It’s Spring. Oh, so Ephemeral!

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The Beauty of Spring

by Sandy Swegel

Spring Equinox is officially upon us. All the joys of the season abound. Birds singing, Crocuses blooming, Baby lambs gamboling in the fields outside of town. Yet one of the dearest and most fleeting of Spring delights is the annual blooming of the spring ephemeral wildflowers.

This is a great season to walk through meadows and along forest trails to catch glimpses of great swaths of these very clever flowers. Ephemeral means lasting a very short time or transitory and these flowers that appear above ground for only a couple of months per year are very crafty. They grow in woodland areas and come to life in the brief interval between the end of winter and the time when the deciduous trees start to grow leaves again.  As the sun streams through the bare treetops, hundreds and thousands of flowers throw out wonderful blooms in celebration of their moment in the sun. Wait two months, and everything will be dark and shady in the woods.  But once you’ve walked and maybe danced among the spring ephemerals, you’ll always remember their hidden presence.

If cherry and apple blossoms are starting near you, make haste to the nearest wooded area.  Lots of botanic gardens and parks schedule hikes during these times. The Great Smoky Mountains are home to an especially large variety of ephemerals from February to April.  But even in your own neighborhood, walk along the creeks to find flowers with delightful names like Shooting Star or Trout Lily, Spring Beauty, Trillium and Bleeding Heart.  Keep an eye out for other spring flowers who aren’t officially ephemerals but thrive in the same conditions like Wild Geranium and Pasque Flowers.

William Cullina, author of Wildflowers: A Guide to Growing and Propagating Native Flowers of North America, suggests planting spring ephemerals in early spring or late summer in the shade of deciduous trees. He says to prepare the site by incorporating four to six inches of compost in four to six inches of soil. Well-drained soil, rich in organic matter is essential. And remember to plant as nature does…in broad swaths of color.

Life is ephemeral…. So get out there and enjoy Spring, our most hopeful season. Or as my favorite (if not most poetic) quotation about the season says:

 “Spring is Nature’s way of saying, Let’s Party!” – Robin Williams

Photo Credits:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mcav0y/166313828/

Saving the Monarch—one yard at a time

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How You Can Save the Monarch

by Sandy Swegel

Native plant advocate Doug Tallamy tells a wonderful story about how the Atala butterfly was saved from the brink of extinction.

“…the Atala butterfly was thought to be extinct in the 1970s. Then landscapers started placing the insect’s food source, a native plant called the coontie, around houses – not to help the butterfly – but because the plant was attractive in home landscapes. The result – a butterfly thought to be extinct found the suburban plants and today appears to be on the rebound.”

 

The greatest challenge for the monarch butterfly has been the loss of habitat across all of its migratory path. The monarch only feeds and lays eggs on one kind of plant: milkweed. Milkweed is considered a weed by Big Ag, and large farming operations have done their best to kill all the weeds including milkweed. Highway departments also have helped eliminate habitat as they found it was cheaper to pour weedkiller on roadsides rather than mow.

It’s difficult for us as individuals to change Big Ag, or highway departments or to stop deforestation in the Mexican winter habitat monarch. But the story of the Atala butterfly suggests that the monarch can be brought back from its hurdle toward extinction. And we, in individual suburban and city yards, can do something. We can plant native milkweed, a beautiful flowering plant, in our own gardens. Our hope will be that the monarch will figure out that the milkweeds are now in a new place…our individual yards…rather than along highways and farms.

For the last couple of years, I’ve lived in the city where my yard has space for maybe two milkweed plants if I smoosh them together. It seems like a pretty tiny impact I can make. It’s hard to buy milkweed plants in garden centers, so I have to grow from seed. What I’m doing this year is germinating the entire packet of seeds in little pots. After I plant my two plants, I’ll give the other baby plants to as many of my neighbors as I can and ask them to grow the plants. With any luck, our entire block (or two) will have milkweeds growing that will be beacons to overflying monarchs. It might be hard for the monarchs to see one or two plants in my yard….but I think they’ll notice a whole neighborhood worth of milkweed.

Habitat restoration on a grand scale is a great idea. But I feel powerless as an individual to accomplish that. But in the meantime, maybe we can offer new habitat in our collective yards. I can grow out a packet of seeds and change my neighborhood.

