Not starving, but thanks anyway

Is my face red! I just understood why scientists at Cornell Lab for Ornithology look down on backyard bird feeding. An article in the Native Plant Trust’s magazine finally put it in terms I couldn’t misunderstand. Birds aren’t starving, even in winter.

House finch in the snow-photo Steve Ryan

    Christopher Leahy of Mass Audubon surmises that the idea that wild birds need food was promulgated in the late 19th century, when conservationists wanted the public to think kindly about birds and stop killing them to decorate ladies’ hats with their plumes. 

Feathers in hats used to be de rigeur-photo Christies

Now we Americans buy 3 billion pounds of food for wild birds annually. Leahy says it’s OK to fill your birdfeeders if you wish, as long as you understand that you’re doing it for your own amusement, not because the birds can’t get by without the food.

Backyard birds like this blue jay are fun to see up close-photo Frank Schulenburg

    I have to admit that was a letdown. I’m a feeder—one of those mothers who expresses love by preparing loved ones’ favorite dishes. So I easily convinced myself that birds needed my help. Hearing that habitat loss was affecting birds just added to my conviction. I’d hate to have to spend the winter outdoors, since I hate to be cold. Wouldn’t the birds feel the same way? And what could they be finding to eat?

Food is love

    Fortunately for the birds, they’ve evolved strategies to get through the winter, as I’d have realized if I’d thought about it. Leahy assures readers that birds aren’t freezing out there. They have insulating feathers. And they’re used to gathering provisions from their winter habitat.

Northern mockingbirds finds berries to eat-photo Matt MacGillivray

    What I can do for backyard birds, Leahy reminded me, is to imitate wild places when I plant and maintain my garden. He argues for messiness. I’m with him there. Thickets and tangles of tree branches provide shelter and protection for birds. Some birds can find insects in those piles of leaves I’ve left on the ground. Others eat fruit from native shrubs, trees and vines. Still others like to find flower heads gone to seed on stalks that haven’t been cut down. Hummingbirds collect nectar from trumpet-shaped flowers.

Hummingbird sipping nectar from cardinal flower

    Last summer I planted a cross-vine (Bignonia capreolata) for this very purpose: to provide nectar and pollen for hummingbirds and native insects. I read that this vine will grow vigorously, so I planted it against the garage where it can get at least a half day’s sun. I’m hoping that in a few years, the garage and a nearby pergola over the garden gate will be covered with the vine’s waxy leaves and orange flowers with yellow throats. Cross-vine is native farther south, so a winter cold snap could kill it to the ground, but I’m told it will recover fast and keep on blooming.

I hope my cross-vine will look this good-photo David J. Stang

    I’ve already got two trumpet honeysuckle vines (Lonicera sempervirens) that are growing strongly and producing trumpet-shaped flowers. A trumpetcreeper (Campsis radicans) promises to add some yellow trumpet flowers once it gets old enough to bloom. I hope last summer’s hummingbird will be back to claim these vines next year.

Trumpet honeysuckle

 

 

Happy New Year!

Sustainable sourcing

I’ve received the first seed catalog of the season! It’s time to start ordering seeds and planning plant purchases for next spring. I want to be realistic and environmentally sound. That poses some new challenges this year.

Previous years' seeds were stored in the refrigerator

    I love spending cold winter evenings mooning over catalog portraits of perfect vegetables and lush, bright flowers. A seed packet doesn’t cost much, and I convince myself that I’ll find space for that special squash vine or those five varieties of string beans. I also tend to over-estimate how many sunny spots there are for annual flowers in the insectary bed or the perennial borders.

Everything looks perfect in the catalog

    The miracle of seeds germinating and sending up their first leaves never gets old for me. I like sowing seeds and coddling seedlings through their first weeks under lights. I don’t do so well with the next stage, growing those seedlings into sturdy young plants bursting with energy for their move to the garden. When I compare my willowy seedlings to their hearty counterparts at the garden center, I often resolve to stop sowing seeds at home and depend on the experts.

My zinnia seedlings look puny compared to the garden center's

    This year things look more complicated for two reasons. First, I’m still trying to avoid introducing neonicotinoid insecticides into my yard. Even seeds may be treated with these pesticides, which are toxic to bees and other beneficial insects and persist for years in soil and plant tissues. I don’t want them here because I’m trying to foster native insects, not kill them. In addition to shopping for neonic-free plants, no easy task, I also aim to buy seeds that aren’t treated with pesticides.

