Asclepias tuberosa hosts hundreds of different species of insects and birds during the year. Who cares? More and more people do! Pollinator pathway folks are encouraging homeowners to carve out a plot on their property so our pollinating friends can survive an increasingly hostile and unforgiving environment caused by mankind’s degradation of the environments. Because of all of us humans, 75% of all American insects have gone extinct since 1970, and 33% of birds. What are we gonna do about it??? Plant pollinator flowers, and do not use any chemicals on your property. It matters. There’s no time left to dilly-dally, it’s a race against the clock to save hundreds if not thousands of species that took Mother Nature thousands of not millions of years to evolve, and humans fifty years to eradicate. Asclepias tuberosa lays out the welcome mat for everyone. Stunning echinacea glows on July 4th in the mid-day sun. Native liatris flower spikes delight both humans and insects. The seeds from this plant drop to the ground and populate your gardens the next year and every year afterwards until eternity. Deer proof. Heliopsis, with its summer colors exemplifies heat, sunshine, and vacations. It’s a roadside wonder, noticeable from afar. Native daisies are home to mini-bees. It must be alotta work getting a meal out of such small flowers. An obvious summer favorite of humans and insects both. Yet another mini-bee doing its job for the hive by collecting pollen and nectar. Everyone loves black eyed Susans. It’s one day old, this garden by the highway. Give it a year and it’ll look good. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Rudbeckia “Indian summer” has 4” wide flowers that chug along with insane happiness all the way until late September/early October. Seeds fall then you have ‘em next year. And the year after. And the year after... The beautiful rose behind is always gorgeous all the time. These signs are painted by the President of the class of 2020 at Trumbull High School. Talented young lady! We have the most obscenely full and beautiful butterfly bushes on the market in many colors. Come see! Ps- TODAY WE SAW THE FIRST MONARCH BUTTERFLY returnee from Mexico. WELCOME BACK!!! Crape myrtle, a summer flowering southern plant with northern cousins hardy up here. Lush foliage and cool bark. Deer proof, and available in many flower colors. Crocosmia Lucifer about to flower. What an interesting flower bud shape. One wonders why Mother Nature designs flowers this way, yet another mystery we will never know the answer to. Joe pye weed, a monarch butterfly favorite and native wetlandy plant. Deer proof with handsome foliage. This variant has maroon foliage, and the original Plant is all green. Flowers attract EVERYONE in the insect world. Reaching for a ripe raspberry my keen eyes saw a preying mantis egg sack still unhatched attached to the stem. I relocated the stem to the nursery perennial section. Since I do not spray any chemical any more (except roundup daily), these insects can control infestations for me. Unfortunately, preying mantis eat EVERYTHING, good and bad, including hummingbirds. That’s Mother Nature for you. (Ok, so they spelled “customer” wrong. You get the point) This is the smallest native yarrow I have ever seen. It looks like babies breath, but it’s very hardy. Asclepias incarnata ‘Cinderella.’ Swamp milkweed. Now, folks, THIS is the plant you need to get if you want to see all forms of the monarch butterfly go from one stage of life to another. This plant beckons monarchs from the heavens and the butterfly answers the call by feeding on the flowers and laying it’s eggs on the foliage. I won’t say any more. Stunning bee balm. Where can you get flower colors like this? Hollyhocks with double petals, double colors on a stunning 6’ tall plant! I was pissed off enough when I saw this to get out and snap a picture. This is a milkweed dying from being sprayed with a weed killer by some person who knew how to spray roundup but not smart enough to know that what he was spraying supports the life cycle of monarch butterflies. Seeing this sickened me at first then angered me. This streamside of “weeds” went on for a hundred feet or so and was pretty much all life-giving milkweed. Our perennial section doubled in size this year- come visit!
Leaving home and going home can be more interesting with a long driveway and an access to cool trees. A unique variety of bald cypress greets me when I come home. Taxodium is the oldest living tree genus on the east coast of the United States at approximately 3,500 years and counting (NYT- article summer 2019- tree on the coast of NC) Soft green foliage alternates with dark bark to create the illusion of an ancient tree. Closer inspection yields an assortment of thoughts- like I should have planted this closer to my house where I can see it all the time. Oklahoma redbud blocking the neighbor’s house with its flawless glossy foliage. Avondale redbud sitting there with its flawless heart-shaped leaves. Pinus bungeana is the main focal point for my driveway turn around. A little weeding and mulch will touch it up a bit. Three days of thunder storms gave us the feeling of the earth getting watered, but I bet if you dug in your soil you might find it to still be bone dry below 4”.
