Month of July 2022: Ecology - con't

This is book one of two. I would suggest you read book two first. It is much better and can be read as a stand-alone. The first half of this book was good and encouraging; the second half fell completely flat for me….botanical names overload throw-down and just too much rambling on and on...pretty much the way I write. Ha! Still, I took away some good things worth noting from this book.

For instance, wild plant seeds are already in your soil, whether you put them there or not. They may lay dormant for years and years, even hundreds of years, then suddenly, when conditions are just right, or you have turned over some dirt and brought these seeds to the surface, these weed seeds may sprout…one reason to not till a garden each year. Just fluff it with a pitch fork and keep a heavy layer of mulch at all times, and pick the occasional weed that busts through.

With this fact in mind, I’m reminded of the year, 2015, when a strange weed popped up inside the chicken yard, tall and beautiful, one we had never seen it before. I later learned it was dog fennel. It showed up for just that one summer and then was gone. In 2017, the chicken yard once again came alive with smart weed, literally covering the entire yard with the most beautiful pink flowers I had ever seen. We have lived in this place since 2004 and have never seen these things before, and have never seen it again since. Besides the two instances above, the chicken yard stays bare…nothing but dirt and chicken poop.

The other thing that I found fascinating to read about was how nature comes and goes in cycles. Coyotes may be in great numbers one year because their food source is up in a particular area. Once they eat up that source, which will have grown in numbers in another area, they will leave and find another place of abundance. But, they’ll be back in a few years as the source has an opportunity to reestablish itself. A boom and bust wildlife cycle!

The author encourages more than just conservation. She wants you to make the extra effort to restore your little piece of property to support the wildlife in your area, which I would LOVE to do. She’s very fortunate to have a husband who loves to work along side her to create their natural landscape. It is a lot of work for just one person. But, I could probably start very small, and I mean very small, like...plant a plant! Ha!

She suggests to plant "native" plants to attract all sorts of insects, birds and animals (preys and predators) and let nature control the environment naturally. Even natural pesticides don’t differentiate between good and bad insects, and you can definitely mess up a cycle. But, in the same breath, she seems to be using herbicides in particular cases for weeds…a little confusing.

Still, if you want to get motivated in restoring your property back to native plants that are meant for and survive in your area, and with plants that truly attract butterflies and birds, then these two books are a must read for encouragement, if anything. I’m still not too fond of her writing style.

END OF REVIEW!

Below are just my own ramblings…of thoughts that popped up in my head as I was reading and of things I read that I would like to remember.

To determine where you can start on your native landscape design, consider these things: How much of your yard do you actually use, and how much can you return to nature, to its natural inhabitants? What paths do you regularly use? I walk to my garden “area”. I walk to the burn pit. I walk to the coop. I walk to the shop.

As far as the front yard goes, I walk to the mailbox. Otherwise, I sit on the front porch swing. That’s where I have the huge live oaks with shade and birds and squirrels, but strangely, never any lizards.

At times, we play games on the side yard with the grandies. This is all on the front 5 acres. These paths could be edged with thickets, flowery grassy meadows, a small water pond with a man-made wetland area…which wouldn’t be hard to establish in one of our low spots, and connect the paths with hedgerows. Dream, dream, dream, dream, dream!

The back 5? Nothing! We mow it about twice a year. There’s nothing but ugly burdock growing back there. A place for field rats and snakes to hide out. I’m not very happy that we wasted it by not doing something with it after all these years.

Forget about plants YOU want, and begin to think about plants that other animals, birds or insects need. Three things to keep in mind and incorporate into landscape when designing a native scape and can be done very effectively on as little as 1/16th of an acre: woodland, wetland, and grassland.

EXAMPLES:

• WOODLAND
- variety of native trees

• WETLAND
- skunk cabbage (carrion flies feed off skunk cabbage nectar, and bluebirds will feed off carrion flies)

• GRASSLAND
- Trumpet vine (hummingbirds love them and feed from the cone flowers during hot parts of summer. LET THEM GROW
- Mullein - hummingbirds line their nests with the soft velvety leaves
- Bluebonnets (feed early insects in April)
- Texas bluebells (feed early insects in April)
- Clover (feed early insects in April) and are nitrogen fixers
- Wild geraniums (May bloomers)
- Wood asters (forest edges-fall bloomers)
- Evening primrose (opens petals at night for the nocturnal moth)
- Wild roses (forest edges- mockingbirds depend on these fruits through winter)
- Muscadines
- Virginia creepers under oak trees (flash fall colors, alerting birds to fall berries for winter migration) NOTE: I currently have wedelia daisy, non-native, invasive, yet I planted a few years back because I knew it would be successful with little or no work at all...AND IT IS!

