Goodwork Almanac

Tag: bugs

  • The Creepies and the Crawlies

    The Creepies and the Crawlies

    Bats, Moths, Spiders, and Other Creepy Critters

    Bats are not the kind of cuddly creatures we imagine when talking about friends of the garden. They are not like butterflies or frogs or a yellow songbird. In the storybooks, they do not sing with the princess or guide the hero. They have been relegated to the dark and the macabre, associations with the suspect and with death. In short, they can be a bit spooky. There are plenty of other critters who are seen as creepy or undesirable, merely for their appearance or behavior. But these creepy critters are usually as beneficial, if not more so, than other, more desirable creatures and we should take the moment to celebrate them when we can.

    I love the creepy and the crawly. I have always had an affinity for both bugs and this spooky time of the year around Halloween. For the past month or so we have had a lodger come to stay with us and she puts up free Halloween decorations. The cat-faced spider, a type of orb weaver, looks quite intimidating at first. Anyone who finds spiders scary would find living with this one intolerable, most likely. She is large and fast, a sickly yellow color in the light, with two spikes on her round back and long, hairy legs. She repels from her web, dropping in one deft motion just like a droplet of rain. One’s first instinct may be to crush such a creature and to wipe the webs away from the corner where she made her refuge. But if one knows about her nature, knows her work and what she contributes, one could more easily recognize and celebrate her life and her beauty.

    We do not crush spiders, especially those known for being beneficial to the garden. Our orb weavers help us manage the population of flying insects that so readily populate the garden’s atmosphere. Flies, mosquitos, moths on occasion. She does her goodwork so we can do ours. Why crush or banish something that is so integral to the health of our little patch of ground?

    We invite the spiders in by planting our garden, giving them ample room for shelter and the very things which invite their food. Tall plants with sturdy stems, good soil, and many types of flowers can create an environment welcoming to the spiders most common to our gardens – the wolf spider, the jumping spider, the orb weaver, the yellow garden spiders. And of course, once they come to inhabit our space, being careful not to disturb their web or destroy their environment with chemicals and other methods of sterilizing the outdoors.

    There are many other critters who get similar treatment, simply for the association we make in our minds. The average bat is nothing to be scared of and, in fact, could be something we give a lot of love and attention to in order to bring life to our gardens and more joy and pleasure to evenings typically overrun by mosquitos and other insects. Though bats have been maligned and misunderstood for a long time, they do their goodwork just like other things and contribute a pivotal role to the ecosystem as a result. Maybe you like spooky things like I do, and you can even appreciate them for that.

    Photo by Derek Keats on Pexels.com
    Photo by Steven Paton on Pexels.com
    Photo by Nandkumar More on Pexels.com
    Photo by DS stories on Pexels.com

    Some bats migrate, others stick around, some bats such as the Little Brown Bat can eat hundreds of mosquitos in a given night. They can occupy many habitats, including rocky canyons, grassy plains, and wooded forests. Knowing which varieties frequent your area can help you decide the best method to make a place for them. For example, where we live in Colorado there are about twenty common bat species.

    I made an effort to speak with our local natural-areas advisors for tips on how an average person could help bat populations. I also asked people in my neighborhood if they had experience with bats or bat gardening and I got a ton of useful information. I recommend reaching out to your local professionals and even your neighbors to find out more about projects that could interest you.

    You do not always have to provide shelter in order to care for or help wildlife, food and water sources can be much easier to cultivate or maintain and help visitors to your garden. Bat houses, while a thoroughly interesting and sometimes-useful project, have a somewhat lower occupancy rate. It may be more beneficial for us to plant a bat-friendly garden instead of building a bat house.

    It can be frustrating to see all the bats flying around your neighborhood and not have any stop by to use your bat house. So why not provide for them in other ways? By cultivating part of your garden to attract critters that bats feed on, you can create many helpful opportunities for bats. Our local professionals recommended native, evening-blooming plants such as evening primrose, 4-oclocks, yucca, and mentzelia. These are fragrant and attract moths and insects which the bats will then feed on. Native trees and shrubs are important as well, acting as host plants for a variety of caterpillars and other insects.

    As for water, bats typically drink in mid-flight, swooping down low to catch a drink without stopping to perch the same way birds do. If you have space in your yard for a large water feature such as a wildlife pond or the like, then this may serve to give bats a drink. Sources recommend a body of water 7-10 feet in diameter. But if you do not have the room for something that large, don’t despair! Any source of water can help insects flourish, and this will, in turn, help bats. It all goes around.

