Dollarweed - What Good Is It?

Talk about a plant that everybody loves to hate!  Dollarweed (Hydrocotyle sp.) is a native plant, also known as pennywort, that loves to grow in the same conditions that also favor lawn grass:  bright sun, plentiful water, low surrounding vegetation.  It's hardy and it requires essentially no care.  With its single, round, silver dollar sized leaves, it is easily recognizable and it boldly stands out in a mass of linear grass leaves.  As such, dollarweed has gained great notoriety - heaven forbid that a non-grass plant disturb the carpet-like splendor of a lawn!

If you look at dollarweed simply as a plant, however, it's really rather attractive.  The bright, shiny green leaves reflect sunlight and are held aloft on pliable, sturdy stems. 

The flowers are umbels of white that are not glamorous, perhaps, but that are quite attractive in a quiet, lacy way.

 This photo shows how the umbels open up as they get older.

This morning, as I took photos, the insects I found on these flowers in a garden bed were tiny ants.  Truthfully, I didn't even see the ants until I opened the photos up on my computer screen.

Perhaps dollarweed's biggest flaw as a garden plant is that it doesn't tend to form solid mats but, instead, prefers to interweave through other plants, refusing to stay neatly in one place.  It's also difficult to completely eradicate from a lawn or flower bed with underground rhizomes that break off readily at each node. 

Because it's a native plant, I've wondered how dollarweed fits into the ecosystem here, but I haven't taken the time to really study it.  All I've noticed on the plant in my yard is an occasional leaf miner.   I'm not sure what insect is doing this particular leaf mining - the larva of a fly? of a moth? of a sawfly? of a beetle?  Any of these different types on insects have certain species whose larvae are leaf miners, feeding on the leaf tissue between the upper and lower surfaces of leaves.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed a closeup photo of the bloom of dollarweed on Instagram.   Responding to the photo, which was identified only by the scientific name, presumably to minimize automatic knee-jerk negative responses, I commented on my interest about how this plant worked in the ecosystem.  The poster replied back with a list of Hymenopterans (bees, ants, and wasps) that had been observed by scientists in 2015 on dollarweed flowers at Archbold Biological Station here in Florida. (See note below.)

Here's the list "floridaplants" sent, comprised of 10 solitary wasps and one native bee.  As you scan it, be sure to note the prey that these wasps use for feeding their young: orb weaver spiders, beetles, flies, leafhoppers or planthoppers, leafhoppers, flies, flies, flies, moth caterpillars, and moth caterpillars.

Episyron conterminus posterus - a spider wasp specializing in orb weavers to provision their nests
Cerceris blakei - a digger wasp that provisions its nest with beetles
Ectemnius rufipes ais - a square-headed wasp that nests in dead wood, provisioning its nest with flies
Epinysson melippes - a solitary wasp that provisions its nest with leafhoppers or planthoppers
Hoplisoides dentriculatus dentriculatus - a sand wasp that provisions its nest with leafhoppers
Oxybelus emarginatus - a prong-backed flyhunter wasp that provisions its nest with flies
Tachysphex apicaulis - a square-headed wasp that provisions its nest with flies
Tachysphex similis - a square-headed wasp that provisions its nest with flies
Leptochilus acolhuus - a mason wasp provisioning its nest with moth caterpillars
Parancistrocerus salcularis rufulus - a mason wasp provisioning its nest with moth caterpillars
Halictus poeyi - Poey's Furrow Bee, a small native bee in the sweat bee family that provisions its nest with nectar and pollen

Wouldn't it be great to get some free, round-the-clock pest control in your gardens?  Especially pest control that specializes in controlling some of the insects above without, at the same time, killing praying mantids, honeybees, or monarch butterflies?

Well, you can have exactly that sort of pest control - IF you leave dollarweed and other small, flowering plants alone in your lawn, instead of treating them like public enemy #1.  In fact, this sort of situation is why Greg and I don't use chemicals on our lawn.  If it grows low, is generally green, and can be mowed, we let it be.  Because of their relationships with native pollinators, I prefer to have native plants as weeds in my grass - rustweed and some of the sedges, for example, as well as dollarweed - but it's almost impossible to have native broadleafed plants without also having non-natives, so we "live and let live".  

