursery, there's a salvage company next to her and they got some little pond forms. They're like, hey, put one of these in the ground. We have 10 more.

Maybe it'll help us sell them. So put it in the ground, fill it up with water. Came back to the nursery three days later. It was filled with thousands of mosquito larvae.

And at that point, I had dunks with me and I'm like, you know what? No one's here during the week. What does it matter if they're mosquitoes? Because I've seen adult dragonflies flying overhead. That's dragonfly food. They're going to find this water.

I'm going to leave it go. I came back a week later and there were literally 200 adult dragonflies swarming. All over the nursery. Within a few weeks, you couldn't find any mosquito larvae in that little, like 50 gallon pond.

Rick:

So any complaints from neighbors?

John Janick:

It's Mount Airy. So I think that, you know, if you could pull this off anywhere, it's here. My neighbors are awesome. I mean, they all support this madness that I do and want to turn in their yard. So they, you know, I'm always talking about this and explain the benefits. So they know what native plants do for the ecosystem and they see it in their own yards now that they have it.

I really haven't got any complaints. I have a few signs right out front. There's like a monarch way station, an autobahn sign. And in the spring, I had someone like paper clipping out there just saying thank you for doing what you're doing. I thought that was really cool. If anything, I just get a lot of people stopping and looking and reading the signs, seeing what's going on. If I'm outside, I'll stop out and talk to them, answer some questions. And people really seem interested in it.

And I think if people are more aware of the benefits of it, you know, how desperately we need to change the culture of like gardening and like making conscious decisions about what we plant in our yards, that's more people would do it. And that's pretty much my mission. Yeah.

Rick:

So my block doesn't have very many yards. People have mostly planted other things. People plant a lot of Pachysandra, because it only grows to a certain height and then it stops. So it's very low maintenance.

John Janick:

Yeah, but it doesn't stop there. It spreads and spreads and out my front window is Carpenter's Woods. I've been a member of the Friends of Carpenter's Woods for about 10 years now. You could see firsthand, I mean, all the houses here in here since the 1900s, the 20s, back when everyone planted Japanese Pachysandra, English, Ivy, everyone had it.

It was really easy. You plant it, it spreads, grows to a certain height, super low maintenance, makes sense, but it spreads into the woods. Every year I'll catch a few landscapers doing maintenance on yards that do have that, dumping the yard waste into Carpenter's Woods, which is illegal. Some of that makes it in, it spreads.

If we took a walk through there now, you'd see just what the impact is. Pachysandra or English, Ivy are just two of probably 20, 30 non-native invasive species that are, you know, causing a tremendous negative impact on the woods because they outcompete native species. Spring ephemeral is like trillions of Virginia bluebills. You just don't see those unless it's planted in someone's yard. I have a lot of those in my yard, but you don't see them because they've all been overtaken by a lot of the invasives in the woods.

English, Ivy, and Pachysandra are just a few. If you've ever walked in the Whistahicken in March, April and see all the yellow flowers, it's lesser cellandine. And once that comes in, like there's really no stopping it, then you have the garlic mustard that comes in right around after that. So all these aggressive non-native species have moved into everywhere in Fairmount Park, and once they're there, I mean, they just crowd out the native species and they're pretty much gone. So, you know, a lot of what we do, it's a small group, the friends group. Try our best. We do like maintenance days. We'll lead volunteer groups, invasive removal. The last one I did was probably for Love Your Park week in May.

Been a few hours, put a big dent in some invasives, but if we took a walk back in that space now, you'd see just how quickly they come back. Unfortunately, in our park spaces, relying on volunteer groups to do work, kind of fighting a losing battle. That's why I think it's so important the opportunity we have as like homeowners.

That's really where the opportunity lies. English, Ivy, it's next to impossible to remove from Carbony's Woods, but in your yard, it's really pretty easy. If you take a look once a week and pull out the little sprouts, you know, you could eliminate it completely without using chemicals or any non-organic means to get rid of it, just, you know, good old-fashioned hand or mechanical pulling, but in our natural areas, it's tough.

Rick:

Is there some alternative to Pachysandra that has its ease of maintenance quality?

John Janick:

So, Pachysandra does great in shade. So, there's a native Pachysandra, Allegheny Spurge, Pachysandra Procumbens. It looks similar. I think it looks a lot better. It's just way less aggressive. It plays nicely with other plants. It doesn't create a monoculture like the Japanese variety does. That's kind of slow to establish, but once it does, it's pretty amazing.

It'll do everything that the Japanese Pachysandra will do. Super low maintenance, basically evergreen. There are a lot of sedges that will do great in shade as a ground cover.

The native violet, it's something that is considered a weed in lawns, but has a beautiful flower and like April, it's a host plant for a number of caterpillars, just has a high wildlife value. Those are just bulletproof plants. I mean, they'll come up on their own here and can form a ground cover. Tons of great options for shade, especially the spring of femurals. So, these will bloom March, April, when the seduous trees are still bare, just growing their leaves.

