Nursery Update - Oct. 08

The nursery is now closed for the season - we'll be re-opening again in mid-April 2009. I want to thank all of our customers this year for supporting us, and for "showing us the love" towards our new native line-up. Thanks to a demonstrated demand, we are going to be able to go 100% native as of 2009!

This is an exciting development, and I will be spending the winter researching the initial line-up of native trees and shrubs to add to our existing perennial inventory. If you have some favorites you'd like to be sure to see, please email me. What I'll be going for are native plants that have a high value in the landscape and that also have a high value to wildlife. Lucky for me, I already did some of this research last winter, and published the results on the Sugarbush site with a neat list compiled from two different sources. Be sure to check this out if you haven't already.

Some garden tips for the season:

Don't let your fall leaves go to waste! Raking them up and bagging them for the curb is like giving away money and nutrients. You can shred those leaves and add them to your compost pile, or shred them and spread them directly on your garden now as a mulch. Either use will provide numerous benefits for your garden. The shredding is an important step to expose more surface areas of the leaves - otherwise they take a long time to break down. You can buy a shredder (I have a Flowtron), run over a pile of leaves with your lawnmower, or suck them up in a leaf vaccum that will shred them for you.

Apply corn gluten meal now on your lawn to take care of the annual weeds that germinate about now. The next application time is spring, when the forsythia is blooming.

Gardening to Attract Butterflies...and Caterpillars

If you weren't among the hordes of people here last weekend to hear me talk about butterflies, this blog entry is for you! (If you WERE among those hordes, you'll know how funny that intro. sentence was!)

The main gist of my talk was that attracting butterflies to your garden needs to go beyond providing flowers for butterflies. Butterfly gardens need to include trees, shrubs, and plants that can serve as food sources for baby butterflies (aka, caterpillars). Many gardeners are geared towards the end game only on the butterfly spectrum, but that is a crucial mistake.

What are Host Plants?

Many butterflies can only reproduce on one, or very few, species of plants with which they have a specific relationship. If those plants are not available in the landscape, the butterflies cannot reproduce, and we will not have those types of butterflies. Trees and shrubs support the largest numbers of butterfly species, as a general rule, although there are some butterflies that have herbaceous plants (perennials) as hosts. If you have lots of butterflies in your flower garden, you probably have a nearby wild area to thank for them. Most of the host plants for butterfly caterpillars are actually trees and shrubs, and many of those species of trees and shrubs are not common landscape plants anymore. Landscapers install, and garden centers recommend, plants that are quick-growing, easy to sell and establish, and new and exciting. These are often non-native plants, and many of them do not have any established relationships with butterfly caterpillars.

Insects and caterpillars cannot adjust quickly to a fundamental change in the plants in the landscape around them. They have co-evolved with those plants over millennia to be able to eat them and/or reproduce on them. When the plants in the landscape are replaced with primarily non-native plants, wildlife – including butterflies – directly suffers.

What are Nectar Plants?

Adults – butterflies - eat nectar from flowers. Nectar is similar tasting across plant species, so butterflies can take nectar from a wide variety of flowers. They are not limited when they are adults in their choice of food, in the same way they are when caterpillars. Butterflies prefer to feed on flowers that occur in tiny clusters, because there is a great abundance of nectar. Some examples are milkweed, Joe Pye Weed, mountain mint, asters, and purple coneflowers. Butterflies generally prefer to drink the nectar of native plants. However, they will also drink nectar from non-native plants, including butterfly bushes.

But, lest this be seen as an endorsement of butterfly bush, let me say in no uncertain terms that there are big problems with this pretty plant! They are on the watch list for invasive plants in Pennsylvania, due to their tendency to seed around, and displace native plants. Butterfly bushes are not host plants for any known species of butterfly. This means they are only good for butterflies when they are adults. Butterfly bushes may be covered with butterflies, but if native plants are nearby, the butterflies will usually prefer those plants. However, faced with a butterfly bush and few other food sources, the butterflies will drink the nectar from the butterfly bush. This would be like me, a vegetarian, eating at McDonald's - there's hardly anything to attract me there, but if I was hungry enough, I could eat the french fries. And I do, on occasion.

And it all boils down to...

Your garden should have a combination of host plants and nectar plants in order to support butterflies through all of their stages of growth and development. The nectar plants should have staggered bloom throughout the entire season, to provide food, and keep the butterflies in your garden.

