More winter food

My garden feeds the birds and other wild critters throughout the winter, and I never put out feeders (to see why, please read this). Some foods are available in spring (when demand is highest and supply is actually lowest), some in summer, fall, or winter. Nature provides food for wild animals all through the year, and your garden can too. This post will focus on winter foods; check back soon for plant suggestions for the other three seasons.

Winter foods tend to be those that birds do not favor–they’re the fruits that don’t get eaten the second they ripen. From the bird’s point of view they’re an emergency cache; from our point of view, they’re winter color. Top choices include hollies (Ilex species), such as American holly, winterberry holly (I. verticillata), and inkberry holly (I. glabra) They’re lovely and colorful throughout the winter.

Most viburnums produce berries that get eaten as soon as they ripen. An exception is cranberrybush viburnum (V. trilobum). The bright-red berries remain on the plant for most of the winter.

Coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus) is an underused plant. It’s a low-growing, spreading shrub that does well in dry soil and shade. It produces tiny, bright-pink berries that serve as winter food all season long.

Don’t forget about the perennial garden when you think about winter food. The main reason I don’t clean up the perennial garden until spring is to provide sustenance through the winter. The most popular seeds–those of sunflowers, asters, grasses–are long gone, but plenty of plants are still full of seeds, particularly ironweed (Vernonia) and brown-eyed susan (Rudbeckia triloba). And if you let leaf litter remain on the ground among the plants, it will protect fallen seeds and overwintering insects that birds will forage for all winter whenever there’s no snow on the ground.

Many birds, especially tiny ones like kinglets, chickadees, and nuthatches, and of course woodpeckeers, eat insects throughout the year. In winter, they find them under tree bark. They’re doing a good service to your trees by eating those insects, some of which can be harmful to trees. Do don’t be in a hurry to spray pesticides on your woody plants (this is the time of year when your tree care company is trying to sell you as many treatments as possible  for next season, so think carefully about what you really need). Spraying pesticides often means eliminating the food that can sustain our native bird populations throughout the year.

The garden in snow

More snow yesterday–snow on top of snow, and the temperature hasn’t risen above 20 degrees for what seems like two weeks. The garden was particularly pretty yesterday afternoon while the snow was still falling.

Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) is holding its seedheads high above the snow for the birds to take advantage of. Although most of the most nutritious seeds (such as sunflower) and berries (such as dogwood) are long gone, plenty of winter food remains for the birds we see everyday.

Coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus) should be called pinkberry. The berries remain bright pink all winter. So please, please consider this small, carefree native shrub instead of the invasive beautyberry.

If your garden isn’t feeding the birds all winter, check back soon for a list of plants you might consider for winter food.

In the dead of winter

If there ever was a day to plan the coming season’s garden, that day is today: 18 degrees Fahrenheit and the beginning of a major winter storm, with 3 inches of fresh snow on the ground already. So here goes.

In the perennial beds, my major goal this year will be to cut back some of the more, shall we say, enthusiastic plants and introduce some additional species, with the overall objective being greater diversity. For example, in one bed Rudbeckia subtomentosa, sweet black-eyed Susan, is crowding out other plants; in another bed, the culprit is bergamot (Monarda fistulosa):

Both of these are lovely plants–but I have too many of them, and they’re tall plants growing too close to the fronts of their respective beds. So I will dig some out, give them away, and plant lower-growing perennials and grasses to rebalance the plots. The plants I plan to order include prairie dropseed (a grass, Sporobolus heterolepsis), vervain (Verbena stricta), dotted mint (Monarda punctata), lanceleaf and rose coreopsis (C. lanceolata and C. rosea), harebell (Campanula rotundifolia), and nodding pink onion (Allium cernuum). Some of these are new to my garden, some are proven favorites.

I will order most of my plants from Prairie Nursery, a mail-order nursery in Wisconsin that specializes in pure species of native plants. I have ordered from them many times over the years and have found both their plants and their shipping methods to be very high quality. They will start shipping for the season in mid-April, but if you order now, you will get free shipping.

