One of my family’s winter traditions is to sit around a big bowl of popcorn and string garlands. Naturally, I eat about as much popcorn as I string but over eating it what the holiday is all about. I remember stringing long popcorn strands as a child and decorating the dogwood tree in the front yard. The tree looked very festive with white garlands and birds sitting in the branches. Now, I do this activity with the younger generation in our family, passing on this festive way to feed the birds.   To make the garlands you just need popcorn, needle, thread, and be ready to clean up a mess. Unseasoned plain popped corn is stabbed with a needle and thread and strung up in rows. I like to add a fresh cranberry every 10 or so popcorns just to make it pretty. This year I’m also dehydrating some orange slices to string up with the garland. The birds and squirrels really appreciate our efforts as we drape our garlands out on the tree branches outside the kitchen window. The birds appreciate a good holiday cranberry just as much as we do.   Peanut butter pinecones are also a festive art project that can be hung outside to benefit birds. What you need is a pinecone, peanut butter, small spatula, and a wet washcloth to clean up. This project can make an even bigger mess including peanut butter fingerprints everywhere. For less mess use an icing bag to squeeze the peanut butter between the scales. After you cram the peanut butter into the cracks of the pinecone you can sprinkle it with bird seed for extra razzle dazzle. Use a string or wire to hang the peanut butter pinecones outside in the tree. Woodpecker and nuthatches love the treats they find when they probe their beak into the pinecones.   Around this time of year, gingerbread houses are popular to make but not suitable to feed wildlife. However, kids can make small houses out of crackers for the birds. Use unsalted crackers and glue them together with peanut butter. The houses can be decorated with birdseeds, nuts, and fruit. A dried orange slice makes a lovely window. It is ok to use sticks in the house construction, the wildlife doesn’t mind. Set out the tiny village where you can watch it from the window. The birds and squirrels will be grateful to destroy it in no time.   Like most holiday food, popcorn, peanut butter, and crackers are not a healthy food for the birds. These craft projects a just a little holiday treat and then the birds must get back to eating healthy seeds, berries, and caterpillars again. This time of year, there is so much feasting. It is nice to be able to look out the window and see the garden creatures feasting too. For children, this activity can also be a reminder to share with others. Giving, is what the holiday spirit is all about.

Fallen leaves are a soft blanket that covers our winter garden. Let the garden rest, leave the leaves. Butterflies and moths roll leaves around themselves into over wintering shelters. Amphibians burrow into the leaves to sleep through the winter protected by this thick layer of insulation. On warm spring days, just watch what emerges from the leafy blankets. Sometimes I can find a sleepy spring bumble bee and hold it in my hand while it warms up enough to begin a day of pollinating my flowers.   Some of the insects and animals dependent on fallen leaves: American bumble bee Checkerspot butterfly Fritillary butterfly Luna moth Promethea moth Wood frog American toad Spotted salamander Ring neck snake Box turtle Red bat

The Solidago family, the goldenrods, get a lot of bad press. The antihistamine companies vilify goldenrods in their adds even though it is usually ragweed that they should be complaining about. Ragweed has tiny pollen that floats on the breeze and straight up a nostril. Goldenrod pollen is much larger and is picked up by bees to be transported between flowers. I once had a neighbor that told me my front yard goldenrods were causing her allergies, her doctor told her. I explained to her that the doctor probably meant ragweed but she insisted. So, I dug up my goldenrod and moved it to the backyard where she couldn’t see it. Sometimes it is best to just make the neighbors happy.   My favorite goldenrod for sun is the cliff goldenrod, Solidago drummondii . Cliff golden rod had stems that grow about 2 ft long but they arch over so it is a much shorter plant then the other goldenrods. Because of the arching, a single plant can get to be quite large around. As their name says, cliff goldenrod is happy growing off the side of a cliff. They also enjoy growing at the top of retaining walls and along the edge of driveways, anywhere with full sun and dry to average soil moisture. Bloom time is early fall.   In the shade garden, try bluestem goldenrod, Solidago caesia . Graceful arching stems have a bluish-purple tint. The 1-3 ft tall stems provide attractive habitat in winter for birds and insects. Blooming yellow August through October attracts lots of bees, wasps, butterflies, etc. Grows best in full to partial shade in Medium to dry soil. Bluestem goldenrod makes a nice border along a shady path.   Some goldenrods can be weedy and aggressive like old filed goldenrod, Solidago nemoralis . However, when it is in the right place, such as an old field or abandoned driveway, it is beneficial. Fast growing native weeds can help repair damaged soil and provide habitat for insects. Once the damaged area is left to repair for long enough, more permeant species can grow and create a more stable ecosystem.   The goldenrods are very important to the pollinators because they bloom in fall when many bees are provisioning their nests with food for the next spring’s generation. Goldenrods are golden yellow and a field of goldenrod is a beautiful sign of fall. Goldenrods and Asters look great together with the blue and yellow complimenting colors. Because goldenrods bloom in fall they can be kept shorter by trimming them back in the summer before the flowers begin to form without compromising the bloom.

