Uncategorized – In Defense of Nature

Landscaping for Wildlife with Native Vines

Daily News-Record, April 2, 2022

040222_dnr_NatureNews — Trumpet Creeper cultivars are sold that produce a true-red flower instead of the orangey red color of our native vine, but they feed wildlife just as well.Nature News | Marlene A. Condon

Some native vines that provide food as well as shelter and nesting sites for wildlife are Trumpet Creeper (Campsis radicans), Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), and Common Greenbriar (Smilax rotundifolia).

All three of these sun-loving plants are considered by many folks to be uncontrollable “weeds”, but none of them are difficult to limit. The alert gardener who does not want a plethora of vines simply needs to pull out the few seedlings that come up each year. Just as with any other kind of plant, these vines “take over” only after several years of ignoring them in the landscape.

Common Greenbriar is a plant that you want to grow in a corner or area of the yard where no one might brush against it. It has barbs that can scratch you, but therein lies part of its usefulness to wildlife. A fox (or cat or dog) chasing a rabbit will undoubtedly be brought to a halt if its prey runs under a greenbriar thicket. Birds often nest here, and the bluish-black berries that this vine produces are consumed by songbirds and mammals during the winter.

You could start a Common Greenbriar vine from fruits, or you could hope one appears in your yard on its own in the right place! Years ago, I encouraged volunteer greenbriar along my driveway and the thicket is quite attractive with its leathery but glossy green leaves.

I love Virginia Creeper because of its beautiful fall foliage that is my favorite color—red. The palmately compound foliage makes this vine extremely attractive growing up a tree trunk. The flower is inconspicuous but produces a bluish-black berry on a bright red stem that’s visible in early fall. Small mammals and many species of songbirds eat it.

Virginia Creeper often shows up in yards on its own (well, with the help of the animals that eat its berries), but it can also be bought from nursery catalogs. They transplant okay except they are sort of slow to really take off. When Virginia Creeper does start to grow well, it can reach over 35 feet (10 meters).

Trumpet Creeper is the best all-around native vine for the yard. It produces pinnately compound leaves and tubular orangey-red flowers that look great from late-spring until fall arrives. Besides increasing the beauty of your yard, Trumpet Creeper provides nectar for Ruby-throated Hummingbirds and seeds for Tufted Titmice, American Goldfinches, and Dark-eyed Juncos. I’ve even seen titmice storing shelled sunflower seeds from my feeders in its hollow dried stems!

Trumpet Creeper requires lots of room as it can grow more than 35 feet (10 meters) long. You must tie the vine to the structure on which you want it to grow until its rootlets attach to the support. I trained mine to climb up the trellising at the south end of my deck and it spills over the deck railing and onto the floor.

Older stems become woody with age. As a result, the vine eventually supports itself and you can untie it.

Marlene A. Condon is the author/photographer of The Nature-friendly Garden: Creating a Backyard Haven for Plants, Wildlife, and People (Stackpole Books; information at www.marlenecondon.com). You can read her blog at https://InDefenseofNature.blogspot.com

Drought Gardening

Daily News-Record, March 5, 2022

Golf courses such as Pete Dye River Course in Radford, maintain turf short and dense to allow golf balls to “float” upon, rather than sink into, the grass. There’s no legitimate reason for a lawn to resemble a golf course.Nature News | Marlene A. Condon

The spring-into-summer drought of 2021 is the worst I can remember in my 45 years of living in Virginia. Let’s hope we will not experience a repeat this year, but gardeners should garden every year as if there were going to be a drought.

Water is a precious resource that is too often taken for granted. Whether you get your water from a well or out of a municipal system, it must come from rainfall that has either collected underground or behind a dam. Rainfall is always variable and we should treat it as the unknown quantity it is. Wells can run dry and reservoirs can be depleted.

With that in mind, you can reduce your demands upon the system by always avoiding unnecessary use of water. For example, lawn sprinklers should not run when rainfall is sparse. A green sward is not more important than the availability of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, etc.

Unfortunately, many people fear brown grass means dead grass and they don’t want to go through the effort of reseeding a lawn. However, the grass is not dying; it is simply going into a dormant (inactive) state. As soon as rains return, new green blades will sprout.

