Goodwork Almanac

Tag: bugs

  • June in our Garden

    What’s Happening in the Garden?

    There are so many things happening in our garden in June. It is hard to believe the year is nearly half over. In the late winter and early spring, you think things are taking forever and then June hits and the garden explodes, the days are as long as they’ll get, and you can hardly keep track of all that is happening. I wanted to keep a record of where we are in the garden’s journey and encourage you all to take a closer look at your own gardens and the visitors that come and go throughout the season!

    Right now, in the middle of June, we have a few different flowers ready to pop and a handful that have already started blooming. Our salvia comes back year after year without much worry or fuss. In fact, our neighbor tried to replace a beautiful patch of perennials with a sterile rock garden and a few sad looking rose bushes and the old salvia came back with a vengeance. While I have nothing in particular against rock gardens or roses, it was nice to see the old natural garden return for one last victorious flush of purple flowers. The bees love these — as my picture shows! Honeybees are usually one of the first visitors to the garden and salvia is there waiting for them starting early.

    Next, we have had several bunches of German chamomile crop up from one seeding several years ago. They are tremendously hardy and self-seed better than other chamomile varieties we have grown. I always appreciate volunteer plants and try my best to protect them and keep them going until they get strong enough to do their own thing. These are usually the plants that end up doing the best in our garden each year.

    As a bonus, some lovely ladybugs decided to make our garden their home this year and laid some eggs in our chamomile. We got to see them hatch and the little black larvae crawled all over the garden for a few days. Now they are in chrysalis and soon our garden will be filled with ladybugs (we hope). We think the presence of aphids on our Sedum Autumn Joy may have attracted them.

    Then we have our Black-Eyed Susans and our Purple Coneflower (Echinacea) which have returned from last year’s garden, even with the devastatingly dry winter we have had this past year. It just goes to show how resilient and robust these native wildflowers are and what an integral part of any low-effort garden they can be. They have not bloomed yet but the flowers have formed and are just about to open any day now. I cannot wait to see what kind of visitors these flowers bring to the garden. They often attract pollinators of many different types, but more on that later.

    In addition to these beauties, we have also had a couple star players return in spite of my almost having killed them (several times). We tried to transplant a few Yarrow plants into our container garden last year and then proceeded to not water them for six months. There was also so little rain or snow this winter, I thought they were dead for sure. Then they came sprouting up with the first wet days of April and May and now they are just about to start blooming. Keep hope alive!

    There were also a few sprouts coming up in April that I misidentified as Milkweed but which turned out to be Goldenrod. This was an absolute shock and joy to discover because I must have done everything I could to kill them last season. I transplanted them late and they shriveled up and died where I planted them — their little brown twig bodies reminded me of my failure each day I passed them. Then, this spring when I thought they were Milkweed, I tried to transplant them into a larger container and they soon looked quite sad on our first few hot days in May. Now they are continuing to surprise me and prove their resilience, as they have taken off and look like they are going to be fascinating plants to watch. I have never grown them myself but I am excited to see them. Goldenrod are known to be host plants for a huge variety of insects and wildlife so I will keep my eye on these superstars!

    Goldenrod is on the left, Yarrow in the middle, and our Milkweed plants are on the right in this gallery above. Milkweed is known as the sole host plant and food source of the monarch butterfly. I would not hold out hope that a monarch would use our milkweed as their home but that would be high up on my wish list for garden visitors.

    Then we have a few of my favorite flowers that I love to see come up each year. They are known to be aggressive self-seeders, and are probably deemed a weed by most people, but I love the Prairie Sunflower. So many insects come to our garden just for these sunflowers and in the later summer I have even seen Goldfinches come to perch on them and feast on their seedheads. It is a lovely sight to behold at the end of the garden season and really connects you to the cycle of the year and the beginning of autumn.

    We are also trying Marigold, Nasturtium, Calendula, and native Purple Clover (not a true clover, I believe). These will be beautiful summer and autumn blossoms if the grasshoppers don’t get to them first. I am looking forward to a long season of growing!

    I thought I would include in this post a “Garden’s Most Wanted” list as a way to track the garden visitors we get this year. It’s a fun way to stay involved in your garden throughout the year and a reminder that we are part of nature and can make welcoming homes for all sorts of critters without trying very hard. If you’d like to, make your own wish list for garden critters and see what you can find throughout the season — this also makes an enjoyable activity for kids and gets them outside in the dirt. Think of it as a nature-themed scavenger hunt.

    GARDEN VISITORS (no particular order)

    Monarch Butterfly

    Toad or Frog

    Bumble Bees

    Praying Mantis

    Goldfinch bird

    Ladybug (check!)

    Lacewing

    Dragonflies/Damsel Flies

    Yellow Garden Spider

    Orb Weaver Spider

    I’ll leave this list at 10 for now and see how many we can spot in the next few months. Of course I will update with pictures if I spot any and this list is not definitive so I am sure there will be many more entries to make that I am not even thinking of right now. I hope you’ll join me in this fun garden activity and share whatever you find with me.

    Thanks for reading!

  • Friends of the Garden

    Bees

    In beginning a ‘Friends of the Garden’ series of posts, I would like to shed light on various plants and animals that bring tremendous benefit to not only our gardens but to nature in general. These posts will include a small portrait of this friend of the garden, as well as ways to encourage this friend and make a niche for them to thrive. I enjoy watching out for all these different forms of life and how they might come to appear in the garden; it is like collecting, without disturbing anything or catching anything. At the end of the season, I get to look back at all the different forms of life I had invited into my world. Some of these friends are having a hard time, so creating corners of the world that are friendly to them is likewise important and I hope to inspire some of that with these short posts. First, the bees.

