Designing with Native Plants Symposium
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Ithaca's 2nd Annual Designing with Native Plants Symposium will present theory and
practice to inform and inspire landscape architects, designers, land managers, horticulturists,
gardeners, and homeowners using native plants to create more sustainable landscapes.
| March 5-6 at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology
Register early for either or both days. This popular event was sold out last year!
For more information and to register...
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Our newsletters
are now archived
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| If you've missed any of our previous newsletters or just want to check a resource described in a past newsletter, just go to our homepage at www.hgcny.org and find all our previous newsletters.
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The Garden in Winter
by
Eric Grissell
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The easiest part of the gardening year, at least for many of us, is winter. There are books on winter gardening, and I politely chose to ignore them altogether. There is little I can or want to do in my freezing garden beteween November and March. All the same, a good garden should provide shelter for all overwintering insects. A good basic design might interweave the entire garden with dwarf conifers and evergreen shrubs... These plants provide numerous protected places such as twigs and dead leaves on the ground to serve as overwintering sites for all those insects we so desperately want to keep in our gardens. And we especially need to have the predators and parasitoids ready to spring forth to feast on all the plant-feeding insects. The worst possible scenario we gardeners create with our bare-earth policy is that of decoupling the predators and parasitoids from their prey. We don't want to race into gardening season having to battle the tides of imbalance, there is enough to do already.
From Insects and Gardens, p. 248
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Greetings!
We're pleased to have Kate Woodle, art director of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo at Burnet
Park, present our next program Build It and They Will Come: Gardening with Native Plants. Kate has been the key person in creating the zoo's extensive
habitat garden, an example of a natural landscape providing habitat for local
wildlife. Right from the start, this garden has successfully provided habitat for an ever-increasing number of birds, amphibians, and beneficial insects.
WHEN: Sunday February 28 at 2:00 pm
WHERE: Le Moyne College Library Special Activity Room (Directions)
Our meetings are free and open to the public. Come and bring a friend!
And don't miss the Designing with Native Plants Symposium (info at left) in Ithaca. Last year's event was sold out, so register soon for either one day or both.
Janet Allen, President
Habitat Gardening in Central New York
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 STARTS THIS COMING FRIDAY!
The 13th Annual GBBC Feb. 12-15
Last year, participants of the GBBC, a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon, sponsored by Wild Birds Unlimited, found 619 species of birds and broke two major records. They submitted 93,629 checklists and tallied 11,550,200 birds--a 9% increase in checklist submissions over the last record, and a new high for numbers of birds counted.
The results are important for scientists, but anyone can explore the results from any of the previous years. There are animated maps, top 10 lists, and more. Explore the results yourself!
It's one of the easiest citizen science programs around. In as little as 15 minutes during the Friday through Monday time period, you observe birds in your yard, a local park, or other locations and report what you see. You don't have to be an expert. There are identification tips on the website, but if you can't identify a bird, simply note that you're not including all the birds you saw. Your data will join thousands of other people's submissions to add to a database that becomes more valuable each year.
The instructions tell you all you need to participate, and there's an FAQ section, too.
Got kids? Here are some fun activities for them online. Make the GBBC an annual family tradition!
Read more...
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How butterflies overwinter
 People are familiar with the monarch butterfly's incredible journey to Mexico where the adult butterflies overwinter. But this is unusual. What do the other butterflies do?
Note the twig-like object attached to the stick in the photo It's a black swallowtail pupa. Swallowtails overwinter in this stage of their development, emerging as adult butterflies in the spring.
Some, such as the Clouded Sulphur may overwinter either as a caterpillar or as a pupa.
Some butterflies in the same family may overwinter in different stages. For example, the Banded Hairstreak overwinters as an egg, but the Gray Hairstreak as a pupa; the Spring Azure as a pupa, but the Eastern Tailed Blue as a caterpillar.
The Mourning Cloak, Question Mark, and Comma all overwinter as adults. Where? In protected crevices, such as under the loose bark of trees, in a woodpile, or beneath a rock. If the temperature reaches 60F, they may emerge and fly around even in the winter! By spring they're fairly old for a butterfly, so they may look pretty tattered when you first see them.
The American Painted Lady, Painted Lady, and Red Admiral butterflies also overwinter as adults, but not in the north. Our population is replenished by spring migrants.
Great Spangled Fritillaries hatch in the fall, eat their eggshell, then become inactive for the winter. However, the Viceroys and White Admirals overwinter as small caterpillars encased in a "hibernaculum" - a rolled-up leaf attached to a twig. In spring they resume their development as caterpillars.
The next time you look out at our wintry landscape, picture all the eggs, caterpillars, pupae, and adult butterflies waiting for spring under all that cold and snow!
Information from Stokes Butterfly Book by Donald and Lillian Stokes
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Invasives: To Pull or Not?
by Jim Engel
 There it was just off the trail! I spotted it from a good 30 feet away. I thought about walking on, but when would I be back this way again? I wondered to myself, how many people had passed this way without knowing, innocently unaware of the future danger to this pristine place? I stopped. My wife and friends continued walking. It wasn't very large, but it was well anchored in the gravelly soil, tucked in between two maple roots. I didn't have gloves to protect my hands from the spines, so I gently gripped the larger stems and pulled several times. The roots finally released their hold, and I had in my hands the remains of a Japanese barberry.
Read more of Jim's adventure ...
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Composting in Winter
It can be a mighty long walk to the compost pile in the winter - and once you deposit your food scraps, they're not likely to decompose very quickly.
There's a simple solution to this problem, though: compost inside with worms!
This kind of composting, called vermicomposting, produces compost even more nutrient-rich than conventional outdoor compost since it incorporates worm castings (i.e. poop).
 Photo: Adding food to the worm binIt may sound yucky, but once you get your system going, it's surprisingly easy and not yucky at all. Since the worms are decomposing the food scraps, it doesn't smell - really! And the worms are content to stay in their bins, so you won't find any worms wandering around the house. Some people even keep their worm compost bin in their kitchen or living room (though we definitely confine ours to the basement). In the approximately 10-12 years we've been worm composting, we've avoided sending about 3 tons of food scraps to the landfill or down the drain. What's more, we've created rich vermicompost for our vegetable garden. All in all, a wonderful return on a small investment of time. Read more about worm composting... The library also has multiple copies of the "wormld-famous" book Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof. Highly recommended! It will answer all your questions. Email us if you'd like some worms to get your worm farm going. |
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