That's your time. That's kind of peak bloom season if you have a lot of shade, seduous shade to get these spring blooming perennials like Virginia bluebells, I mentioned. Blood root, one of my favorite plants, you know, white flower, one of the very first blooms after the winter. Golden rag warts, another good one.

So many. If you really want to see options for spring of femurals and shade plants like that, I would definitely recommend going to Mount Cuba Center in March or April. Where's that? Just over the border in Delaware.

Got an hour drive, but their collection of spring of femurals is like absolutely amazing. You know, that used to be everywhere, but when these ground covers that are used in our home landscapes, escape cultivation, get into natural areas, you know, these are otherwise fragile plants and they just get wiped out by the invasive species. They do exist in the Wissa Hicken, but they're hard to find and if you know where they are, you kind of keep that a secret so people don't go and poach them and get rid of the last of the natural populations that we have.

Rick:

So if people are interested in finding out what you have at Good Host Plants, what should they do?

John Janick:

So I keep my species list up to date on my website, goodhostplants.com. During the season, or open Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays, I'm always there for Saturdays. The fourth season I've been there is on Front and West Theory. This is the first year I have some help. I have a great helper, also John. I'm there on Saturdays and one of the things I try to do is just be there to talk natives to anyone who comes in. I love talking about this and I will talk as long as you need. That was always tough for me when I first started out.

I had so many questions, but you know, nurseries are busy places and at some point you get to be annoying. But I always said like when I started this, that's not going to be me come and talk to me. Like I just want to get people interested in. I have about 1200 square foot and growing demo garden that I've been planting for over two years. So everything I grow is planted and right now, which is July, really through October, is peak bloom season.

It's kind of tough describing what something is going to look like when it's in a three and a half inch court pot and it's about a foot tall. But now it's really easy when people are new to natives come here. What could I plant? Well, let's take a walk outside and walk through the demo garden. And then it's really easy because not only do you see what the mature plants look like in bloom, but you also see the insects and wildlife that they attract in what's essentially like a warehouse district. The pollinator species diversity in that 1200 square feet is really nothing short of amazing. Like I would definitely recommend stopping by on a weekend, coming to talk.

The other thing I would say is I put a lot of time into Instagram, always sharing photos and tips and the progress, like what works, what doesn't. It's like really, really good when you could like search a hashtag for a species, a Latin name or a common name to find out more about it. Like when it blooms, like how tall it gets, what are the tracks?

Like it's really amazing. There's a really good native plant community on there. So that's at Good Host Plants on Instagram.

But otherwise, yes, shoot me an email info at goodhostplants.com. I'm here to help. I'm lucky. Like I still have my day job. Web developing, it allows me really to do this because I would be starving if I had to native plants. But the great thing about keeping my day job is it allows me to keep to my mission, which is to like grow straight species, native plants from open pollinates, seed local eco region. If I depended on that for my livelihood, then I'd be tempted to sell either cultivars or non-native species because that's what people are used to buying.

But what I grow is the good stuff. So I'm going to stick to that. And how's business?

It's doing much better. I mean, the first two years, no one knew I existed. It's a little tough to find some kind of like a back street behind a gate behind a warehouse between a cemetery and a cardioid ship. But eventually, if you get past the warehouse, you'll find me. And now luckily, there's a nice demo garden. It's actually a nice place to visit.

First two years are kind of lean. I mean, the native plant community kind of knew where I was. If there's someone who has native plants, they'll find you. But I wanted to reach further in that community. And this year, things really grew.

I'm getting a lot of like younger folks who live nearby and like fish town Kensington, places like that. Just I want to help the bees. I heard about the plight of the pollinators, like species decline.

I heard native plants are the way to go. Like, what can I do in there? They're interested. They know this is a thing. And they found me.

It's a great opportunity. A lot of these people don't have yards per se, but they have like roof decks or outdoor planters. And if you have a pot, like you can make an impact, like anything can be grown in a pot, if you're able to water it. So I have stuff grown in pots on my patio at the nursery. I moved an old soakstone sink from my basement to there just to show what can grow in a pot.

Every plant counts. And it's great to see that it's like catching on. It's just something that we need to change. And it connects with a lot of other movements that are going on. So I'm really excited about where it's heading. And you know, the partnerships I could hopefully create.

Rick:

What partnerships are you hoping to?

John Janick:

I mean, there's a few groups I'm kind of working with. Food crops like veggies, you know, native plants go hand in hand with that because they attract the pollinators that also pollinate the vegetables, like pycnatum, for example, mountain mint. I mean, if you have a veggie garden, you should have mountain mint because that easily attracts the most bees and pollinators out of any native plant that I grow, especially like the mason bees, solitary bees I talked about. You get those nearby. They're also going to do your tomatoes and your other crops.