Getting Started with your Butterfly Garden

It’s easy to incorporate key butterfly host plants in your garden.

A great one to try is parsley. It’s a host plant for Black Swallowtail butterflies. It’s a biennial, so it will stay in your garden for two years before dying; it’s cheap to buy; you can plant it among other ornamentals in your garden; and you can share it with the butterfly caterpillars for your meals. This is also a good one to try if space is limited, you garden on an apartment terrace or only have windowboxes.

If you have a shady area of your property that stays rather moist, you could plant paw paw (Asimina triloba). It’s one of only a couple of host plants for the Zebra Swallowtail butterfly.

Fritillaries use violets as their host plants. Violets make a great groundcover in the shade.

If you want to attract monarchs, you need to plant milkweeds on your property. Milkweeds are any plants in the genus Asclepias, some of which are very garden worthy. Monarch populations are in serious jeopardy due to loss of breeding sites. Monarchs make a yearly migration to the forest of Mexico, where they spend the winter. They return to the same spots in the spring and summer. Monarchs are losing habitat because stands of milkweed are being crowded out in many places by purple loosestrife, an invasive plant that thrives in the same conditions as milkweed.

Oaks are host plants for over 500 species of butterflies. Planting oaks on your property is a long-term investment towards having lots of butterflies on your property. The other major butterfly trees, in order, are cherry, willow, birch, poplar, crabapple, and maples.

Switching in native plants for non-native plants is almost always a good thing for butterflies. For example, native switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) is known to support at least 25 species of butterflies as a host plant. Non-native Miscanthus (silver-hair grass) is known to support just 1. I've got a large and very beautiful Miscanthus in front of my house which is going to be on the chopping block come spring, to make way for something more useful and just as beautiful...any takers, stake your claim now!

Also…

This may go without saying, but I'm not the silent type: Never use chemicals in your butterfly garden. Many chemicals used for weed or pest control will kill insects, including caterpillars and butterflies.

Some Additional Resources

"Bringing Nature Home", by Doug Tallamy, Timber Press, Nov. 2007. There's a great butterfly and host plant list at the back of this great book. All of my detailed info. comes from his website, where he is publishing his research on host plants for butterflies and moths: http://copland.udel.edu/~dtallamy/host/index.html.

http://home.dejazzd.com/kgard/bcn/butterflies2009.html:
Thanks to my helper this year, Jan Slater, for bringing this great site to my attention. It's a list of all of the butterfly species that have been actually sighted in Berks County in the last 5 years - much better than the larger, more theoretical lists of butterflies in PA that includes sometimes hundreds of species that may have only been sighted once, 46 years ago, in one county, by someone who may or may not have known what they were looking at. Greatly helpful as a cross-reference to Tallamy's list.

And last but not least, we've started a butterfly list as part of the Sugarbush website, identifying each known host plant that we carry that supports species of butterflies that have been sighted in Berks County, PA over the last 5 years. It's right on our plant list. Happy gardening!

The evil twin of native plants: invasives!

It's growing faster than a speeding bullet...it's a bird, it's a plane, it's - Tree of Heaven?!

If only this line ended differently! Alas, it does not. Plants horribly out of their context are often the fastest-growing plants in our landscapes. No holds barred, they are not subject to the diseases, pests, and growing conditions of the place to which they are native, which always kept their growth in check before. There, they were in balance with their ecosystem. Here, they are like good farm boys from Iowa suddenly on a wild weekend in NYC with no parents, and a wallet full of money. You can hope everything's going to be okay, but chances are, those boys are going to let loose in ways they never would at home.

But, one major difference is that the farm boys can return to Iowa and repair their reputations, leaving NYC only slightly more chaotic than when they first arrived, while the invasive plants, with their unruly behavior, are here to stay. And just what is unruly behavior in a plant? If they germinate even a little more quickly, or grow taller a little more quickly than the native plants around them, the battle is over, and the invasives have won. And this is exactly why many invasives have earned themselves that name. Invasives displace native plants, along with the insects which prefer to feed or reproduce on native plants. To add insult to injury, they sometimes also release chemicals that actively kill other plants around them.