    Now onto the topic of bat houses. There are a lot of details to this topic, as there are many variables to get correct if you want to help the bats without unintentionally creating a harmful situation. We do not want to introduce a bat population to disease or predators or lure them into our garden only to hurt them with pesticides or herbicides. The whole point is to help wildlife thrive and to do that we must know a bit more about this project.

    Bat Conservation International recommends paying attention to six specific safety principles when installing a bat house: preventing the house from overheating, protecting the bats from predation, avoiding pesticides and herbicides, protecting bats from domestic pets, waiting for bats to find their house on their own, and observing them from a distance.

    There are still more bugs that deserve our attention for the goodwork they do! We know about earthworms and butterflies. It is becoming somewhat normal to celebrate these critters and it feels easy because butterflies are usually colorful and beautiful to look at and worms are familiar and friendly-looking. But there are still more insects to appreciate, in spite of their appearance.

    Our compost bin was recently host to a decomposer that we celebrate and cultivate, the Black Soldier Fly Larva. But these are bugs that look fairly disgusting and which may be associated with the lowly maggot or ideas of rot, decay, and foul smells. While they are certainly playing their part in the natural processes of rot and decay, there are no foul smells here to be had! The compost bin continues to break down these materials into a dark, rich compost and the larvae’s frass (their waste) is added to the compost’s fertility.

    The flies themselves have no mouths or stingers so they cannot harm people, though their long, black bodies may remind them of a type of wasp. The larvae, doing their goodwork in breaking down our kitchen scraps, end up creating a massive amount of food for livestock or other birds – we have given our hens these larvae by the handful and they devour them greedily. In this way, a loop of waste can be closed but not only that, it can be turned to benefit, profit, abundance, and fertility.

    The scraps from our kitchen become compost and bugs, the bugs become healthy chickens and eggs, the compost becomes healthy soil for the garden, and the garden ends up on our plate and in our bellies as tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and the rest. What a powerful process, and all because we have learned to celebrate the rot and decay, we have cultivated a corner of our world for the lowly larva, the disgusting bug which might otherwise have been eradicated or destroyed.

    The Power of Preference

    It is at this point in the post that attention must be drawn to the fact that our power of choice in cultivating our own environments yields tremendous results, for better or for worse, when compounded over the entire population. It is the reality that people have a tremendous amount of influence over their environment without being entirely conscious of what this means. This prowess has created huge improvements in the quality of life but our blind spots to certain aspects of nature have also created havoc in the systems of plants and animals. It becomes clear that, for a creature to go on living, it must find a place in our psychology rather than just a niche in its environment.

    When writing our ‘friends of the garden’ posts, it is difficult to elaborate on the intricacies of an ecosystem when there are very clear preferences being played out in the kind of environment humans tend to inhabit. It can be frustrating and a little disheartening to try to convince people that bugs should not be seen as pests, that moths and bats are inherently beautiful and valuable, not just as staples of a productive food web but in themselves as creatures of the universe, interesting and worthwhile as any other lifeform. You eventually come up against a lot of complacency and apathy. Moths and other bugs are seen as pests, so the pesticides come out. The poisoned insects become food for other animals which become sicker and sicker. Imbalances create ecological issues and the delicate balance we rely on demands evermore intricate technological intervention. All this because the moth is not as graceful as the butterfly.

    Photo by Liliane Buntinx on Pexels.com

    One day, when we reconcile ourselves to the nature of our psychology, we will see that we are inextricably linked to the seemingly spontaneous operations of nature. As long as we reduce, deemphasize, trivialize, or ignore certain aspects of ourselves, it will inevitably follow that parts of nature will suffer. We wield power over nature and environment that is disproportionate when compared to the power we wield over our own minds.

    Which is why I love this season so much. It provides for us a moment to contemplate the parts of ourselves that we typically avoid or have little relationship with – death and decay, frights and fears, the things that haunt us or gross us out, the things which are swept under the rug, sanitized, or ignored the rest of the year.

    We celebrate them in this spooky season, we put out spiderwebs and fake bugs, skeletons, ghosts, zombies eating brains. So, this October, consider inviting the real spiders to stay in your garden (doesn’t have to be your living room!), create a corner of your world for rot and decay to take their natural course, celebrate the macabre and the terrifying and the lowly. The spiders, the bats, the moths, the larvae. These are part of the natural world and they are part of us. We find them haunting and beautiful as they put together their corner of the universe.

