Prep for Garter Snake Ravine

1- Residential Habitats -- Critters and Their Homes, Blog Comments Off

Jan 032015

A garter snake soaks up the sun while Garter Snake Ravine is dug. I worked not more than ten feet from this snake, banging and chopping at the rock/stone/gravel hardpan surface for a couple of hours till I spied it under the coyote brush.

This month’s project with Orchard View School at the Laguna Foundation’s property, the Laguna Environmental Center, is called Garter Snake Ravine. The name was inspired by the many garter snakes that have been seen at this wildlife installation’s site.

The wood chip pile to be moved/shaved off a dozen feet or so to create space for Garter Snake Ravine. View from behind Compost Cricket Corral, looking past Log Pile Apartments. Habitat it! Note the coyote brush at the pile’s left edge. Coyote brush is a very important native, drought tolerant habitat shrub in our environs of Northern California. The coiled garter snake in the first picture was basking under that shrub while I worked.

Front view of the wood chip pile to be moved away from Log Pile Apartments to make way for the new wildlife habitat installation, Garter Snake Ravine. Note the coyote brush (large shrub, right) and the ceanothus (smaller, left) behind the wood chip pile. Those native plants will be good habitat components of the adjacent Garter Snake Ravine. Ultimately, the wood chip pile will work together with (right to left) Garter Snake Ravine, Log Pile Apartments, and Compost Cricket Corral to support wildlife habitat — food, water, shelter, and a place to raise young. As for water alone, the wood chip pile will store moisture and wick it to the habitats’ grateful critters during the long, dry summer months. Critters feeding daily/nightly in the compost will seek refuge in the many (too many to count!) nooks and crannies of these habitats. Microbe- and nutrient-rich soil amendments will made by those willing habitat critters.

There’s a wood chip pile to be moved! Note the Laguna de Santa Rosa is cresting in the background. By tomorrow it will flood Sanford Road (the white station wagon, top left, is heading south on Sanford). This is tree frog, salamander, and newt weather. Rain, rain, rain! The Laguna floods its banks every year, providing the services of the wonderful watershed it is — to allow water to spread out and return to the land before rushing down river and out to the sea. A great place to kayak!

Stuart from Stone Horse Farm gave the pile a shove and scrapped the top soil layer off to one side. Thanks for the tractor (top right) work, Stuart! Note the packed gravel and stone soil base that was uncovered from under the wood chip pile. Unlucky for us and the critters, the small area seems to have been a road surface debris pile at one time. Lucky for us and the critters, the habitat microbiome will eat up the asphalt debris.

The coyote brush, a sacred plant (especially to the snake living under it), is roped off to protect it during the wildlife habitat installation.

Holes are dug into the packed gravel, hardpan adobe clay, and stone surface. Water soaking in the holes will soften the surrounding ground to allow faster digging progress.

Looking south to the Hop Barn, with manure pile on concrete slab. The Foundation’s Native Plant Nursery is off to the right. Currently, the manure is too wet because water from the road (left and alongside the barn) runs downhill, past the barn, and onto the concrete slab. The soaking water displaces oxygen in the manure pile; an anaerobic, poorly composting pile results.

Note the grass swath behind the wheelbarrow that runs up to the barn. SOME DAY a ditch might run along the concrete slab, diverting the road runoff away from it. Garter Snake Ravine, a pond (during winter rains) and deep hugelkultur (during dry months) habitat is designed to make use of the ditch water before leaving the immediate area. The deep-hole and bermed soil landscape will also help keep Compost Cricket Corral dry and maximize its aerobic composting function. The deep hole of Garter Snake Ravine will be underneath the wheelbarrow in the above photo.

I like this wildlife habitat installation design!

A hole is dug and filled with water for further digging.

Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam come to mind as water fills Garter Snake Ravine.

Garter Snake Ravine, using hose water during this installation trial run, drains into and under Log Pile Apartments. Good thing that the Apartments’ rents are stabilized now that the habitat installation will have running water.

