I recently took a driving trip to visit friends and family in the South – Clover, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and DeLand, Florida (a little northeast of Orlando), with half of a day stop in St. Augustine (where we happened upon a Celtic Festival parade). Frankly – too much driving, but the stays in the actual places – lovely.
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A highlight was a daytrip on the St. John River, which I never even knew existed. It is 310 miles long, flows north to Jacksonville, with a drop of less than 30 feet over the length of its fall, so it is very lazy and winding, and links with many, many lakes and loops — a very watery environment that would be easy to get lost in. One part of the St. John River looks pretty much like another (hence, no pictures to entertain you) – but we saw all kinds of animal life: several species of herons, ospreys, kingfishers, egrets, yellow swallowtail butterflies, alligators (looking like someone threw out an old tire, lying there amid the foliage of vegetation), and manatees. Manatees! Hard to see in the black water unless they swam up close to the surface. We cut the motor way down and watched, and did see them, the big lumpen bodies with their spatula tails that make a characteristic pattern of ripple in the water as they move.
The other highlight was visiting the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden in North Carolina (just over the S. Carolina line). This is a relatively new garden, dating to 1999, which I’ve visited before, in showier seasons. This time the main gardens weren’t much to look at, there wasn’t much in bloom – a Chinese Fringe Flower tree, hellebores, daffodils, a magnolia that had been burned by the cold – but I was charmed by the addition of a children’s garden, opportunely sited on a hillside that might actually wear active little bodies out. What a good idea! I also enjoyed the conservatory, which I had not visited previously.
Sorry to report Bradford/Callery pear is growing everywhere, both in urban areas and in the wild, in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It is the street tree of downtown Clover (two blocks long – blink and you’ve missed it) – nobody loves it.
guest post by Toni Stahl, Habitat Ambassador Volunteer, Backyard Habitat
Leaf Litter for Migrants
Canada Geese have chased me. They came back from the edge of extinction, but are now flourishing because of the perfect habitat we have inadvertently created for them in many residential areas. We created man-made, open-water ponds surrounded by lawn. If you landscape the pond with native plants (scroll down here), many of the Geese should move to grassy, open-water ponds. The native plants will clean the water so no chemicals need to be added, as well as create a habitat for other native water creatures. Add barley straw to limit algae growth. Canada Geese can be aggressive toward people and nest too closely to people when people feed them. Educate others not to feed them.
This video shows the shocking difference between forest floors with and without invasive, non-native (European or Asian) earthworms. The worms decompose leaf litter and roots too quickly, actually eating the rooting zone out and removing the habitat for seeds, plants and small animals. You can learn to identify non-native worms from the Great Lakes Worm Watch.
No worms should be in glaciated areas (e.g. around the Great Lakes), but worms are slowly invading. The ones to be concerned about are those non-native (all of which are invasive) worms we can control. You can help save forests. Compost without non-native worms (e.g red wiggler from Europe). Discard non-native worms (even fishing or compost worms that appear dead) in the trash. Don’t take anything that could contain non-native worms or their eggs into wooded areas, including dirt off your shoes, livestock hooves, vehicle tires, ATVs, and earth moving and snow removal equipment. Make sure there are no non-native worms in any plants you give away, whether they came from a nursery or your yard.
Good news: Students and parks joined together to create a pathway for migratory birds to go through Broward County, Florida.
Tips for Your Yard
Organic Lawn Care: Apply Corn Gluten (between 3/15 and & 4/10 in the Midwest) as a pre-emergent broadleaf weed killer
Leave the leaf litter to help migratory birds, like the Fox Sparrow in my yard above, which doesn’t reside in my area
Wait until a plant starts to green before cutting it back. As one example, swallowtail butterflies overwinter as a chrysalis attached to the stem of a perennial. They have adapted to look like the plant, so they are almost impossible to see on a stem
In the northern part of the country, put up clean, bird nesting box(es) before mid-March
If you feed birds and want to deter Grackles, switch from Sunflower to Safflower seeds, which Grackles dislike and the other birds eat
Flocks of Grackles and other blackbirds are likely to visit your bird feeder only a few times a year (spring migration before breaking into territories and during fall migration)
If you feed birds in winter, natural food is not available (insects, seeds, berries) when weather first warms. March and April are the toughest times for birds so continue to feed them until insects are flying.
Pick up plastic sacks, trash and other debris and throw them into your trash to keep this dangerous debris from harming wildlife and from going directly into our streams and rivers, polluting our drinking water
Nature News
Earth Hour, turn off lights 8:30pm-9:30pm local time on 3/24
Sometimes the things we view every day are relegated to a lesser role in our lives. They become commonplace, uninspiring, unimportant. That is why we must travel occasionally, even if just for a silent momentary reverie, from which we return and view our daily world anew. Asclepias in all its forms shouts to us from the roadsides and meadows each year with striking flowers, waving foliage and elongated seed pods (follicles). A durable, tenacious and adaptable family that does a lot of heavy lifting for our local ecologies, Asclepias deserves a closer look and greater appreciation!
Credit: Mark Gilson
Asclepias tuberosa
Butterflyweed is a faithful herald of summer in Northeast Ohio, blooming bright orange along our roadways and meadows. A few years ago I noticed the flowers in late-June off Rt 2 in Painesville along the dry road-banks near the Grand River. Had they always been there? Two months later I donned my amateur-plant-explorer hat and set off in search of seeds. Parking on the freeway and climbing the fence would have been the most direct approach, but difficult to explain to Ohio Highway Patrol. Instead, I headed north of the city through a warren of curving streets, small homes and apartments, aiming for the utility wires that followed the highway. Undeterred, I crawled under a locked fence and hiked a quarter mile. A few pods waved among the weeds here and there, but not the multitude I had anticipated. Had the meadow been mowed? Were these truly A. tuberosa or were other species mixed in? Did E.H. Wilson run into these problems as he sought out cherries in Japan?
