Here’s a little piece of garden art that always starts a conversation – and raises questions I can’t answer, leading me to shrug stupidly and sputter disjointed bits of information. So I decided it’s time to stop embarassing myself and do a little Googling.
So, what you see is an artificial nest for orchard mason bees, pollinating bees that are native to the U.S. Solitary and therefore not hive-building, these bees lay their eggs in mud-walled cells like these drill holes, or straws packed in a coffee can that’s then mounted a few feet off the ground facing the morning sun. Although the person who sold me this nest-holder raved about the pollinating abilities of these bees, they can’t be managed directly by humans – say, hauled around to different farmers’ fields – and thus aren’t suitable to large-scale agricultural use. Even worse, most native pollinating bees nest in the ground, so any disturbance and they’re history. The use of pesticides has also reduced their numbers.
All of which helps in explaining why honeybees were brought here from Europe to pollinate crops for our growing population. But the recent destruction of about half the American honeybee population by a parasitic mite has highlighted the dangers of overreliance on any particular species. So I’m right there, offering these little drill holes to the wandering orchard mason bee looking for a nest site. I know it won’t make much difference in the scheme of things but hey, it’s something. And not a bad-looking garden ornament, either.
RANDOM HONEYBEE FACTS: The average honeybee hive holds 50,000 bees. It takes the nectar of about 2 million flowers to produce one pound of honey. Honeybees are used in the pollination of 130 agricultural crops in the U.S. and add $14 billion to crop yield and quality. 15 to 30 percent of our diet relies on honeybees.
FUN TREND: Reportedly, a "deeply cool and trendy" new hobby in British cities is beekeeping, on rooftops and in tiny backyards. One advocate describes it as a "fashionable thing to do something for the environment." Don’t look for this trend to jump the pond and land in Washington, D.C. any time soon, though. Beekeeping is banned in D.C. and many other stinger-fearing jurisdictions.
My recent post about this National Wildlife Foundation program elicited some questions – does my community have this? – so here’s a link to the communities that have either completed the process and been certified, or have registered, meaning they’re working toward certification. Three more communities have registered since the list was updated: Burlington, VT; Clarksville/Buffalo Junction, VA, a rural community on the NC border; and Lawrence Township in the Indianapolis area.
Notice how these communities concentrate in Virginia and the Seattle area? Further confirmation that Seattle’s an environmentally progressive community. Virginia has the good luck to have the Foundation headquartered in Reston, and nearby Arlington County recently became the largest habitat community in the U.S.
So if your community isn’t on these lists, maybe you can help make that happen.
And Readers, thanks for generously offering your photos for the cause. They’ll be accompanied by links to your sites and blogs.
A really cool program I’ve recently jumped on board is the National Wildlife Foundation’s BACKYARD WILDLIFE HABITAT PROGRAM. You might have seen one of their signs designating a certified backyard – one that attracts wildlife with food, water, cover, and places to raise their young. But I hasten to add it’s the birds and bees we want to attract, not raccoons, deer, or rats. Not a big turn-on, those critters, so birds and bees it is. But this program that’s been quietly changing front and backyards across America since 1973 has gotten bigger and better.
SUSTAINABLE GARDENING – a term ya gotta love – has recently been added to the requirements for certification, and here they mean things like using mulch, reducing the use of chemicals, and growing more drought-tolerant plants. And I say Hooray for the NWF coz just reading through the application for certification educates homeowners about healthier ways to treat their property.
HABITAT COMMUNITIES, a much newer program, applies the same criteria to whole towns or counties, combining healthier individual backyards with similar improvements to public, nonprofit and businesss-owned sites to achieve a multiplier effect and create wildlife corridors. Imagine wildlife-friendly plantings in schoolyards, churchyards, parks, or along city streets. Points are also awarded for events like stream clean-ups and invasive plant round-ups. Plus, don’t forget, the use of sustainable gardening practices – the gardening practices we’re all trying to get people to adopt these days, despite the public’s persistent addiction to perfect lawns and everblooming everything.