Another quote from Tallamy:
If half of the American lawns were replaced with native plants, we would create the equivalent of a 20 million acre national park – nine times bigger than Yellowstone, or 100 times bigger than Shenandoah National Park.

If you have more space in your yard, Tallamy tells about a great experiment in Delaware where researches planted Common Milkweed in a naturalistic planting in a 15′ x 15′ plot. That plot produced 150 monarchs in one season.

Let’s create this new hidden monarch habitat in our yards. Whether you have two square feet like me or space for a 15′ x 15′ plot, you can help save monarchs from extinction. One yard, one packet of seeds, one plant at a time, we can provide food and a place to raise baby monarchs.

Photo Credit:
http://www.sectlandscaping.com/topics/celebrating-native-plants-a-profile-of-doug-tallamy/
http://www.butterflyfunfacts.com/atala.php

7 great reasons to put up some bat houses this weekend.

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Help House the Bats

by Sandy Swegel

Need a project this weekend while you’re waiting for winter to finish? How about building a bat house, or just installing one in the eaves of your house. This is an excellent weekend project and there are lots of great reasons for sharing your property with bats.

7. Bats eat mosquitos. Each bat can eat 500 mosquitos just in the first hour after dark. Think about bats eating all the mosquitos in your backyard or near your grill. That’s 500 fewer possible bites on you!

6. Bats eat bad bugs.
In addition to mosquitos, bats also eat garden pests like rootworms and cucumber beetles.

5. Bats are a lot like us. They are mammals like we are. They have long life spans and can live as long as 40 years. It’s a myth that they are dangerous dirty creatures carrying rabies. They clean themselves constantly (like cats). They don’t bite unless you try to pick them up. Raccoons, skunk and fox are much more likely to have rabies.

4. Bats need our help. Suburban development has wiped out lots of the natural wild habitat of bats. Female bats, like humans, generally only have one baby per season. They need a home to keep their only baby safe and keep the species going. Nearly 40% of American bat species are in severe decline or already listed as threatened or endangered. Spring is bat mating season, so hurry up with the new house.

 

3. Bats make gardener’s gold, i.e. bat guano. Bat poop is an excellent fertilizer. In the days before growing marijuana became legal and high tech, weird hippy guys would come into our garden center every Spring to pay cash for the 50-pound bags of bat guano we ordered every year just for them.

2. Bats give us tequila. Yep, bats are the pollinators for blue agave, the tequila plant! No bats, no new blue agave plants, no summer margaritas.

1. Bats are super cool to watch on summer evenings. You can see bats in the magic hour between sunset and full darkness. They fly erratically in the darkening sky, flitting and diving for insects.

Here’s one link to building your own bat house or you can buy bat-approved houses or bat house kits from Amazon or your local wildlife store.

http://www.batconservation.org/bat-houses/build-your-own-bat-house

Windowsill Arrangements

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Why You Need Windowsill Arrangements

by Sandy Swegel

“It’s strange the way, after a while, we seem to stop looking out the windows of our home.” This clever observation by Nancy Ross Hugo led her to many days of creating tiny arrangements of flowers on her windowsill. She muses, “when you’re arranging on the windowsill, the backdrop (the scene outside the window), almost insists on being seen.”

I recently ran across Nancy’s blog of windowsill arrangements (and a book just published) and just fell in love with the idea of these small whimsical arrangements of nature. Growing up in traditions of the deep South, my family often had little bud vases of a single bloom in the guest bedroom or the bathroom counter. I like windowsill arrangements because they draw on that same idea of delicate touches of natural beauty dotted here and there throughout the house. I also like that a windowsill arrangement unites the creativity of using found pieces and perhaps a single flower with the use of an unusual container such as a bud vase or perhaps a crystal glass or a china egg cup or a mini terrarium. I also like it that windowsill arrangements don’t cost much.

 

Give windowsill arranging a try. You don’t have to be a great artist to create a lovely bit of art that unites the backdrop of your outdoors with a bit of beauty and color right on your windowsill. Delightful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credits: http://windowsillarranging.blogspot.com
Book: http://www.amazon.com/Windowsill-Art-One-Kind-Arrangements/dp/0989268853

 

Early Spring Flowers for Pollinators

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Why to Plant These Wildflower Seeds

by Sandy Swegel

Hungry pollinators are starting to wake up. Well, maybe not this week in Colorado if they are smart. We still have a foot of old snow on the ground, but the sun will come out later this week and I expect to see the first crocuses poke out from the melting snow.