Above all, gardeners need to be patient.
Credit: Lois Rose
I waited a year, revisited the spot in June and attached orange tagging ribbon to dozens of butterflyweed. In the fall I returned and collected absurd amounts of seed pods from verifiable A. tuberosa.
My goal was to provide seed of ‘local genotype’. As a nurseryman this had never been a priority for me. Then I met the good folks from Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH) and life, horticulture, spirituality became science-based and complicated. I was starting over. Returning home with my bounty, I was visited by misgivings. How can I be certain these plants represent ‘local genotypes’ of native plants? After all, my secret spot was less than a mile from Storrs & Harrison Nursery, one of the world’s largest, which operated for almost a hundred years. Other nurseries and other perennial-growers had flourished all around. What if my ‘genotypes’ had originated in Mexico, Malta or Madagascar? Should I test for genetic markers and, if so, where would I find a reliable baseline reference? Ultimately, I decided to go ahead with my ‘local native plants’ and let Jim Bissell (Botanist/Maven for CMNH) worry about the consequences. Let the buyer beware.
Drought-tolerant and long-lived, aslepias tuberosa is a great candidate for rain-gardens and low maintenance areas with dry well-drained soil. Sometimes called Orange Milkweed or Butterfly Milkweed, this species has less of the milky sap than its cousins. At 12-24” in height the orange flower clusters (umbels), lance-shaped dark green leaves and sturdy stems provide support for taller companions. Favored by Monarch Butterfly caterpillars, hummingbirds and native pollinators, the plant responds to trimming and looks handsome in a well-tended garden. I’ve seen container-plants over at Klyn Nurseries that are so colorful and crowned they resemble a greenhouse pot plant. Native Americans chewed the tap root to treat pulmonary illness, leading to another of its names, Pleurisy Root. Combine it with yarrow, which blooms at the same time (my favorite is the tall, old-fashioned Achillea x ‘Coronation Gold’) for a colorful cut-flower combination. Some gardeners flame the base of the stem before placing it in a cut-flower vase in order to reduce the flow of sap. Color variations from yellow to red occur naturally; cultivars are available from specialty growers and other evil-doers.
Credit: Lois Rose
Be careful promising A. tuberosa to the Spring Plant Sales. It takes a while to wake up and sometimes does not like being forced in the greenhouse.
Aslepias incarnata
Swamp Milkweed, asclepias incarnata, is a comparative giant at 4-5’. With pale pink flowers appearing slightly later than Butterflyweed, this ecologically important native plant is best-known to many of us for the dried pods that explode with cottony bundles in Fall and Winter. Native to wet areas and river bottoms in Ohio, Swamp Milkweed also thrives in relatively dry conditions.
Credit: Laura Dempsey
All these Asclepias form tap roots when grown in the soil, rendering them difficult to transplant in the garden. Yet they grow happily in a container with a well-drained mix. I dug up an A. incarnata once and moved it to a native garden in our nursery. It suffered horribly the first season but later regenerated from roots and took off. Allan Armitage writes about the nightmare of weeding Milkweeds from nursery rows and gardens. Not only do the roots grow down, they grow sideways! One volunteer that I left alone in our nursery spread eight feet in sandy soil before I realized what it had going!
Credit: Laura Dempsey
Asclepias syriaca
Garrett Ormiston, one of those educated folks over at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, corrected my ID of a statuesque milkweed in our nursery. What I was calling Swamp Milkweed turned out to be Common Milkweed, aslepias syriaca. One of the best plants for providing food to butterflies and their larvae, says Garrett, its leaves are broader and it prefers drier areas than Swamp Milkweed. Also, the pale-pink flowers are round rather than flat. I think it provides a stunning although overlooked specimen for gardens and natural areas. If this was recently discovered or developed…it would be touted by Proven Winners!
Credit: Mark Gilson
I collected Common Milkweed seeds and left them in our tool room for over a year (it’s our only roof that doesn’t leak). Busting open the pods makes a mess with all the white fuzzies (a technical term), but after some experimentation I found I could pinch out the silks and find a bounty of round dark seeds beneath, clustered there like tiny coins. I scattered the seeds in late-winter in an open tray filled with regular potting soil. I provided a light covering of sand, although that was probably not necessary. I placed the trays under intermittent mist because it is generally more reliable than my intermittent watering. Alternatively, just moisten the soil and place the tray in a sealed clear plastic bag. A couple weeks later the seedlings began poking up through the sand and soon filled in like the proverbial hairs on a dog’s back. Usually we dibble the seedlings into two-inch cells and offer them that way or later shift them to larger containers. As far as cultural conditions in the nursery, let me just say I am amazed at how much abuse these durable plants can take.
Credit: Mark Gilson
The tray in the photo was moved to a shade house from which it subsequently disappeared. An extensive investigation revealed that a student worker discarded it, remarking he thought it was a tray taken over by ‘weeds’. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Don’t believe the toxicity warnings by Euell Gibbons from 1962. Remember Euell Gibbons and ‘wild hickory nuts?’ Leaves of Common Milkweed have no bitterness when tasted raw and can be prepared like asparagus with no additional processing.
Something is Eating My Plant!
Milkweeds present a conundrum to the gardener and grower. When we say…’beneficial to local ecologies and pollinators’…we mean…’bugs will eat the heck out of them’. Here it is…should we apply pesticides to our native plants? Inspectors for Ohio Department of Agriculture frequent our nurseries and object to any commerce in bugs. They force us to use helicopters each year for gypsy moth control.