I will be back to finalize the prep for Garter Snake Ravine next week. Please do not fall in!

Sunny Galbraith’s Biology students from Orchard View School will be here in two weeks to complete the wildlife habitat installation. At that time, we will install an owl perch, a hugelkultur, a water-collecting soil berm, and a many headed creature writhing out of Garter Snake Ravine.

Enjoy your habitat installations and outdoor classrooms. Habitat it!

Tony

20121119 Patio Veggie Pots 5 of 6

1- Residential Habitats -- Critters and Their Homes, 2- Food Forest Gardening, 3- Habitat It And They Will Come -- Tony's book No Responses »

Nov 202012

Anita dumps a new load of soil critter food.

Day 5 in this 6-day video series: Preparing patio pots for winter veggie planting.

First a video re “Patio Veggie Pots”, then some animal habitat pics (below the video):

Patio Veggie Pots 5 of 6 (video):

Soil Making in Leaf Trench Highway (pics):

Horse manure ages in leaf Trench Highway, on top of many layers of garden debris organics.

Mushrooms pop out of Leaf Trench Highway’s manure after the first rain. Good stuff! Having the fungi/mushrooms means the manure will break down faster.

Harvesting compost from Leaf Trench Highway.

Later that year, Tony harvests compost/rich soil from the trench.

Anita dumps a new load of soil critter food. These apples were “debris” for a neighbor that wanted under her tree “cleaned up”. The soil critters and we are sure happy to have the mess!

A short retaining wall is added to Leaf Trench Highway. The short wall of re-used fence boards will allow a higher pile of organics to be heaped into Leaf Trench Highway, yet keep the walkway clear. Note how the block keeps the sledge from splitting the dry fence board.

Leaf Trench Highway’s short retaining wall in place, holding back tulip magnolia prunings (limbs and twigs). Lichens, mosses, and algae so abundant! Does life get any better?!

Pics and captions from Tony’s new book, Habitat It and They will Come :

Figure 2.11 White Clover and Leaf Trench Highway. Leaf Trench Highway is about making soil — the 3 foot deep trench is filled with green mulch (for example, a whole lot of pumpkin vine prunings), then covered over with old (cool) manure and compost. Potato starts are dug in. Harvest, 6-9 months later, yields full-grown potatoes PLUS a long, deep trench of beautiful soil to use elsewhere in the garden. The white clover attracts pollinating insects to the potato flowers, adds nitrogen to green mulching, and is a sheltering go-between for critters to travel from one garden bed to another. Laying the slate pavers on soil, and not on sand or cement, allows soil fungi, microbes, and larger animals to pass through the soil, thereby assisting the growth of the clover cover crop.

Figure 3.37 The After of Salamander Resort. One year later and the resort is still operating. Driftwood creatures, a thriving beet crop, and Salamander Sunny Swimhole hide the goings-on eight feet below. See Figure 3.36 for “The Before”. Watering the pond waters the beets waters the compost waters the wood chips waters the oak rounds waters tank cavities waters Salamander Shady Shallows, AND waters the adobe clay earth surrounding Salamander Resort. Water + Cavities + Microbes + Mollusks (slugs and snails) + Worms + Insects = Happy Salamanders. The half wine barrel pond, with a 5’ x 5’ sheet of pond liner, was home this spring to Pacific Tree Frogs (and tadpoles). Many types of insect on the wing visit the pond. A salamander must be living somewhere in all that! Note some habitat features: clover on the slate path links this habitat to the rest of the garden, the pond’s surface rocks provide a critter rest stop, the “fedge” (food hedge of fig, pineapple guava, loquat, and pomegranate) along the fence provides flowers and food, and the compost in Leaf Trench Highway at the base of the fedge attracts its own ecosystem of soil makings and critters.

Happy planting veggies on your patio and see you tomorrow.