    Solitary bees

    Not all bees are social in nature, such as the honeybees who form intricate hives and live in colonies. Some bees, known as solitary bees, make their nests in the cracks and crevices of logs, in sand or soil burrows, or even among cavities of hollow reeds. They are still excellent pollinators and should be encouraged by a bee-friendly garden of flowering native perennials. Coneflowers are an excellent choice for these gardens as they provide both food and shelter. Examples of solitary bees include: the mason bee, the leafcutter bee, the metallic bee, miner bees, and squash bees.

    Bumblers

    Bumblebees come in many varieties and I am always glad to see them hanging around our garden. Something about their graceful clumsiness, the way they bend the whole stem down when landing on a flower brings me immense joy. Bumblebee types include: the American bumblebee, the red-belted bumblebee, and the yellow-banded bumblebee. There are several varieties of bumblebee that were once prolific in the U.S. but which are now in trouble due to pesticide use and habitat disruption. Bumblebees do have a queen and a colony, though they are sometimes located in the ground rather than up in the trees, as a honeybee hive typically is.

    Honeybees

    The honeybee is a great bee for both pollination and the economically attractive habit of making honey. Beekeeping is a wonderful hobby, perhaps even a wonderful enterprise if you are so inclined, and can teach you more about the wonders of nature. But this post is not really about the honeybee or honey production, it is more about encouraging a huge range of native bee populations just for the fun of it! We may return to the traditional honeybee work in another post.

    Photo by Alexas Fotos on Pexels.com

    How to Create their Niche

    Let’s start low and go from there. Since many solitary bees and bumblebees make their home in or on the ground, it would be wise to provide these bees ample room to set up shop. Providing sandy soils, muddy areas, or hollow reeds will give the bees a place to make their home right in your garden. Allow your garden to ‘rest’ by leaving accumulated leafy material and twigs on the ground. This provides a refuge for all sorts of pollinating, beneficial insects to overwinter. Setting out shallow trays of water, with pebbles in the water for the bees to land on, will also encourage them.

    Photo by Guzel Sadykova on Pexels.com

    Avoid using pesticides or chemical fertilizers in your garden. You may think the pesticides only ‘target’ the insects you do not want but these chemicals can have negative impacts on beneficial insects as well. And since their homes are made in or near the soil, treating the soil with strong chemical fertilizers may also disrupt their life cycles and make for a poor habitat. As always, do your due diligence before applying chemical anything to your garden so you can be aware of possible negative side effects, or just to make sure you are applying it correctly. Improper application of even a mild chemical can create issues.

    Next, what to grow in your garden to attract the bees. I am a proponent of any flowering native perennial. If it is native, there is a chance it will provide a home for some type of native insect, even if it is not a honeybee. Since it is perennial, you won’t have to plant it every year and each year will bring a stronger growth. And because it flowers, it will provide food for birds and insects as well as beauty for your garden. It does not have to be only native plants, either.

    Photo by Guzel Sadykova on Pexels.com
    Photo by Joseph Lim on Pexels.com

    Most websites on bee information recommend asters, echinacea (coneflower), and daisies. Black-eyed Susans and sunflowers are beautiful and also provide food and shelter for bees. We have planted prairie sunflower in our garden in the past few years as it is resilient and prolific. I have personally had good luck with sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ which does wonderfully in our local climate, as it is drought and cold tolerant, though not a native plant. The bees really seem to love it. The image above is a bumblebee sitting on blooming sedum I believe.

    Photo by Erik Karits on Pexels.com

    I would also personally recommend Anise Hyssop. It smells like warm spices and attracts so many insects to your garden, you won’t know what to do with them all. Other websites also recommend bee balm, borage, goldenrod, clover, salvia, and yarrow. We have had great experiences with borage, salvia, and yarrow as they are all incredibly hardy and return year after year – the borage is an annual but it self-seeds so aggressively that even many community gardens do not allow it to be planted. For our purposes, this is great news, as we want our pollinator-friendly garden to spread throughout the neighborhood!

    Lastly, there are a few things you can create which may encourage these friends of the garden. Drilling holes in logs, providing bundles of reeds and sticks, even simple leaf and stick piles can come to serve the purpose of shelter for a native bee. There are many examples of bee structures you can DIY, plans for these projects litter the internet by the hundreds, and it would be a fun addition to your garden décor. I did not know until recently that bumblebees will use a bee-house (similar to a birdhouse) and that they are relatively simple to make. If you are not so handy to build your own, you can surely order some type of structure or have your crafty neighbor help you make one.

    It may seem ridiculous to drill holes in a log or collect a bundle of sticks together but you must remember how sterile and barren the world has become. The habitable corners of the world for a native bee may be few and far between when it comes to living among us. It may be several miles of paved over road and parking lots, sterilized yards of chemically-treated turf grass, or barren xeriscape rock before they come to a spot where they can set themselves up. Drilling a silly hole in a silly little log could make the difference between them finding absolutely nothing and finding at least a little silly log.

    Whenever you are creating a niche for something in your garden, just think about the main things they would need: water, food, and shelter. Then consider stopping anything which might deter your garden friends, such as chemical fertilizers or herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Soon enough your garden will be bursting with life and your garden friends will decide to come pay a visit, maybe even setting up a permanent home in your little corner of the world!

    Conclusion

    This post serves as a superficial primer on bees, a short look into these friends of ours and how to recognize them and bring them around. It is not the definitive source on bees and I would encourage anyone reading to look through a guide that is more thorough in its information. Below are links to several sites I visited while writing this post and which include a wealth of information on bees, their habitat, and encouraging their health. You can even order some bees over the internet if you are so inclined! Happy beekeeping!

    https://kindbeefarms.com/shop

    Yellow-Banded Bumblebee Guide: Habitat, Behavior & Conservation