Credit: Mark Gilson
Last year the Asclepias in our garden center were visited by two giant voracious caterpillars. My wife, who loves monarch butterflies as much as a good cabernet, took this on as a learning opportunity for our customers. She raised butterflies on the counter in our store, brought in ladybugs, and watched our Asclepias disappear day by day. Once I saw her sell a denuded stem in a No. 2 container. The happy customer responded to her story…’I know…I know!’ The story is getting out. The foliage, after all, grows back pretty quickly, just in time for hordes of orange aphids. In our wholesale nursery, again, we’re not supposed to sell plants covered with orange aphids. Since I don’t like to apply pesticides (it’s one of my least favorite jobs), I decided to leave it up to the customer. Some took the plants along with the teeming hitchhikers.
Credit: Laura Dempsey
While the scientific debate regarding neonicotinoid pesticides, in particular, and their impact on pollinators rages on, we just read in a nursery industry newsletter: “Treating swamp milkweed with neonicotinoids, regardless of active ingredients, application timing and method, resulted in high concentrations of residue in nectar.” (Source: Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, Journal of Environmental Horticulture, Volume 35, page 24-34). While the effect of pesticide residues on pollinators remains a matter of scientific inquiry, and while it would be heresy for a nurseryman to object to all pesticides (and I don’t!), let’s rely on ladybugs and a judicious blast of water from a hose to control bugs, when we need to, on our Asclepias!
Asclepias…what a great story-plant for teaching the public about natives, nurseries, ecologies, pollinators and how it can all come together in our gardens!
Mark Gilson is a third-generation nurseryman and past-president of Nursery Growers of Lake County, Ohio. Visit: http://gilsongardens.biz/category/marks-corner/
A week ago I went to the Natural History Museum to listen to the speakers at the Ohio Natural History Conference — all of them good and interesting talks (confession; I was tired and slept through two of the afternoon talks; I hope I didn’t snore). They were all short and sweet (20 minutes each), about the relevance and importance of natural history and the natural world, and about the specifics of our changing world, the resilience of it — or not. All of this is just lead in to a lead in; I was much taken with gab-gifted naturalist Harvey Webster’s title for his lead-off talk: “Whither natural history?” and his confession that he had always wanted to use the word ‘whither’ – and now he had.
Whither. An interesting word, archaic sounding and poetical. Whither; meaning ‘where’, as in ‘where are we bound?’ That was the context of Harvey Webster’s question about natural history and the natural world. On a planet with a changing, volatile climate, in an age of extinctions and endangered species and at-risk environments, and I include our own built environment in that — whither are we bound?
There is another whither, spelled differently, but spoken the same; it is whither’s homo-phonic sibling, wither, meaning to become dry and shriveled, to decline or decay. Which seems to be one potential answer or result at the tail end of ‘whither are we bound.’ And when I go there, I am close to despair for what we have lost and must surely lose, and I grieve in premonition of the losses yet to come that I cannot even imagine. That’s when I write poems like this:
A Prayer from the Prayer Adverse
How close despair and prayer lie down in bed
born of the same love and through the same eyes
see both fore and aft : that squirrel offers sun
flowers to feathered gods : that locust sheds tears
as leaves : how mute swan swims in now murky
meres and the strangled oak dies gleaned Through
the same eyes — those hidden eyes — they see
Whither the wild crane and whippoorwill? seals
Sadness to silence and tightens the throat
Despair inarticulate ends all Yet
through those eyes those hidden eyes there may
still come a lightening : a prayer — un-glossed —
if an un-glossed prayer may hope For all
that I love some slight brightening
But that is not, actually, whither I am bound today, and so, having gotten both the w(h)ithers out of the way, time to refloat this raft.
These last mild days have drawn me out into the ‘wilds’ of Forest Hill Park, into the valley, especially the short section where the Dugway Brook flows free in its original channel of layered eroded shales. At the south end, its ‘source’, it pours out of an enormous pipe (large enough to drive a small car into), then flows north for perhaps a quarter of a mile, or less, where it disappears, again, into another monster maw. Here one might well ask of it, ‘whither are you bound?’– for it now disappears again, goes underground into an artificial, and killing, concrete channel, and stays buried thus until it reaches Lake Erie at the eastern edge of Bratenahl, where it at last flows free again, out into Lake Erie.
This short distance free to the air is not enough to restore the stream to life. Before it reaches this unfettered stretch it flows buried under Cain Park, emerges briefly by the swimming pool by Cumberland Park, then goes back underground by the Community Center to emerge again, briefly, for this short free stretch in Forest Hill Park. It is a dead stream. Nothing lives in it. But, in this short stretch of its freedom, it is still beautiful. And when I look at it as I walk by it, I wonder what this area was like when my mother and her father hiked these woods and brooks (the Doan and the Dugway) when they moved here in 1920. I like to think that someday, perhaps, the buried section in Forest Hill Park might be freed, re-aired, re-enlivened — and also, all that is now underground between East Cleveland and Lake Erie, providing again a living life-line for life, and the life of the spirit.
Lois Rose, Gardenopolis-Cleveland co-editor, writes of this little stretch of free flowing stream: “I remember the first time I ever walked the stream bed – I could not believe my eyes. It was like a fairy tale — you stepped out of the parking lot and you were in the country on a stream bed, hidden from view, alone. There is a sense of secrecy. You hardly ever see anyone on it. You do not even know this exists, even though you live a mile away. It’s by the Rec center – yet very far from it. I have a sense of pride in that stream. I appreciate how sad and less-than-it-could-be the stream is – but it has brought me a lot of pleasure over the years.”
And so it has me, also.
Twenty years ago I visited a place in Ireland called Glendalough, a monastic site of some antiquity (6th century). We hiked up into the bracken covered hills there, following a little rollicking brook through its self-carved cloven bed in the rock. Somehow our poor diminished Dugway manages to remind me of that tannen-saturated jewel, both of them with their cascades and rills, and narrow congested places where the water runs fast — leading me to hope that in some future that I probably will not see, some future wisdom and largess will once again set the Dugway free.
I leave you with one more poem, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is a better one than my own, in the same way that the stream it describes, flowing into Lough Lomond in Scotland, is a far better brook than our loved but poor and limping Dugway.
Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fawn froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
It was late. A still, quiet night in the dead of winter. Everyone else was asleep. I turned off the last light before heading upstairs to join them. Then FLASH! The motion sensitive light above the garage turned on. A scream of white light announced the presence of something in the backyard.
I slunk to the edge of the kitchen window and peered outside. Nothing. On to another window. Another view. Nothing. Check the gate across the driveway! It had not been disturbed.
Then the light turned off. Darkness returned.
I should just let it go. It’s probably nothing. Turning to go upstairs, FLASH! It’s back. Uh oh.
The curious inner voice prevailed and within seconds my coat, boots and gloves were on and I headed outside. Cautiously.
Opening the door as softly as possible, looking to the left, to the right, quietly I moved forward. The fresh coating of snow made the frigid night seem quieter than usual yet there was no noise. Then rounding my car which was parked beneath the light, there it was. Or, there were its footprints.
Chipmunk and mouse tracks leading from seemingly everywhere to the underside of my Prius. They no doubt found refuge from the cold in a cozy corner of the engine compartment, complete with their own carry-on bedding.
That got me thinking. What other mysteries about our wild neighbors can only be told by a snowy winter? Here in the Heights, wild animals live all around us – chipmunks, squirrels, mice, fox, rats, skunk, possum, raccoon, deer, rabbits, coyote, hawks, owls, turkey, cardinals and a host of other birds. We see them, some frequently, others rarely. Where do they come from and where are they going? Just what are they doing all day and all night?
Our snowy winters give us some answers to these questions and even better, let our wandering minds weave stories of their fascinating, undetectable lives.
In a typical week my meanderings take me on journeys through Lakeview Cemetery, in to Forest Hill and Cumberland parks, across a school yard and alongside neighbors’ lawns. There lie patterns of tracks that invite story telling. Tracks creating mesmerizing braids of life.
Tiny, barely visible tracks of mice so light their print is nearly timid. The bold cloven mark of deer. The three pronged wide print of a turkey. The convoluted Escherian travails of a squirrel.
Some tracks speak to independent movement while others show a pair moving together. Or was one being followed by the other?
Tiny tracks appeared in every direction from a small clump of grass in a deserted area. Were they coming to and from home or hiding from a hawk?
Tracks in a solitary line lead to a patch of disturbed snow. Was there a fight or merely a playful tussle?
Then there were the tracks that ran away from the reddish brown patch of snow. Here was a spot shared by a winner and a loser.
Some tracks of the same animal are smaller than others. Young ones surviving their first winter?
Some tracks give away the sneaky routes of home invaders. So that’s where they come in!
Some tracks come right up to the house. Maybe they are peering in our front windows when we’re peering out the back.
Tracks tell us of the incessant activity of which we are otherwise unaware. They show us swift sprinters and playmates. Others move slowly, gracefully.
They are awake, doing their stuff, while we are cozy under our covers. By morning, they show a picture that took all night to paint. It’s not as if you can stand in your bathrobe looking out in the dark and see it all unfold. You very well know that if you tried, that night you’d see nothing. It’s the next night, when you’re fast asleep. They’re out there putting on a show.
Homes, gardens and sidewalks stretch out across miles and miles and miles of winding roads, streets, boulevards and alleys where once lay fields, and streams and forests. They’ve adapted to us. Some of us have adapted to some of them. They’re mostly invisible, except for their tracks.
There is no limit to the fascination of life around us. Wild lives connected to us in ways we barely know. Even if you pay attention, it’s hard to keep track.
by Lois Rose, Master Gardener Educator
All photos from Ann McCulloh
By February in northeast Ohio we are looking forward to some sign of green. We are hoping to be caressed by the humidity and warmth of early spring, the scent of bulbs pushing up through the soggy soil.
And then there is the coming of the Great Big Home and Garden Show at the IX center. I have been attending these shows for many years in a specialized capacity, answering questions from the public about gardening.
When I have a bit of time off of the answer table, I can wander freely and take on the sights and sounds of the show. And I have to say that this has been a more and more disappointing experience over the years and this year is no exception.
I observed walking into the hall from the Exhibitors’ entrance that there seem to be fewer stands and vendors this year taking up less space. I have not confirmed this as a fact but I know that there were almost no vendors selling plants or plant accessories.
And the gardens that are installed with a mountain of sand, a city of bricks and a lake of water features are less and less what I hope or want to see.
Perhaps I am behind the times, out of sync and outside of the mainstream, but what I saw was primarily hardscape….paths leading in a U-shape through each exhibit. Large patio scapes with fire pits or grills and bars and outdoor seating for entertaining. Oh and there were some plants thrown in.
What plants you ask? All of the perennials and shrubs and trees and bulbs and annuals have to be forced into bloom at nearby greenhouses.
This is a challenge and a science and an expensive effort.
There were some triumphs in some of the gardens. For example there were white-flowered hellebores in some of the displays that were tall and showy.
There were a myriad of daffodils and hyacinths, some with excellent fragrance.
There was a forsythia bush in full bloom and a Cornus mas or Cornelian Cherry and a few other fruit trees with good blooms showing.
BUT… I have often groused about the displays of early- mid -late spring flowers shown at the same time as if you would be able to achieve this kind of show in your own garden. Tulips and forsythia and azaleas and fruit trees….February and March and April and May joined together in unity.
I wonder if the average show-goer realizes that many of these plants bloom consecutively and not at the same time…
One display had a charming large metal pot planted with a water garden, papyrus and water hyacinth.
And a sunken Hosta and fern garden under a sidewalk grate.
There was a construction of a house front with a balcony fitted with mannequins reclining near a full complement of jazz band instruments…evoking New Orleans during Mardi Gras, with a small albeit conventional garden below with a very old decrepit upright piano with plants in the top.
It was dark and quiet in the garden display area, with many fewer people so the experience was a respite from the main hall.