The only one of the insects in the list above that I've knowingly observed in my yard is the native bee, Halictus poeyi, Poey's Furrow Bee, shown in the photo above on Gaillardia and identified on BugGuide.net.  Coincidentally, it's the only one of the insects on the Archbold Biological Station's list with a common name. That doesn't mean the wasps aren't an important part of the natural web of nature, too, it just means that people haven't paid a lot of attention to them.  They're generally small.  They're not very colorful.  They don't bother people. Until recently, it's simply that nobody has paid much attention to them.  Generally, scientists often don't know which species, exactly, each wasp specializes in utilizing as prey for food for its larvae.

What a shame that we've ignored these important parts of the ecosystems in our yards and gardens...but what an interesting chance for everyday gardeners to help restore the balance of nature.  Literally as well as figuratively.  Best of all, this ability to help restore Earth's ecosystems is as easy as refraining from using chemicals on our lawns.  Seems like a no-brainer to me.


_________________
Note:  According to the Instagram poster "floridaplants", self described as a botanist, this is the list of wasps and bees that were observed nectaring at dollarweed, Hydrocotyle umbellatus, at Archbold Biological Station in Florida.  The scientific paper (?) is Deyrup, M.A. and M.D. 2015. Database of observations of Hymenoptera visitations to flowers of plants on Archbold Biological Station, Florida, USA.  Unfortunately I haven't been able to get a copy of this database online, so I'm going out on a limb here and assuming the information is accurate.  After all, it's not like many people have the interest or ability to make up a list of scientific names like this.

Blueberry Blooms...But No Bees

My blueberry bushes have started to bloom and I am anxiously watching to see if any southeastern blueberry bees show up to pollinate them.

I literally sat about 10 feet away from the bushes yesterday, from 11:40 a.m. to noon and watched.  It was 55 degrees F. outside and sunny.  There were no bees visiting the flowers.

Today I went out at about 3:25 p.m. and watched again for 10 minutes.  Again, it was sunny.  The temperature was 72 degrees F.  Again, I saw no bees.

Why am I so concerned?  I had bees (and blueberries) last year.

Well, last spring I shared with you my excitement over finding a small cluster of southeastern blueberry bee nests in what I thought was a public area down the street from us.  Across the road from this little cluster of nests was a 15 year old hedge of blueberry bushes in the backyard of another neighbor.  Such unassuming little creatures, such delicious fruits, and it was so much fun to connect the two.

Several months after my enthusiastic post, though, the neighbor whose yard abutted that "small public area" where I found those blueberry bee nests chose to rototill up this small triangular area and cover it with sod, effectively annexing it to his yard.  It all looks very "upscale" now, so nobody else seems to be upset, but I doubt any of the bees were able to survive the dual assault - and, like most solitary bees, southeastern blueberry bees only have one generation per year.  Effectively that little population of southeastern blueberry bees has been destroyed.

Even if a few of the bees managed to survive the rototilling and heavy sod overlayment, the sod carpet was almost assuredly grown with neonicotinoid insecticides.  Given the immaculate and well groomed appearance of the property overall, I'm guessing that neonics have been and will continue to be used to maintain the lawn's manicured appearance.

Neonicotinoids affect bees.  They are insect-icides, and very potent ones at that, even at small concentrations.

Sadly, the destruction wasn't done yet.  The house across the street, the one with the blueberry hedge, had sold the previous fall.  Last summer, the new owners yanked out all the blueberry bushes, presumably because they interfered with their unobstructed view of our little lake.

I'm trusting that there are other southeastern blueberry bee nests around that haven't been destroyed and that the little bees will find my blooms before too long.  It IS early in the season, after all.  Meanwhile, when I can, I'm going to keep going out and keeping watch over my blossoms, hoping to see the little "mini-bumble bees" busily poking their way up into the blooms.

