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Get more native plants at the Regional Market
Sept. 24
Pippi's Perennials has generously offered to donate part of the proceeds of their plant sales on Saturday Sept. 24 to HGCNY.
Pippi's is in Shed D, Stalls 10 and 12 from 7 am to 2 pm.
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HGCNY Plant sale -
a success!
Profits from our plant sale keep this newsletter free to all! (There is a monthly fee for using this Constant Contact service.)
Thank you to all of you who donated plants and bought plants.
Thank you also to our sponsors who provided plants on consignment or for advance purchase:
The Plantsmen
Amanda's Garden
Maple Hill Nursery
Pippi's Perennials
White Oak Nursery
Also, thank you to the people who helped out on organizing and running the sale:
John Allen and Randi Starmer (the Plant Sale Committee) Sylvia Albrecht
Carol Biesemeyer Linda Rossiter |
| HGCNY on Facebook |
As as more of us participate on our Facebook page, this will become a useful resource for asking (and answering!) local HGCNYers' questions about habitat gardening. Join in what can become a very useful conversation about habitat gardening in Central New York.
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Leaves
by Sara Stein
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| Fall leaves remaining in the spring, decomposing to make beautiful soil
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Recall, before laying down a mulch of pine bark, that each bush or tree is accustomed to a cover of its own dead leaves below it, and so are the decayers that refeed it.
Keep a compost pile for kitchen wastes and cornstalks, but remember that fallen leaves, dead stems, and pulled weeds left in place supply a steadier source of humus than a once-in-a-springtime dole of rotted compost.
~ Sara Stein, Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards, p. 135
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| Our Habitat Garden |  |
Visit Our Habitat Garden website for information on providing habitat, earth-friendly gardening practices, plants, and various creatures here in Central New York. |
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Join HGCNY!
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Becoming an official member of HGCNY is easy: just join Wild Ones! When you're a Wild Ones member, you're automatically an official member of HGCNY. |
| Interested in Edible Gardening? | 
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If you'd like to get information on Edible Gardening CNY, just send an email to John to find out about edible gardening tours and programs.
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Greetings!
 | An excellent resource
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September program: DON LEOPOLD
Ecology of Natural Plant Communities in Upstate New York
We're excited to start our program year IN OUR NEW LIVERPOOL LIBRARY VENUE with popular speaker Donald Leopold, SUNY-ESF professor and author of Native Plants of the Northeast.
Dr. Leopold will discuss the distribution and abundance of plant species, the basic ecology underlying many of the plant communities in Upstate New York, and plant species relative to specific environmental conditions. He'll highlight a number of projects that incorporate these ideas and suggest how home gardeners could apply these principles to their own landscapes.
Free and open to the public. Bring a friend!
WHEN: Sun., Sept. 25 at 2 p.m.
WHERE: Liverpool Library (NOT Le Moyne)
(Directions to the library)
Note the NEW venue for our meetings!! The Le Moyne College Library's Special Activity Room has been a wonderful venue for our meetings for the last few years. Thank you to Beth Mitchell for arranging for us to use it until we outgrew it!
We'll now be meeting at Liverpool Public Library in the Carman Room.
Janet
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NOW is the time! SEPTEMBER 17 - 26 Fall into Phenology is a 10-day campaign from Sept. 17-26 asking people all over the continent to note what plants are doing as the seasons change. It's easy to participate, and should take only about 10 minutes after you register.
The more people participating across the country, the better the geographic coverage and the more useful the data is to scientists.
Teachers and parents: This is a very doable project that can be an enjoyable and important learning experience.
And what exactly IS phenology?
Phenology is literally "the science of appearance." It is the study of the timing of the biological events in plants and animals such as flowering, leafing, hibernation, reproduction, and migration. Scientists who study phenology are interested in the timing of such biological events in relation to changes in season and climate. Read more from Project Budburst... |
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Using all those leaves
Here in the Northeast, we're fortunate to have an abundance of magnificent trees and shrubs -- many of which shed their leaves in the fall. We've grown up in an era where the "logical" thing to do was to rake them up, bag them up, and put them out to the curb.
Then we as taxpayers pay dearly to send out our town employees in big trucks and payloaders to scoop up these lightweight leaves, take them to a central location, and turn them into mulch.
