a refuge for tiny baby tree frogs
I made a video of the flying insects that are drawn to the native wildflowers in my tiny back yard.
The pink flower heads are joe pye weed, and the white flower clusters are white boneset (late boneset).
Continue reading “Native Pollinator Species Density and Diversity”
There was an eight-week drought in April and May that caused the local rabbits to eat a lot of plant varieties they normally ignore, but the rains came in June, and the year recovered somewhat.
By August, there were numerous Tiger Swallowtail and Gulf Fritillary butterflies, although not as many as 2022.
I have many photos:
Continue reading “Pollinator Meadow 2023”
When you sew native pollinator seeds, stop mowing, and allow natural meadow to emerge an replace a lawn, you will have many visitors.
I’ve noticed that since my yard now has many songbirds and chipmunks and shrews and rabbits, there is usually a hawk or owl watching it hungrily.
Needless to say, I see many types of wildlife at night, but never rats. When I see rats, I see them making bee lines from the storm drains to the birdfeeders in the more conventional lawns around me.
Also, since I installed my mosquito fish ponds, I can go out in my back yard without a shirt for hours. When it was a standard lawn of Saint Augustine grass, it was swarming with mosquitos, mostly invasive Asian tiger mosquitos.
Native ecologies work.
Pictured above are joe pye weed and cup plant in the foreground and Mexican sunflower in the background.
Each year I feel anxious until I have some seed gathered for next year.
The tangles I have growing in the front an back are pretty dense in terms of the number of species of vegetables and flowers.
The vegetables include tomatillos, groundcherries, peppers, squash, pumpkins, okra, and several varieties of heirloom tomatoes.
The flower seeds also have to be gathered, although the birds leave very little of the sunflowers seeds to harvest.
Continue reading “Seed Harvest 2022”
The front and back yards are tangles of heirloom vegetables and wildflowers of many different types, and that draws a lot of butterflies, especially the large yellow tiger swallowtails.
Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifolia) and various varieties of sunflowers dominate about half the area with full sunlight, with cosmos, coneflowers, and zinnias making up most of the rest, at least as far as annuals.
Note that all of those flowers are warm yellow, orange. and red colors, and so it’s a little dazzling on blue-sky days, especially with all the large butterflies flying around.
Continue reading “Sunflowers and Butterflies”
The large maple in the back yard was home and pantry to all sorts of birds and animals, and so I wasn’t happy taking it down, but it needed doing.
The maple was asymmetrical and leaning over the house.
The issue was using a lot of energy to change things very fast and move all the organic material (tons of wood and leaves) off the property in a day because that is the way tree services work.
It went against my principle of making change slowly, even in removing invasive plants and ornamental shrubs.
I prefer to make large changes as incrementally as possible to minimize impacts on all creatures, especially salamanders and snails and other slow moving critters.
For the tree, I wish I could have left the main part of the trunk standing to rot in place and provide habitat for many kinds of insects, birds, and animals.
It could have been cut off at 12 feet, and I could put a beehive on top.
This is a male specimen of the eastern Hercules beetle (Dynastes tityus), a species of rhinoceros beetle native to the eastern US.
I saw one of these only a handful of times growing up, and I was amazed each time.
I associate them with years when June is rainy, and the plants are fat and green. I think every one of these I have seen turned up the day after a night rain.
If I had any doubts about turning my lawn into an ecological oasis, this guy showing up would have convinced me.
At least half of my time tending the pollinator meadow is spent removing invasive evergreen seedlings: monkey grass (liriope), Japanese privet, wintercreeper, English ivy.
These plants might not feed most insects and other animals, but birds love the seeds and poop them all over creation.
The problem is that these plants displace native species that feed a higher number of species, including caterpillars and other insect larva.
A plant doesn’t have to be rare or endangered to be ecologically valuable.
Continue reading “Biodiversity and Ecological Value”
The ancestors made their gardens only in the rich damp soils of the bottom lands around rivers and creeks.
My yard is mostly clay and sand and is well up the hill from a creek.
Growing most vegetables would require unsustainable and wasteful irrigation using water from the municipal water supply which is taken from the Chattahoochie River.
It doesn’t make sense to do that if the goal is to maximize biodiversity and habitat overall.
Continue reading “Pollinator Meadow vs Garden”
Going into this, I explained to my son that we had several challenges and unknowns and that the goal for the first year might be merely to raise enough seed for next year, preferably enough seed that we could sow it in a thick tangle with enough left over in case a late freeze killed the first round of seedlings.
We did much better than that, at least for most things.
We had a gallon of tiny tomatoes about every 2 to 3 days and a good supply of peppers too, more than we could eat and dehydrate easily.
We managed to get about two quarts of black beans for seeds, and the Chinese brown cotton made enough for seeds too.
On the other hand, the rabbits killed the squash plants by chewing the bases of the plants, and so we only got a few scalloped squash and zucchini.
The corn was a complete loss in spite of growing very well. The squirrels ate it all.
