Goodwork Almanac

Tag: native perennials

  • August in Our Garden

    August in Our Garden

    The update for July will get rolled into August’s look at our garden. It seems a fitting time to do it. Early August is about halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. In the distant past, this time was known as Lammas or Lughnasadh, a pagan celebration of the beginning of the harvest. I always feel that day in August when the sun starts to turn and the light feels heavier, slower almost, and I know the harvest months are upon us.

    In the past, our garden has been primarily vegetables and our harvest season has begun in August with cucumbers and the first tomatoes. Then some of the root vegetables come in. The beets and carrots get pulled and we get to marvel over their colors.

    This year, our garden has been scaled back and consists mostly of flowering perennials that we hope will attract a plethora of pollinators and other critters. I shared my wish list of garden critters in our previous garden update, in June.

    Our July and early August were filled with many garden visitors, some from my list and others that I have written of before.

    Here are some of the bumblebee pictures I managed to get. The first, with the red band, is on our prairie sunflower. The second, yellow and black, is on the purple coneflower, and the third, also yellow and black, takes a liking to our borage. In addition to these, I also caught a few glimpses of an all-black variety of bumblebee which moved far too quickly for photos. Maybe one day!

    I cannot describe how happy it makes me to see bumblebees in our garden. In previous years, I have found them few and far between in garden visits and most of the bee sightings were regular honeybees on our salvia. Definitely not a bad thing to me, but bumblebees feel more magical and cartoonish. They are entertaining to watch and beautiful to study. 10/10

    Here are pictures of an iridescent green bee, which I believe to be the metallic green sweat bee, Agapostemon texanus. These have also been showing up more frequently in our garden this year and I thought they were going to be scarce. These are beautiful bees to watch in person and they are amazingly fast. I had to sit still in front of these flowers for several minutes before they happened to land and I got these photos. Worth it.

    Here are some other varieties of bee that seem to love our prairie sunflowers. They range in size from miniscule to about the size of a honeybee. From what I can assume, these may be carpenter or mason bees in addition to others I have yet to learn about. Several of them have made homes in the fenceposts by our garden (pictured below). I want to continue to build up the variety of insects that visit our garden but I feel this year has already been a success when compared to other years.

    There have also been other critters visiting our garden, the birds! I got to strike another entry off my list, the beautiful goldfinch. In the evening, I heard something which I thought was a mouse squeaking furiously. When I turned the corner, I spotted a pair of goldfinches perched on our prairie sunflowers. Every year around this time, our sunflowers draw the goldfinches in and feed them as they pass through. It is always an honor to be a part of their migratory patterns and to see their little yellow bodies flit from the flowers to the nearby trees when you try to catch a glimpse. Like little phantoms in the corner of your eye. When you get to watch them in action, it really is special.

    We have also been getting a red-tailed hawk in our area, perhaps drawn in by the mice that like to make a house in our garden shed. The hawk is sizeable and prominent wherever they decide to perch and getting close enough for a picture can be a practice in patience. In person, they are much more noble and majestic.

    Our garden, which in June was just a collection of green in a bundle of tightly-wound leaves, has been bursting with colors. The yarrow, coneflowers, sunflowers, borage, and black-eyed susans have all bloomed and done their goodwork attracting pollinators. Morning glory and moonflowers open each morning supported by the tall sunflowers or drooping over our fence. Goldenrod has exploded in yellow — pictured here in our neighbor’s garden. But the salvia and the chamomile are on their way out, forming seedheads and turning brown. The sedum autumn joy is just about to begin its blooming, signalling the start of fall. Even in the midst of the summer heat, the next season is palpable and waiting.

    The summer heat, the flowers, the garden, and the world of fascinating insects that arrives each year brings a flood of happiness and contentment for me. In the beginning of the harvest season, I get reflective on a time of unbridled enthusiasm and nonstop activity. Everyone is up and doing something, and you feel drawn into the life of these most open and inviting months. But there is also a soft spot in my heart for the fall, for the big harvests and cooler nights, for the slowing of time and the diminishing of the daylight. Things become quiet and thoughtful and you get to immerse yourself again in the joy of planning next year’s garden while still in the abundance and happiness of this year’s.

    I hope you have enjoyed this brief tour of our garden during this, the beginning of the harvest season. Stay cool for the rest of August, and happy gardening. Thanks for reading!

  • Chaos Gardening

    Chaos Gardening

    C – Choose and collect your plants. This is a fairly straightforward step. It doesn’t have to be a specific type, it doesn’t have to be native plants (although that would be cool). The first consideration that you should make is what you like and therefore what you want popping up in your garden. Explore different colors and different heights, different textures. Try a mix of perennials that come back year after year and annuals that you start each season. Try to line up blooming windows to keep something always blooming in your garden throughout the year.

    I started out gardening with an affinity towards vegetables and that was basically it. It wasn’t until later I started to appreciate annuals like marigolds because of what they did for my vegetable garden. After that, I started to explore perennials. I enjoyed them because I didn’t have to start them every year. They became a big part of celebrating spring and watching the garden come back to life after hard winters. When the sedum would start creeping back out of the soil or the yarrow’s green leaves first pressed their way past the mulch, it fills you with joy that the winter is ending and the garden is returning.

    Over the years, I have also collected the seed heads from any attractive flowers I find blooming in our neighborhood. We take walks down an alleyway nearby and it is filled with Feverfew and Flax. Pinching the seeds off, I spread them in my garden and wait for them to grow. The added benefit of collecting seeds from local plants is that you know they grow well in your area with minimum care.

    Feverfew, in the daisy family. We collected seeds this year and spread them in our garden.

