If You Plant It, They Will Come

There have been a lot of rats around the house this year and Leon traps them now and then to try to keep the population down. One of the traps he set in the greenhouse disappeared and two days later I heard some shuffling outside my home office window. I said, “Leon, I hear something outside my window here–can you go check?” And he did.

It was a poor young opossum with the rat trap on its toes. Leon set it free and picked it up because it was cute and he had to show me! He then let it go in our woodland garden and it wandered away during the night. We had opossums in the neighborhood when we first moved here 27 years ago. One was living in our crawl space, and Leon picked that one up, too. I’m excited that a creature like this is finding space to exist in our neighborhood.

The summer seemed so extremely hot and dry and was quite miserable from a gardener’s perspective. The ornamentals put on their early show and then fizzled early. The natives are faring better but I have supplemented their water every week or two to be sure I don’t lose any. The summer of 2022 was the driest summer in Seattle’s history. And the fall is dry so far, too–and no rain in the forecast for at least ten more days. I’ve noticed how the western red cedars are putting out far more cones than usual. When plants are stressed one response is to hyper-procreate to try to ensure the survival of the species. I really hope all these trees don’t get sick and die in the near future. The evergreen state feels like the everbrown state lately.

Some of the perennials in my native plant garden have also hyper-procreated (as have some of my relatives, to be sure). I harvested some seeds today and will plant them over the winter solstice holiday break with the native seeds I purchased.

The fluffy seeds are Douglas aster, the tiny ones are large-leaved avens, and the pea pods are large-leaved lupine.

My worries about the thimbleberry divisions were misplaced. They have leafed back out and look fresh and healthy.

My porch-light “mothing” hobby has dwindled a bit with the cooler weather but there are still some fun surprises. Here are some of the gorgeous visitors in the past month.

The most common moths in September were brown-lined loopers and small dusty waves. There have been a few sliver “y” moths, too–one of my favorites. Other beautiful moths are the light brown apple moth, the flame carpet moth, the square-barred bell moth, the gold ribbon argent moth, the thicket knot-horn moth, and the garden rose tortrix moth, whose claim to fame is looking exactly like a splat of bird crap. The small dusty waves are interesting because they come in myriad colors and sizes–from white to grey and with varying numbers of spots. As humans, we are always looking for animals to be easily identifiable. We forget that each of us belongs to the species Homo sapiens and look at how varied we are! Most animals have significant variability in their appearance, too. Inconvenient for identification, but critical to survival and evolution.

The leaf hopper was a tiny, spectacular beauty, Menosoma cincta. The green jewel is the southern green shield bug. And the spider is a surprising one, possibly the Eurasian armored long-jawed spider, a long way from home.

As mentioned in previous posts, skipper butterflies are my favorites and in the last few years, I’ve only ever seen one at a time and only for a day or two all year. There were four, and likely five, skippers flitting around the memory garden today, nectaring on catmint and verbena! I am attributing this to my native-forward landscaping and insect-friendly practices. I went crazy with the phone camera and the macro lens and the little beauties were less photo-shy today.

I hope that these skippers will mate and lay eggs in my garden on the native grasses and next year there will be even more of these bronze beauties.

There were a few other pollinators out today, too.

Of the eight Douglas aster cuttings that I took, seven of them were successful. I potted them into 4″ pots today and moved them outside the greenhouse so they can get used to the weather. These will go into the garden in late September or early October when the rains have returned, and one is destined for a pot in Dean and Brian’s yard in Happy Valley. The red-flowered currant and ocean spray cuttings seem less far along and likely less successful. I will leave them in their starting pots until spring and then pot them on.

As I worked in the garden and greenhouse today I listened to David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet. He has been a favorite of mine for a long time and this audible book is good to hear while working in a native garden–rewilding is one of the calls to action. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has kids or grandkids and cares about the future of humans on this planet or preserving the other life on this planet. It is not joyful or fun to hear about all the missteps humans have made since the dawn of man, but Attenborough provides a map for a better future during this narrow window of time when changes could still make a difference.