There has been a lot of habitat destruction around our neighborhood in the last 12 months or so, all in the name of "sprucing up".  It's been disheartening to watch, since one of the big factors that attracted us to this area was the mature landscaping.  In fact, I'm planning to do an entire post on the topic, so for now I'll stop here.

Please join me in hoping that there are other pockets of southeastern blueberry bees around, ready to find our blooms, producing delicious berries and food for next year's bees in the process.

Slut Shamed, Homeowner Style

Pardon my French, but "slut shamed" rather perfectly describes what I feel like about this....

I came home last Wednesday night to this unsolicited message, gathered up with the mail and lying on our dining room table:

Presumably Greg found this tag, a "lawn report card", if you will, hanging on the handle of our front door.

Apparently, a total stranger happened to come by our house and felt compelled to stop and leave a written note for us, telling us that our lawn needs weed control, fertilization, pre-emergent treatment and pest control.  Our lawn is also apparently suffering from freeze burn.  This stranger repeated that our lawn needed pre-emergent and weed control.  Evidently the situation is dire because he exclaimed about how badly it needed these things.  He also told us that grass plugs would be available soon.

Call, he said.  It was underlined to underscore the urgency.

I am rather amused by the depth of my angst about this.  Of course I understand that this is purely a marketing ploy, done to drum up business, but it still really bothered me when I read it.

Because I consciously and conscientiously garden to provide habitat for pollinators, birds, and other wild creatures, I don't use commercial pest control or pre-emergents or weed control.  Insecticides, herbicides, and even standard fertilizers work against my goal.  After all, "-cide" means "-killer" and there is no pesticide, herbicide or insecticide that can differentiate between "good" and "bad".  They just kill what they are designed to kill:  "pests", broad-leaved plants, grasses, insects, etc., depending on the chemical formulation of the -cide being used.

Taken yesterday, this is a photo of our front lawn, 4 days after our failing report card was hand delivered to us.  We have done nothing to the lawn or to the gardens in those intervening days.  To be honest, we really haven't done anything in our yard or gardens in several months now, and there IS obviously work that needs to be done as spring begins to sneak up on us.  There is also lots more gardening, planting, and growing that I want to accomplish.  However, given all that, I am comfortable with the general appearance of our lawn.  It seems to balance reasonably well between looking rationally maintained and providing healthy habitat.

Here is our front lawn in early October, while it is still green.  Far from perfect, but it still seems acceptable to me.

Truthfully, I am rather astounded by how unsettled having this "report card" left on my door actually made me feel.   If receiving this little "reminder" upset ME this much, when I am knowingly making the choices I am making for reasons that are very important to me, what does an unsolicited report like this do to the average homeowner, who is just worried about property values and neighbors' approval? 

I KNOW our lawn is full of non-grass plants, also known as weeds.  Some of these plants are native, most are not.  I remove the really problematic ones by hand, but if the non-grass plants will handle being mowed, I generally don't worry too much about their inclusion in our lawn.

What I DO manage for - and worry about providing - is a healthy mix of plants and animals in our yard overall, a mix that includes pollinators, predators, and a good selection of native plants to feed leaf and seed eaters, as well as pollinators, birds, toads, anoles, and all the other wonderful life forms that I've observed just in our little 0.4 acre lot over the last 2 2/3 years.

Is our yard "pristine"?  No.  I don't want our yard pristine, I want it ALIVE. 

Is our yard alive?  Yes, it is.  Our yard is alive with chattering chickadees and flitting yellow-rumped warblers, with brilliant gulf fritillary butterflies and little solitary bees, with stalking preying mantids and shimmering long-tailed skippers, with watchful green anoles and fat saucy toads. 

That's worth a bit of lawn shaming any day.

The Surprising Lure of Open Ground

Why on Earth would I share a photo of such a nondescript area of our "new" backyard, here in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida?

To put it bluntly, I am sharing this photo because it is one of the most "happening" places in our yard.