Another "logical" solution of the past was to burn leaves. Even though the smell of burning leaves may bring back fond childhood memories, this practice has long been shown to be both an air pollution and a health hazard, especially for children, seniors, and anyone with breathing problems. Besides, it just doesn't make sense to have such a useful resource go up in smoke!
Leaves aren't waste
It's not difficult to take care of our own leaves on our own properties. Not only does it avoid having an army of big polluting, expensive trucks roaming our neighborhoods, but it creates an invaluable resource for your habitat garden: leaf humus.
It's easy to turn leaves into humus
 | | Columbine poking up through the leaves in spring |
1) The easiest way is simply to let leaves lie where they fall. This won't work with lawn, of course, but just as in nature, plants can overwinter with a covering of leaves just fine. In the spring, you can either remove some of the leaves or just let the plants poke through by themselves. (Some young or very small plants might need some help if there's very thick leaf cover.) A bonus is that your soil becomes better and better each year with no expense and no work.
2) For lawn areas, you can use a mulching mower to grind them up and just let them stay on the lawn as free fertilizer.
3) Of course, a chipper/shredder can grind up vast quantities of leaves. Shredded leaves make excellent mulch and will decompose quick quickly. The disadvantages of this method are the work of doing this, the expense of buying the machine, and the pollution created.
 | Our leaf barrels in two sizes
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4) Perhaps the easiest way to use your leaves is to make "barrels" of 3- or 4-foot fencing and just pile them in. In couple of years, you'll have beautiful leaf humus with no work at all. (If you want to speed up the process, turn them occasionally.) And you'll need less space than you might think. That large pile of fluffy leaves "cooks down" quite quickly.
Design idea: Make a leaf fence You can make use of those barrels of leaves to create a compost fence or even a living fence. Just make the barrels slimmer and line them up, fence-like. They can even be used as vertical planters by replenishing the leaves as they decompose. (For details, see video below.) Fun for kids: Make a leaf fort Another use for these leaf barrels is to create an free-form enclosure for kids to play in. For more info: * A nice 2-minute video from the New England Wildflower Society (NEWFS) on making these leaf barrels * A how-to article from NEWFS on leaf column construction * How we handle leaves in Our Habitat Garden |
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Here's how to ID that unusual bug
 | | Tebenna moth, a tiny 3mm moth, identified by BugGuide.net volunteers |
As you start enjoying your habitat garden, you're likely to start noticing some of the small creatures that help make the world go 'round: insects.
Not only are these creatures essential to a healthy world, but you'll find many of them to be quite fascinating and often beautiful.
But it helps to put a name to a "face." Here's where BugGuide.net comes in. The site is volunteer-run, but hosted by Iowa State University.
Here's their own description of their site:
We are an online community of naturalists who enjoy learning about and sharing our observations of insects, spiders, and other related creatures. More than just a clearinghouse for information, this site helps expand on the natural histories of our subjects. By capturing the place and time that submitted images were taken, we are creating a virtual collection that helps define where and when things might be found. We capture never before seen behaviors and we have photos of species that you won't find anywhere else on the web. How to use the site One way to identify an insect is to simply explore the photos of insects already submitted. Another way is to submit your own photo of your unidentified visitor. After creating an account (a very easy process), I've submitted a number of photos of insects for identification. I've been amazed at how quickly I get a response, and now I can put a name to the "face" of the insects I've found in my habitat garden. |
 Dinky yellow flags
Sandra Steingraber is a biologist, cancer survivor, and mother. She's also the author of Living Downstream (recently made into a documentary), Having Faith, and her latest book, Raising Elijah. (She also happens to be a professor at Ithaca College.)
As she notes in her latest newsletter:
The Canadian and U.S. governments have the same scientific evidence available to them--indeed much of the data on children's exposure to pesticides and its possible contribution to pediatric brain tumors were generated on this side of the border. So why have so many jurisdictions in one nation chosen, as a response to that data, abolition of cosmetic pesticides while jurisdictions in the other rely on dinky yellow flags? As Steingraber says, "Benefit of the doubt goes to children, not to chemicals." Read her whole essay ... |
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