Do I bother YOU when you’re eating?

 1- Residential Habitats -- Critters and Their Homes  No Responses »
Dec 022010
 
Anna's Hummingbird
Male Anna's Hummingbird

A male Anna's hummingbird at our back deck.

Garden Log:

1. Not much in the garden today, on this near-winter day.  A brief hello while moving our 4 small potted citrus under a jasmine vine thatch along the deck lattice.

2. Divided up the kitchen washbasin water between the  citrus, avocado, and paw paw tree pots.  All the trees are young and small.  The 4 avocado and 4 paw paw are patiently waiting to be unpotted and are residing in Anna’s Avocado Aviary alongside are back deck.

You the Habitat Gardener:

1. Our back deck has lattice along one side to increase privacy from the next door neighbors.  Then, we planted jasmine at the base of the deck to grow on the lattice — awesome privacy,  EVERGREEN plants and beautiful, fragrant flowers.  Great cover for brave nest-building birds, wasps, and spiders.  Habitat!  Nowadays the jasmine could use a trim, but I knew there was a reason I didn’t get to it.  Okay you young citrus trees in pots, wanting to escape the night’s frost, hide under here.  So the citrus pots were pushed up against the lattice wall and are tucked under the overhanging jasmine thatch.  The frost, which falls straight down, will fall directly below the canopy line of the jasmine and won’t leaf damage the citrus.  Mission accomplished and I didn’t have to move the trees and cover them with a sheet elsewhere.

Jasmine Gondola Apartments alongside back deck

Jasmine Gondola Apartments alongside back deck. Since this pic (last March), the jasmine has grown much thicker. The citrus are resting comfy tonight up against the lattice, protected by the jasmine vine thatch overhead. The empty gourds hanging in the jasmine thatch provide shelter for spiders, crawling insects, and wasps.

2. Our Sunset zone here in Sebastopol, California is 15.  Pretty cushy weather-wise.  Dry summers with morning fog, cool winters with some frosting, almost no snow.  So we are going to grow avocado and paw paw (the largest native North American friut, native to east of the Mississippi).  Frost protection, especially during the trees’ young years will help them get to the old years.  And some work may be worth it — both tree species deliver exceptional fruit and the trees are long-lived and attractive.

In order to more easily throw a tarp above the trees, they will be planted alongside our back deck.  The deck structure will enable an easy secure point to toss a tarp above the trees.  Note that I say “above” and not “on”.  The covering, whether it be a sheet of cloth or plastic, should not rest on the trees wood or foliage.  If touching like that, the cold above the tarp will transfer through the covering directly to the tree.  So the key is to provide a covering AND an air space above it.  And because I envision an aisle of avocado, paw paw, guava, and honeysuckle, all in bloom some day, the habitat is called Anna’s Avocado Aviary.  Anna’s frequent our garden, even beyond the hummer feeder that hangs on the back deck.

Anna's Avocado Aviary alongside deck lattice frame.

Anna's Avocado Aviary alongside deck lattice frame. The area was chosen because a frost-protecting tarp can be easily spanned, on especially cold nights, from the high lattice wall over to the honeysuckle trellis. The large potted trees alongside the deck are avocado, the smaller are paw paw.

A closeup of Anna’s Avocado Avairy’s guest of honor:

male Anna's hummingbird at feeder

A male Anna's hummer wants to know, "Do I bother YOU when you're eating?"

That’s all folks!

Tony

Happy Thanksgiving weekend AND Saving a Pond

 1- Residential Habitats -- Critters and Their Homes  No Responses »
Nov 272010
 
Salamander Sunny Swimhole remodelled and flushed

Happy Thanksgiving weekend all!

So nice to have a little more focus on what we have to be grateful for.

Garden Log:

1. Emptied the kitchen compost into the Earthworm Bin.

2. Emptied the kitchen wash basin onto Salamander Resort.

3. Removed leaves and sunken oak wedge from Salamander Sunny Swimhole, the pond over Salamander Resort.  Flushed pond water.