Yeah, I wouldn't believe it either, if I didn't look out my kitchen window and see it for myself every day, regularly, throughout the entire daylight period.

I am still not sure what, exactly, attracts the birds to this particular area.  They don't dust bathe in the open sand.  There are no thriving ant colonies in the area or obvious signs of other insect life.  There is no pea gravel or other, slightly larger, gravel that could help in their crops.  Yet every day, over and over again, I see blue jays, red-bellied woodpeckers, mourning doves, mockingbirds, and cardinals come into this area, stay for a while, then fly off again.  Obviously something is attracting them.

By watching closely, though, I've figured out a bit of the mystery....

The red-bellied woodpeckers fly directly from the trunk of the laurel oak (on the left) or the pignut hickory (on the right) down to the ground, stay for 30 seconds or so, then fly back up.  Watching through the binoculars, I think they are generally picking up the laurel oak acorns that were thick on the ground last fall and through the winter. 

The acorns aren't nearly as common now as they were then, which is hardly surprising, but still the red-bellieds come.

The blue jays fly down from the branches of the surrounding trees.  They, too, seem to be going after the acorns, based on what I see through the binoculars.

On the other hand, the mockingbird perches on the hammock first, then flies to the ground.  He seems to scavenge a little longer than the jays or the woodpeckers and it's hard for me to see what he is finding.  I suspect insects or some other small invertebrates, but it could be seeds.  (I am speaking of this as a singular bird, since I tend to see one mockingbird at a time, but I strongly suspect that more than one visits the area.)

I haven't been able to see anything in the beaks of the cardinals or mourning dove that come in to feed either.  For these birds, I suspect the attraction is seed from the "weeds" that are easily as major a component of the area as any grass that remains from the last sodding.

So why share this area at all?  I guess because I want to point out that even seemingly barren, "waste" ground can be valuable to some wildlife.

When we first moved in, I saw this part of the backyard as an area that needed to be fixed, preferably sooner than later.  I just wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with it.  Now I'm not so sure.  This patch attracts many more birds than nearby areas that have much healthier grass.  I do worry about erosion, though, since we get frequent rain and the land in the backyard slopes slightly.

For now I'm content to just wait and observe.  Funny how natural systems see worth in different ways than we humans do.

P.S.  That ugly, plastic, green flag?  I mark plants I don't recognize or that I may want to move when they have come up in the lawn.   That way, I remember to keep an eye on them and the plants don't get mowed before I decide what to do with them.  That particular flag is marking a dainty little sedge that I want to move somewhere more picturesque.

Woohoo! The Big Weed Is Done!

I've traded the last week of my gardening life (and probably the last cooler temperatures we'll see until September or October) for a weed-free front lawn.  As I sat on my hiney for 30 hours, more or less, carefully pulling out the crabgrass and other invaders, I had plenty of time to wonder if I'm truly just a crazy Luddite - or if I'm doing the environment (and us) a huge favor by handling a perceived problem the low-tech, non-chemical way.

Scene:  The front lawn, where the goal is a carpet of buffalograss. 
     The center of the lawn was plugged 2 summers ago during late July and early August, with half dead plugs of buffalo grass.  It has filled in nicely, but it still had some crabgrass and prostrate spurge that managed to come through this summer, probably at least in part because Greg had mowed it very low this spring to help it green up more rapidly.
     Along the edges and between the lower flower bed and the main body of the lawn, where there had been remnants of the old mix of fescue, Bermuda grass, and weeds, Greg added more buffalo grass plugs this spring, so those areas had lots of open soil this spring that had filled in thickly with weeds since then.

(Important note:  The back lawn, which was the first area we plugged two summers ago, is looking great and needs almost no weeding at all this summer.)

Conundrum the First:
     The standard way to manage a buffalo grass lawn after plugging is simply to mow it regularly at about 2" height.  Slowly, as the buffalo grass fills in, fewer and fewer weeds will germinate;  those that do germinate will be chopped off and stressed, allowing the buffalo grass to continue getting thicker each  year.  We could certainly do that, but I wanted a weed free lawn faster than that.  Greg really wanted a weed free lawn too.