In a previous blog, I showed the Elymus grass that had turned brown and I cut the whole bunch of them down. It seemed dramatic and dangerous at the time. As so often happens, however, Mother Nature was nonplussed.

The native plant garden isn’t pretty, perfect, or full of flowers. The goal is for it to be attractive to bugs and birds and mammals. And someday, amphibians and reptiles. So, it doesn’t have to look good to me or to any neighbors. I’m happy if it is just interesting to people so they ask questions. There is a lot of space still in my little garden that doesn’t have plants at all. Some of the seedlings and starts are just putting on their first year of growth this year. They are plants that people don’t normally see in a standard garden–things like Puget gumweed, Oregon sunshine, checker mallow, native grasses, fireweed, columbine, dock, nettle, and lupine.

Here are some photos of those little investments in the native future.

There are parts of the garden that are lovely to me (even though that doesn’t matter, of course!). This little shady corner has some happy natives with beautiful leaves.

Luckily, I’m not the only one who finds something of interest in this little corner. Look at all the holes in the large-leaved avens foliage! Excellent! So much foliage entering the food web!

In my last post, I mentioned that the butterflies in my garden have been visiting non-native plants. The butterflies are not the only nectar- and pollen-hungry bugs that are feasting in the garden.

In the spring there seemed to be a shortage of bees and flies among the flowers. It was concerning. As the weather has warmed up, however, it has become clear that there are more native pollinators than ever.

Below are some photos and videos of pollinators I’ve seen this year. They are not easy to capture, especially on the warm days we’ve been having lately.

I got a couple of videos of pollinators on native plants, too, which makes me so happy!

The summer native plant propagation project is going well. However, it might have been a mistake to dig up a bunch of thimbleberry suckers in late July. There are about eight divisions, most with excellent roots. They shriveled up right after potting on and look awful right now. Hopefully, they’ll snap out of it in the coming weeks.

Other new cuttings include some ocean spray starts that I stripped from a shrub that was overgrowing the sidewalk on the North Seattle College campus and was destined to be pruned. Similarly, I grabbed a few native willow cuttings from the same sidewalk. Willows are proving particularly challenging for me even though they will root in water. They don’t seem to transfer well to the soil in pots and even worse to the soil in the garden. I found a stand of goldenrod in a ditch nearby and I took four cuttings of those, as well. They were part of a native plant restoration that had gotten a bit wild so I am assuming it is a native species. I’ll confirm that if they root and leaf out.

My favorite success so far is the Douglas aster experiment. It looks like all of the cuttings I took from my overgrown aster colony have rooted well and are ready to pot on into bigger pots. This is a much faster way to get adult aster plants–it takes a full year from seed to get them even close to this size.

All of the red-flowered currant cuttings are still green and appear to be rooted. My only regret is that I didn’t strike more cuttings of everything. Next year, I’ll know better.

There are many bigger and showier butterflies around Seattle but skippers are still my favorites. In my childhood, they represented the ultimate test of steady hand and speed when I would sneak up on them and catch them by pinching their wings between my thumb and forefinger. Not my proudest conservation moment, but it brought me joy at the time and the captives all flew away.

When I was in the garden on a hot, sunny day this weekend, I saw the first skipper of the year on a non-native aster in my memory garden.

Here is the drama queen of the local butterflies, the western swallowtail. This one is on another non-native plant, the perennial phlox near our driveway. There aren’t enough native plants blooming in my yard yet to attract these butterflies, but maybe next year.

It seems like moths contribute a lot more to local food webs than their glamorous butterfly cousins. The number of moths in the garden this year is impressive. I’m not sure if there are really more moths or if I’m just noticing them more because I’m obsessed with them this year. Below are some recent moth discoveries here at the house.

Moth names are fun, too:

Common rustic, brown-lined looper, fruit tree tortrix, garden rose tortrix, dusky raisin, tissue, four-spotted yellow neck, small gray, common pug, vagabond sod, oak lantern, holly tortrix, hedge rustic, privet twist, thicket knot-horn, shy cosmet, small dusty wave, single-dotted wave, cork moth, and maple looper are a few names of those pictured above.