They cleverly placed a bistro in this quiet area so that you could eat a nice meal in relative calm. Expensive but quiet.
And on the other side of the ledger there were a few displays that had houseplants as their prominent green material. They were integrated into borders with outdoor plants but still, houseplants with large leaves. Is this fake news?
So I conclude that the public wants hardscape for their yards and the companies know this and therefore provide it in their displays.
The plants and displays that I remember from the nineties, interesting foliage plants for example, newer cultivars, are clearly a thing of the distant past. I did not find anything much to buy for my garden….metal frames of animals, gnomes, little owls and cute little ….not for me.
But you can ride the ferris wheel for 2 bucks, and buy fudge and a super mop.
That is the home part of the show which is fully realized. Too bad the garden section has been diminished.
Mentor Marsh has been a National Park Service-designated National Natural Landmark since 1966 for being one of the most species-rich sites on the Great Lakes shoreline. The Marsh was named Ohio’s first State Nature Preserve in 1971 and is a National Audubon Society Important Birding Area. This unique wetland suffered dramatically in the 1960s when salt-mine tailings leached into Blackbrook Creek. By the early 1970s, most of the swamp forest trees and marsh plants had died. The 765-acre wetland basin was overtaken by reed grass (Phragmites australis), a 14-foot-tall nonnative invasive plant from Eurasia. Phragmites grew so densely within the nearly 4-mile-long former river channel that an estimated 1 billion plants were growing just a few inches apart. Partial abatement of the salt source in 1987 lowered salinity levels to borderline brackish conditions along one-third of the marsh and lowered the salinity to freshwater levels on two-thirds of the wetland.
The Cleveland Museum of Natural History began a large-scale restoration of Mentor Marsh in 2012. Guided by Museum restoration ecologists, the Phragmites is being sprayed with an aquatic-safe herbicide and then physically mashed flat to allow native plants to grow. The results thus far have been heartening. Dozens of native plant species are sprouting from the soil seed bank, and Leopard Frogs are expanding throughout. Rare marsh birds—such as American and Least Bitterns, Virginia, King and Sora Rails, and Common Gallinules and Wilson’s snipe—are now nesting. Fish, such as Northern Pike, are spawning, and Yellow Perch fingerlings are starting to use the Marsh as a nursery. Otter, beaver, wading birds, waterfowl and shorebird migrants are starting to use the restored Marsh as stopover habitat. While recent surveys have confirmed Blanding’s and Spotted turtles are no longer present, their recovery is possible.
As Ohio’s largest stand of Phragmites, the perennial roots of these tall invaders are well established. Results so far have eliminated 85% of the Phragmites basin-wide, with some older treatment units nearly in the clear while other newer units are experiencing an anticipated bounce back rallying from the massive network of root reserves, or emerging as seedlings from the seed bank. Follow-up on the remaining estimated 15% is critical, requiring an intense commitment of time to traverse the sticky Carlisle muck soil to cover a wetland basin with 12 miles of perimeter.
During the 2017 field season, in an effort to accelerate desired ground cover to outcompete other invasive species lurking nearby, Museum staff, partners, contractors, volunteers and inmates planted over 19,000 live plants of 23 native species in the Marsh. Some of the plants were grown from seeds collected onsite and propagated at a local prison as part of a horticultural job skills program. Other plugs and live stakes were purchased from restoration nurseries and conservation seed growers. We plan to redouble our efforts in 2018, with continued efforts to raise funds towards this worthwhile project.
We could not have undertaken this monumental task without the assistance of the many partners, grant funders, volunteers and donors who believed in what we are doing.
David Kriska, Ph.D., is a Restoration Ecologist in the Natural Areas Program of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History
What could possibly interest a driver through the landscape west of Toledo? Flat corn and soy bean fields stretch to the horizon—green in summer, gray-brown in winter. That’s the way it’s been for the nearly 25 years my wife and I have been traveling to Chicago to visit our daughter.
In the last three years, though, we’ve noticed a change. Instead of bare, tilled soil in winter, the majority of farmland we observe remains untilled and is filled with corn and other crop stubble. Although colors remain pretty much the same gray-brown, what we are seeing is revolutionary. Conventional farmers, who have been growing crops in the best agri-chemical, paint-by-numbers style—so many pounds of artificial nitrogen, phosphorous, etc. per acre–, are now consciously prioritizing growing life in their soil.
Tilled field and…No till. Still brown, but much more beautiful.
We’re not the only ones to notice this change. Two years ago it even made the New York Times.
Now a book has come out that puts the shift into a worldwide context. It’s called Growing A Revolution by David Montgomery. Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington; author of previous popular books, most notably “Dirt,” and a winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” award.
Montgomery’s thesis is that a consensus is emerging in all corners of agriculture and horticulture—from conventional to organic—that the only path toward resilient food production must include an interlocking trio of practices that fall under the rubric of “conservation agriculture.” These are: No till soil management, cover crops, and crop rotation.
As obvious as these three practices will sound to Gardenopolis Cleveland’s cutting edge gardeners, the abiding wonder of this book is how often humanity has gotten this apparently straightforward mix wrong. The Mesopotamians messed up the (once) Fertile Crescent. Thomas Jefferson experimented with cover crops and crop rotation, but also invented and promoted the mold-board plow—that great destroyer of mycorrhizal fungi and their nutrient-gathering capability– and thus managed to undo much of the good of his other innovations. In the 1970s, a young researcher named Rattan Lal, now one of Ohio State University’s most distinguished professors, vastly improved small farm productivity in African test plots with a version of conservation agriculture. But a few short years after his departure, all his good work had been overgrown with trees. Only the small-scale farmers of China and Japan appear to have been able maintain consistently healthy soil over centuries (aided enormously by their techniques for safely recycling both animal and human waste).