4. Potted red currant and jostaberry starts that were saved during the demolition of Rock Pile Planter.

5. Photographed what was a caterpillar yesterday and is a pupa today.  Just outside our front door, where the sun’s warmth is wind-sheltered, a caterpillar was crawling along the siding yesterday.  In just about the same space today — “You haven’t gotten very far Little One, have you?”  Well duh!  That caterpillar may be there all winter.  In fact, it’s not even a caterpillar any more.  It’s a chrysalis, attached to the siding with a sticky silk ball.

Butterfly chrysalis on wood siding.

Butterfly chrysalis on wood siding.

Close-up of butterfly chrysalis

Close-up of butterfly chrysalis. Yesterday it was a plump, cylindrical, light-green, soft-skinned caterpillar. Today it is forming angular, hard ridges (natural I-beams) and a dark, thick crust.

You the Habitat Gardener:

1. The nights are getting chilly, even for cold-blooded invertebrates.  I like to use planty of straw in the Earthworm Bin to keep it well insulated and to create a compost-breaking-down situation.  All the die-hard microbes will generate heat, that will allow the straw and kitchen food to breakdown (from the microbes, of course), which puts off still more heat.  The bottom will fall out of this Pyramid Scheme when we run out of kitchen scraps to add to the compost — “Quick!, gather up those rotten fallen apples and feed them to the worms.”

2. The Salamander Resort, our 6-foot-deep habitat hole/cavern/rock, wood, and soil pile, still has an unplanted surface.  Intense soil making for now.  The surface has been covered with different layers of organics, including manure soil, oak leaves, wood chips, magnolia leaves, straw.  Great place to dump the kitchen washbasin, which is considered blackwater.  “Blackwater” is a notch more ecologically volatile than greywater because of either sewage (toilet) or food particles from the kitchen sink.  Sewage or food — all the same to a microbe.  So for our garden, we purposefully wash our dishes in a half bucket, let it cool, then dump it in non-food areas or on the ground being careful to stay away from any leafage or root crops.  Food particles and nitrogen-based “Earth-friendly” soap.  [Pill Bug to his family]: “Soup’s on!”  When in doubt, spread any greywater/kitchen water around then garden so you won’t drastically inundate any one plant.  And don’t forget to save the bottom of the wash basin for one of your favorite plants.  “Who will get all this yummy oatmeal flake- and baked eggplant polenta-infused water today?  Who’s been good?”

3. My heart broke this week.  All the hard work I did to set up a cooler-than-cool pond habitat in Salamander Sunny Swimhole turned out to be a flop.  A cold snap, with some nights as low as 26 degrees (well, after all, this is sunny California!) set in and forced a lot of falling leaves.  Between the shorter days of low-angled sun, the flood of organics falling out of the air (leaves), and the lower temps, the half-barrel pond ecosystem could not keep up.  Murky water filled with fallen leaves AND a touch of “oil slick” on the surface.  It was the slick that told me this pond is going anaerobic — it’s being starved of oxygen.  All the precious muck that I saved during the the relocation plus the current conditions were just too much for it to keep up, for it to recycle life from the decaying matter being quickly added to it.  A note about the shiny, multicolored slick:  it’s a sign that there’s too high a concentration of nitrogen in the water, usually from muck on the bottom.

Sure, there’s some lesson to be learned here about our pond that went flop.  But the bigger picture lesson I want to convey is how freeing it is to learn from a mistake and to feel the satisfaction of having corrected it.  My heart broke not because the pond wasn’t working.  My heart broke because I was WRONG.  Don’t you just hate that!  I was so jazzed to include a neat piece of wood (a freshly cut oak wedge with rotted out holes) when setting up the pond.  What design, what art!  All my visions of tadpoles and other aquatic critters meandering through the wood’s passages, perhaps escaping a foraging raccoon, gone up in smoke.  How couldn’t this be Paradise?

Daily cleaning out of some of the fallen magnolia leaves postponed more effective action.  Luckily, I was smart enough to finally give up the ghost and hauled the wood wedge out of the pond.  Smelly!  Foulness that bespoketh rotteneth (Old English, so old that they may not even know about it).  Clearly an inorganic situation, AKA anaerobic, going on in the pond.  How cool once the wood wedge was out.  More water could be added to make up for the displaced wood.  Also, I was able to scoop out leaves and muck more easily.  Then I gave the pond a good flushing with fresh water.