Conundrum the Second:
     Why, in heaven's name, do I care about having a weed free lawn?  I've never worried about it before.  Mulling over this question, I realized I want to be able to choose not to mow the lawn at all, during the summer, because I love the soft, fluffy look that a buffalo grass lawn gets without mowing.  However, ANY weed shows up starkly in that situation, because the weed is almost invariably taller, stiffer, and/or a wildly different color of green than the softly undulating, gray green of the buffalo grass..
     Also of significance regarding this question of weeding, my weeding mantra ("One year of seed, 7 years of weed") kept running through my brain.  Any crabgrass or other weed that I allowed to seed into the lawn this summer would simply mean more weeds germinating in future years.

Conundrum the Third:
     Why not judiciously use an herbicide?  Although buffalo grass is notoriously sensitive to herbicides, there are a few that are labeled for it, and Greg keeps reminding me that "antibiotics" are occasionally necessary and useful.  But I just can't bring myself to use the darn things except against plants such as poison ivy - it would be too easy for me to keep justifying the tradeoff as far as time goes, probably leading me to a quick and rapid slide down a very slippery slope.  I also knew, though, that Greg would have no such qualms - and therefore I also wanted to give him his weed free lawn before he took matters into his own hands!

So, despite my periodic plunges into feelings of total ridiculousness over spending so much time WEEDING GRASS, for Pete's sake, I kept at it - and I am happy to report that the front lawn is now weed free (or, at least, as weed free as it's going to get this summer) and gracefully descending into dormancy as the heat and drought of another prairie summer take hold.

Ironically, I have no pretty pictures to share with you of my newly pristine lawn.  Did you catch the part about the lawn descending into dormancy?  That means that the photos I took this morning make the look dead - not the sort of image that inspires.  In person, the health and vibrancy of the lawn is obvious.  In a photo (at least, in MY photos), not so much.  So I'll share pictures after the next good rain, when the returns to its soft, gray-green beauty.

A final thought:  I'm not sure that buffalo grass is a good option for most American yards these days.  The cultural fixation on vivid green, crew cut carpets in front of each home - weed free and, often, actually maintained by a mow, blow & go crew - is simply not in sync with a buffalo grass lawn.  I can't imagine anyone else in this country being as...stupid?...stubborn?...dogmatic? as I've been to hand weed even a tiny area of lawn, and I can't imagine anyone in this country willingly and knowingly accepting a lawn that isn't weed-free from the get-go.  So, while I love our soft carpet of buffalo grass lawn, I can't really recommend it for others without pointing out its serious (to the typical American gardener/homeowner) limitations.

That said, I'm going to be thoroughly enjoying our soft, gray-green carpet of grass for the rest of the summer without feeling the need to mow or fertilize it and rarely feeling the need to water it.  I'm really glad that we made the switch to buffalo grass.  It was definitely the right decision for us.

Buffalograss Lawn, A Year Later

Last summer, at the end of June, there was a sale on buffalograss plugs at High Country Gardens.  Since our lawn was non-existent in the backyard and looking pretty awful in the front yard, I took the leap and ordered grass plugs.  Lots of grass plugs.

Right before they came, the weather turned gruesome, but when the plugs came we had no choice but to get them in the ground as soon as we could;  otherwise we'd lose the money I had invested in this native grass lawn.  With much groaning and sweating, we worked days (actually mornings) on end to get them all plugged in.  It took almost two months, two months that were ironically some of the hottest and driest on record around here, but we got it done.  I shared the initial results last year, first showing the back yard and then the front yard, as we got them finished.

One of the hardest parts about a buffalograss lawn is that it takes a while to fill in and, while you're waiting, the weeds tend to get a bit overwhelming.  This spring the weeds were driving me crazy, so I decided to treat the lawn like a flower bed and simply handweeded it.  I discussed the process, trying to justify the time to myself and others.  When I got the back yard buffalograss area done in May, I photographed it, noting that it was looking pretty good but still needed to fill in.