The main contributing factor to humanity’s soil-building failures has been a combination of population growth and an impatience with gradualism. As Europe’s much-plowed soils were running out of fertility, European colonialists replaced it with the Peruvian seabird waste known as guano. As guano supplies diminished, German chemists developed the Haber-Bosch process to produce artificial nitrogen fertilizer. Artificial fertilizers also became one of the pillars of the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1960s, that temporarily rescued farmers worldwide from depleted soils and diminished harvests.
You know the rest of the story: monocultures, fertilizer runoff, Monsanto, glycosophate, herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” and a steady decrease in soil fertility that all of the ministrations of Big Ag have only made worse (requiring still more artificial inputs).
What Montgomery has discovered, however, is that we seem to have reached a genuine tipping point that is taking us back to soil and its neglected life-giving potential. One of my favorite moments in the book occurs when Montgomery, the bearded “Left Coast” professor is invited to speak to a group of Kansas farmers.
Did he look like this? More gardeners ought to wear overalls. They’re both comfortable and practical. Just be careful not to walk into the Stone Oven coffee house like this!
“As I ended my talk I looked out on a sea of baseball hats. One elderly fellow in the middle stood up, stuffed his hands down into his pockets, and said he’d taken one look at me and didn’t think I could possibly say anything worth listening to. I braced myself for what was to come. But then he surprised me. He said the more I talked, the more sense I had made. He’d seen what I was talking about on his farm. It no longer had the rich fertile topsoil his grandfather had plowed. Something needed to change if his own grandchildren were going to prosper working his land.”
What has also changed is soil science. Mycorrhizal fungi were only named and their function thoroughly described by German scientist A.B. Frank in 1885. Frank contended that mycorrhizal fungi and plants worked in a vital system of symbiosis, with plants trading sugars made via their unique process of photosynthesis for minerals which fungi’s chemical exudates were uniquely able to mine. Frank’s findings flew in the face of conventional wisdom and went through waves of acceptance and dismissal throughout the following century. Yet today we recognize the plant/fungal relationship as the most fundamental to life on land. Neither biological domain could exist on earth without the other (let alone us animals!).
Sara Wright in her lab.
The power of the plant/fungal relationship has only really come into focus in the last 20+ years. In 1996 Sara F. Wright, a U.S.D.A. scientist, first identified glomalin, the mycorrhizal exudate that gives good soil its crumbly texture and, at a micro-level, allows bacteria and fungi to perform their most soil-enhancing functions. (Why hasn’t Sara Wright won a Nobel Prize!)
At the same time, scientists’ recent ability to decode genomes has revealed a vast, previously unknown realm of microbiological life. To soil scientists the soil microbiome is still, literally, terra incognita. We know enough, however, to understand why the trio of conservation agriculture practices that Montgomery describes work so powerfully together.
No or minimal tillage allows mycorrhizal fungi to extend their appendages called hyphae. These hyphae, in turn, mine rock and other geological formations for otherwise inaccessible minerals. They also merge with other like fungi and thus create a vast underground network that, sensing some plant’s need for phosphorous, can both mine and deliver it.
Vetch fixes nitrogen and is a great cover crop.
Cover crops supply their own package of nutrients, including nitrogen (e.g. vetch) and phosphorous (e.g. buckwheat). Harvesting them off above the root, moreover, leaves carbon compounds in the soil to feed all the fungi and other microbiota.
Rotation of multiple crops, the third component of conservation agriculture, follows the lesson that almost every veteran tomato grower knows: One crop in place year after year eventually attracts more natural enemies than it can handle. The more varied crops, the safer they all become. Moreover, different crops access different mycorrhizal species and networks, as well different minerals. (E.g. sunflowers, which draw up zinc and make it available to the other crops around them).
The lesson: in diversity there is redundancy and strength. All three practices conserve carbon and build soil. In fact, Montgomery cites a 2014 Rodale Institute that estimates that complete worldwide conversion to conservation agriculture could offset almost three-quarters of then current global emissions. This might not be as pie-in-sky as a realist might imagine. Montgomery emphasizes throughout how profitable regenerative conservation agriculture can be for farmers (not, however, for suppliers of agri-chemicals!).
Montgomery has clearly written this book for the next potential generation of farmer converts to conservation agriculture and to their potential policymaker supporters. But the predominantly gardener readers of Gardenopolis Cleveland will find the book a useful mirror by which to judge their own practices and act as even more informed consumers. The book is accessible in a comfortable journalistic way, but the reader is always aware that, when required, Montgomery can draw on his deep scientific training to summarize, accept and/or dismiss scientific studies as appropriate.
Some other tidbits/insights:
–Montgomery notes that many “organic” farmers fall short—and their crops suffer- -when it comes to implementing conservation agriculture. The more enlightened seem to be adopting some of the techniques of conventional agriculture—like every once-in-while application of a fungicide—to get their conservation agriculture trio of practices into proper balance. Despite my description above, soil and circumstances vary, and there seems to be a emerging productive middle ground, albeit still with very low chemical inputs.
–The two biggest obstacles to widespread adoption of conservation agriculture in the U.S.? The first, predictably, is Big Ag, the complex of seed, agri-chemicals, equipment producers, and food distributors. These companies dominate U.S. agricultural research and educational funding not to mention the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. They are also the only entities to consistently profit off the current system. The second, more surprisingly, is crop insurance. The ability of make money even through crop failure keeps our present destructive system in place. Montgomery seems to take special pleasure in describing how well off financially the new conservation agriculture farmers—who pay exponentially less for chemical and other inputs—have become–to the point of fancy wine cellars!. Most are so profitable they don’t bother with crop insurance, even if it is federally subsidized.
–Smaller really is beautiful. Conservation agriculture with its multiplicity of crops tends to lend itself to much smaller farms than the as-far-as-the-eye-can-see, massive monoculture systems. Because the former are more profitable, they may also make room for more -farmers and more prosperous small towns to serve them. Check out this video to see what can happen.
Could a more prosperous rural America close our current rural/urban political divide?