The trees are now glistening with the sun out and leaves still dripping from the rain. THANK GOD for the break in the bone-jarring drought. ...and our nursery has never had more perennials than we have now. Last night we got some rain then the front escaped with a high following, showing off its characteristic awesome sunset that we get after each storm passes by. I just had to go out and take a picture. Too bad my phone can’t take a wide angle photo. Maybe it can, I just don’t know how to do it. The rain we got last night came in two downpours with each one getting things wet but not penetrating the rock hard concrete-like soil. Do not think for one nano-second that any of the rain we got makes one difference in the sad state of the hydrology in Connecticut now- it doesn’t. And... if you have planted anything this spring or last fall, you need to water by hand... with a hose. One woman bought a butterfly bush that began to die within a day or so. When asked, “yes,” she is watering daily. When pressed on her watering technique, she said her irrigation was watering it.
“No, it’s probably not enough,” I told her. The pot the plant came in is 12” deep, and an irrigation system designed for lawns just gets things wet visually. I told her to water with a hose instead. Another lady said her trees arrived just in time for the rain. She got her trees three days ago, and it rained last night. I informed her about proper watering (and how rain does not count), and I hope these examples serve as a gentle reminder to everyone to get that water down into that root system if you wish for plant success during this trying time. March, April, May saw no planes nor helicopters. Less traffic or no traffic at usually busy times... but that rare interlude is over now that we are back on the roads again. Too bad in my opinion. Summer is here in a full drought onslaught on our ecosystem. The DOT hasn’t mowed the highways yet, and it looks really cool with tall grasses bending in the wind. It’s BEAUTIFUL!!!
Perfect example of a toxic wasteland of American vanity. Lawns like these “look nice,” but eradicate life on this particular property and poison multitudes of ecosystems on their toxic pathway into the ocean. Added to all the other toxic lawns, toxic roadway runoff, and thousands of other sources of pollution, it’s no wonder insects, birds, and marine life are going extinct. ITS JUST NOT WORTH IT! It’s not SOMEBODY ELSE causing the Grande problemo, it’s US! Clover is NOT your enemy. It is NOT a weed. Chemical companies want you to think so though. They want you to buy their chemicals. Chemicals that you spend money on. Chemicals that you have to handle. Breathe. Get on your skin. Chemicals that have toxic residuals on your property (despite what they say). Chemicals that kill every plant-like organism on your property as well as the path the chemical takes after it leaves your property and winds its way from your town all the way into the ocean.Lastly, get this: Chemicals that are cousins of AGENT ORANGE!!! You really want to be associated with this behavior? I have for decades, and in light of the massive extinction of both insects and birds over the past fifty years, I reject the traditional vision of the "PERFECT LAWN." That vision needs to change if we are to hear chickadees chirping in the spring and see barn swallows swooping all over the place in the summer. Time has run out, and we need to become part of nature NOW, despite the laid back attitude of the ignorant climate deniers. If you really care about the future of our planet, WE need to change- do not wait for our pathetic government to make us change, this change needs to come from all of us individually. NOW. So why is clover so special? How does it work? How can it feed your lawn for free??? It’s not magic, but it is close. There’s a steamy illicit love affair between clover roots and a microbe, kinda like “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours!” Click here for Wikipedia detail on this relationship. Thank Mother Nature for this brilliant mechanism- took millions of years for this process to evolve. YOU DO NOT NEED SCOTTS LAWN FOOD ANY MORE. Ever. link to a very interesting description getting into a little detail about the science behind the illicit relationship: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule NOTE: It is not good to feed a clover lawn with any fertilizer no matter how tempting it is to do so. Somehow, the clover and the bacteria recognize the increase in nitrogen and they cease the symbiosis, There is no gigantic sacrifice that you need to make to allow clover to be your lawn's friend. You can either let it take over your lawn where it is completely compatible with turfgrass, or you can overseed your lawn with clover for a faster, more uniform effect like I did in front of the nursery this fall. Clover seed costs $20/lb and covers 2,000 square feet on bare soil for a 100% clover lawn, or covers 3-4,000 sqft when used on a combination clover/turf lawn. Clover facts: Clover feeds your lawn for free from the time of application until the end of eternity. Clover outcompetes weeds, so NO MORE WEED KILLERS NEEDED, ever. Clover stays low and keeps turf shorter, requiring less mowing (less air pollution) Clover attracts endangered native insects with it's sweet nourishing flowers, and has no bad insects, so NO MORE LAWN INSECT KILLERS! I sprayed the entire lawn with roundup to kill that poor excuse of a lawn. I then pulverized it with a