In the shrub beds, the major need is pruning, and this weather will prevent it. We did major pruning last winter, but many multistemmed  shrubs require yearly maintenance to keep them healthy and to prevent them from growing too large for a small garden.With luck, we’ll have some storm-free days between now and mid-February to get the pruning done.

I plan to approach the vegetable garden differently this coming year than in the past. As I have mentioned here, I have a plot in the Glen Rock Community Garden, and while I am very happy to be included there and have met and learned from some great gardeners over the past three seasons, some members are not as vigilant as they should be about removing diseased plants. As a result, the garden becomes full of pests and diseases by late summer, and harvests suffer. To  combat these problems, I plan to concentrate on early and late crops, primarily greens of various types; herbs such as parsley and dill that the rabbits destroy in my garden (the community garden is well fenced in); quick-harvesting crops like peas and, perhaps, one sowing of green beans. I’ll grow my tomatoes at home to avoid all the blights that affect the garden.

I’m looking forward to the first taste of mesclun and mustard greens, typically sown in March and ready around May 1:

Winter pruning multistemmed shrubs

Right now–the dead of winter, when woody plants are completely dormant–is one of the best times of year to prune. Because I have a small garden and many of my shrubs want to be larger than I want them to be, I do a lot of pruning every winter. And today it was neither raining nor 10 degrees outside, so I pruned three large shrubs.

The way to keep the size of a large shrub under control is to remove individual canes close to ground level. Each year, you remove a few of the largest branches. This keeps the shrub vigorous and helps maintain a compact size. This rule holds for all multistemmed shrubs, including lilacs, viburnums, dogwoods, aronias, serviceberries, hydrangeas, forsythia. If it’s a woody plant that produces multiple stems, this is how and when you prune it.

Most people try to prune shrubs totally incorrectly: they cut off the tops of the branches, as if they were giving the poor shrub a bad haircut. The shrub responds by putting out lots of small branches just below the cuts, and the result is something that looks like multiple witches’ broomsticks. Not to mention a shrub that is wider and almost as tall as before and that retains all its oldest wood.

So here’s how you should do it: Select up to one-third of the canes, the largest ones,  and cut them off as close to ground level as you can, making clean, angled cuts so water will not pool in the cut surface. You may have to remove a few smaller canes to allow you to reach the large ones, but that’s OK. This technique reduces the overall size of the shrub, encourages it to produce new, vigorous branches, and increases its overall health and vigor.

Today I pruned a large American hazelnut (Corylus americana) whose branches were getting too close to our front walkway; a black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa) that was blocking part of the sidewalk; and a cranberry bush viburnum (Viburnum trilobum) that’s planted too close to the back door. The pictures show how I pruned the hazelnut in detail:

The base of the hazelnut is at the center of the picture near the bottom. Note how may stems there are and how the plant is leaning over the walkway. This shrub has been in place for over 10 years and has reached a mature height of more than 12 feet. We pruned it pretty severely last winter, and it responded by  blooming and fruiting heavily last year and producing a lot of young stems. Today I decided to remove just the two largest canes.

Here’s what the shrub looked like after pruning–notice the two cuts, made diagonally through the stems:

And here’s a detail of the two cut stems, which were made with a handsaw:

Unfortunately we’re due for a storm tomorrow, because I really want to get out there and prune. It makes me feel as if spring will really come.

Winter food

As I’ve explained, I don’t put out bird feeders, but there’s lots of food in my backyard habitat for birds and other critters. This picture shows the berries of coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus), which will remain for most of the winter. Here are also lots of seeds still on the plants, particularly on the Rudbeckias:

These pictures were taken within the last couple of weeks (just before and just after the snow melted). In the middle of this particularly wretched winter, native plants still provide plenty of seeds and other nutritious foods. And the leaf litter serves as shelter for moths and butterflies. I don’t clean up the garden until spring, so all of last summer’s bounty remains to help wildlife get through the winter.