–Finally, a special point of pride for Ohioans. Rattan Lal, whom I’ve mentioned on this blog before, and David Brandt, a farmer near Columbus, emerge as towering heroes of this book. After reading this book, you’ll appreciate these two state treasures even more.
I’m beginning to think that “Crickets in the House” may become an annual post at the end of each singing insect season. For those of you who have expressed interest in the terrariums and their residents in previous years, this post is especially for you.
I’ve become increasingly accustomed to warmer Novembers with singing tree crickets, ground crickets, and occasional katydids through much of the month. I now expect a gradual decrescendo of insect song during the course of the month up near Lake Erie where the warmer lake temperature modifies the effect of advancing arctic air.
Not this year. A hard freeze earlier than we’ve recently experienced completely silenced the outdoor concert by mid-November. Fortunately, I’d already begun bringing crickets home.
When the first arctic cold front approached, I gathered up anyone I could catch. I could see lightning from cold-front-generated thunderstorms out over Lake Erie as I snatched my last Forbes’s Tree Cricket and the goldenrod on which he was singing.
A brief warmup followed. A few tree crickets and many ground crickets made it known that they had survived. Some species are pretty hardy and can get through a couple nights of frost, and that was true this year.
But the next cold front – the insect-killer – would be the final act for all of them. When this frigid air mass had almost reached Cleveland, I was on my hands and knees out in the back yard with my flashlight searching for our resident Carolina Ground Crickets. High temperatures were predicted to be in the upper 20s to lower 30s and lows were in the mid to upper teens in my region. No one was going to survive this cold front.
It was pretty crowded in the house.
There were two Broad-winged Tree Crickets, both Black-horned and Forbes’s Tree Crickets (who will be the subject of their own post), a Four-spotted Tree Cricket, and a Jumping Bush Cricket. The ensemble I called “the little ones” was made up of two Handsome Trigs, a Cuban Ground Cricket, an Allard’s Ground Cricket, a Striped Ground Cricket, and the three Carolina Ground Crickets I’d rescued at the last possible minute from the backyard.
Carolinas seem to do quite well in the house and I enjoy them very much. I seldom see these common, yet elusive crickets because even indoors, they live under leaves, between rocks – anywhere they can be invisible and inaccessible. Here’s one of them getting started on his evening of songs:
In previous years, I’ve used glass terrariums with screen lids that had ample soil and cricket-friendly plants like grass, little asters, violets – basically whatever is hand in the yard and easy to dig up. The combination of soil, small plants appropriate to their natural habitats, some dead leaves and small pieces of wood, bark, or a little rock to sit on and hide under provides an opportunity to watch behavior that’s difficult to observe in the wild.
(Dmitri and the terrariums, October 2015. The stones at the corners kept the lids securely in place)
I’ve seen crickets sit up on leaves and twigs in the sun, females ovipositing in the soil, and tiny nymphs growing up the following year. I’ve also learned about where and how they so successfully conceal themselves.
However, other creatures live in that soil and hide out on the plants as well. Spiderlings from a hatch-out somewhere in the kitchen will slip through the screen and mature in a terrarium, remaining undetected until a bit of a web (or an unfortunate prey item) reveals their presence. These are not orb weavers with stunningly beautiful webs. No, they’re much sneakier common house spiders (Parasteatoda tepidariorum). It is most disheartening to find a tree cricket or even a ground cricket strung up on a line of web.
There were also tiny white dots in one of the larger terrariums that hatched into an entire civilization of ants which traveled in and out from the terrarium to the far reaches of the kitchen. I eventually had to relocate all the soil out to the back yard, trying to keep the ant family unit intact as best I could.
Crane flies would occasionally hatch out, much to the cats’ delight, and the best surprise was a lightning bug/firefly (they are really beetles) that emerged as an adult in February and flashed every night for a month. Lightning bug larvae eat slugs, which were always in residence and forever feasting on the crickets’ lettuce.
The spiders were my main concern, however. I decided to try to control the ground level a little more since this is an area where they would retreat to hide. Perhaps sand from the lakeshore areas instead of our heavy clay soil would be less hospitable to the spiders and might also help eliminate the layers of algae that always seemed to accumulate on the glass walls.
The crickets who were at home in sandy soil were fine with the change. Those that were not probably missed having a basement level filled with little holes and channels in which they could conceal themselves. The plants generally did not appreciate the dryness, and after a year of mixing humus back into the sand I decided to just try dried leaves and grasses.
I switched to plastic cricket carriers, added an inch of sand to the bottom, and covered it with dead leaves along with their usual tiny food dishes and pieces of lettuce and apple. Just to be safe, I covered the lids with fine mesh fabric to deter the house spiders if the carriers were near the sunny south windows where spiders are more common.
The resident Striped Ground Cricket is not much to look at, I suppose, since he was already a little battered and worn down when I caught him.
He sings every day, though, and you’d never know from listening that he’s such an old guy. I’ve included a sonogram excerpt so you can see both the steady rhythm with which he sings and how each individual song is a quick series of wing strokes. (By the way, that’s a Jumping Bush Cricket up on the second floor that also can be heard in the recordings.)
I add lettuce and a tiny slice of apple along with dry cricket food and water cubes to the singing cages and cricket carriers every evening, and they’re set. Replacing the heavy glass terrariums and screen lids with plastic carriers did make them easier to move and care for. (They like this little radiator space heater and sing much more when I turn it on.)
The Handsome Trigs and the tiny Cuban Ground Cricket can escape virtually any enclosure – even the miniscule opening where the handle of an insect carrier attaches to the lid. Only my beloved mesh singing insect cages, cherished presents from Wil and Donna Hershberger, keep these insects safe. They have lettuce, a tiny piece of apple, the smallest dishes of cricket food and water cubes (caps from one of the cat’s pill bottles), and a bit of blackberry leaf in season each evening.