So it's like, they just go hand in hand. You know, just trying to work with groups like that, schools, a lot of schools are getting into like gardening for habitat, things like that. Over the first few years, I probably donated more plants than I've sold. I'm still always willing to do that. So anything to get the word out.

Rick:

I wonder about rental properties. You know, it's one thing for a homeowner to make a transformation. Yeah, seems like a bigger hurdle for rentals.

John Janick:

I've had a few people come into the nursery tenants. The majority of them will plant pots, but there was one woman who came in where she kind of worked a deal out with her landlord, like, I want to plant natives, you know, I'll do all the planting. They worked out a deal. It's possible if you get the right landlord to work with. Landlords like to hear low maintenance, not needing fertilizer, not needing to be watered.

Rick:

I see. So that's the leverage to landlord. Easier, less work, less money for you. Was your wife on board from day one, or did it take some convincing?

John Janick:

Yeah, she understands it completely. Now she can't walk through Carpenter's Woods without wanting to pull like English IV or things like that. It's just that the struggle early on, when it was just me, I have three kids and it takes a lot of time to run a nursery, especially if you already have a full-time job. You know, when I was first building my hoop houses every weekend throughout the winter, spring busy like every single evening and weekend, potting up plants, getting them ready for spring, and then the nursery is 20 minutes away. So hour, hour and a half, I'm gone.

I'm coming back late for dinner, not seeing my kids. It was a real struggle and honestly, like it wasn't sustainable, especially when I wasn't getting any business and I was losing a lot of money, invested a lot of money, even getting a truck. I mean, just, you know, it was really tough and thought about giving up, but you know, luckily I have a wife and family that supports my passion and without their support, like I would have been out within a year. So it's been tough, but like I said, I have a great helper now. I've learned a lot. One of the best piece of advice I heard is like, to grow plants, you have to kill plants and I've killed a lot of plants along the way, you know, having to do everything from propagation, potting, construction, marketing, paying the bills, doing the outreach, like social media, building the website, like, you know, dealing with like pest management. I had to do every single step in that.

So that just allowed me to learn, allowed me to make mistakes. There's no real like handbook, like so you want to start a nursery. Here's the guide, like there's a lot you have to figure out on your own. Luckily, I know a lot of really knowledgeable people in the trade. You kind of learn from each other, you know, four years into it, really have it dialed in to the point where I'm not going to come back after not being at the nursery for five days and I'll have lost 300 plants because there's like a dry spot in the irrigation system. So it's a learning process, but luckily I've been through every step of it and feel really good about it.

Rick:

So it's your second full-time job?

John Janick:

Yeah, pretty much.

Rick:

The family is your third?

John Janick:

Yeah, not in that order. The best thing that might be able to happen to me is that I get put out of business because there are too many native plant nurseries in Philly, like that would be an awesome day. Running a nursery is really hard.

It's great. I'm filling a need right now, but if I could do other things, my mission will always be natives. Habitat, restoration, education, outreach.

I'd really like to plant more and do design and do people's yards and spend more time helping out in the park system, but when you have to keep 5,000 plants alive, that's where a lot of your time has to go because it's not easy.

Rick:

Well, we still have a tiny bit of light. Should we go walk around a little bit?

John Janick:

Yeah, sure. I might hear the frogs.

Rick:

So here we are outside and inside of John's house and we're just going to take a walk around and see what we see.

John Janick:

I have a pergola with five different native vines on it and one of the ones I planted was a pipe vine.

Rick:

And if you don't know what a pergola is, it's an open-topped archway that has a bunch of vines that have grown up the pillars and are covering the roof.

John Janick:

Yeah, otherwise known as like a arbor, something like that. It's meant to give shade and you really get shade if you have vines grown up over the top. Mine's about 11 feet tall and I put it in about five years ago and now it's kind of covered in a few native vines. Cross vine, native honeysuckle, Dutchman's pipe. What we are looking at here is the pipeline swallowtail. Caterpillar, it's inch long at this point. It's really cool. It's just a jet black with red spots on it and that'll become the swallowtail by the time. Swallowtail, yep. If you want those.

Plant pipe vine. Dutchman's pipe.

We're heading back to the wildlife pond and you could hear the frogs calling I think if we hang out for a few.

Rick:

So we're just looking at a lovely small pond. I'd say it's about 10 feet across, five feet wide with stones around it and where are all these plants around it?

John Janick:

So there's a lot of marginal plants in there.

Their roots are saturated. So there's blue flag iris, copper iris, arrowarum, picrowed, some aquatic plants. There's a lotia. So it's a duckweed which can be good and bad. It will overtake the whole surface of the pond which isn't necessarily good so we'll fish a lot of that out but the birds will bring that in on their feet and we're kind of waiting for my green frogs to start calling. There's a boat and there we go right on cue. It's about seven adults and you could hear the males calling all night especially after rainstorms.