“Phenology is the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors.”   Notable biologist like Edgar Denison and Aldo Leopold kept phenological records of the natural occurrences they saw around them. Leopold had decades of journals where he noted the first arrival of spring birds, fall migrations of ducks and the first bloom of wildflowers. Keeping a notebook of when flowers bloom each year is a practice of phenology. The bloom dates can be compared over the years to see if plants may be blooming earlier due to climate change or perhaps disappearing all together.   If plants are blooming earlier, are their pollinators around when they bloom? If the pollinators are not in sync with the flowers, then seeds will not be fertilized. If the plant blooms too early, could it be damaged by a late frost? I saw spring beauties booming in mid-February this year only to be covered by several inches of snow. Dose blooming too early decrease the populations of these plants or their pollinators?   Botanical journals such as Denison’s and Leopold’s contain valuable data that we can compare to notes today to see how life has changed over time. From year-to-year, changes are small and may have their ups and downs, but when we have enough data, we can see a big picture of long-term trends. The graphs from all this data show that plants are blooming earlier and sometimes not at the same time as their pollinators leading to declining populations.   Today, instead of writing in paper journals we can record our sightings into databases like i-naturalist. Allowing so many data points to be recorded in one space where scientist have access to them has made big phenology projects less tedious. Of course, we can still record data from our yards into a garden journal. This age-old practice is a way of keeping in touch with our gardens over the years. Each of our gardens is unique, filled with one of kind individual plants that we can get to know intimately.   Recording phenology is a way of connecting to nature, of being present and attentive. Each of us can study the biological life cycles around us in our own back yards. Keeping a record of birds, blooms, insects, and weather patterns can help us become better gardeners. A garden journal can become a keepsake or just a way to jog the memory the following year. What is happening in your garden today?

Sometimes the energy of youth fades and a large garden can become a burden to keep up with. Short term set backs like replaced hips can result in long term changes to mobility. Or perhaps, priorities change and there just isn’t as much time for the garden. Don’t sweat the small stuff. An established garden can be allowed to mature with age. Plants may move around and fill in. As trees mature more areas become shade. Or large trees may die and create a sunny patch. Let the plants find their space. Switch from being a gardener to a caretaker that guides the plants but lets them fulfill their own goals. Relax your standards. Find a gardener. If you can, hire someone to come take care of your garden for you once a week. Better yet, find a young person and train them to take care of your garden while they build their own native garden at home. Perhaps give them some of your more rambunctious plants to start their new garden. Make a point to help or just sit in the garden while the gardener is around to stay involved in the process. Downsize and simplify. Allow bigger patches of plants to form even if it smothers some diversity. Plant more shrubs in the further regions of the yard to take up space and shade out weeds. Focus your energy on the most beautiful parts of the garden. If an area is getting too weedy, mow it. Plan for accessibility. Make a path and sitting space that is accessible. Walkers and wheelchairs need flat even surfaces and easy to get out of seating. This may be a back deck or patio or a new space may need to be made. Plan this future need into the design of your garden so that you will continue to have access to this space that brings you joy. Focus on the view out the window from your favorite recliner. Invest in adaptive gardening tools. There are many special tools that allow you to stand and garden. Gardening stools can give you a place to sit and still be able to dig in the soil. Rolling garden carts can keep all your tools accessible and also be a place to sit. Tools with special grippy handles allow arthritic hands to be comfortable. A walking stick can help keep your balance. Go to physical or occupational therapy. Gardening is an important part of your life that you shouldn’t have to give up. Advocate for yourself to get the help you need to stay outside. Follow through with your exercises and stretches. Commit to supporting your health so you can be out in the garden for as long as possible. Aging and disability should not mean the end to enjoying your garden. There are many ways to prepare yourself and your garden for the future. Remember that gardens are living changing spaces. Guide that change to meet your needs in the future.