You can keep your lawn green longer by not cutting grass before it has grown three inches tall. Longer blades shade the ground, keeping grass roots cooler and slowing evaporation of water from the soil.

Of course, many plants don’t go dormant when there’s a lack of precipitation. Flowers, vegetables, fruiting vines, and newly planted shrubs and trees need water on a regular basis or they really will die.

Most plants are composed of 90% water so they suffer if they give off more of this vital fluid through their leaves than they take in through their roots. Savvy and conservation-minded gardeners know how to help their plants maintain constant moisture levels: They mulch.

To mulch is to place a blanket of material at the base of plants. Organic matter of any sort — seedless hay or straw, leaves, pine needles, wood chips, shredded bark, and newspapers — adds nutrients and tilth (crumbliness) to the soil as it decomposes. Use whatever is easiest for you to obtain.

Mulching reduces the evaporation of moisture, insulates the soil to reduce temperature fluctuations that could be harmful to roots, and it prevents a hard soil crust from forming. These crusts, which tend to form on the clayey soils that are prevalent in much of Virginia, inhibit water absorption and permit wasteful runoff.

Once the soil has warmed in spring and there has been a good rain, place the material as close to your plants as possible without touching the stems. Stems that remain constantly wet will rot.

Do not water unless your plants truly need it. Plants often wilt temporarily in the heat of the afternoon sun, but they should recover nicely by late evening or the next morning. If they do not perk up by morning, give them a slow deep watering.

Peanut Butter — It’s Not Just For People

January 3, 2020

A white-breasted nuthatch gets peanut butter while a female downy woodpecker pecks at suet on this “homemade” snag in the author’s front yard.
Marlene A. Condon / Special to the DN-R

Happy New Year! You can give birds a happy start to 2020 if you provide peanut butter (PB) as part of your daily offerings.

Many people put out peanuts, but I find that PB takes up less space in the cupboard, and it does not spoil as quickly. This fatty food is attractive to many kinds of birds: Tufted Titmice, Carolina Wrens, Northern Cardinals, Dark-eyed Juncos, Brown Creepers, White-breasted Nuthatches, Blue Jays, chickadees, and sparrows. And there is nothing better for bringing in woodpeckers.

For birds that can cling to a vertical surface, you can simply smear the peanut butter on tree trunks or pine cones. But for birds that can’t cling very easily (for example, cardinals, sparrows, and juncos), you should place the PB on a flat surface, such as a tray or the top of a stump.

Pure peanut butter can be served, but a fattier version will provide more calories which birds especially need in winter. I melt one part shortening (but you can use lard instead) and then stir in an equal volume of PB (chunky or smooth) until it is well mixed.

To stiffen up the mixture to make it easier to handle, I add about three parts (also by volume) cornmeal. Flour could be used, but the resulting mixture can be difficult to spread. You can adjust the amount, however, to alter the consistency. Cornmeal might be more flavorful, although I can’t say that I’ve noticed any preference indicated by the birds.

Other animals, such as squirrels and raccoons, enjoy peanut butter too. To keep mammals from eating all of the PB, I place it in a modified suet basket which can be hung on a baffled pole out of their reach. A shelf is attached to the basket so that non-clinging birds still have access to the PB.

A suet basket is simply a wire cage into which you can place raw fat pieces (suet) obtained from the meat department of a grocery store, or commercially prepared rendered fat (melted fat hardened into block form). You can usually purchase suet baskets in local hardware and department stores and pet or bird-supply outlets.

I have also drilled holes into snags (standing dead trees) and filled them with peanut butter. These PB trees are magnets for Red-bellied, Downy, Hairy, and even Pileated Woodpeckers—and Gray Squirrels that rapidly deplete this PB supply! To remedy this situation, I placed one-quarter-inch hardware cloth over the holes (hardware cloth is sold at most hardware stores). The birds can still eat the PB through the screen, but the squirrels can’t (see photo).

If you do not have any natural snags into which to drill holes, you might do as I did. A neighbor gave me some locust logs — two that were 6 feet long and one that was 12 feet long — which I “planted” in a vertical position in my front yard where I could easily observe them. They became very popular dining spots for a variety of birds.