The first warm days of Spring bring out lots of our pollinator friends. In a long winter like this, honey supplies are running short and honeybees are eager for fresh food. Wild bees and bumblebees who don’t have honey stores are very hungry. Ladybugs that woke up a few weeks ago and have been eating aphid eggs in the leaf litter are eager for some sweet nectar or pollen. Everybody’s hungry and are flocking to the first flowers to gather nectar and protein. They need to build up their own strength and to provide food for Spring babies.

 

You can spot some of the first pollinators of the season if you look closely at the first Spring bulbs. Plan to plant more flowers for pollinators in your garden if you want to attract more. You can lure pollinators to your yard by having the first flowers. Then they’ll stay for the rest of the season if you have flowers in bloom all year.

 

Some of the easiest spring flowers to grow are:
Crocus
Snowdrops
Grape hyacinths
Daffodils
Tulips, especially native tulips.

Little bulbs like snowdrops and grape hyacinths re-seed themselves and naturalize a good-sized patch. If you don’t have these in your own yard, it’s easy dig up a few bulbs from a friend’s overgrown patch and transplant into your own garden. They don’t mind the transplanting too much and will bloom as usual…attracting more pollinators to your yard.

So bend down close to those little crocus flowers to see our pollinator friends. Bring a camera. The bees get groggy from gorging on pollen and are often moving pretty slowly, so it’s easy to get a good picture.

 

Photo credits:
Mason bee on crocus: http://www.earthtimes.org/scitech/saving-bees-new-pesticide/2612/

Bee on tulip: http://matthewwills.com/tag/honey-bees/

Bee on muscari and fly on snowdrop: http://urbanpollinators.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/more-early-spring-flowers-for.html

To make your pollinator garden click here!

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Design Your Garden with Collages

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Decorating Your Garden

by Sandy Swegel

The snow is still deep. Temperatures still below ten degrees. Seeds are ordered. Poppies and wildflowers were strewn on last week’s snow. Garden magazines are read. It’s starting to get hard to occupy the impatient gardener. My irritation with being bored is at about the same level as my neighbor’s 3-year old whose delightful need for attention and distraction sends her knocking on all the neighbor’s doors. Oh to be a pre-schooler again.

I’m past the age where I’m happy playing with crayons or Barbie. But as I watch the clever neighborhood moms coming up with a million games and projects to occupy snowbound children, I decided there was a way I could almost be a pre-schooler again. I could make a collage.

Only in the grown-up world, it’s not called a “collage.” It’s called a “visioning board.” The movie “The Secret” made visioning boards popular. I’m not too big on just having pictures of a perfect garden because, well, I know me. I’m never going to have a perfect garden. I’ll get too distracted by turning the compost pile or watching the bees or running off to do errands to get my garden perfect.

 

But a Garden Vision Board or Garden Collage is great for keeping track of new ideas and creating imaginary gardens. And all my pretty seed catalogs and magazines have perfect-sized pictures for cutting out small images of flowers and plants that I can paste on my board.

It’s easy to get started.
*Piece of paper, poster board or old cardboard. An old dry erase board and magnets work too
*Scissors (you’re grown up…you can have the pointy ones now)
*Gluestick or tape.
*magazines and catalogs.

So simple but the whole point of visioning is that the process does make your ideas happen. This year some of the favorite flowers or vegetable you collage with now will be growing for real in your yard or pots.

Collage Ideas:
Flowers. Everybody wants more flowers and more color in their yard. Gather pictures of your favorite flowers. Put pictures of flower arrangements so you can remember to grow those flowers.

Garden design. You can collect photos of designs you like. One day you’ll get around to it. My father collected pictures of gazebos for twenty years before he finally retired and had time to build one. I know I will make an herb knot garden one day.

Tweak your mature garden. If you’re ambitious with a printer you can print out a picture of your garden to use as the base of your collage and try out what flowers bring some added pizazz to the nice garden you already have.

Vegetable gardens. The preschooler next door has an electronic game that lets her plant carrots and tomatoes. She’s too young to know we used to design our vegetable gardens with pen and paper in the olden days. Gather pictures of your favorite foods.