bobcat, raked it out then seeded it with tall fescue. Clover is being applied on Monday. Many people are surprised that I use roundup- it's one of the very few chemicals that I use, and I use it almost every day, and have (and will) for about 40 years. Roundup is not supposed to be breathed, swallowed, or gotten on the skin. Don't do those things, and you'll be ok. In the environment, Roundup is sprayed on foliage to be absorbed systemically by the plant. It sticks to organic matter in the soil and will not leach sideways or vertically. Roundup is eaten by microbes in the soil so there is no residual. For me, roundup is a safe and effective tool that I will always use, but if you do not want to use it, that's your prerogative... so you will need to do the work manually or figure something else out. I have wanted a “perfect” lawn in each house I’ve lived in. Some were pretty nice, but never for very long when droughts, weeds, and insects had their way with all my efforts. A perfect lawn is essentially total warfare against Mother Nature... nothing is more unnatural than a perfect lawn. My vision of a perfect lawn included wide lawnmower swaths, weed-free, and deep green... mowed down to perfection. As time has gone on, though, I have realized that without a foot of pure topsoil, an irrigation system, and a nonstop barrage of toxic chemicals applied ALL THE TIME, a “perfect” lawn is impossible, unrealistic, environmentally unsound, and morally repugnant. My college education, decades in the business, and supervisors license for pesticide applications has helped me revise my opinion of what a “perfect” lawn looks like... from a modern day sterile lifeless monoculture to an alive, diverse, lively bustling environment sustainable and logical, not to mention- FREE. Sounds like heresy, but please hear me out. Backtrack a bit. If you want the traditional American perfect lawn, you gotta feed four or five times a year, crabgrass control, broadleaf weed killers, insecticides, and fungicides. Well-fed lawns need more frequent mowings, then all the weed whacker work around edges and beds. That’s a LOT of pollution you are spewing into the environment with no regard for what those chemicals do after application. Did you ever think about what happens after you put fertilizer on your lawn? Between rain and irrigation, only some of the fertilizer gets used in the turf soil environment. The rest is dissolved and runs it’s way down drains, streams, rivers, and then into salt water. The amount of runoff depends upon how rock hard your soil is. The harder the soil, the more you are polluting the ocean. Excess fertilizer from homeowner’s lawns probably contributes more to environmental degradation than all the coal burning power plants in our country. Millions of acres of American vanity killing ecosystems all over our country. Excess fertilizer runoff feeds algae which reproduce fast and eat up all the oxygen in water which in turn kills fish and other aquatic organisms. Not just in ponds but in the ocean too. Fertilizer is a killer of natural organisms,and you should care about that. The most common weed killer in use for homeowners is 2-4-D, a cousin of “Agent Orange.” Did you ever think about what happens to lawn weed killers after you put it out there on your lawn? I never did. I just assumed that it was safe for the environment because it was readily available. But it’s not safe. When weed killers are washed down after irrigation and rain, these diluted chemicals are responsible for attacking microbial invisible organisms that make up the bottom of the food chain. I do not know how far up the food chain 2-4-D kills microbes, single celled organisms, and misc plant life, but it is a very significant amount of toxins introduced into our natural environment by unknowing homeowners. Monarch butterfly larvae chomping on asclepias at the nursery. 66% of monarch butterflies have disappeared since 1970 because of you and me living our anti-nature lifestyles. Everything humans do on a daily basis can be considered to be anti-nature. Humans are the enemy of all ecosystems world wide, and it may just be too late to do anything about it but we can try. Ever think about what lawn insecticides do in the environment after they kill all insects on your lawn? They get washed down into watercourses and kill microbes and other microorganisms all along the way. Invertebrates are affected also, in ways that probably just weaken them so some other environmental stress that wouldn’t normally hurt them- kills them. Its not just your lawn that’s involved, it’s everyones, millions of acres of weed killers, insecticides, fertilizers, oil/tire particle/transportation pollution runoff that cooks a toxic brew measured in parts per million. Not enough to see with the naked eye, but high enough to kill on a molecular level. Lawn insecticides are non-selective, they kill EVERYTHING. When they are applied to a lawn, they eliminate any natural food chain that may exist in your turf. Unintended insects are also killed (Think lightning bugs, preying mantis, ladybugs, etc). As they get diluted on their way into the ocean, they still kill but on a smaller and smaller scale with every mile travelled. Bottom of the insect food chain... but just as important as visible mammals like whales and lions. All life on the planet is important, not just the larger visible ones. I JUST saw this. Looks like I’m not the only one thinking about pollinators on the side of the highway!!!