Be careful when flushing a pond, especially if you are flushing with city water which might contain health-related additives in it.  Those additives, like fluorine and chlorine, will bubble out if you let them sit overnight.  But straight from the city-water hose to the pond in an excessive amount might overwhelm some critters and kill them.  But back to Tony’s state-of-the-art foul pond.  For our pond, it was already foul, so I flushed it, flushed it, and then flushed it some more.   Hey, we’re starting over, both me and the pond.  The pond will recoup and achieve it’s ecosystem.  I will find something to be right about, again, some day.

Stay posted — I’ll post a pic of the pond’s success as it comes.

Tony

Chapter 5 (“Resources” by Anita Smith) — page one

 5- Resources for You, Your Neighborhood, and Beyond  No Responses »
Nov 242010
 

Chapter 5 (by Anita Smith)

Resources for You, Your Neighborhood, and Beyond

One need not sit very long nowadays with unanswered questions about the garden, the environs surrounding it, anything, really.  There is so much information available.  In fact, the real challenge might not be finding information on a subject, but rather acting, doing, or creating.  Regarding your garden, eventually you will want to take a leap, and what better place than in the garden.

-Tony McGuigan

Introduction

Has Tony’s passion or sense of humor infected you yet?  What Tony’s doing in the garden and offering the world through his writing, I believe, is unique.  Watch out, his perspective and playful approach is contagious!  By this point in the book I bet that you’ve at least smiled and giggled some.  I hope you’ve felt your heart expand and warm, and your childlike excitement and curiosity about the natural world reignite.  I hope you’ve also been touched by hope; a sense of hope about the possibilities for a more healthy, equitable, and sustainable way of living.  There are countless things we can do—no matter who we are or where we live—to make the world a better place for everyone and all life on this precious blue orb.  The resources in this chapter are intended to help further tantalize and support you on your journey.

There are a few things I want to mention before jumping into this offering of resources for You, Your Neighborhood, and Beyond.  First, I’m operating on several assumptions here.  One is that biodiversity is a good thing.  The more biodiversity on the planet—on our continents, in our watersheds, and around our homes—the better.  It’s like having a well-stocked toolkit for keeping things running smoothly and fixing things when they break.  There are, of course, some ecosystems that naturally have lower biodiversity than others and have evolved unique and intricately balanced dynamics.  As a dominant species though, we’ve done WAY too good a job of messing with those dynamics nearly everywhere on the planet, and we have significantly and alarmingly reduced Earth’s biodiversity in the process.  If everything is indeed connected—as nature shows us it surely is and many wise people have intoned—then that diminishment of biodiversity is bound to plague us.  We would be wise to proactively address this rather than ignore it or wish it away.  Recent advances in the study of human ecology, specifically reconciliation ecology, are part of the resource toolkit we can draw upon to help inform our proactive response.  Reconciliation ecology is the science of inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work or play.

For more of Anita’s chapter,  Resources for You, Your Neighborhood, and Beyond, see Tony’s book, Habitat It And They Will Come .

Cheers.

Tony

Wicking Pots AND Huckleberry Trunk Split Repair

 2- Food Forest Gardening  No Responses »
Oct 222010
 

Garden Log:

  1. Fed Mexican lime, Kaffir lime, and Lemon Guava kitchen scraps before mulching with earthworm harvest, wood chips, granular spore, and a sprinkle of water.
  2. Chop and drop throughout the back garden.
  3. dock and comfry grown for "chop and drop"

    Western Fence Lizard Liar with dock (left) and comfry (back right) grown for "chop and drop". Insects will come to eat the red currant berries (taller green plants alongside slate) and lizards from the rockpile habitat will feast on the insects.

    Wood chip mulched Hister Beetle Huckleberry Habitat, apple and pear trees, and Sea Lion Splash’s kiwi vine.