Wild animals (prey and predators) come and go in cycles…a boom and bust cycle. Years ago, when we first moved here, we saw wild hogs tearing up our back five, but then they left and we never saw them again. Maybe they were passing through. Our area must not provide them with enough of the foods they eat. Thank you, Jesus!

Wild coyotes come and go. Very seldom, but some nights we can hear them going nuts, which is totally awesome. I have one of those nights recorded on my phone. One evening, during daylight, I even saw a coyote walk up behind the coop where our chickens were out and scavenging. He grabbed one and cantered off into the woods. Other than a few instances, we hardly ever see them around.

2014 was year of the banana spiders. Their webs completely covered the forest line. I have never seen anything like it before. That was the year I was mowing, trying to be careful around the woods so I wouldn’t run into one….but I did anyway. I let loose of our zero-turn mower, slapped the cap off my head and mowed over it. It was completely mangled, so I played a joke on my husband. I put on the most shocked look I could muster up and walked into the house a little dazed, holding up the mangled hat. He took a good look at me and, and with total concern for me, asked, “What the hell happened? Where’s the mower? In a ditch?” Ha!

The one constant we will see is the ebb and flow of crazy ass rat snakes in the coop looking to steal some eggs. One particular year, 2017, I walked in to take care of business, and behind my back, and up above the rafters and hiding out in a nest were four rat snakes slithering around. That was just one day, which was a big year for rat snakes. My husband is the most awesome snake wrangler! I couldn’t have chickens without a wrangler. He catches the snakes; I catch the pictures.

Then one year there were mice everywhere, but no snakes. Mice in the attic, baby mice under the hood of my car, mice nest in the tractor. They even chewed threw the wires of the tractor ($$). We had mice (and field rats) running around in the coop. That was the biggest year of mice we have ever seen around here. But then the snakes came back. We even found a snake in the house. But, that was all “HIS” fault! I told my husband he better fix that rubber strip underneath the door before a snake gets in here. I actually told (a.k.a. nagged) him for about 6 months until he finally changed it out. That snake actually bit him…m-hmmm! I really hate to say things like, “I told you so.”

This year, spring 2022, we’ve already removed two huge snakes from the coop (catch and release…somewhere else special…ha). They got 9 of our baby chicks. Then, one evening, a few weeks later, we were sitting on the couch talking, and what did I see? A huge rat snake crawling up our living room window. WTH? Summer 2022 is promising to be a big year with snakes.

Spring 2022…this year - We had martins galore flying around our property for the first time ever since we’ve been here, 2004. Was this because it is the first spring that our county didn’t spray for mosquitoes from the sky? And because my husband hadn’t mowed yet? After he mowed the back five down, the birds disappeared.

Spring 2022…this year - Barklice webs appeared for the first time ever on one of my oak trees. It covered huge limbs with a white web, really thick in some places, mainly around the tops and joints of limbs. Why haven’t I ever seen these before this year? Could it also be for the fact that our county didn’t hire the plane to spray the air for mosquitos this year? Barklice are beneficial. They clean tree bark of fungi and dead rotten wood. They hung around for a month or two, then disappeared. By the end of June, they were gone to find another food source.

Summer 2022...this year - First year to see a few real grasshopper locusts, but lots of those huge green small-winged grasshoppers. The author notes on page 245 that when her grasshoppers returned, so did the meadowlarks to eat the grasshoppers. (Identify meadowlarks, if any. Do mockingbirds eat grasshoppers? I hope so because I’ve seen a larger number than usual hanging out here on Hoo Hoo Acres.

OTHER INTERESTING TIDBITS OF INFO

Plants and trees are filled with their own plant juices of fungicides, bactericides, miticides and vermicides that protect them against a wide spectrum of insects. They have a mix of poisons they regulate as needed. An oak tree, once bitten and severely hurt by a leaf-eating pest, will withdraw nutrients from its leaves and pump up its production of toxic tannins. Injuries to plants or trees have chemical effects. (p. 110-111) We have bred these toxic defenses right out of a lot of wild plants and garden cultivated crops. They may be more palatable today, but we have to work harder to protect them.

Ladybugs only lay their eggs on already aphid infested plants, including roses. These aphids will be the only food source for the ladybug larvae until it develops wings and flies away.