  • Fall in Our Garden

    Fall in Our Garden

    The autumnal equinox has come and gone. The light is starting to go out of our days. Flowers, one by one, wilt and brown and fall, their dark stems reminding us just how far the edges of summer had gotten before receding, before beginning their long walk back into the winter. Our marigolds, still holding firm into late summer, have mostly died back along with the other flowers, setting seed for us to collect.

    One of my favorite activities in the garden is to collect seeds by the handful and spread them haphazardly all over the soil where they will stay dormant until spring. It is not measured or scientific, not planned or orderly, but I always find joy in seeing who will volunteer, who will come sprouting forward under the specific circumstances of the spring that awaits us. There can always be a little rearranging if necessary but it is nice to let the garden choose its layout. It holds a secret knowledge that I can not possess and that fascinates me.

    I have managed to encounter a few more of my wish-list critters in the past month. With the prairie sunflowers reaching their peak and setting their seedheads, the birds came in in frenzy. One afternoon, I happened to be standing at the kitchen window when I noticed a few goldfinches perched on the dried seedheads. Goldfinches are among my favorite birds. I reached for my phone to snap some quick photos and noticed more birds coming closer, perched on the edge of our fence and skittering along the ground after the spilled seeds.

    Taking a few more photos, I rejoiced that my garden could provide such bounty! Then I heard a strange tapping noise and, looking out the window again, I saw a woodpecker pecking at the little holes in our fenceposts used by carpenter bees and other solitary bee varieties. It flew to the stalks of the sunflowers and pecked on those for a minute, accompanied by the other birds, and then flew away. All in all, I must have seen about twenty birds in the span of ten minutes, with four types represented. Goldfinches and Chickadees I knew but I had to research the others. I believe they are a Hairy Woodpecker and a Red House Finch. Goldfinches had been spotted before and were crossed off the list, but the others were bonuses that I gladly accept!

    We also had the pleasure of finding an orb weaver spider recently. More specifically, it is the Cat-faced Spider, intimidating but harmless to humans. A great friend of the garden, reducing pests and managing insect populations. Terrifying appearance aside, it is a beautiful creature, and I attempted to capture its beauty in photographs which do not do it justice. It is about a quarter inch in size, perhaps the size of a penny, and its web was intricate and delicate. We were able to see a moth wrapped in its web, perhaps leftovers it was saving, and we saw it in action when a fly struck its web. The spider leapt to the fly’s wriggling body to eat it in one fluid motion. Orb weaver can be crossed off the list!

    While these were not in our garden, I delight in the fact that I got an opportunity to see them at all. These are some monarch caterpillars on milkweed, as well as a monarch adult landing on some goldenrod. You can tell why I want to cultivate those plants so badly! The fact that they attract monarchs is reason alone, but they also have amazing colors and textures and attract a multitude of other critters.

    Also photographed are a couple of yellow garden spiders, not in our garden but neat to see in their element. These things were quite large, about the size of a fifty-cent piece from the tip of their leg to the tip of their leg.

    There were also plenty of repeat visitors in our own garden. Lots of bumblebees on the moonflowers, the honeybees landing by the dozen on the sedum autumn joy. Throughout the season, we got damselfly and dragonfly visitors using our tall grasses and flower stems as resting posts but there was no evidence they were going to stay to complete any part of their life cycle. A water feature might attract them for this, but it was enough just to see them stop by. No toads or frogs this year but never say never, I suppose. There are a few weeks left until the first frost.

    As I mentioned before, we have started to collect our seeds for next year. I do not spread all of them so randomly, though I wouldn’t mind that approach. We tend to collect a few hundred of each variety in the fall and keep them cold throughout the winter – a technique called cold stratification necessary for certain seeds – and then plant them strategically in the first light of spring. Between the randomly sown seeds and the meticulously planted, we always have some success and some failure and the garden is given many opportunities to decide what it will wear that year.

    I really love this season, for many reasons. The heat of summer is dying away but it is not quite the blistering cold of winter. There is certainly an element of comfort and joy in this season that other extremes do not carry. And the final few claps of color in the garden remind you how precious each season is, and to cherish it as much as possible in each new day.

    We remember the whole season and how it unfolded, without our control or participation, but we had that corner of the world, our garden, with which we could bear witness and participate in pure creation. How lovely. I love every step of it – the planting, the ready soil, the watering in the evenings, the collecting seeds, welcoming our little guests. We pass from the season of abundance to the season of gratitude, looking forward and looking back, glad to do our little good work.

  • 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