We have the same issue here, but add cedar, willow and cottonwood to the list. I feel like I spend as much time fighting to keep the woodland out of the garden as I spend trying to keep the grassland out of the garden. Pecans, elms and hackberries are the ones that give me the most trouble in the veggie garden. Redbuds used to, but they haven't popped up in the garden as much in recent years as they used to. Of course, the garden sits mere feet from the edge of the woodland, and the pecan tree, which is old and beautiful, sits immediately west of the garden. There are many other native pecans in the woodland, but I think the majority of the pecan trees I pull up out of the garden are from the one pecan tree.

The squirrels aren't as bad about burying nuts in the garden as they are about burying them in the lawn. A million oaks and pecans sprout every year in the yard but they are easy to mow down. Ever since we raised the height of the garden fence, I haven't seen a squirrel in the garden a single time. I see them in the yard every day.

We do the same thing you do with little saplings and seedlings...share them with folks. Every now and then we have an oak tree pop up in the yard and we tend to leave it there if it is in a place where there is room for a tree to grow.. My feeling is the more shade around the house, the merrier.

The only tree we really work hard to eliminate from non-garden areas is the eastern red cedars. I wish I had a nickle for every cedar seedling or sapling I've pulled up, dug up or cut down.

This is one reason it is hard for me to go buy a tree. It is hard for me to justify spending money for trees when we already have trees coming out of our ears.

I've also given away to bermuda grass to people, too, who want to start a new lawn or patch an existing one.They are sitting there calculating how many squares of sod to buy, and I am handing them buckets of bermuda grass dug up out of my garden and telling them to just go home and stick them in the ground and they will grow. One friend told me once "I am never buying grass sod again". This only works if they want common bermuda, though, and not one of the tif types that always look like a golf course when mowed short.

One tree that doesn't pop up enough, as far as I am concerned, is the native persimmons. When I see them in the pasture, I mow around them and even will carry water to them every now and then. They usually only pop up in areas close to the existing trees, or whever the coyotes have planted them. We used to have 4 big groves of persimmons in our immediate area within a mile or so of our house, and now our grove is the only one left. One burnt up in a wildfire, the second and third groves died slowly following the drought of 2011....and the drought of 2012 finished them off. Only ours remains and it looks healthy and happy. The groves that died may have been growing in sand that drained too well for them in the hot dry years. Our grove is...

Heh. We're looking for (ideally) a female native persimmon tree to put in the middle of the front garden, next to the Tam-o-Pan. Preferably, a young tree that is just starting to produce fruit. What we're going to settle for is a Meader American persimmon. The persimmons won't be pruned or shaped as much as the rest of the trees in our garden. We plan to allow them to more or less maintain their natural shapes and sizes. We're not going to be ready for that until this fall, anyway. But this fall, I'm going to buy, beg, borrow or steal some variety of American persimmon tree!

Now. What is a hackberry? Is it edible? Will it grow on a fence? If so...

I forgot about cedars. I don't see them in the garden too much and the hayfield gets mowed every year--twice. But the fence bordering the hayfield grows up in cedars and we keep cutting them out. We don't have native pecans but we do have hickories and they come up in the garden sometimes but not as much as the black walnuts. We do have persimmons down in the woods and I see seedlings down there but they don't make it to the garden either. Neither do the sassafrass and wild cherry.

The only trees we buy are fruit and pecan, from Stark Bros. I bought some Stark trees from a local nursery last fall and both died. I think they had been heat stressed.

Hackberries are HUGE trees. The one in our woods is 3 ft in diameter and over 50 ft tall. Not suitable for a city lot. If you are a cedar waxwing, you think the berries are delicious. They come through every fall and strip the berries from the hackberries around here. I wish I had a female persimmon to share, but by the time we know they are females they are too big to move. I could send you some seed and let you take your chances.

I will watch for a female, but you usually cannot tell if they are female until they are at least 4 or 5 years old and, as Dorothy said, getting too big to dig. I have some 4-year-old seedlings I'm watching now but none of them flowered this spring so I don't know what they will be. Here at our house, the male trees tend to really outnumber the females. Our largest female is the first persimmon tree I found, and it is about 60' tall. The wildlife get all of its fruit since we sure cannot harvest from a 60' tall tree. It is alone in the woodland. The grove on the banks of the pond has a good mix of female and male trees, but they are pretty large--20 to 30' tall. It is their seedlings in the pasture that I am watching now to see when they will finally begin to flower. Maybe next year.

We do buy fruit trees, and an occasional understory tree for the wildlife: chaste tree, mimosa, desert willow, etc.

I hate hackberries and our woods are full of them. In Fort Worth they grew in our fenceline when we bought the house, and had swallowed up the chain link fence. I found seedlings like mad there. Here, we don't let any of them grow near the house so we don't have to fight the seedlings all the time. We'll always have the hackberries here on our property though because, except for the cedars, we don't cut down any trees that wildlife use for food. The hackberries do best on the southern and eastern edge of our woodland but not close enough to the garden to become a problem. The possumhaw hollies are close enough to be a problem, but I won't cut them down either.