  4. Harvested white clover mulch from under Norwegian Hill Basket to seed/mulch Salamander Redwood Lodge with white clover.
  5. Digging in SSSC’s Lower Chamber, slowly but surely. Lined waiting toilet tanks with cardboard over holes in bottom. Filled tanks with wood chip.
  6. Prepared 15 gallon tubs with layered alfalfa and clay from SSSC. Tubs stored near Earthworm Box and will be used to mix material into box contents. Also layered 15 gallon tubs under deck that wick water to jasmine and grape; top layer is adobe so rotting alfalfa does not stink too bad.
  7. Tied string around split trunk of huckleberry.

To you, the Habitat Gardener:

  1. About those 15 gallon nursery pots used to wick water (#6, above), that’s my solution to not having drip irrigation EVERYWHERE. Sure, everywhere would be most efficient, but I do wallow in procrastination at times. The wicking pots, also provide a place to make poor soil good soil, as the mulch breaks down AND it’s habitat. All that soil/clay/mulch/wood chips/water — you know there’s a multicultural neighborhood going in those pots.
  2. “Chop and Drop” (#2, above) is about carbon farming — plants grown for their ability to harness the sun’s energy and turn it into green leafage.  Both the comfrey and the dock in your garden can be grown “as weeds”, leafing out wherever you want to build soil.  The plant grows, you chop it down, NOT PULL IT OUT.  That dock or comfrey plant will grow back, you will chop it again, Pete and repeat.  The beauty of your labor will be making soil.  As the plant grows, it will send out roots.  Chop to ground level, and those roots die back AND, in the process of dieing back, leave organic matter in your soil.  Not only has the plant busted its root down into the soil, but also it will leave some of the water and organic matter in it behind when the above-surface life is cut from it.  And even better, the comfrey will also nitrogen fix the soil.  In other words, the rhizomes clinging to the comfrey roots will release nitrogen into the soil when the root dies back.   Emphasis on “when” there because most gardeners that grow comfrey as companion plants in their gardens don’t realize that significantly more nitrogen is released when the rhizome dies back.  Chop to the ground, release nitrogen to the subsoil, mulch the surface with the nitrogen-rich leaves, and know that that comfrey plant will thrive again, to be chopped again.  You might want to get to the comfrey before it goes to seed; controlling the rhizome spreading plant is challenging enough.  Also note that the comfrey is a very medicinally useful plant.  As for dock, the very young (inner) leaves are tasty raw by themselves and in salads.  Don’t forget that mega salad you’ve got growing in the back of the garden, AKA “the compost pile” — dock greens are a great way to jumpstart the pile.
  3. For huckleberry trunk repair (#7, above), I used 1/2 of garden twine (knotted one end and split the string open) to create a thin strand that will decay by the time the plant is ready to bust loose from the bondage. I had thought that the huckleberry shrub was dying from a water issue but then found that the trunk was split during planting. Since planting this spring, the wound seems to have healed partially and the plant has bulked up — it’s going to live! The berries will be enjoyed by many critters, including me and the birds. Check out the pics to today’s repair job for that split huckleberry trunk below or at: BEFORE and AFTER.

Save a life (yes, plants count), enjoy a berry or two.

Tony

Watered Clay AND Chicken Haven coop

 1- Residential Habitats -- Critters and Their Homes  No Responses »
Aug 202010
 

Garden Log:

1) Took a break from digging SSSC today but did water the clay in barrels and bins along the garden path. 2) Finally found the “missing” plans to Chicken Haven coop and pen

To you, the Habitat Gardener:

adobe clay from habitat installation awaiting fill stage

1) About the watering of the clay: A lot of that clay will go back into the hole that will become Salamander Shady Shallows Cellar. Some will get stored away for a future habitat installation. But for now, we want to keep the clay moist so it is usable — the hot sun will turn it into rock if it drys out. Not too much water, though. Too much water will drown the microbes and create an anaerobic (no oxygen) situation on the bottom of the containers. Smelly!, that’s anaerobic; think about decay, sulphur, methane, pew! So a light sprinkle of water will be just enough to offset the sun’s heat for a while. My plan so far (changes daily, and isn’t that fun!) is to install habitat features in the enormous hole waiting for our creativity. Oh, how I love being vague — “habitat features” could be anything, maybe even the kitchen sink. Actually that’s just a lead-in to what we will be using — enamel tiolet tanks. Yes, tiolet tanks saved from the dumpster at a water-reducing project I happened upon. Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? But better than a fairy tale, these enamel tanks will last FOREVER under ground. A lasting tribute to the amphibian world in the form of stone-like caverns with organic bedding. Dig hole. Fill hole with tiolet tanks packed with wood chips, tree limbs that jut out of the hole, cardboard tubing, straw bale “tiles”, and lots more wood chips. Pour in liquified clay (INGREDIENTS: clay, water. Not an approved source of daily nutrition!). Let it sit, and sit, and sit. Serves 500-1000 amphibians, and trillions of microbes! But why the liquified clay? Thanks for asking.

The vaulted Lower Chamber of Salamander Shady Shallows Cellars

Liquified clay will refill the hole and allow it to self support itself. The hole is large enough that although The Lower Chamber is vaulted, we wouldn’t want to run the risk of having it collapse. A collapse of any magnitude would change the surrounding garden features. This is a small garden (that’s why we are going underground!) and we don’t want the nearby slate path or planting beds to collapse. And what fun to visualize the liquid clay solidifying and creating structure to the hole. The sides, and the vaulted lower chamber, will become one again with the same clay that was dug, scooped, and shaved from the hole. The liquid clay will tightly fill around the wood chip-filled tiolet tanks and the rising tree limbs. Once the toilet tank wood chips and tree limbs decay (yes, will take years), hollows and tunnels, respectively, will be created. The hollows will have soft, moist organic bedding and the tunnels, installed at a climbable slope, will have critter-friendly soft, moist organic footing. A pond on top of the filled-in hole will allow salamanders, toads and frogs to breed in our garden. True, a small pond, but at least it’s wet, it’s water. Water — the g

iver of Life. And from that pond, perhaps an amphibian or two will seek refuge and everlasting happiness below in Salamander Shady Shallows Cellars. I love happy endings.

2) Check out my plans for Chicken Haven below.

Chicken Haven plans -- East view

Chicken Haven plans -- Top view

Chicken Haven plans -- South view

Chicken Haven plans -- West view

Chicken Haven plans -- West view and notes

Chicken Haven plans -- North view

Dream, and record it!

Tony

Not in the Garden as part of Master Plan

 2- Food Forest Gardening  No Responses »
Aug 202010
 

Garden Log:

1) Rough day garden-wise, for me. No time spent in the garden today.

You, the Habitat Gardener:

1) No time spent in the garden today for you either, eh? Well, then, we’ll dig deep to find us a silver lining in not getting out there. In fact, it seems to me that we could give ourselves credit for not disturbing the earth, the soil, the fabric of Life that teems well without our intervention. Bare soil left bare for microbes, mollusks, insects, and larger critters. That garden life will use exposed soil to navigate through and on, to shelter in, to make shelter with (like a mud wasp might collect mud to create a nest nearby), to eat (as an earthworm processes the soil for the food in it), and to bathe in (like a bird might take a dust bathe to rid itself of tiny critters). The soil, the “weeds”, the debris piles are just there and they will do fine as we take our break from the garden or otherwise do not get to it. The fullness of Life in the garden won’t skip a beat if we don’t get out to it. My message is: Relax. Allow what you don’t do to be a part of your habitat gardening Master Plan.

Frederique Lavoipierre, Entomology Program Coordinator, of Sonoma State University’s School of Science and Technology, offers this regarding the fragile chaparral ecosystem that is often “improved upon” by gardeners:

“Introducing “more structural diversity with meadows, and trees and different canopies”, and increasing “the amount of water on the land and more soil” may increase the usefulness of the land in human terms (and may even shade out the offending [unwanted trees and plants]), but it will no longer be chaparral. Chaparral is not meant to be structurally diverse to the extent found in a permaculture garden, and increasing water, and especially adding more enriched soil, effectively destroys the fragile chaparral environment. Chaparral is a beautiful and biodiverse ecosystem that does not need improvement. It has an incredible biodiversity of insects associates and harbors many plants, reptiles and small mammals that only thrive in the somewhat poor (to us) soil of the chaparral.”