Neonics poison bees when they visit flowers

    That’s why I prioritize organically-produced seeds, sure to be pesticide-free. It’s convenient that the year’s first seed catalog comes from The Natural Gardening Company, the oldest certified organic nursery in the country. This seed house emphasizes vegetables over flowers, and being in California, they don’t necessarily feature varieties suited for the Northeast.     

     Closer to home, there’s Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine, which offers lots of organic seeds. Even if they're not organic, Johnny’s seeds are untreated, and none contain neonicotinoids. Even Burpee offers some organic seeds. It’s hard to pass up beautiful new varieties in the catalogs that aren’t organic, but I have enough organic choices to make
it bearable.

Basil and borage growing from neonic-free organic seeds

    Second, I’ve made it a goal to buy less plastic with my garden purchases. That means trying to bring home fewer plastic six-packs and individual plastic pots of seedlings. For the last couple of years, my friend Jennifer and I have bought some of our herbs in fiber pots. These are theoretically compostable. At my house, they turn into dog chews before they can decompose. At least they’re plastic-free.

    What about the rest of my plant purchases? Almost all at local garden centers will be offered in plastic pots. 

Organically-grown seedlings, but they're in plastic pots

I’m going to look into bareroot options. Strawberry plants are often shipped this way without soil or containers, and I’ve read that other plants can be too. Let’s share sources!

                         Happy Holidays

As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined

With branches bare, I’m getting a good chance to observe how my trees and shrubs are pruned—or not. My idea of a well-shaped tree or shrub is one that looks as if it just naturally grew into a pleasing shape that expresses its best self. Some of my shrubs look that way and a small number of my trees. 

I can't take credit for shaping this Japanese maple. It just grows this way.

I wish I’d been bolder and more alert about pruning when they were young. It’s not too late, though, for the ones that are small enough for me to reach from the ground. 

    One of my first major garden purchases, in around 1989, was a crabapple tree, Malus ‘Donald Wyman.’

'Donald Wyman' in bloom-photo wundoroo

The cultivar had just won the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Gold Medal for its toughness and disease resistance. The tree is still with us, producing pink buds every spring that open to white flowers, but its shape isn’t particularly pleasing.

In winter the crabapple's awkward form is painfully evident

    ‘Donald Wyman’ has had a hard life. First I planted it next to the house, then a few years later moved it to the foot of a big red oak. That meant we could enjoy its flowers from the house, but its branches had to reach out away from the oak to get sunlight. After some misguided initial pruning during which I mistakenly cut off flowering spurs, I mostly left its branches to grow however they would. I could have helped the shape of this tree a lot if I’d intervened in those early years.

    A doublefile viburnum that I brought home later (Viburnum plicatum f. tomentosum ‘Shasta’) fared better. 

'Shasta' in its May beauty

By this time I was more experienced and less timid about pruning. I’ve revisited the viburnum every year in late winter and again in June after it blooms. As a result of this gradual nudging and its tolerance for partial shade, it’s kept a full but natural-looking form. I see that this year I’ve let some suckers shoot up from close to the base, marring the silhouette. Those can be easily nipped off in March.

Cutting out the tan vertical sprouts will help keep 'Shasta' healthy and good-looking

 

 

    My pruning aesthetic doesn’t involve shearing. I don’t like to see neighborhood shrubs carved into little meatballs, though I recognize that a romantic, billowy garden can benefit from some straight lines and dense forms. At this point I’m just trying to keep up with pruning out dead wood and crossing branches. I have a few pruning projects on the docket for late winter 2020. 

    A top priority is to start reshaping a poor smoketree (Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’) that, like the crabapple, has grown lopsided by reaching toward the sun. 

The smoketree has grown toward a patch of sun

By taking down hemlocks two years ago, we enabled the smoketree to start filling in its undeveloped side. I want to cut off some branches on the other side to encourage the reshaping process.

A smoketree that got enough sun

    I don’t think of pruning as unnatural. After all, wind, disease and lightning take branches off too. I like to see pruning as encouraging woody plants to fulfill their potential. Besides, pruning in winter reminds me that spring will eventually come.

Drowning in plastics

I’m increasingly horrified at how much plastic packaging I bring home. As we learn more about how plastic pervades our environment, I’m thinking I need to do more to reduce my plastic use, but how? It’s hard to imagine buying food without plastic bags, wraps, trays, and containers. In the garden, too, I accumulate an increasing collection of plastic pots and other equipment.

Reusing plastic boxes that held salad greens as mini-greenhouses

    Some recent news stories about plastic are really scary and discouraging. We’ve been hearing for years about floating islands of plastic in the ocean with fish, seabirds, and other creatures taking in plastic waste from the water.