Clovers break apart fixed nitrogen in soil, which allows plant roots (even grasses) to absorb it. Nitrogen have two atoms so tightly stuck together that plants can’t use it at all to make protein unless they are broken apart. As the clover sprouts and grows, it is provided with a large amount of nitrates to feed its bacteria multiplying deep in its roots. All that nitrogen is released as the plant dies off. So, having clovers in your lawn at springtime is actually a great thing. Plus, there is nothing prettier than a lawn full of spring clovers. (p. 124)

Ants and aphids - I always see trails of ants climbing my okra stalks, and now I know why. I thought they were trying to kill my flowers by sucking up all their moisture or something. But, nope! I also noticed that I see quite a few aphids on some plants each year as well. The ants are headed up the stalk to massage the aphids ass to help them release that good sugary stuff from their butts that they love so much. Ha! But, it is still good to disrupt their little orgie because these ants are guarding these aphids, which reproduce and multiply more rapidly than any unguarded ants. (p. 108)

Ants are actually very beneficial and not just good for rubbing the hinies of aphids. They will attack crop eating caterpillars and leaf-chewing beetles. That’s great, but, around here, ant beds seem to form around the roots of my young trees and in my garden beds, especially after a lot of heavy rains. Is that harmful? According to this author, she puts ants right up there with earthworms. Both cultivate the soil by tunneling through all that heavy dirt. This allows water and oxygen to reach the plants at the roots. (p. 125)

Earthworms - One particular English earthworm that has been Americanized, the Eisenia fetida, is very prolific at composting human feces into potting soil. Unfortunately, it is only sold in Australia. This potting soil contains 3% available nitrogen. Soil (or even feces) that transits through an earthworms body has a thousand times more decayer bacteria than in surrounding soil, 5 times more nitrogen, 7 times more phosphorous and 11 times more potassium. (p. 134*, *”Earthworms: their ecology and relationships with soils and land use” by Kenneth Ernest (1985))

Weeds - When weeding, throw your weeds back into the garden. The roots have siphoned up all the nutrition, different nutrition at different levels, and as they decay, will disperse those nutrients back onto the top of the ground where they lay. And when the rains come, the nutrients sill sink into the soil feeding and giving life to microbes a little further down, and so on and so on.

Grasses - There are only two categories of species of all plants: cool season (C3) or warm season (C4). Cool season grasses (or plants…like clover) can’t handle the heat. They end up taking in too much oxygen, over carbon dioxide, and suffocate themselves. You will know what you have when your grass (or plants) die during the hot, droughts of summer. My lawn, as most others around here, is St. Augustine grass….obviously a cool season grass. If not watered, eventually it will turn brown and lay dormant until the first rains. Crabgrass, a warm season grass, is from Africa. It grows plentiful around here, especially in my garden. Another grass that is a pain in my ass is the never-die nutgrass. Is it a warm season species? Bermuda grass, also from Africa, is a warm season grass. But, we don’t prefer those grasses, or other native summer grasses (such as little bluestem), that don’t cost Americans billions of dollars each year to maintain. These are even listed by the government as “noxious weeds”. Nope! Most prefer the cool season pretty grass as advertised, and that breaks the bank to keep alive during hot, droughty seasons. The warm season grasses capture carbon dioxide in its tall, thick stems and refuses oxygen in the heat of the summer, allowing it to thrive under pressure.

You can begin anywhere. Now, I want to learn more about grass. Start by determining how many different grasses I have growing here, and naming and finding out if they are native or not. My neighbor’s field had the most beautiful two feet tall grass this spring, when usually he has the most beautiful yellow flowers. Our field has always been chockfull of different marsh grass, thistles, and tall burdocks galore…now pepper vine and kudzu taking over. UGLY!

Monarch butterflies - have to have milkweed to feed and lay their brood during their migrations. Without milkweed, these butterflies will become extinct. Plant milkweed!

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

The author had such a hard time just trying to get a burn permit in the state of New York. She had planned on yearly burnings of small sections at a time of her meadow to nourish and kill weeds so the native seeds and plants would grow, in turn attracting more wildlife.

She made a very valid point regarding the millions of people who keep lawns and the environmentalist who claim to want to restore, conserve and protect nature and our earth. I never would have thought about these things:

“On our meadow’s side of the scale is a single item: a once-every-three-years burn. On the lawn side hang air-polluting mowers, blowers, edgers, thatchers, whackers, and aerators fueled by gasoline; the petrochemicals that make up lawn fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides; the fuel-hungry industrial processes by which these products, the bags and bottles that contain them, and the spreaders and sprayers that distribute them are manufactured. And trucking, too, of course. To that side of the scale must also be added water, both the incredible volume that keeps lawns green and the onus of water pollution caused by chemical runoff. Could one hour of triennial smoke possibly be so heavy?” (p. 170-71)

She and her husband ended up getting their permit, and they burned. Sounds like the same political crap regarding windmills and electric cars, which the cost of both grossly outweigh the benefits.