I wish I could capture the bird activity with my camera. It’s continually fascinating.

Hasbrouck Heights Garden Club January 16

I’ll be presenting a talk and slide show on “Easy to Grow Native Plants” this Thursday evening at 7:00 at the Hasbrouck Heights Garden Club. The Garden Club meets in the Hasbrouck Heights Free Public Library at 320 Boulevard.

I’ll also be speaking in Glen Rock, Wyckoff, and at a meeting of the Bergen-Passaic chapter of the Native Plant Society of New Jersey in the near future, among other places. Look for upcoming announcements here.

The deep freeze is good news for the environment

The temperature is supposed hit 32 degrees today, but on Tuesday it topped out at 9 degrees, a reading we are no longer accustomed to. Although in the past we would typically have a day or so with negative readings each winter, that hasn’t happened in over twenty years, and as a result, the environment is changing in many ways. The most obvious example is that we are now considered to be in climate zone 7a, not zone 6b as we used to be.

I wrote recently about some of the ill effects of warming on our local environment. Yesterday’s New York Times presents some hopeful news about the recent freeze: the temperature might have gone low enough to kill off pine bark beetles in the Pinelands and hemlock wooly adelgids in Connecticut. We won’t know for sure until next summer, but the news is good.

And as for me, I’m hoping the deep freeze will result in a smaller crop of baby rabbits next spring. Surely this cold weather wiped out some of those pesky critters.

And even more about monarchs

In several previous posts in this blog I’ve detailed the amazing migration that monarch butterflies undertake each year and described their life cycle. Right now there are six fresh inches of snow on the ground and the temperature is 8 degrees, so I’m thinking about my summer garden and hoping I see more monarchs this coming season than I did last year, when I spotted just a single one. In past years my garden hosted monarchs routinely. They would lay eggs on my milkweed in July during their flight north and nectar on the asters and boltonia during their September flight south. Sometimes, in September especially, there would be a dozen or more on the same plant at the same time.

Over the past decade, monarch populations have declined precipitously because of a number of factors, primarily habitat loss. In the Mexican mountains where the midwestern and east coast monarch populations go for the winter, logging has removed much of the forest. And in the American midwest, because corn prices are way up due to ethanol production, farmers are now plowing under every last bit of land, including remaining bits of prairie that held–you guessed it–milkweed plants. Add to that the use of genetically modified seed that grows herbicide-resistant corn (so farmers can use lots and lots of herbicides to kill all the weeds, including, once again, all the milkweed), and you’ve got an almost extinct butterfly species. In normal years, 450 million monarchs used to spend the winter in Mexico. Last year it was 60 million. This year, it’s 3 million.

Some people are replanting milkweed, as a recent article in the NY Times details. In the Midwest, a large-scale citizen-science project is underway to plant milkweed in backyards. We can all help–monarchs fly along the east coast as well, or used to. Contact Monarch Watch to order a Monarch Waystation seed kit. Or easier still, plant a couple of milkweeds (Asclepias incarnata for wet sites and Asclepias tuberosa for dry sites) and a couple of New England asters (Aster nova-angliae) in a sunny place in the spring. Soon you’ll see gorgeous flowers like these:

You can get another take on this issue in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior. Kingsolver was a biologist before she began writing novels, and this book is a thinly disguised excuse for setting out the results of climate change and habitat loss in fictional form. It describes the social and economic consequences in a small rural community when, for unknown reasons, the entire monarch population overwinters in the Tennessee mountains rather than in Mexico.  An entertaining way to get a good overview of just a few effects of climate change and how scientists study them.

And an in-the-garden-this-week note: once the weather warms up a bit, now is the time to prune woody plants. Believe it or not, they’ll begin to break dormancy by around mid-February, so the next six weeks or so are prime pruning season. Check back soon for more about winter pruning.