2. We have a mud wasp nest in the garden under

Mud Wasp nest under slate seat

West County Seat, a stacking of slate for critters to live in and humans to park on.    I love the local color — the orangeish soil is our yard’s adobe. I put out clobs of it on some of the wood we have in the garden. The clay keeps the wood moist longer AND wasps flock to it to gather it up and build nests with.

Close-up of mud wasp nest

Nice job today, not in the garden.

Tony

Ivy creatures

 1- Residential Habitats -- Critters and Their Homes  No Responses »
Feb 172010
 

Previously posted on the Spore Lore Forum:

Hi sporelore,

I have an area of ivy in my backyard that is mostly shaded and I want to replace it with some not-as-invasive plantings that will still provide cover for critters. How should I go about doing that in a way that will cause the least disruption to all of the local fauna and do you have any ideas about plants that would be helpful to the critter tenants?

Thanks so much for your help,
stacy

Stacy,
Sounds great about replacing the ivy.
Some questions so I can recommend plants, get a feel for the garden:
Where do you live?
What’s the moisture content like? For instance, is the area under tall trees, surrounded by greenery, or bordered by asphalt?

Thanx. I look forward to getting you an answer. Sorry I took so long to get back.
Tony

Speculation on deer

 3- Habitat It And They Will Come -- Tony's book  No Responses »
Jan 082010
 

Previously posted on the Spore Lore Forum:

Anyone care to speculate why a deer might wander the sands of north Salmon Creek? Spotted these fresh tracks near the tide line last week?

Dan,
Deer tracks along the tide line:
–What comes to mind to me is how deer are good swimmers. I used to live on the south shore of Long Island (NY) where deer would swim across the bay for a change of food and shelter. Perhaps the Salmon Creek deer are comfortable walking the surf line, an easy and direct transport to fresh food and shelter. Not too many people at 3AM, either.
–I wonder if the deer seek salt at the tide line, like a salt lick, during winter cold snaps.

Walking the beach — what a great place for questions!
Tony

Winter Veggie Planting

 2- Food Forest Gardening  No Responses »
Jan 052009
 

Previously posted on the Spore Lore Forum:

Last week when I was pruning a rose bush and weeding around it, I found a small garter snake curled near the base of the rose bush under some leaves and debris. It was cold and barely moving, but alive. I covered it back up and left it alone. It got me wondering though, should I be leaving the unwanted plants (“weeds”) and leaf material alone right now, and in general not doing much in the garden (except perhaps the raised veggie beds) because there may be reptiles and amphibians hanging out too cold to move??? I don’t want to step on anyone!!! Any thoughts on this, in general, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks   –artichoke

tulip magnolia leaves left to mulch groundcover plants

Tulip magnolia leaves left to mulch groundcover plants

Artichoke,
Thanx for asking! And I am also answering for the critters in your garden.

Absolutely! A good idea to leave most of the leaves, mulch, and “debris” (one person’s trash is another’s treasure) in the garden. Not only will the extra layer, or blanket, keep the microbes and other animals warmer, but it will also keep feeding them. Those organics will also continue to break down and nutrify the soil for next spring’s blast of Life. Also, the plants themselves, like some bulbs and roots of trees and shrubs, will be better protected by the blanket of soon-to-be compost. Soil run-off will also be less if your precious topsoil is protected from pounding rains by the fallen leaf layer.

The flip side — why to clear out (and note I do not use the term “clean out”) the garden beds:
— If the soil is poor draining and you feel a tree or some plants would apreciate drying out.
— If you won’t sleep well without the beds cleared out. If that’s the case, save your soul (I jest) by minimizing the damage to the ecology. Consider leaving a debris pile in the yard to create habitat. Perhaps next spring you will be able to harvest some good compost from the bottom of it. Till you do, the ecology will enjoy the food and shelter (and Jungle Gym).

Have fun with your garden “stuff”. I’d love to know how it goes.
Tony

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