link to article: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/opinion/tennessee-wildflowers-nature.amp.html Musta been about twenty years ago I realized that I had not seen honey bees in the perennial section for a VERY LONG TIME. I knew that it was because I did due diligence to our customers by spraying orthene systemic insecticide on everything preventatively so our customers got "CLEAN" plants. It occurred to me that I wanted to see honey bees more than I cared about having 100% insect-free plants, so I stopped spraying, and haven't since. Now I look back at those days and realize how stupid and thoughtless I was spraying like that. The very first year of insecticide-free lifestyle for us resulted in DOZENS of honey bees happily pollinating willy-nilly. There were butterflies all over the place, and life abounded in our perennial section. The BIGGEST reward, however, was the monarch butterfly larvae. I had never seen them ever before in my life. The ones I found on the Asclepias tuberosa flowers were huge, almost the size of my pinky. Multi-colored, zebra-striped, and very strong-willed as a caterpillar. This is how it all starts folks! Lucky butterflies! First, though, you gotta attract them to your property. This is done with two very different types of plants: 1. The flowering plants that the adult butterfly sucks on to get loads of energy. 2. The milkweed family of plants in nature that are like neon signs flashing the message: "LAY YOUR BUTTERFLY EGGS ON ME, ON ME, ON ME!!!" The eggs are laid on the weedy milkyweedy plants- I know of five plants they lay their eggs upon. Eggs hatch and the almost invisible babies start to feed immediately, molting five times before pupating. Mommy only apparently lays only one egg per plant so there's enough food for it's voracious appetite. They are very interesting insects with extremely complex life cycles that we humans know actually very little about.
Wanna attract monarch butterflies? Try planting tree hydrangeas. They feed on the high energy nectar in preparation for their long flight back to Mexico. Seeing monarchs on tree hydrangea flowers is stunning due to the color contrasts. I unloaded a much sought after delivery this am of weeping redbuds and three different types of tree hydrangeas Limelight hydrangea trees about to flower. Low growing trees with spectacularly incredible white-chartreuse flowers in summer. Everyone’s grandma had these trees way back when. Full sun to part sun Then there’s the shorter pinky winky tree hydrangea. Bottoms of the blossoms turn bright pink as they age. Cool!!! The brightest flowers seem to belong to the quick fire tree hydrangea. The entire blossom turns pinky/reddish/maroon as it ages Heart-shaped glossy foliage of the awesome redbud trees stun passers-by in the early morning sun.
Great replacement for the crummy purple leaf plum tree which seems to die or get sick pretty early in life. Redbuds live forever and ever. It’s true, and liability laws need to be changed.
This tree lives on my neighbor’s property. I correct myself- it’s DYING on my neighbors property. I warned the young couple a few times over the last few years that the leaning portion is EXTREMELY dangerous and is going to crush their house when it breaks free. The house recently underwent a complete makeover and after the tree crushes the house, it will need to be done again. Sad part of this story, though, is their newborn infant lives under that tree also. The tree will crush the house- hopefully not his bedroom. The psycology of homeowners like this is perplexing. Do they leave loaded guns on the floor for their children to play with? Do they allow the brakes on their cars to become worn out and then not fix them? You get my point. So why on earth leave a tree about to fall over on your property? Just goes to to show how oblivious humans are about their surroundings and about nature itself. In college, trees like this were called “man killers” because they fall with no warning on nice windless days- no high winds needed to topple them. They just rot and rot and rot till there’s nothing left to hold them up. Now is the time (before winter storms) to walk around your property to check for bad trees. Got Qs? Call a tree guy. |