Everyone wants these fuzzy flying mammals in their garden. Bats swoop acrobatically through the night air scooping up mosquitoes. Many Missouri bats are endangered due to loss of habitat, environmental poisons, and exotic diseases. We can help attract bats to our gardens by providing safe spaces for them to live. Missouri bats eat bugs, so avoid using pesticides. Try to grow even more bugs in the garden by planting native plants. A healthy insect population will attract bats and other insect predators which control the mosquitoes. Night blooming flowers like Missouri evening primrose will attract nocturnal bugs. Nighttime insects are also attracted to light-colored flowers and ones that are very fragrant. Bats do not land to drink, they drink on the wing, swooping low over water. To provide water, it needs to be a long pond or trough with plenty of air space to swoop down. Bats may live on your house, in the chimney, under the siding, and in the attic. Looking for bat droppings around the house is the easiest way to see where they are roosting. Leave dead trees in the yard to provide more natural bat homes. The easiest way to attract bats is to build a bat friendly native garden. Bat gardens can be more beneficial than bat boxes for attracting bats quickly. Bat boxes are often overlooked by bats and can take several years before they are occupied. However, a fragrant garden can attract a bat overnight. Guide to gardening for bats batcon.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Guide-to-Gardening-for-Bats.pdf

Join a plant swap Many native plants are easy to cultivate by splitting up large clumps or collecting seeds. Finding commonly used plants can be easy on a plant swap page where others have too many. Volunteer in a native garden Native gardens are always producing extra plants where they are unwanted. Gardeners get first pick of rehoming these wayward plants. Start with seeds Collect seeds from established gardens to take home. Ordering seeds is cheaper and they ship easier. Buy smaller plants Whether plants are sold in plug tubes or one-gallon pots they are all roughly the same size after three years. Plants can’t really begin growing until they are in the soil so plant them early. Collect leaf and lawn mulch. Befriend the neighbor that puts leaf bags on the curb and collect them as a landscape mulch. Grass clipping can also be collected and used to make compost. Try to avoid those that use chemicals on their yards. Make you own soil Compost yard and kitchen waste to have the healthiest soil on the block. No fertilizers needed.

This spring I went camping at Big Spring State Park in southern Missouri. In one day of hiking, I saw 52 species of flowers blooming in the river bottoms, forests, and glades. So much diversity of colors and species and all the bees and butterflies they attract. It is amazing. Mother nature seems to know best how to support a diverse and healthy collection of blooms. Once I have caught my breath, I think about this natural display as inspiration for garden design. Some plants like to group up while others are scattered. Some like to grow in a line across the hillside while others dangle their roots in the creek. The magic is hard to understand and even more impossible to reproduce. I grasp what I can and try to put it on paper. Naturalistic design mimics nature. Plants drift, there are no straight lines, textures contrast, and layers of green compete for light. We try our best to recreate the beauty we find in wild places and bring it home. But we can’t quite build the same experience. As much praise as I get for my garden it is still a poor comparison to preserving a natural area. These beautiful wild spaces are where we find our inspiration and see what nature is capable of. We must visit them often to learn from them and keep them safe for future generations.

This March is the Honeysuckle Sweep for Healthy Habitat Month. "In an effort to energize the greater St. Louis region around improving habitat for our native plants and animals, area conservation organizations join together to spotlight invasive bush honeysuckle and the need to remove it so that large swaths of land can become productive areas for native habitat, recreation and enjoyment. To that end, organizations will host public events and volunteer removal days during the month of March." The idea is based on Missouri's very successful operation clean stream, a yearly river cleanup event that has been going on for over 50 years and involves over 2,000 volunteers. Operation Clean Stream introduces Missourians to a day of floating on a beautiful river while picking up trash and for many is a day to remember.  Children enjoy hunting for beer cans in the rocks. Adults brag about how many tires they have pulled out of a stream bank and fit into their canoe.  Once someone learns the value of picking up trash out of our streams, they make a habit of picking up trash wherever they go. Honeysuckle Sweep brings the same hope of public education and responsibility.  Many people do not know what a honeysuckle bush is or why it is a problem.  Educating the public with this focused event will help bring the problem to the front of our minds.  Once people spend a day removing honeysuckle in their neighborhood park, they will learn how to identify it and see that it also lives in their backyard. As we see invasive shrubs during our daily lives, we should do something about it by removing them.  Gradually we will get the problem under control with a lot of help from our friends. Although honeysuckle can be found in almost all public spaces it is possible to imagine a different future. The task may be daunting, but can be achieved with a concerted effort from the community. Back in 1967 the rivers of Missouri were filled with trash.  Any river was a convenient place to dump whatever you didn't want, even old cars.  The amount of trash was so overwhelming it was hard to enjoy a float trip. Today our rivers are clean and the public values them as beautiful places for recreation, not trash cans. Come to the Honeysuckle Sweep. Let's make honeysuckle choked parks a thing of the past that is unacceptable in the public eye. We are going to educate the public to remove honeysuckle where they see it. Help us make the Honeysuckle Sweep for Healthy Habitat an enduring and successful event this March. Learn more at http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/sustainability/sustainability/biodiversecity-st.-louis/honeysuckle-sweep-for-healthy-habitat.aspx

It saves a lot of work later to make sure all the grass and weeds are killed in new beds before planting them. The best part of preparing a new flower bed is planting day but be sure to put in all the preparatory work ahead of time. If the grass is not all the way dead or some bind weed is coming up, deal with that first and postpone planting until it is all dead. Weeding around new plants is hard on them and disturbs their roots. If the weeds are allowed to grow alongside the flowers they will compete for space, water, and nutrients and flowers may not be as robust. Even if a bed does not appear to have any weeds growing, seeds and root fragments may remain. Leave the bed empty for a month to see if any weeds sprout. Do your future self a favor and start off with a clean bed.