Now that you know what I’m talking about, why am I writing about it and how can you help? It all started on our local gardening email group when someone mentioned the Community Habitat program and the fact that of the 15 certified communities in the U.S. so far, 3 are in Virginia and none are in Maryland – yep, a big zip. And if you’re not from these parts let me explain something about the mindset around here: Maryland is blue and Virginia is red, so we Marylande
rs expect to beat the pants off Virginians when it comes to anything remotely progressive. And eating Virginia’s dust in this really cool environmental program? It hurts.
So meetings have been held and the citizenry of Crunchy Takoma (nuclear-free and don’t you dare laugh) are determined to be the first town in Maryland to accomplish community certification, thereby salvaging our city pride, at least. And I have two volunteer assignments, both of which will earn us points toward certification: writing articles and updates about the program in a local newspaper – easy enough to do with my new gig as a gardening columnist – and "having a website" about the program.
Now Readers, if your assignment were to create a "website," would it be a traditional, static, official-looking but boring site, or would it be something dynamic, interactive, fun and hip – to wit, a blog? I’m preaching to the choir and of course you’d all choose the blog. And Blogger is free and easy, so I’m there!
And here’s where you come in. The photos you see here are the sum total of my wildlife-related photos for possible use on the new blog, WildWildTakoma. So readers, and especially gardening bloggers, we need photos of:
– birds, bees, frogs or turtles in your garden
– plants in your garden that are loved by any of these critters, or
– ponds, birdhouses, or other features that attract them.
What the hell, I’ll even take stories of plants and features that attract wildlife. Just point me in the right direction on your blog and I’ll take it from there, giving you photo credits, of course. I’ll eventually be forwarding the fruits of our labors to the NWF, so someday your photos may show up on WildWildToledo or WildWildEugene – who knows?
[Photos: My birdhouses by Julie Wyatt of the Takoma Voice Newspaper, and a pollenating bee eggholder in my garden. God, can that really be what it's called? Help me out here.]
For this review of Jim’s talk last night to the Takoma Horticulture Club, I Google-imaged his name to see if I could find him, cursing under my breath that I hadn’t brought my camera and done it myself. This is one of the resulting photos and it’s so not Jim I had to laugh. It’s some other Jim 
Gallion who hasn’t created, with his wife Teresa, the most beautiful replica of nature I’ve ever seen on their property near Frederick, if his PowerPoint show can be believed.
Yes, I’m happy to report that someone is achieving the ideal of combining the love of nature with a love of beauty. And right up front he told us he wouldn’t be encouraging us to get rid of all our nonnative plants, meaning almost every plant in our gardens – he even grows them himself. So we could relax and be seduced by his gorgeous photographs of the birds, bugs, rabbits, frogs and plants in his garden.
In his gentle way, Jim’s on a mission to spread the word. He and Teresa work through their design/consult firm, Gardening Adventures, to help homeowners move toward harmony with nature and enhance the beauty of their surroundings. And on top of what they get paid to do, they contribute 300 or so hours a year in community service, which is 275 more than what’s required to maintain their Master Gardener status. And judging by Jim’s talk, he’s a great teacher for the cause because his love of nature is infectious.
More good news – their excellent articles on such topics as wildlife in the garden, native plants, and turf reduction can be found on line. Here they’re listed with other Master Gardener articles, so scroll down alphabetically to Theresa and Jim Gallion.
Among Gallion’s words last night:
- "If you don’t have some nonnatives, you’re missing out on a lot of really cool plants," so he’s not a "native plant elitist."
- You can create a habitat even if you only have a balcony to work with.
- His winterberry has tons of berries and has become the guarded territory of a mockingbird couple.
- Hang your suet-holder upside down to discourage the "junk birds."
- Turtles love colonies of May apples.
- To attract the Zebra Swallowtail, grow Paw Paw, but only if you have room for them to spread.
- To attract Ruby-Throated Hummingbird (in photo), grow the native columbine. It’s a good groundcover in partial shade, reseeding freely.
- Neither toadhouses nor butterfly houses work. Bat houses work once they’re discovered by the bats, which may take a while.
- Leaving de
ad wood to decay in place is great for the critters, and looks good, too. A standing dead tree will attract even more woodpeckers if you drill some one-inch starter holes along it.