Tony

Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs

1- Residential Habitats -- Critters and Their Homes, 2- Food Forest Gardening No Responses »

Jan 102011

Brown Marmorated Stink Bug on redwood driftwood

Garden Log (what I did):

1. Cold here in Sebastopol, California — well at least for us — with the growing season nearly dormant. We finally got some garlic starts in the ground about a month ago in the front veggie bed along the sidewalk. Maybe this week I’ll plant fava beans there to grow SOMETHING.

2. Harvested hachiya persimmons from a neighbor’s tree.

3. Inspected Salamander Swimhole’s vitality.

4. Discovered brown marmorated stink bugs on a piece of driftwood in the front garden.

You, the Habitat Gardener (reflections):

1. Our garlic crop in the front bed will be ready next late spring, just in time for us to plant sunflowers. We get garlic; the critters will reap the sunflowers.

2. The persimmon that was left on Oak Pedestal last night is half eaten. A long deck screw holds the persimmon in place and secure from strong critters, like a squirrel, that might want to eat the persimmon elsewhere. The long screw’s head was snipped off, then that end was impaled into the oak limb’s crotch, leaving the pointy end of the screw skyward.

Top view of Oak Pedestal feeder with partly eaten persimmon.

Top view of Oak Pedestal feeder in winter garlic bed with partly eaten persimmon.

Side view of Oak Pedestal feeder in winter garlic bed.

So easy to screw an apple, a persimmon, a tough piece of food onto the screw and thwart thieving critters. Ha!, I am smarter for once.

Top view of Oak Pedestal feeder surrounded by a summer crop of sunflower. The black oiled sunflower seeds are bagged birdseed. How fun to place some seeds on the sunflower leaf platters. Note the up-ended deck screw (in the oak limb crotch), which is used to secure apples and other food offerings.

3.Salamander Swimhole, which seemed a lost cause because of foul water (see my November 27, 2010 entry: http://sporelore.com/residential-habitats/garden-pond/) is clearing. The magnolia tree’s leaves have all fallen for a month now so the pond is no longer being overwhelmed with fresh organic matter. Algae is growing faster now that more sunlight is reaching the pond; the magnolia leaves were shading the new pond water. Just-visible microbes are whirling about in the water and the potted plants are showing new growth. The pond will thrive, with luck in time for a pacific tree frog to want to lay eggs in it this spring.

4. Brown marmorated stink bugs ( Halyomorpha halys) are in the insect family Pentatomidae and are known as an agricultural pest in their native range of China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Yes, they are not native to our California soil. But they are so cool! Given the species’ alien trait, I’d rather they didn’t exist in our garden BUT three bugs on one small piece of driftwood means there are probably many others entrenched in our neighborhood. What’s a sustainability-minded Master Habitat Landscaper Apprentice like me to do? Nothing, that’s what. Sure, I rather the garden be full of native insects to work the garden and provide food for higher tropic animals. But perhaps alien pollinators (or non-pollinators) will feed some of those higher tropic animals, i.e., animals more sophisticated/more developed. An insect meal might just be an insect meal to a hungry woodpecker during these food-is-sparse short days of winter.

A couple of cool facts about these alien-to-California brown marmorated stink bugs: a) They are actually bugs! “Bug” is often a lay term for “insect”, but “true bugs” are only one order of insect, like “beetle” is another order of insect. b) Stink bugs get their name from a smelly fluid emitted from their thorax when threatened. I was lucky to get the bugs pictured (below) without getting sprayed — surely their sluggishness from the cold was in my favor. c) The term “marmorated” is derived from Latin for “marbled”. Close inspection of the seemingly “brown”/dull-looking wing tips and exoskeleton’s back plates (pronotum, esculetum, elytron) reveals magnificent design and color. Sure wouldn’t want to be an ant when that steel-plated star cruiser crawls overhead.

Enjoy all things, stinky or not.

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.

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.

: Oak wedge and flowerpot habitats in Salamander Sunny Swimhole.

: Set-up of Salamander Sunny Swimhole. Beware, the leaves are coming!

: Salamander Sunny Swimhole without oak wedge and with new water. A new start after the pond went foul.

: Butterfly chrysalis on wood siding.

: 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.

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

Tony