Timeline - Oddities and memorable moments that have popped up around here on Hoo Hoo Acres since we have lived here (Dec 2004):

2014-07-01 - Banana spider invasion - took over forest line in spring
2015-04-13 - Daddy Long Legs gathering underneath the grandkids playhouse
2015-08-10 – Dog Fennel invasion - took over chicken yard in heat of summer
2016-01-27 - The crawfish takeover
2016 – Mice invasion (babies dropped from under hood of car, chewed through tractor wires, chewed through a stack of plastic gardening cups 16” long…instead of running on top, etc…)
2017-01-21 - The birds
2017-04-28 – Snake invasion (4 snakes at one time found in coop) & many more over the summer
2017-11-19 - Smartweed invasion - took over chicken yard in summer
2017-12-10 – Snow in Texas (not a first, but very rare and memorable)
2021 - Pepper vine invasion - took over hill of elderberry in back five
2022 – HARD winter – most people, including me, lost all their citrus trees down here in SE Texas (unless they were WELL protected…mine were just protected, but not well.
2022 – Martins galore flying all over our property (front and back five) this spring for 1st time ever. NOTE: The county had not sprayed for mosquitoes yet this season.
2022 – Another snake invasion in our forecast? – already early this spring 2 snakes removed from coop and one crawled up our living room window.
2022 – Kudzu invasion - took over pepper vine that took over hill of elderberry in back five
2022-07-09 First gator to ever find our old polluted pond

NOTE: I've posted a few photos on my Goodreads Profile of some of the "firsts" around here at Hoo Hoo Acres. ( )

‘Noah’s Garden’ was one of the early books advocating using native plants and gardening for the wildlife. Stein relates, in wandering fashion, the long process she and her husband undertook of returning a large site to something sustainable and critter friendly- both macro and micro. She shows the problem with having a lawn instead of a meadow, and with planting exotic (non-native plants) to the exclusion of natives. Not having a landscape that provides food and shelter to native insects, birds, and mammals means that pest species numbers just explode with nothing to keep them in check. And that point is where people end up reaching for the spray gun.

It’s a very interesting book for the most part, although it bogs down near the end and I started skimming for a while. There are sources that go into more detail about meadows, pest species, and gardening for wildlife available now, but it’s a nice starting point. Four stars. ( )

Restoring the ecology of our own back yards.

The book is about how the author quit trying to control her land with gardening and landscaping but instead thinking of what habitats the animals need, let things grow up their own way and planted native foliage and took out exotic or invasive trees and weeds. Sounds straightforward perhaps, but she details precisely how complicated it is. Discusses so many things. How out of balance things get in nature when we get involved. How un-inviting to wildlife and birds the open spaces and empty, uniform lawns we like are. How problematic -on many levels- alien species are in the ecosystem. How important and scare open water like ponds are, and their efforts to build and dredge one. How varied the trees of the forest are, their stages of growth, their needs. How the land and plants will take care of themselves if you have the right ones in the right place. How marvelous the return of living wild things to the places you make welcoming for them. How childhood memories of certain birds, insects, frogs and other living things came back when she restructured and left alone the landscape for them. How to make things look appealing (appeasing neighbors who don't like messy or neglected-looking yards) and yet have the foliage, food sources and cover the wild things need. How communities could interlink the plant cover in their yards to create the "corridors" animals need to travel and disperse. And on and on and on. And I know she's just mentioned a few of the things her reading and research and delving educated herself to, so I wish I could hear the all of it.

from the Dogear Diary ( )

This book occupies similar ground to Suburban Safari and Bringing Nature Home, less anecdotal than the former, less academic than the latter, engagingly and informatively combining personal experience and scientific research. The author bought a multi-acre plot of land, cleaned and tamed it into a garden, then realized the wildlife had disappeared. The process of restoration wasn’t a matter of returning it to a disrupted nature, but of strategically ungardening. ”I spent the following months studying awesomely complicated and almost incredible tales of how plants and animals run these entities we call ecosystems. Over the winter, I tried to translate this research into garden plans. I’ll save you the time and trouble: it doesn’t work. ... The Master Plan is too complicated for me or you – or, frankly, for the ecologists whose flashlights of observation tease me on – to write out, draw up, or even ever to comprehend fully. But, paradoxically, the Plan may not be so hard to follow. The general outlines are before us in the woodlands, thickets, meadows, marshes, and other ecosystems still to be found. ... As to the broad brush strokes of the Plan, we can certainly draw up lists of plant species that grow in these habitats. As for the fine details, I think we needn’t worry. This is a picture that, well started, will fill in itself.”

(read 17 Jul 2012)