Planting a garden requires some math. Finding the area of all the weirdly shaped garden beds can be an unwanted flash back to geometry. This might be why there are so many rectangular beds, to avoid the math. However, in my experience native plants don’t like straight lines. To calculate the bed area, I measure my beds as if they were a lot of smaller rectangles.  Height times width of every rectangle gives me their area. When I add them all up, I come up with a close enough measure of the total area. After the area is found, then the number of plants needed still must be calculated. Different species have all different types of spacing requirements. I put my plant spacing as two-foot centers in an offset pattern that looks like a triangle between plants. Not all plants are two-foot centers but a lot of them are. If I’m planting a group of larger plants, like asters, I can calculate that bed separately to give them a larger spacing. With my plant spacing and bed area the calculator gives me the number of plants needed. I divide up this number by the number of species and find out how many I need to order. The calculation of the bed area can also be used to figure out how much mulch is needed. I prefer to mulch lightly with 2 inches of mulch. Bed area times height of the mulch will tell you how much mulch you need. Converting from feet and inches into cubic yards can be done using conversion tables. Next, we calculate watering. Tree and shrub watering in the first year is five gallons of water per inch of trunk, spread around the root zone once a week. Herbaceous plants should also be watered once a week to wet the soil to a depth of one inch. Calculate the amount of water by multiplying one inch by the bed area and then convert that to gallons. Or I usually just water and then check that the soil is wet to one inch down. If the soil is already wet from rain, then there is no need to provide supplementary water. After the first full year of watering, plants do not need to be watered regularly. In the summer and winter there may be times of drought and supplementary water on the garden will help plants stay healthy until the rains return. If the new garden is a rain garden, you will want to calculate what size of basin you need to capture your roof water. For that you will need to know the area of the roof connected to the diverted downspout, and how much the average rainfall event is. The depth times the area of the rain basin needs to match the area of the roof. To find out how fast the ground can absorb all the water, do a percolation test by digging a hole in the garden plot, fill it with water and time how fast the water disappears. To help with all these calculations I have added a few online calculators to this website. They can help to calculate bed area, mulch, plants, and water needs. As well as how big to make a raingarden. Geometry, who knew it would be so important. Another math problem to solve is always how much garden can be made within a certain budget but that will have to wait for another day. However, a few of the calculations here will get us started on an estimate.

Instead of adding a beehive to the garden think of the other bees. Honeybees aren’t native anyway. Native bees don’t live in hives, they are mostly solitary insects. Bees can be attracted to the garden with several manmade living situations. Many bees nest in decaying trees either by excavating a hole or using premade holes. Removing dead trees will eliminate bee habitat. Bee blocks are just wooden blocks with holes drilled in them. Untreated scrap lumber chunks can be used or pieces from a tree being removed also work well. The larger the bee blocks the more bees they can support. Some bees nest underground. Bumble bees can sometimes form colonies of ground nests. The bees need bare ground in loose soil to excavate a nest where they are not disturbed by foot traffic. Mulching every inch of garden soil can eliminate the type of habitat some bees need. Sand boxes can make good nesting areas for some bees. Vertical stems also form nesting opportunities. Bees can lay their eggs in the stem or overwinter in there for protection. Some native plants that have nice hollow stems are blackberry, hydrangea, elderberry, cup plant, milkweed. Cut pieces of bamboo can be bundled and placed vertically or horizontally for bees to occupy. Built bee houses do better if they have protection from the elements. They can be tucked under the eaves of the roof or placed under a deck. I like to keep mine on the front porch so I can watch them traveling in and out. Predators might also find built bee habitats easier to exploit. When all the bee nests are close together it is easy for a woodpecker or racoon to cause a lot of destruction. Putting wire fronts or bee blocks can help protect them. Keeping bee houses in high traffic areas, like next to the front door, also reduces predators. Bees come in all sizes so they will want a wide variety of hole widths to choose from. Larger width holes will need to be deeper to accommodate more bees. When bees use a tube to lay eggs, they place the female eggs in the deepest part of the hole with the males towards the outside. If the holes are not made deep enough, they will only hatch male bees, and we need females to continue the population. Find out more about how to make bee houses and what size holes to make at https://www.xerces.org/sites/default/files/2018-05/12-015_02_XercesSoc_Nests-for-Native-Bees-fact-sheet_web.pdf