- Gardening with successions of petunias and zinnias isn’t gardening; it’s yard decorating.
- But butterfly bushes are like "McDonald’s drive-throughs."
- Recommends National Wildlife Federation’s Attracting Birds, Butterflies, and Other Backyard Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Native Plants for Wildlife Habitat and Conservation of Land, Chesapeake Bay Watershed Edison.
- Recommends The Wild Ones at www.for-wild.org.
Can you tell I was won over? Yeah, I want frogs and some more woodpeckers, just for starters. I’ll try to remember that Jim also suggested going slow and not expecting overnight results.
Last but never least, thanks to Kathy Jentz for bringing Jim to the club.
This just in – a photo of the our Jim Gallion. Ah, that’s better.
Here’s a nature pick-me-up for a dreary winter day – this fabulous documentary about a flock of escaped parrots in SF and the man who’s dedicated his life to them. A smart and lovable aging hippie, Mark Bittner was determined to spend his life doing only what he loved, whether it was his music or later, spending time with these and other large birds, even if it meant being very poor. So about 10 minutes into the movie old Mark had me questioning my very way of life.
Then there’s the birds themselves, just as lovable and even more watchable than Mark. Bottom line – I want one, or more. Do you think my cats would mind? (Hell, no; they’d love a change of diet.) And in their own way, the birds, too, challenged my thinking, especially my assumption that nonnative animals in the wild are a terrible thing. Upon learning that some environmental groups had tried to have thes
e wonderful animals exterminated I was shocked and appalled. Killer bees from Africa? Go ahead and nuke ‘em. Nutria clogging the Chesapeake Bay? Well, they’re bigger and almost cute, so go ahead but don’t show me any photos. Hey, they never asked to be brought here from South America. These parrots were spared, at least for now, but with flocks now living wild in various U.S. cities, the issue of what to do about them will surely rise again and I’m just hoping we come up with the funds to send them back to the wilds of Argentina, if it comes to that. And I thought invasive plants were a hot issue.
But don’t worry; the movie isn’t about controversy. It’s really about romance, in various forms.
A final note: If you rent this little gem I recommend getting the DVD version (assuming it’s even available in VCR) because of the terrific extras, like little stories about bird sanctuaries and Mark’s home movies, every bit as mesmerizing as the movie itself.
Happy Winter Solstice! My little gift to you is a terrific site I just discovered, though it’s been loved by many for years. It’s all about the solstice, with lots about its ancient and cross-cultural observance. At Candlegrove I also found this basic science that blew me away.
"Today brings the Winter Solstice. The actual moment of the Sun’s lowest latitude in the sky is 10:35 am, PST. Welcome Yule!
"Solstice means "standing still sun." Daylight won’t begin to lengthen significantly for a few days. For example, here in San Francisco, at winter solstice we have 9 hours, 33 minutes of daylight. Our day will remain that length in minutes until Christmas, before gaining a minute more.
"In fact, even though winter solstice brings the shortest day of the year, it doesn’t feel like it to many people. That’s because more people experience sunsets than sunrises. At mid-northern latitudes, the earliest sunsets occur during the first week of December. Sunset actually occurs a little bit later each day as we move closer to the winter solstice. The days really are getting shorter, but it’s because the sun is rising later each morning. That’s why the days at the beginning of December usually feel the shortest. This tidbit from Jack Horkheimer of the PBS program, Stargazer."
I was prompted to do this bit of research after noticing the sun’s position in the sky this morning, when it looked exactly like this photo. Actually, I’ve been noticing its progression up and down the latitudes all year – yet another reason to spend time in the garden. Though it was only 30 degrees when I went out this morning (just below freezing for readers living in more science-friendly nations) it felt great. That’s thanks to enough layers of clothes and being really active – collecting and hauling those leaves I keep talking about. And that’s coming from a warmth-loving Southerner.
Here’s a little piece of garden art that always starts a conversation – and raises questions I can’t answer, leading me to shrug stupidly and sputter disjointed bits of information. So I decided it’s time to stop embarassing myself and do a little Googling.