Gardening Friends. Or you can just cut out pictures of bees and dragonflies and hummingbirds and all the other pollinators to remind you of your gardening companions.

Vacation Gardens. A collage of all the gardens I could have had if I hadn’t moved to Zone 5 Colorado. Bananas and tropical flowers.

Mostly, I’m collaging to have a little tactile fun and inspiration in the middle of a snowstorm. We have to remember that the reason we started gardening is that it’s fun and beautiful and creative. Not just work to be checked off a to-do list, but a place to nurture our spirit.

Photo credit: http://simplehomecraft.blogspot.com/2012/07/garden-collage.html
http://mamaslittlemuse.blogspot.com/2012/05/designing-garden-from-pictures.html

Good Bones

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Winter Garden Treasures

by Sandy Swegel

Oh, Look. More Snow in the forecast.

I’m trying to be a grateful gardener. Really, I am. I watch the weekend forecast for yet more snow and utter to myself, “Oh, it’s good. We need the moisture.” I squint to see if daffodil shoots can push their way through old hard ice and console myself, “Snow is so good. It insulates the plants and protects them from howling subarctic winds.” But after weeks of cold, I’m running out of gardening reasons to love the snow.

Then I remembered Winter Bones. There’s that old adage that the secret to a good garden is good bones. From a design standpoint, that means the basic structure of the garden. The trees and paths and arbors. It’s hard to see the bones during the summer with all the foliage, but looking at the winter garden is like viewing an X-Ray of your garden. The foliage and flowers are gone and now you can see the skeleton of your garden.

Want to strengthen your garden’s bones? Take an inventory now of what you see as you walk in the apparently barren yard. Walk around your neighborhood and see what gardens are enticing even though it is winter.

 

Here’s what Winter Bones I like to see in the garden. Which ones do you have? Which ones can you add in this year?

Trees that make archways over paths.
Judicious pruning of trees you already have can make lovely walkways. Prune branches up so that branches along a path are at least 7 feet high. You can walk under them but not hit your head.

Thin Your Trees.
Apple and Plum trees can get quite dense without regular pruning. They block the sun from getting to the garden beds underneath and they produce less fruit. While these trees are still dormant, cut out some of those water shoots and old broken branches so you can see the structure of the tree now.

Grow interesting Bark
Paperbark trees are my favorite trees in winter. Their peeling, colorful bark called out to be touched and admired. Paperbark maples are great as are the Paperbark Birches which survive better in arid Colorado. The white bark of aspens and birches are great in summer and winter. In warmer places, sycamores and crepe myrtles and eucalyptus are exquisite bark

Grow tall shrubs
Twig dogwoods (red and yellow) stand out now. Pruning out a third of the old branches each year gives a beautiful shape and vivid color. Nine-barks in winter show off their great peeling bark.

Strategically place grasses
Clumps of grasses placed on corners or edges of beds or even as a mini hedge help create “rooms” in your garden, Grasses grow just in one season, so if you have a new garden and are impatient for structure, grasses provide it in one season.

Photo credits:
www.davesgarden.com

T

Native grass seed

Heirloom vegetables

Wildflower Mixes

 

What can a Gardener Do in a SnowStorm?

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How to Survive Winter

by Sandy Swegel

Oh my, what a winter. In Colorado we haven’t suffered like the Northeast has…just last week we had five glorious warm sunny days in which I cut back grasses, pruned dormant trees, and started some cleanup. Alas, today, there’s eight inches of snow on top the fence and more coming. What’s a gardener to do?

You can Design a Snow Garden.
OK, come summer you’ll call it a Moon Garden because it will be all white. But I’m been Googling all the plants with “Snow” in their names. One hot summer night this July, I could be surrounded by a field of white flowers that cools me off remembering that snowstorm last February.

My thoughts so far:

Agapanthus SnowStorm
Spirea SnowStorm
Bacopa Giant Snowflake
Alyssum Snowdrift

Then there are the common names: Snow in Summer, Snow on the Mountain, Snow Flower, Snow Drops, Snow Rose, Snow Poppies. There is no end to this pun. But it could be a wonderful whimsical garden that would delight your friends and just glow in the moonlight. Install some garden solar-LED snowmen or snowflakes to come on after dark. You’ll either have the cleverest garden or the most eccentric garden on the block. Either sounds great when you’re stuck in a snowstorm.

