Get the buzz this year

If your New Year’s resolution is to join hands with others to make the world a better place, start in your own backyard. Big change can come from small scale refurbishing and the lives you save will repay your kindness with fruit, food, erosion control, and an increase in oxygen from the bevy of plant offspring produced by pollination.

Just don’t be surprised that the helping hand you reach out is accepted by a claw in gratitude; and please don’t squeeze. The tiny denizens of a healthy garden include bees, beetles, butterflies, birds, moths, flies, and bats who move pollen in important ways.   Good habitat is a premium for them, and you can help by creating pollinator friendly gardens.

Audubon Rockies wants to help you in your resolution, offering the Habitat Heroes – Gardening for Beauty and Birds workshop, Saturday, March 5, 9 a.m. to noon at the Boulder County Parks and Open Space building in Longmont, Colorado. As part of the Habitat Heroes program, the workshop features two speakers who give advice for creating meaningful gardens with pollinators in mind.

The Habitat Heroes program encourages gardeners to practice wildscaping, a form of landscape stewardship that utilizes native plants, minimizes water consumption, and provides habitat for birds, bees, and wildlife, large and small. According to the Audubon Rockies press release, it doesn’t matter if your landscape is a residential yard, a few pots on a balcony, a public park, schoolyard garden, orchard or farm – the concepts can be used in many forms.

As more wildscaped gardens emerge, they’ll create a mosaic of habitats that link to larger natural areas, providing a mix of food and shelter for wildlife and insects across urban areas.

This half-day workshop is for both novice and veteran gardeners who are interested in wildscaping tips and techniques, attracting wildlife in an urban environment, eliminating chemicals in the landscape and minimizing water consumption. The workshop features two prominent gardening and horticultural experts:

Marcia Tatroe, writer and columnist for Sunset Magazine and the Denver Post, and author of Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West and Perennials for Dummies. Marcia will discuss how wildlife habitat can coexist within a covenant controlled community, and how to ensure your garden pleases both wildlife and fastidious neighbors.

Deryn Davidson, a Colorado State University Horticulture Extension Agent for Boulder County. Deryn will explore how gardens can be designed to enhance the aesthetics of a site, attract pollinators and provide habitat for an array of wildlife.

If you go:

What: Habitat Heroes – Gardening for Beauty and Birds, sponsored by Audubon Rockies, Boulder County Audubon Society, Terra Foundation and in partnership with CSU Extension, Boulder County.

Where: Prairie Room, Boulder Country Parks and Open Space, 5201 St. Vrain Rd., Longmont

When: Saturday, March 5. The workshop begins at 9:00 a.m.

Registration: $15.00 per person.  Visit brownpapertickets.com with the keyword  Habitat Hero.

Door Prize: Win a Garden in a Box, an exclusive pre-planned garden from High Country Gardens.

 

Read Full Post »

Aphid wars

The first of the aphids showed up in November, a small herd of them clustered on the soft, succulent tips of the hibiscus plant overwintering in the sunny window of the back room. My spouse was concerned, but I pooh-poohed this, saying I’d pick up some insecticidal soap to get rid of the sucking pests.  “A couple of spritzes and they’re out of here,” I said.

Mother Nature loves overconfidence, especially in gardeners who routinely try to bend her to their will. She clearly loved the challenge I threw down, because the aphids she sent to worry my plant are imbued with a resilience and will to conquer that would please any conqueror of yore.

As soft bodied insects, aphids are vulnerable to soaps; it disrupts their exoskeleton and causes catastrophic water loss. In order for it to work, the soap has to coat the body of the bug, so spraying the entire colony is a must to ensure control of the pests.

If you miss any aphids, they’re bound to bounce back quickly. Aphids are parthenogenetic; they can produce offspring without fertilization of eggs.  They’re also viviparous, hatching eggs within the mother’s body and birthing live young.  The young are almost always daughters, who, at the time of their birth, are already maturing their own eggs for offspring.

They’re all girls, nearly all the time, and are born pregnant, which is why their numbers increase alarmingly fast. Nymphs are mature enough to produce their own daughters in an average of 10 days, under good conditions such as a warm place with no predators.

This is exactly the condition in our back room, something that in my overconfidence I failed to take into consideration. Casually, I sprayed the colonies at the tips of the plant.  A few weeks later my spouse asked when I was going to get the soap to spray the aphids, and, puzzled, I said I’d already done this.

“Really? It didn’t work,” he said, calling me to the back room to behold colonies covering both tips and budding flowers.  I sprayed again, to the same results: the soap knocked back some of the aphids, but the colonies returned with greater vigor in a few days.  Muttering and calling the beasts unpublishable names, I attacked again, and again, employing soap and hand swipes to rub the bugs away.

The battle seemed lost, until one day a sight stopped me as I raised the soap bottle. A ladybug, perched atop the uppermost growing tip, snacking on aphids as if they were cookies.  We welcomed this beetle like an honored guest, the two of us hovering and watching her feed.  “Will she get all of them?” My spouse asked, eyeing a bud with a particularly large number of aphids.

She got through quite a few of them, but she didn’t stick around; after her snack she seems to have settled back into the mulch in the pot to continue her off-season rest. We look for her daily, and considered purchasing more to help her out.

But ladybugs come in bags of hundreds and our house is too small to host them; my imagination had them raiding our meals once the aphids were gone in a manner much like the zombie hoards on TV. Other biocontrol options are even less appealing, such as releasing parasitic wasps.  Although they’re helpful in reducing aphids, swarms of wasps aren’t exactly a welcome mat to visitors.

The aphids are still there, but fewer in number; my routine of spritzing them with soap are keeping them at bay until the ladybug reappears. This balance is a good one, and we wait for warm spring days when the ladybug reappears to help out.

Read Full Post »