I enjoy growing native plants from seeds. It can be pretty slow, though. Cuttings are a faster way. July is usually a good month to take shrub and perennial cuttings.

Today, I took a tray full of red-flowered currant cuttings. In addition, I took cuttings of my osoberry and the salmonberry plants in the native plant garden. Lastly, I decided to see if Douglas aster cuttings will strike this time of year.

There are other opportunities for propagation in the native plant garden–the large-leaved avens has a lot of seed heads on it and will produce thousands of seeds this year. The thimbleberry and native roses are spreading all over the place and I can pot up the suckers in the autumn. The roses are putting on quite a show right now and the thimbleberry has some berries coming for the first time.

I added the iNaturalist Seek app to my phone this week and started using it to identify insects and plants and it is AMAZING! If the photo is good enough, the app seems very capable of identifying all the insects and plants.

Here was a tough one that I never thought the app would recognize. But Seek rose to the challenge! Meet the diminutive Black-smudged Chionodes Moth!

My favorite food-growing podcaster, Kevin Espiritu, had a series of pods about native gardening this past week. Please find his excellent podcast here and the interesting 101 about growing natives.

My own native plant garden has been very much on its own the last month or so as I’ve been traveling and not around to help out or even notice much. Over the last few days, I’ve made up for lost time trying to get my seedlings organized and photographing the garden.

Unfortunately, the large Elymus plants making up the base of my home prairie were looking sad. They were either diseased, stressed, or just unattractive. I decided to cut them back and give them a chance to come back green and healthy. The added benefit to cutting them back is that I removed the seeds before they ripened (I hope) so won’t have as many volunteers around the garden next spring. There are hundreds of seedlings that came up from last year’s seeds, already, and that is probably enough Elymus for now.

Here are some highlights from the native garden this spring.

I’ve spent hours and hours transplanting native seedlings this weekend, including the above Sidalceas and below salmon berries. The large trays include Puget gumweed, Erigeron speciosa, and Oregon sunshine.

The native plant garden that makes up my Homegrown National Park site still looks pretty empty. Despite this, there is a lot of great growth and seeding happening in that garden that pleases me and speaks to the garden not only being able to sustain the plants that I’ve placed there but that new plants will be generated that can be potted up and given away to neighbors and friends.

Here are some updated photos of the native plants.

I purchased a new light that is supposed to be better for moth attracting but it has had limited success. We had a beautiful tissue moth below on our doorbell this week.

My favorite evening ritual is to check the porch area on my way to bed for moths and bugs that help confirm that natural food webs are still occurring outside our house. Last week, I saw the first moths of 2022.

There are a few native flowers in the native plant garden this month, too, including Oregon grape, osoberry, and native ginger.

While looking for videos on locally native plants, I stumbled on the course videos for a Western Washington University professor, T. Abe Lloyd. His videos are very informative and charming. Find some HERE.

We spent a long weekend up at the cabin in Tonasket. There weren’t many flowers in bloom, but the scenery was beautiful. Winter was hanging on tenaciously there and it snowed one day for a couple of hours. The sage buttercups were bravely blooming. I photographed some ponderosa pine trunks just to show the beauty/brightness of their trunks. And one dead tree that was obviously a woodpecker favorite with remarkable neon lichen (wolf lichen) on its decaying branches. Lots of sky photos and meadow views with the aspen grove.

Many of my native flora seed pots are on the shelf just outside my home office window. Despite their proximity to the house they see a lot of curious activity from wildlife including wrens, jays, towhees, sparrows, rats, and squirrels. I’m honestly not sure if there are any seeds left in some of those pots.

We have a crow couple that we’ve been feeding for seven or eight years–Half Beak and her beau. Daily, Half-Beak lands on one so the stone sculptures in the garden that is clearly visible to anyone in the living room (usually Leon). When we see her, we pass treats to her by dropping them in the driveway or on the porch–dog food or chicken or whatever we have handy.

Leon left town for the better part of a week and the crows must have gotten hungry because suddenly Half Beak found me in my home office and threw a little tantrum looking for some food.

Her tantrum involved removing tags from my native plant seeds.

Sometimes, when you plant it, they come…before the seeds have even germinated!