There it goes again. See some flyer flies. Yeah. No mosquitoes yet? Yeah. I'm just jumped in.

Yeah one of the things I do sometimes when I go out to take out the trash on trash night. There we go. I'll often be gone for a half hour using the light on my phone to like shine on the underside of leaves looking for caterpillars and things like that at night.

But yeah it's pretty amazing.

If you put one of these in they'll find it eventually and before you know it you have a thriving green frog population.

Rick:

Nice. And what's going on on the top of your garage here?

John Janick:

So this is kind of an all native experimental green roof that we put in about five years ago. Initially there's probably about 25-30 species that we're trying out. A lot of them are used to really dry conditions and initially for the first few years I had irrigation set up. This will be the second year that I didn't even hook up the irrigation.

I just kind of left it. Now we have had kind of wet summers but it's pretty amazing what is growing up there. Things you never think would grow in green roof conditions like bone set up there. I have a blazing store. Asters do incredible up there.

You see a golden rod. It is starting to get some shade as my quaking aspen and black birch cover some of the sunny areas but on average it's doing really well. Not a lot of storm water. The hits that's roof ends up going into sewers because it filters through the plants. It goes down into my rain barrel. The overflow goes into the pond. The overflow from the pond goes into a boggy area.

Rick:

So I see some yellow flowers here.

John Janick:

Yep that's black eyed susan. A bulletproof native like super easy to grow. It'll bloom for like two months this time of year. No maintenance. These tall ones are a jope pie and these will attract all the big butterflies like the non-native butterfly bush will except that it's native and it actually supports butterfly larvae so fulfills a role. The non-native butterfly bush is you know without a doubt great for adult butterflies and moths like seeking nectar but their larva can't eat its leaves so it's a missed opportunity. Whereas the jope pie it's a favorite actually of monarchs. One of my favorite combinations is jope pie combined with swamp milk weed.

They take the same conditions. The adults will come to the jope pie for the nectar and they'll lay their eggs on the swamp milkweed nearby which we see here. They'll pretty much grow anywhere full sun to partial shade and this out of all the milkweed is probably the top one for caterpillars. The monarch caterpillars just love this and it's not just monarchs. Tons of different pollinators bees butterflies visit the flower for the nectar. One of the things we do at the preschool is we'll collect the caterpillars that I think last year we raised about 50 before I stopped collecting them. They were just way too many come end of summer beginning of school year. The adults will emerge and every day I come home from work we'll release a few more monarch butterflies and it's like a huge hit with the preschool kids. Here's the cone flower another one that blooms forever and you see these big pointy seed heads and the flower dries up that's what the birds really like. And let's go out to the front.

Rick:

And I'll just say that we're looking at this strip which is three feet wide or so and it's full of these different plants that John is describing up to about a height of two or three feet so it looks very different than your usual strip of grass.

John Janick:

Yeah these are all super beneficial plants come here in the daytime you will see tons of bees we have some asters and grasses we have that mountain mint that I talked about there's a broadleaf mountain mint like super pollinator plant.

Rick:

And here's John's wall neighbor looks like it just has bought into the ideas.

John Janick:

Yeah blended into my neighbor's yard or planted this about three years ago and it's tough to see where the boundaries are in our properties because we both have wild bergamot going right through the property line there

Rick:

which is about five feet tall with white pink flowers everywhere.

John Janick:

Yep there's a winged sumac small tree there they've got a dogwood great native tree.

Rick:

Would this yard eventually become a forest?

John Janick:

Yeah I mean everything in Pennsylvania if you'll want it to remain a meadow you have to either mow or cut back. I like to cut back in late March. I leave everything standing because a lot of things will feed the birds the seeds will persist on the flowers they'll feed the birds in the winter that hollow Joe pie we looked at it's always a lot of woodpeckers but I heard one in the backyard and it was actually poking into the hollow Joe pie plant that I left up because there were insects overwintering there in those hollow stems it's feeding the woodpeckers during the winter so it's all part of the puzzle. And I'm seeing a lot of insects flying around.

Night time is the time to come out and see all the moths and things like that you have to use a flashlight but so many things that are out here in the sun.

Rick:

Well John thanks so much for taking the time. Yeah sure. Bring us into your world.

John Janick:

Absolutely thanks for having the honor.

Rick:

For more about John Janick see the show notes or go to our website nwphillypodcast.net and big thanks to Grace Jeschke for suggesting John as a guest. You're welcome to suggest guests too just send an email or use the suggest a guest page on the website. If you like the show please subscribe and tell your friends and follow us on Facebook to hear about new episodes every two weeks. I'm Rick Mohr thanks for listening see you next time for more stories from Northwest Philly Neighbors. you