EcoGardenista

In January of 2021, we removed our lawn and started planting drought tolerant California native plants. These native plants co-evolved with other native species over thousands of years. In the process, they became the only source of food for the caterpillars that feed baby birds, and serve as the foundation for the bulk of our local ecosystem. We were inspired by Doug Tallamy's lecture, "Nature's Best Hope" (also a NY Times bestselling book) You can read more about this in my welcome post, and watch his video here:  https://bit.ly/Tallamy-CAPlants   Fast forward to today, with unexpected rains that provided a reminder that the fall native California planting season is just around the corner. This inspired me to do a bit of weeding in between the showers and start to imagine the next steps for each garden area.  Since we started over a year and a half ago, the  front yard has been transformed from lackluster lawn to four garden 'rooms':  1) The Courtyard Garden...

A recent trip to Sydney and the nearby Blue Mountains region with the family provided the opportunity to explore the ways that Australians are promoting habitat gardening and biodiversity in this region.   We stayed at a lovely AirBnb in Leura, NSW, in the Blue Mountains. Most of this area is a  massive wildlife reserve and is rich with biodiversity. The variety of birdsong, especially in the mornings, was amazing. Here are a few of the ones that we captured on camera, though we could hear hundreds more. They are the most active before dawn and at dusk, so images were hard to capture. If you go, I highly recommend staying in a place that has an adjoining wild space so you can fully experience the wildlife here. Grandson, Charlie, took a picture of this red and green King Parrot in the back yard: I jumped up in the middle of a conversation in the living room so I could capture this image of the Eastern Spinebill in a (non-native) flowering quince. This bird returned to th...

  At last!  We have leafcutter bees in our garden!  We have been busy and traveling, so did not actually see them take some of these leaves for their nests, but we are so happy to see that they have found our garden in any case.  W e're watching for them now, noting that leafcutter bees are striped like a honey bee, but carry pollen on their abdomens (see image below).  They are solitary bees that cut circular pieces of leaves from plants such as Western redbud, rose and azalea. They then use these pieces to line their nest and also plug the spaces between their egg cells. You can find them nesting in wood, hollow stems from plants, or in other natural cavities. It is easy to encourage them to nest in your garden by providing them with some of these natural materials or even a 'bee hotel':  https://beegarden.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/How-to-build-and-use-bee-blocks.pdf California is home to over 1,600 species of native bees - more than any oth...

     Chickadee with caterpillar © Alok Singhal  some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC) Our local birds are in serious decline. The adult birds that are visit our feeders in fall and winter will start nesting in early spring. When they do, they will seek millions of caterpillars to feed their young. That’s right – the babies don’t eat seeds. Their throats are tender and they need thick, soft, nutritious caterpillars (think of them as ‘sausages’ for baby birds).  But caterpillars are increasingly rare, and many of our local baby birds face starvation each spring. How can we save them? Caterpillars grow primarily on native plants like the ones listed here:  https://bit.ly/Feed-Baby-Birds . Just as monarch caterpillars need native milkweed, checkerspot caterpillars need bee plant (scorophularia californica) and monkeyflower, acmon blues need buckwheat and lupine, sphinx moth caterpillars need clarkias. In short, we need to grow the plants that grow the caterp...

  Free Wildflower Seeds! Sometime in November 2021, I stumbled upon a simple model for inspiring people to try native gardening - give away free seeds, and leverage social media in the process. In the beginning, I simply gave away seeds to friends, family, and people on my block. But the most successful seed giveaway was on Nextdoor, which made distribution easy (I'd drop off seeds at a Little Library near my house or mail out to people). The seeds were popular but by themselves were not going to inspire people to create habitat gardens. So, I included a handout (below) with the images and info below, and also invited people to join the "Bring Back Bay Area Bees, Butterflies and Birds." group that I started on Nextdoor. I heard from many people that they found the resources very useful. And, within 8 months, over 325 people had joined the Nextdoor group and started sharing plants, seeds and tips with each other. grow wildflowers - grow butterflies! Butterflies and mot...