On not feeding the birds

This afternoon I spent a pleasant quarter hour watching a small flock of sparrows–I think they’re chipping sparrows, but bird identification is not one of my strengths as a naturalist–feeding in the perennial border right outside my office window. I allow the fallen leaves to remain in place in the flower beds all winter, and they protect lots of overwintering invertebrates and seeds. The tiny sparrows were energetically grabbing and tossing up bunches of leaves to uncover the food below. I am proud to say that I provide these noisy, active creatures with abundant winter food. Throughout the winter, my garden routinely hosts mixed-species foraging flocks of native sparrows, juncos, chickadees, downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, and kinglets. But I don’t attract them by putting up feeders.

I don’t feed birds or other animals directly, although I plant native shrubs, flowering plants, and grasses that serve as natural food and cover. As a result, my yard is full of birds and other wildlife. After a great deal of research I took down my birdfeeders about a decade ago, and I strongly believe that feeding wildlife is harmful to the animals that eat the food, to humans, and to the environment in general. I’ll explain just a few of my reasons for this statement.

Feeding encourages nonnative species

Time and time again, people who feed birds complain about the proliferation of pesky nonnative birds, such as European starlings, pigeons, and sparrows, at their feeders. I see it myself—one of my neighbors, who has a feeder, is troubled by large numbers of pigeons, while the goldfinches and cardinals fly right past his yard and flock to mine. By putting up feeders, you encourage these alien species that outcompete native birds for food and nest space. (And you also attract rats!) By planting native plants and encouraging beneficial insects, you encourage native birds.

Feeding spreads disease

Aside from the problem caused by molds and bacteria that grow in feeders (hummingbird feeders are a prime example of this), the congregating of large numbers of birds at feeders has been shown to spread disease. The house finch, a North American bird that looks like a sparrow dabbed with raspberry juice, had its population plummet because of a devastating eye disease that causes blindness. This disease is spread by the close proximity of birds at feeders. If you watch birds feeding from a natural food source, you will see that they almost never come into very close contact, as they are forced to do at a feeder.

Feeding puts populations at risk

The presence of artificial food sources can cause unnatural increases in populations of certain species, often in areas to which they are not native. For example, mockingbirds now live year-round in this area, whereas they formerly migrated south for the winter. This change in behavior can cause a species to become completely dependent on food provided by humans; if the food is suddenly withdrawn (because you move away or you go away for a week and your feeders remain empty), populations that have become dependent may not survive. If, on the other hand, you provide natural food sources, those sources will remain whether you are here or not.

Feeding concentrates prey and encourages predators

Predators, such as housecats and hawks, are smart. If prey species congregate in one specific area, predators will come around for an easy kill. Because feeders are often placed out in the open, without nearby cover, birds don’t have a chance. When I had a feeder in my yard, a neighbor’s cat was always lurking. Now, although there are many, many birds around, I almost never see cats. In nature, predators have to work hard for a meal. When we make things easy for them, we tilt the balance of nature in their favor.

Feeding tilts the balance of nature

This is really the overriding argument against feeders, in my opinion. Nature is so complicated, predators and prey live in such a delicate, precarious balance, that everything we do has unintended consequences. We just don’t know enough about even our local ecology to justify intervention. For example, many people who feed birds say that if they didn’t, the birds would die in the winter. Yes, some probably would, but that’s natural. It’s natural for animal and plant populations to fluctuate seasonally and over periods of years; that’s how balance is achieved. It’s natural for weak animals to die during a hard winter; that’s how nature ensures that the only the strongest will survive to breed in the spring. By altering this balance to suit ourselves, we help the weak to survive and we artificially tilt the balance of nature. If, however, we encourage wildlife by planting native species they need for food, we help maintain or reinstate that natural balance.

Ecology is a fascinating, bewildering study. It humbles me, because I’m continually discovering how much we don’t yet know! But the more I learn, the surer I become that the only way to improve our environment is to intervene less and, in every thing we do, to aim to restore the balance of nature. And feeding the birds simply doesn’t accomplish that.