Controlling invasive plants is a major part of establishing - or protecting - natives in your home landscape. This is an ongoing task, because as soon as you think it's under control, some lovely birds - which you are attracting to your home with all of your native plants - will "deposit" seeds of some unwanted invasives, which will then germinate, and you'll start the cycle all over again.

But the situation will get better over time. Start with taking out all of the plants that are of fruiting age, because this is where the problems are starting. Then work your way down to the less mature plants, which are definitely taking up space, but are probably not going anywhere fast if they're not themselves setting seed. After a while, you'll be down to just the plants that are germinating every year, and these are easier to pull up.

How to get rid of the invasive trees and shrubs, like the aforementioned Tree of Heaven, my personal arch nemesis? Cutting them down will take away their ability to produce seed that season, but they'll resprout. You will need to kill the plant in order to keep it from coming back with a vengeance. Here are some methods to try for the larger trees and shrubs:

• You could cover the stump with a layer of thick black plastic, well-attached to the ground, and keep that in place for a year, and see if that works.
• You could keep on cutting off all of the sprouts from the stump or stem, as soon as they come out - eventually this will wear the plant out, and it will give up, but this may take a long time.
• You could try to pull out the entire stump and root mass with a big truck and a chain - although with some plants, if you leave behind even small pieces of root, those will resprout.
• Or, you could paint the newly-cut stems or stumps with a concentrated solution of glyphosate (aka the active ingredient in Round-up), to keep them from re-sprouting.

Of course, many invasives can be controlled by pulling them up when they are small, or simply cutting off their flowers, if they are annuals (like garlic mustard). These should always be the measures to turn to first, when they are options.

But - what if you don't know what's in your yard? Find out! The DCNR has some great tools to help homeowners identify, and learn how to control, many varieties of invasive plants. Here's a link to one of my favorites - a tutorial that includes pictures and control methods for each invasive variety:

http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/Forestry/invasivetutorial/List.htm

Take heart! There's no way your property has more invasive plants than mine does, so if you need a sympathetic ear, you've got one here. Good luck!

Talking about natives - part 1 of ??

Yesterday evening I had the very great pleasure of hearing Mike McGrath, organic gardening guru and host of WHYY's "You Bet Your Garden", speak at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

The storm the previous night had knocked out the power in the village, but this sort of mishap doesn't deter gardening fanatics. The entire audience sat in chairs outside the hall where the talk was to have taken place, with Mike right up front, perched on a step, talking to us as if we were all sitting around his living room.

The scene had that slightly otherworldly feel that you sometimes get in a Camphill village - like time had stopped about 50 years ago, when many of us were still connected with farms, in one way or another, and with our neighbors. Children of all ages fluttered behind the seated adults, looking for all the world as if they'd been birthed by fairies. I had the distinct impression that if you were to offer one of these waifs an X-Box, they'd look at you silently and curiously, wondering if perhaps it could be used as a footstool, helpful for reaching the limbs of taller trees.

Mike touched on a variety of creatures beneficial for organic gardens, including toads, birds, and spiders. But it was what he said about the bees that caught my imagination.

Honeybees are in serious decline across the country - and indeed, across the world. The mysterious diagnosis is termed "Colony Collapse Disorder". Nobody is really sure what all of the culprits are, but mites and viruses are on the list. This is important for everyone, as fully one third of all of our food in the US is pollinated by honeybees.

But, as Mike shared, much of the problem might have to do with the fact that honeybees aren't native to the US. Turns out, they're Italian, and quite well-adapted to that Mediterranean climate. Honeybees have never had an easy or a happy life over here in the US, where all sorts of mechanisms have to be employed to keep their hives going. They can't sustain themselves here - we sustain them, because we need them to pollinate our food crops.

The mantra of organic gardening is "right plant, right place" - because a plant well-adapted to the growing conditions of a particular site will be healthier, and better able to fend off pests and disease than one that is poorly adapted, and needs lots of coddling to make it. Sounds like the honeybees aren't in the right place, and now they're showing us why this was a bad idea to depend on them so heavily.

Unfortunately, many of the favorite foods we grow in the US are also not native here. "As American as apple pie?" Nope - apples are from central Asia, more Turkish or Russian than American. Maybe this is why it's difficult to grow apples without lots of coddling, at least anywhere east of the Rockies - they just aren't meant for this climate, and they show us why it was a bad idea to put them here by getting attacked by every pest known to man.