    We are currently growing Yarrow, Echinacea, Sedum, Mint, Anise Hyssop, Salvia, Bachelor’s Button, Knautia, Lamb’s Ear and Black Eyed Susans in our container garden. Our Chamomile, Prairie Sunflower, and Borage are such aggressive self-seeders that they are almost like perennials – I hardly ever have to plant any new ones. I enjoy annuals like Aster, Marigold, and Red Clover. The clover is nice because it grows prolifically but does not crowd the other plants, keeping low and sending up little red flowers here and there during the early summer. If grown densely enough, it can act as a living mulch or groundcover to help retain more moisture.

    H – Host plants. Once I began to appreciate flowering perennials, I took an interest in choosing native plants to our area in order to attract local pollinators and beneficial insects. Looking online, I could find native perennials as well as a list of insects that use these plants as hosts. This means they use the plants during a significant portion of their lifecycle, not only for food. I began to plant native grasses, as well as hardy groundcovers – some without flowers and some with flowers.

    Praying mantis. There is a native variety and an introduced variety.

    Once I took an interest in pollinators and beneficial insects, my gardening style changed dramatically. I was no longer interested in vegetables alone, isolated from everything else. I was no longer interested in straight lines and rows or arrangements. This is perhaps the moment ‘chaos gardening’ took hold in me. I began to buy wildflower seeds and spread them in every nook and crevice I could find. This year we are beginning a Goodwork project in cultivating milkweed plants.

    Milkweed is the host plant and main food source of the monarch butterfly. The prairie sunflower that grows so aggressively in our area attracts the beautiful yellow goldfinch that pecks at the little sunflower seeds in the early mornings. Our grasses attract dragonflies. The chamomile is a favorite of the hoverflies and the bumblebees. This post is not about insects, though they’d be elated if your garden went native!

    Milkweed seeds collected in the fall. Milkweed requires a cold period before germination.

    A – Abandon lawns. This one may ruffle some feathers. I understand the utility of a manicured lawn and I understand there is no doing away with lawns completely. But if I can inspire someone to turn a portion of their labor-intensive yard into a chaos garden, host to half a dozen or more species of beneficial insects and wildlife, I would be glad.

    In talking to the adults of my life who must care for their lawn, either as required by an HOA or out of a sense of duty and order, I have found that lawns tend to be expensive nuisances. They tend to become patchy during periods of inconsistent care, they require regular mowing during the summer months which either costs time and effort or money in outsourcing this chore. Water isn’t cheap and a good portion of it is wasted on lawns due to evaporation or runoff. Products for fertilization or the killing of weeds can become costly – as well as killing the beneficial biology in both the soil and surrounding areas. Not to mention the various mechanical equipment requirements needed – lawnmower, aerator, de-thatcher etc.

    Why not save your back and your budget by switching all or a portion of your lawn to low-maintenance, low-tech chaos gardening methods? Maybe keep the front lawn for appearances and turn the back into a tapestry of colors and textures bursting with all sorts of characters. Spare your back, save some cash, replace your grass.

    Purple blooms and a little green alien visitor,

    O – Organized disorder. That is the name of the game. The more straight lines and clean areas, the less life a garden is going to support. Gardening is dirty, it can be downright disorganized and ugly at times. That does not mean it is an unhealthy garden. The chaos garden doesn’t have different areas for different types of plants. Old, decaying material is not cleaned up right away. That’s okay, more space for bugs to overwinter and food for worms as it breaks down. It is all part of the plan – maybe not your plan as the gardener, but the garden’s plan as a unified and healthy entity.

    Your chaotic garden should also suit your needs and interests, too –after all, you are the gardener and you should enjoy gardening. One should account for seating areas, paths for easy access to every part of your garden, and the occasional marker in order to remember what is growing where. I love it when I can walk people through my garden and rattle off the names of all the plants I have going. Not sure if they care but I like it! And when you have a chaotic garden, it sometimes helps to have a little signage here and there to identify the main players.

    S – Sprawl and Serendipity. Happy surprises. It brings such joy to see things start to thrive in your garden. You can feel a sense of pride that you have created such a fertile corner of the world, that things grow naturally and without much assistance. A sense of creativity pervades this practice – you almost feel like you were the one to create this world, or at least that you had a hand in it, and this makes you feel close to divine.

    Black eyed susans. They attracted a whole bunch of different insects!

    This sense of mastery and creation is also overshadowed, from time to time, by the many little surprises that take place in the garden which you know you had no hand in. It may be a ‘volunteer’ sprout that comes up unexpectedly in the corner. We get volunteer radishes occasionally, due to some neglect in previous years that allowed several radishes to set seeds. Or maybe it’s a bundle of insect eggs you find beneath a leaf. An earthworm, a ladybug, a praying mantis. We found a handful of baby toads in our garden one year, using our thai red chili plants as protective cover from the hungry birds. It always made our day to see them hopping from plant to plant as we watered.

    As your chaos garden begins to thrive, you may notice yourself collecting the seed heads and spreading seed haphazardly. You may take an unprecedented amount of cuttings that all begin to explode with life. Don’t worry, there is always room in the garden for more plants. The garden has a special way of expanding each year. Let its sprawl slowly take over your life.

    A bee on our Black eyed susans.

    John Muir noted that if you pulled something in Nature, you would see that it was attached to everything else. These happy surprises in the garden remind us that we are part of nature, too, and witnessing that fact each day can do wonders for your mood and outlook. Wander the garden with your hands clasped behind your back and your eyes calmly fixed on each plant as you pass by. Smile quietly and take it all in as you meander through. When you slow down, when you pay attention, you get to be part of some truly remarkable events. Events so small and so quick, it is almost as if they hadn’t happened. Yes that is a line from Watchmen, that doesn’t make it any less poignant.

    Anyway, here are some photos for your scrolling pleasure.