Albatross chick with a belly full of plastic-photo NOAA

This year I was alarmed to learn that the air and soil too are polluted with microplastics—bits smaller than 5 millimeters, most microscopic. Of the increasing mass of plastics we humans are manufacturing—currently more than 300 million tons per year—only nine percent is recycled. The rest breaks down into smaller and smaller bits. These tiny pieces of plastic fall from the sky with rain and snow, and not just in populated areas. A recent study of the Arctic found surprisingly high microplastic concentrations there too, with more released as polar ice melts.
 

Arctic Sea ice in 2011-photo NASA

    Scientists estimate that we’re ingesting tens of thousands of microplastic particles in our food and water every year. Health effects aren’t known yet, but it’s thought that lifelong plastic ingestion can harm the immune system. If you drink your water from plastic bottles, you’re taking in four times more plastic than if you drink tap water. At least that’s easily correctable. Other animals don’t have any way to avoid the plastic we’ve so liberally sprinkled throughout their environment, so they’ll ultimately suffer more.

Water with a side of microplastics

    I don’t know exactly how I’ll kick my plastic habit in the garden, but I’m making it a goal. If you’ve found solutions, I’d love to hear about them. I just watched a helpful video from The Old Farmer’s Almanac about alternatives to plastic in the garden. Some suggestions: wooden seed trays; seedling pots made from natural fiber or recycled paper; trees, shrubs and perennials bought bareroot instead of in plastic pots; homemade soil amendments and potting mix to replace bagged products; and metal or wooden plant supports instead of plastic netting.

Tomato seedlings in newspaper pots

    Many of these measures would involve a loss of convenience. Plastic pots and trays are light and easy to wash and store. Large ceramic containers for summer plantings are prettier but much more cumbersome and expensive than their plastic counterparts. Avoiding plastic pots at the garden center will severely limit plant shopping options. It feels like time to start turning away from plastic, though. If I could buy and use 10 percent less next year, at least that would be a start.

Can I garden with less of this stuff?

    Much of my garden equipment is plastic: wheelbarrow, large pots, barrels. I should use this equipment for as long as possible to amortize the embedded carbon, but I think I’ll stop planting vegetables in those plastic pots. I’d just as soon avoid adding microplastics to our homegrown tomatoes.

Thankful

This Thanksgiving I’m thankful for garden clubs. Back in 2016 when I gave my first sustainable gardening talk at Holden Garden Club, I had no idea what to expect. I was harboring an anxious fantasy that garden club members would be dressed in peach basket hats and white gloves and be interested only in arranging flowers.

Setting up for a garden club meeting? {{PD-US}}

     Maybe there were clubs like that in the 1950s, but the Holden group and the clubs I’ve visited since haven’t matched that picture at all. My impression now is that the clubs are bastions of good values, springs of water in a civic desert where kindness and community spirit are sorely needed.

    The clubs I’ve visited are mostly members of the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts. We know about each other because of a speakers’ forum that the Federation holds each spring to help the clubs find talks they’d like to hear. Clubs typically book speakers for monthly meetings except in summer, so their officers need to select nine or ten talks or demonstrations per year that will interest and educate their members. I find club members impressively open to hearing about new ideas, more so than many groups I’ve been part of in other contexts.

Duxbury Garden Club meets in an historic building in summer

    In addition to meeting monthly to socialize and exchange information, most clubs pursue community projects ranging from maintaining beautiful plantings in public places to engaging schoolchildren or nursing home residents in plant-related activities. To raise funds for club activities, many run spring plant sales that are major community events.

Garden clubs tend gardens in public spaces

    Club members tend to be women ranging from middle to older age. Some have a passion for floral design, it’s true. 

Thanksgiving arrangement created by Elsa Lawrence at my home club, Temple Shalom Garden Club

The majority are also “dirt gardeners,” those of us who like to get outside, dig holes and plant things. These are people with plenty of life commitments: work, family responsibilities, and community involvement. Yet they take the time to focus on doing the right thing for the environment.

     Sure, not everyone in the room sees gardening through my sustainability lens. But I always find a few who are right with me, excited to talk about what they’ve tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t.

    Take the Arlington Garden Club, where I spoke this October. Their brochure describes them as “a group of gardeners interested in conserving natural resources and the environment through educational programs and public works.” Those are my goals, too. I see gardeners as natural environmentalists, because we’re outside observing nature closely. It’s great to know that garden clubs identify themselves as part of the movement to protect our planet.