This all leads to some interesting questions about nativity. What does it mean to be native to a place? Does it mean to be born there, to be able to grow up to maturity, or even to thrive in a place? Or does it mean more than that?

I was born in Berks County, but I've never been able to identify myself as a Berks Countian. I realize this is because my parents weren't born here, but were both transplanted from other parts of the country. This means I grew up without the body of knowledge of what it means to be from Berks implanted in me from a young age. For example, all things Pennsylvania Dutch are foreign to me, including the foods. I've heard of chow-chow, but I have no idea what it is, and no inclination to seek it out and try it. Instead, I relate to a body of knowledge, values, and food that originated in other places, places where I have not even lived - the childhood places of my mother and father, in rural Minnesota and Rochester, New York. How strange that is!

Turns out plants act in much the same way. Plants relate to the growing conditions not where they've germinated and grown up, which could be anywhere, but to the growing conditions of their true native place. They may well be able to make a life for themselves outside of their native range, but there are missing elements to their transplanted experience. Crucial of these missing elements is their relationship with the insects around them.

And what, you may be asking, do insects have to do with anything? For that, I will need to introduce you to my new most favorite person in the world, Doug Tallamy. I haven't met him yet, but that will change in September when he comes to the Reading area to speak at the Berks Hort Club. He wrote a book, published Nov. 2007, called "Bringing Nature Home". In this book, he detailed the vital connection between native plants and native insects. Here's the crucial part: Native insects eat the leaves of native plants at a much higher rate than non-natives. In many cases, they cannot use the leaves of non-native plants at all.

We need to take one step further back until this makes sense. Plants capture energy from the sun and turn it into food, in the form of their bodies. All life depends on plants being able to photosynthesize, because plants pass this collected energy from the sun all the way up the food chain - ending with us. However, not all animals can use the energy contained in plants directly. We are surrounded by lots of green grass, but it's not usable food energy for us. However, some of us eat cows that can eat grass, so we get the energy from the grass that way. Humans are not unique among animals in our inability to digest most of the vegetation around us. However, luckily for us, insects can and do digest lots of vegetation. They are the most efficient converters of the energy in plants into a high-protein, animal form - in the form of their bodies. And insects are the preferred food of many small animals, which in turn are eaten by larger animals, which in turn are eaten by us. Thank you, insects, for keeping us alive!

Okay, now back to our gardens. Birds and butterflies are on the most wanted list of every gardener. But, in order to nurture the birds and butterflies, we need to make sure their babies are well-fed. Take birds first. Adult birds like to eat berries, but baby birds eat insects. Those mama birds dropping caterpillars into the scrawny beaks of their young? It's the high protein, easily digestible diet baby birds need to get off to a good start. This is not unlike baby humans, who need a different diet in their first months than the diet they will eventually adopt for the rest of their lives.

But, I digress. Caterpillars, in turn, eat leaves. Not just any old leaves, mind you - they eat the leaves of plants which are familiar to them, plants with which their ancestors co-evolved over thousands of years. It's a chemical thing. You can put a caterpillar on a butterfly bush (a non-native shrub), and he won't know what to do, other than climb down and find a plant he can actually eat. Once he's eaten the leaves of his preferred plant, metamorphosed and become a moth or butterfly, then he can eat the pollen from the flowers of the butterfly bush - but it didn't do him a bit of good when he was a young'un.

You see where this is heading? Not enough plants to feed the caterpillars in our yards, even if our gardens are full of beautiful plants...not enough caterpillars for mama birds to feed their babies...not as many baby birds being born or making it to adulthood...not as many birds. And the equation ends even earlier for butterflies. End of story.

The surprising truth is that most of our landscape plants come straight from - can you guess? - nowhere around here. We have Asian and European landscapes everywhere in American suburbia. And we're paying the price with wildlife that's struggling to survive, to find those plants that used to live here that we've squeezed out of our landscapes because they were too ordinary, or not as fashionable as the newest introductions from Europe or Asia. After all, it took the European plant breeders to recognize the beauty in our native purple coneflower, and to start choosing cultivars of it. Then they started to sell them back to us and we said, "Wow! Those are beautiful...why didn't we think of this before?"

Where did this all start? Ah, yes - nativity. So, what is a native plant? You can see from the above that the answer is very complex. It's a subject that interests me, so I will keep writing about it. Stay tuned!