The droughts of 2011 and 2012 have thinned out our overgrown woodland a lot....survival of the fittest and all that......

Dawn

Sure, contact me. I feel bad now because as I was mowing today in a newly cleared patch of woods, I ran over probably 20 young sassafras trees. There are still more so I will go mark a couple and dig for you come fall. I bet you would love a pawpaw tree then, but I can't help you with that. They stay smaller than persimmon, which as Dawn said, can get 60 feet tall. In fact we had a female persimmon that tall which our neighbor cut back about ten years ago because it was right in the fence line between our properties and he needed to rebuild fence.

Another native plant that is really nice is spicebush. My grandfather showed me some 40+ years ago and made tea from the new twigs in spring. It has a wonderful lemony smell to it. We have lots of that too and it stays small, no higher than 6-7 ft.

Our biggest hackberry is doomed. A third of it broke off during the 09 ice storm and the remaining branches are about 1/2 dead, so next winter it comes out. There are smaller ones in the woods so the waxwings will still have berries. I too hate pulling up all the seedlings. If only the birds would eat every last berry.

I plan to prune the centerpiece American persimmon at least a bit, while keeping it's natural shape. It'll also provide shade against the sun. The house faces almost due west with no shade on that side of the house. The persimmon tree will have some room to grow, while the other fruit trees in the front garden need some height restrictions placed on them through the open pruning techniques we're using. I hae considered pruning the persimmon into a semi-vase or partially open shape of some sort, which should keep the mature height somewhere well under 60 ft. Providing I live long enough to keep it pruned up at the proper intervals. LOL.

Mulberry Knob, we are also looking for two paw-paws. If you happen to learn of the whereabouts of any small ones,lemme know. Chances are, it'll be better to go ahead and just buy them in order to get the size I want. Those are on the planting diagram for the front garden. They go in the northeast corner of the front garden, closer to the house. A bed is already prepared for them. I'll prune those the same way we're doing the rest of the fruit trees - a combination of open/vase and espalier techniques.

Believe it or not, two spice bushes are on our planting diagram for the front garden, for exactly the reasons you've listed. They'll be planted on either side of the walkway on the north side of the garden, next to the long bed. Yeah, I'm after some of the oddball stuff that provides different nutrients while adding to the variety of flavors, colors and textures we'll have in the garden.

All of those bushes and trees will also offer some noise mitigation for the day time trafic around here. It's wuiet at night and on the weekends, but during business hours, it can be hard to hear someone standing just a few feet away. That, or I'm gettin' old. One of the two.

We still have the driveway bed to play with, too. The only thing we've planned for it are two fig trees. The rest of that bed is only three feet wide, but would work for espaliered trees, bushes, vines and such. The soil in that bed has already been amended enough for those types of plants.

Most of the sassafras trees would go along our back fence somewhere. ...mebbe. That, or in the driveway bed. They're really an understory tree, if I remember my youthful woodland wanderings. They weren't really on the list, but then again, we haven't really planned anything for the back yard, either. Not even a bubble diagram. Jusrt, "Something, something' for fence beds and 'something, something' for the center of the yard" is as far as we've gotten.

I sent you an email through your profile. Lemme know if you've recieved it, please.

I'm not sure how I missed this thread, but you guys are talking my language. I googled Paw Paw trying to find a site I saw last year that had them for sale but had run out. Instead, I got OK Gardening. I don't want black walnut or hackberry, but I would love mulberry, persimmon, sassafras, black locust, mimosa, etc. In fact, I have plans for most of those in early Spring. I would be willing to try my luck with wintersowing seeds if I can't find seedlings. I pass a couple of mimosa trees between town and my house and I have been hoping someone would be in the yard so I could ask if I could take some seeds from the tree. Ilene is supposed to be working on getting a mulberry tree for me, but I could use several. I always have Black Walnut trees in every flower bed.

Dorothy, I bought yellow bell pepper plants from the greenhouse that is north of your town, and they have been fantastic. They are still producing so I hate for that first freeze to come. I don't have anything else worth saving, but I may have to cover those and keep them going for a while longer.

Hey, I saw a mention of spice bush. I have wanted to grow one because it is a host plant for the spice bush swallowtails. Are they difficult to grow here?

I kill trees all the time. In fact, yesterday I chopped off two pretty good sized seedlings that that been taunting me from the end of the driveway bed. Elm and pecan. It's a never ending chore around here!

Lisa

Carol, I have been saving persimmon seeds for Warren and have marked a sassafras sprout for him. If you will send me your address again, I can send you some too.

Lisa, spicebush is native to Adair County. There are a lot in our woods. But don't know how they would do in your part of the state. I can go look for seed but I think they are all gone already.