Promoting native plants and insects at  a New York garden club event

    But what I enjoy most about meeting garden clubs is their culture. I’ve found them friendly, good-humored, well organized, down-to-earth (no pun intended), and committed to learning. No wonder they continue to thrive. Thank you, Massachusetts garden clubs, for letting me share in the fun and the growth, both personal and vegetative.

With Norwell Garden Club Program Chair Carolyn Auwers and President Laurie Hall at Norwell Library

Post-pesticide paradise?

It’s been three years since I stopped authorizing pesticide spraying on our property. As this year's gardening season ends, I’m assessing the effects of that decision.

    After I pulled the plug, the garden wasn’t reduced to stubble by a plague of leaf-chewing insects. But neither did it remain unchanged. I'd sort of hoped that spraying all those years might have done so little that the garden wouldn’t look different without it.

Lush and green in 2013--but with pesticide spraying

    I started the spraying back in the 1990s when I noticed pinpoint white speckles on the leaves of Japanese pieris (Pieris japonica), an elegant early-blooming evergreen shrub. 

Marked leaves of Japanese pieris

A technician from Lueders Environmental diagnosed pieris lacebug, a tiny sap-sucking insect that originated in Japan and has spread around the gardening world. Decades of spraying kept the pieris leaves clean. When we stopped the spraying, the lacebugs came back. New foliage emerging the next spring was shiny and unmarked, but by the end of the growing season, all the pieris foliage was speckled again. 

    After we stopped spraying our many boxwoods (Buxus sempervirens) for psyllids, their leaves too weren’t as well formed and healthy-looking as they’d been with chemical protection. 

Psyllids have inscribed and curled these boxwood leaves

I’d thought the nonnative boxwood shrubs were problem-free. That was a false impression created by pesticide spraying.

    I’d agreed to use pesticides thinking I was protecting my trees and shrubs. Later we added dormant oil spray for hemlock woolly adelgid and Spinosad, a naturally derived insecticide, for winter moth. Those were nonnative insects with no local predators, I argued. I feared that they’d decimate my yard if they weren’t stopped.

A bleak scene: hemlocks dying from woolly adelgid infestation

    Around 2011 I started to get uncomfortable with this approach. Yes, I was targeting problem insects with each pesticide, and the chemicals had each been chosen for least toxicity for humans, mammals and birds. But my newfound concern for the native insects in the yard shifted the frame. I came to realize that no matter how carefully they were applied, these pesticides would always cause collateral damage, killing native insect bystanders that could be leaf-eaters, pollinators, or beneficial insect predators that I wanted to foster and encourage.
 

I didn't want to kill beneficial insects such as this ladybug, seen here eating an aphid

    After gradually cutting down on spraying, in 2016 I finally decided it was time to make a total break with garden pesticides. Regretfully, we had our hemlocks cut down so we wouldn’t need to spray for hemlock woolly adelgid, a particularly pernicious nonnative pest.

The fluffy white balls along these hemlock twigs are woolly adelgid egg cases

    Probably no one but me noticed when, without pesticide treatment, the leaf damage reappeared on the pieris and boxwood leaves. The leaves didn’t change color or drop off. The subtle damage just made me worry that worse was to come.

     Instead, this year the infestations seem less comprehensive. That could mean that without pesticides, the garden ecosystem is rebounding. In a healthy ecosystem, there’s a balance between leaf eaters and their predators. 

Dragonfly on St. John's wort: one of the predators I want to welcome

There’s also plenty of redundancy, so that if one population of insects has a hard year, there are others to fill their role in the community. I’d love to think that’s the ecosystem we’re building here.

Pillars of the community

With winter approaching, most flowers have disappeared from the garden. One family of flowering plants, though, keeps on giving. Asteraceae, the aster family, competes with the orchids for the most populous of all plant families. Flowers for pollinators aren't the only ecosystem services they offer. Lettuce, dandelions, thistles, dahlias, zinnias, and marigolds are all members of this vast tribe.

 

Black-eyed Susans are in the Aster family

    Most flowers in this family are daisy-shaped, from the tiny flowers of goldenrod to huge sunflowers. An older name for the family is Compositae, because each blossom is a composite of many smaller flowers. What looks like a petal of a daisy flowers is actually an individual ray flower. The central disc, where the seeds develop, can comprise thousands of tiny flowers.