 

 

http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/FullImageDisplay.aspx?documentid=35248
http://youreasygarden.com/dont-forget-white-in-the-garden/snowstorm-landscape_0270/

 

 Heirloom Vegetable Seed

 

Wildflower Mixes

Grass Mixes

Organic Vegetable Seed

A Valentine’s Day Gift for the Bees

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Bee Love

by Sandy Swegel

Nothing like Valentine’s Day to make us think about who and what we love. If we look at the huge number of Facebook “likes” we get when Mike posts about bees or wildflowers, we know our followers have a special love for wildflowers and for the bees and other pollinators who feast on wildflowers.

So how about we all do something special for bees this Valentine’s Day and plant a special Wildflower Patch for them that is a food source both beautiful and safe. A wildflower garden can be a whole meadow or it can be a tiny corner of your garden. Size isn’t as important as a good source of food that’s grown from seed naturally.

 

We’ve written here before about the dangers of the neonicotinoid pesticides (now more easily named neonics.) The bottom line is that if you buy plants, it is likely they were treated with neonics at some point in the greenhouses where they are propagated and grown for sale. Neonics are good killers and control the aphids, mealy bugs, scale and thrips that plague crowded unnatural greenhouse conditions. It’s much for expensive for big growers to treat pests naturally when mass spraying of neonics takes care of the problem for them cheaply. The cost to the bees doesn’t factor into the budget.

But for bees, it’s starting to look like even small amounts of neonic residue left in plants can hurt them. See the link below for the Harvard study that found that healthy bees that were exposed to even sublethal doses of neonics were significantly less likely to survive winter.

The only way to protect the bees until neonics are outlawed here as they are in Europe is to make sure they have natural sources of flowers that are grown from seeds instead of from purchased plants. And the best plants to grow are the ones bees have evolved with: Wildflowers. Anyone who gardens that knows that Wildflowers are a real “if you plant it they will come” experience. Every pesticide free wildflower you plant will be covered with happy bees.

So our Valentine’s message is this:02.13.15-VDay-FB
“Bees, We Love you. We want to show you our love in a time-honored way humans have always shown love: we want to feed you lots of good food: the pollen and nectar from naturally grown wildflowers. We want you to be healthy and happy and share many more Valentine’s Days with us.”

Harvard study:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/study-strengthens-link-between-neonicotinoids-and-collapse-of-honey-bee-colonies/
Photo credit:
http://www.sweetcomments.net/picture/valentines-day/bee-valentine.gif.html

Lessons from an Orchid Show

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Indoor and Outdoor Gardening Ideas

by Sandy Swegel

Seeking solace from Winter and brown landscapes, I headed to the Denver Botanic Gardens yesterday. They have turned all their indoor spaces into a grand orchid show with orchids in the conservatory, orchids in hallways, and orchids tucked into every nook and cranny. A perfect winter escape.

Here are some ideas I got for both indoor and outdoor gardening.

Green in a Color Too.
There were intriguing green orchids underplanted with miniature green plants including mosses, creeping jenny, dwarf junipers. It was a riot of texture and color…the colors were all green but clearly, there are many different green colors: chartreuse creeping jenny and growing tips of juniper, deep dark green ground covers, bright green coleus, variegated green ivies, soft green mosses and prickly green evergreens. Oh my. This mixing of green colors and textures works outdoors especially in shadier areas too. Do what the DBG did…throw in a lone shock of purple and, voila, the planting is art.

Orchids Aren’t Just for Pots.
The orchids weren’t just sitting inside pots. Their roots were also packed in orchid bark held together by plastic wrap (disguised with attached moss) and tied to the top of trees or dormant branches. This would work in the kitchen too…how about an orchid leaning down from the top of the refrigerator…or attached to the side of the cabinet at eye level when you’re doing dishes. Orchids are very close to being air plants…they just need some humidity. Tie an orchid to a ficus tree in your living room.

 

Orchids Can Be Team Players.
Traditionally we display orchids as lone divas. One orchid, in its own orchid pot, on a bare surface…very modern Asian looking. But the world of orchids has changed. Once it took many years to grow orchids but now tissue cloning churns out beautiful flowering orchids so cheaply you can often get an orchid that will bloom for months for only $10 at the grocery store. The DBG used these specimens as one flower among several in container plantings. This would work outdoors too in shady moist locations.