Even a few small, dead leaves in the bottom of the little singing cages will please the Handsome Trigs, and they appreciate having a curled-up dead leaf in which to sing. This seems to be a preferred concert venue, which is one reason that singing males are so difficult to locate.
Here’s a recording of trig in the photos above singing his crackling, sparkling song. You’ll see that there are little spaces between the wing strokes; it’s those spaces that separate the texture of his song from those of our other trigs. He’s also astonishingly loud for such a tiny individual! (Maybe you’ll be able to hear Tatyana purring softly on the E below middle C as well.)
It’s the tree crickets who typically are the challenge. They don’t live on the ground – they live in plants. I do my best to replicate the habitat in which they were singing when I found them, but there are challenges. Appropriate vegetation grows in soil, along with all the other life forms – including cricket predators – that are found there. I needed leaves: leaves to hide in, leaves to sing from, leaves that possibly might even be a preferred food.
Blackberry leaves.
I use small, empty plastic pill bottles as little vases for the end growth of blackberry canes. The leaves last for at least a few days in the water, and I cover the bottle opening with a folded, dry blackberry leaf to prevent anyone from falling in and being unable to escape (this had not happened, but I was trying to think of potential tragedies to avert.) When I’ve had a couple inches or more of soil, I’ve used stem holders stuck into the ground. I’m still experimenting with the new configuration.
I also mist the leaves –including the leaf litter in the ground crickets’ carriers – every day. I’m careful not to get any water on the dry cricket food because it molds. I also don’t spray the crickets directly because they get very indigent about it. Broad-wingeds scuttle under a leaf. Ground Crickets dash for cover. One of the Forbes’s Tree Crickets would jump right up at me as if he were going to take me on. The Allard’s Ground Cricket, too, would pop straight up in the air almost to the top of his carrier. They all said, “Just NO!”
I included thick twigs beween blackberry stems for the Jumping Bush Cricket because this species travels along twigs and branches. Slender twigs also function as stakes for apple pieces in tree cricket carriers. There are goldenrod and aster flowers earlier in the fall and seed heads later that are much appreciated by Forbes’s, Black-horned, and Four-spotted Tree Crickets. Because they do occasionally go down to the “ground level” of the carriers, I added some leaves, bits of flowers and seed heads, cricket food, and water cubes if anyone wanted them.
This has been very successful – they sing and sing from the blackberry leaves. I’ve seen one of the Broad-winged Tree Crickets eating the leaves. I think the others do as well, because I never see them eating the lettuce I place up there. The Broad-winged Tree Crickets hide on the undersides of the leaves. The Forbes’s and Black-horned Tree Crickets occasionally do this as well, but they also bask in the sun on the upper surfaces of the leaves during the day.
The Jumping Bush Cricket is right at home in blackberry as well.
Members of this species are intriguing and quite odd, and I’ve learned enough about them to give them yet another post of their own. For now, though, here’s the Jumping Bush Cricket in the photo above singing up on the second floor of our bungalow. The “little ones” all come into the bedroom at night, but he’s so loud that sleep would be impossible if he were to join them.
You’ll notice in the sonogram that his song, like that of the Striped Ground Cricket, has a predicable rhythmic pulse. Also like the Striped, each chirp is actually a little cluster of wing strokes.
Unfortunately, obtaining blackberry became a challenge much earlier than usual this year. Not only did NE Ohio had that surprisingly cold spell in mid-November, there was also no snow to insulate and protect the meadow and woodland plants that still had leaves. Even along the lakeshore, where temperature don’t reach freezing until considerably later than inland areas, most of the blackberry leaves were scorched and desiccated. Normally, I’d head out into the NE Ohio snow belt counties, dig under the snow, and retrieve blackberry leaves that were still relatively green and soft. Not this year.
It’s December 13th now and tree crickets often seem to fade away after Thanksgiving. The few that have lived until late December, including the phenomenal Snowy Tree Cricket who survived in his blackberry until early February, were the exceptions.
The Broad-winged Tree Cricket in the opening photo sang so assertively for such extended periods of time that perhaps it’s not surprising that the less ambitious Broad-winged outlasted him.
That elderly individual is still quietly hanging on the underside of his blackberry leaves though he hasn’t sung at all in the past several days. It almost seemed that once the overachiever passed on, this one didn’t even try to bother. Maybe he’s just old and decided to retire, but he’s still welcome here.
Since motionless camouflage is his strategy, I can actually remove the sprig of blackberry on which he’s hiding and place it on the kitchen table while I freshen up his house. He’s on the back of a different leaf each evening, but the photos below document one of the only times I actually saw him change locations.
(You can see he’s pretty old. This cricket had already lost a back leg and part of an antenna when I found him)
The eccentric Jumping Bush Cricket still sings every night, but otherwise, all the songs are from the ground crickets and the Handsome Trig. Maybe the last of the blackberry I searched for and harvested a few days ago will survive longer than all the thorn scratches that I inevitably find on my legs and arms afterward.
If you’d like to read about making “singing cages” for keeping crickets and katydids at home, you can find more information at Songs of Insects.
If you have John Himmelman’s book, Cricket Radio: Tuning In the Night-singing Insects, explore the detailed chapter called “Assembling Your Cricket Radio.” There’s lots of information on the requirements for various crickets and katydids.
Coming up next: two specific posts about the crickets I’ve learned more about this year both from studying them outdoors and getting to know individuals very well indoors this year: Jumping Bush Crickets and especially the look-alike/sound-alike Forbes’s and Black-horned Tree Crickets.
I’ll close with a recording I think you’ll enjoy. It’s a Broad-winged Tree Cricket (the powerful singer) and a Forbes’s Tree Cricket singing simultaneously on the dining room table one evening. The Forbes’s sings a major 3rd higher, which is commonly true in the field as well. It was so peaceful in the evening to listen to this duet that graced our home until only recently. The remaining crickets, however, will carry on for a little longer…