 

The central disc of a daisy offers multiple flowers for pollinators to visit

     Walking around the garden this week, I could still spot the brown and black flower heads of asters (Symphyotrichum spp.), black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta), coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) and oxeye sunflowers (Heliopsis helianthoides), all North American natives in the Aster family. Flowers of sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), another cousin, were still bravely opening after a hard frost earlier in the week. I aim to have something blooming for foraging insects throughout the growing season, but this perennial’s performance exceeds expectations.

Sneezeweed flowers opening

    It’s good to have these Aster family members in the garden because they offer a lot to insects and birds. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center recently zeroed in on the contributions of sunflowers to Texas’ ecology. Sunflowers don’t just provide plentiful nectar and pollen for pollinators and beneficial insects. Extrafloral nectar exuded from stems attracts ants. Beetle larvae over-winter in sunflower stalks. Even wide sunflower heads benefit wildlife by providing cover for quail and grouse chicks learning to forage for food.

Sunflowers offer both food and shelter for native insects-photo Pudelek

    Sunflowers may still be blooming in Texas. Here the blooms are gone. Massachusetts has fewer native sunflower species, but in the cold months it’s easy to observe birds feeding off seeds of daisy-shaped flowers of Asteraceae. In my yard, they like oxeye sunflower seeds and the fat seed heads of coneflowers. I haven’t seen any goldfinches lately—they’re not frequenting my thistle (nyjer) seed feeder--but if some stop by this winter, I hope to see them perching on the coneflower heads I’ve left standing.

    Of course, the Aster family isn’t exclusively altruistic. I notice how good the flowers are at recruiting passersby to transport seed to new locations. A pappus, a hairy or bristly structure, surrounds each fruit and helps it attach to fur or clothing or be wafted by the wind. Picture a dandelion head that releases its seeds to the breeze.

It's easy to see how thistle seeds hitch rides

    I’m determined to grow some annual sunflowers to maturity one of these years. So far my seedlings have consistently been bitten off at soil level before their stems get woody. I blame squirrels. 

A futile attempt to protect a sunflower seedling

I have a “pest-control pop-up,” a 3-foot tall tent made of fine mesh fabric on a flexible frame, that I hope to deploy next spring. Maybe if I sow the seeds and cover the area with the well-anchored tent, I can foil the dastardly sprout-eaters. Hope springs eternal.

Compost shortage

Once my composting operation settled into a routine, I could count on having two of my four bins produce a good supply of fully made compost every year. Every fall I spread a thick layer on the vegetable bed, where organic matter is used up fast by food-producing annual plants. 

Food compost from the closed bin will enrich the soil of the vegetable bed

When I planted new areas, I spread compost on the soil surface before starting to dig. When I learned that harvesting (really mining) peat contributes to global warming by releasing carbon, I started mixing finished compost from the bins with coir (coconut fiber) to make homemade peat-free potting mix.

     This year I haven't produced as much compost as I used to, and I'm going through it faster. Last year I gave away so many potting mix samples that I ran short of finished compost. 

Cute, right?

The reason for the samples was to interest garden club members I met in making their own peat-free mix. I thought if they tried mine, they'd see how easy it is to make a mix that looks, feels and functions a lot like commercial products based on peat. 

     Last year too I piled fewer fall leaves into the bins. I used to heap up leaves on the bins at the end of the gardening season, knowing the fluffy mounds would flatten during the winter, gradually decompose, and become part of the compost. But last year I went big on piling the whole leaves on beds to provide winter shelter for native insects.

Collecting leaves from the sidewalk to pile on garden beds

     Another call on my compost supply last year was the sheet composting project I started last March. The majority of the material for this composting-in-place soil improvement mound came from thick layers of wood chips and fall leaves. Thinner layers of compost were needed, though, to introduce soil organisms that would do the decomposing. I can see that they're doing their work. Already this fall the mound has sunk to about half its original height.

The sheet composting mound is sinking and starting to look like soil

     These extra demands on my compost economy have left the bins nearly exhausted this fall. Cutting down vegetable plants and emptying summer containers, I've started the process again in two of the four bins. According to the old system, though, the other two bins should be full of year-old developing compost. They're not.

The cupboard is bare

     In the past, I've just waited two years for the compost to be finished. Usually I make a point of adding garden waste to the compost as it comes, with no recipe. But I don't want to go through next summer with no finished compost. I may have to adjust my lazy-woman's composting method this year. 

     To get back on track, I can mix shredded leaves with the dead plants in the bins. 

Shredded leaves will decompose faster

Combining "brown" high carbon and "green" high nitrogen components will speed up the process. Desperate times call for desperate measures.