I may need a gardening icon.

[thanate]

The reunion went off fairly well-- much was accomplished (although there's always more) and I think we handled the worst difficulty of the weekend when one of my tires went flat on the way home. Fortunately the magic lady in the box could direct us to a tire place (of the same sort I bought the tires from in the first place) and it was both open and not particularly busy. We even had a floor jack in the car (rescued from disuse in my grandparents' garage) to help attach the spare quickly.

I've been reading Bringing Nature Home by one Douglas Tallamy, which is interesting not only because of its content, but because I've heard a great deal of what it has to say recapped by my mother over the last several years. The book reads a little like the good sort of textbook, as it keeps bringing in scientific study examples and half-restating points with different sets of examples. On the other hand, I may not be the best audience, since I get a bit impatient with being lectured on things I already know... Either way, I'd definitely recommend it for anyone with land in the mid-Atlantic US, and suggest that others check it out from the library and then look up plant lists from their own biome.

The basic premise is this: as those of us who have studied elementary school biology in the last few decades probably remember, a good ecosystem starts from the plants to the things that eat the plants to the things that eat the things that eat the plants, etc. Well, most of the things that eat plants are insects, and they are very specialized to transform the particular chemical make-up of the certain species of plants that they eat into high-protein insect bodies. Not a lot of people notice this bit, but what they do notice is the songbirds, who need tasty & nutritious bug snacks to feed their hatchlings and keep them going as they migrate.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, we've all seen those light pollution maps for the US, and if you've ever flown across the country looking out of airplane windows, you'll probably remember how much of the dark spaces is filled up with roads and farm fields and other things that aren't nice insect-producing bird habitat. The conclusions and research on extinction in island & isolated populations are left as an exercise to the reader. What makes it worse is that most of the green space in suburbia is either nothing but lawn, or a few foreign plants that neither feed the local insects nor provide anywhere safe to build a nest. If we continue in this fashion, we are setting ourselves up for little but a wasteland of lawn service, sparrows, starlings, and a vast infestation of japanese beetles.

The solution, of course, is to turn suburbia into habitat for the little things we can co-exist with. Plant areas with native shrubs, and then fill in around them with the appropriate native ground covers, and try to feed as many different species of insect as possible, so that even if one gets wiped out or never finds your garden, there will be five others to support both the birds, and (coincidentally) the predator insects that'll eat the pests on your tomato plants before they wipe out your crop.

In furtherance of these goals, I've gotten my mother to front for an order of bare root native shrubs from Fairfax County, which she is picking up for me today, and I have chopped the forsithia back to the ground in the interests of giving whoever I plant behind it a little more sun to start off with. I'm re-arranging the edges of the garden beds to make less lawn and more bed, and we finally bought a new mower after the death of the old one last fall; it's corded, but will not be producing gasoline fumes in my presence, which seems like worth a try to me. We'll see how many extension cords get mown over in the adjustment process. More interminable exciting details to follow, as the season progresses.

Comments

[hydecat.livejournal.com]

We have a corded mower, and we've yet to run over the cord. It's just feels like you're vacuuming your yard. I'm a fan.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

That comparison had occurred to me also. The problem here is liable to be that grauwulf isn't too good at the minding corners & cords sort of precision, and I'm just fine about it the first three times and then I forget to be. But as my mother pointed out, we can take it as an exercise in learning to fix extension cords if necessary. :)