So here are the photos taken about 2 weeks ago, at the beginning of July, about a year after we plugged the back yard and about 10 months after we plugged the front yard.  We watered last summer, as the grass was establishing, but we have not watered the grass at all yet this year.

The back yard looks pretty good.  It's a little shaggy in this photo because it hadn't been mowed even once yet this summer when the picture was taken, so the runners were getting a touch long.  I did do a second, light weeding of the lawn back here in late May/early June to get rid of the summer weeds that were sprouting - there weren't too many, but there have been none at all since then.   The grass has filled in beautifully with no further effort.

The texture is wonderful -  very soft and inviting.  The color is not a bright green - but, hey, it's green without any watering!  (It's still green 2 weeks later, but I'm thinking it's about time to deep water it once.  Even buffalograss needs a bit of water occasionally to stay healthy.)  The only down side that I see is that "dog spots" are pretty noticeable - and when you have 2 large German shepherds, you do get lots of "dog spots."  The spots fill in again without any care on my part, but they leave the lawn looking patchy.

The odd shape of the lawn to the right, leaving bare ground around the birdbath and beyond, is due to heavy shade under a full, large green ash tree.  We tried plugging in High Country Garden's drought tolerant fescue here, but despite receiving the same care that the buffalograss plugs did, only about 4 of those plugs survived.  I'm probably going to make this area into a bed of some sort around the trunk of the tree (perhaps just mulch, but outlined appropriately);  meanwhile we're just letting the buffalograss move over as much as it wants, to see how much shade it will tolerate.

As I expected, the front lawn looks pretty patchy, even without dog spots.  Fescue and buffalo grass don't make good partners and we never consciously killed off the fescue.  I also never did do the second (summer weed) weeding on the front lawn.  Again, the density of the buffalograss is not bad, but it would have been nice to get it completely cleared out of weeds to see if it wouldn't stay pretty weed free after that.  I guess we'll get to compare the front and back yards to see how much difference it actually made to do that last weeding.

The green-brown clumps in the foreground and under the honeylocust are the leftover fescue.  We haven't watered this area at all this year either, so the fescue is looking stressed from lack of water...plus Greg has been mowing it very low to favor the buffalograss, which further stresses it.  Next summer it will be (past) time to kill off the fescue and start plugging in buffalo to complete the front lawn, but I'm pleased with our start.  It will never be the lush green of fescue, but I'm tickled with how well the buffalograss is handling both heat and drought, as well as how rarely it needs to be mowed.

In summary, would I do it again?  In a heart beat!  I'd try to pick a less awful time of year to plant the buffalograss plugs, but I am super pleased at how nice it looks and how easy it is to maintain.  In my column, this is definitely a score for buffalograss!  I might even come to enjoy the open space of a lawn around the house!

Bits and Pieces on May 1st

It's May 1st.  My larkspur just started to bloom, while the lanceleafed coreopsis and Missouri evening primrose started blooming a couple days ago.  Helen Jane's rose is almost done.   Looking back to photos from last year, my flower gardens seem to be about 2-3 weeks ahead of spring, 2011.

I finished weeding out the backyard buffalo grass over the weekend.  We plugged it last summer, during the beginning of "the heat," and the plugs were still healthy and strong.  It looked better than the buffalo grass in the front, which we didn't get to until August, but it had some areas where a particularly vicious mix of little barley, undead Bermuda grass, and annual brome (Japanese, I think, but maybe downy) were attempting to completely take over.   Here is a photo, showing how much it has filled in...but how much it still needs to fill in, too.  Hopefully the predicted heat, combined with our recent rains, will take care of that, now that I've got the competition out of the way.

In the vegetable garden, the 2 Brandywine tomatoes that Greg took a chance on (planting in mid-March) are looking "full and fluffy" and have started to flower.  At least we should get a couple tomatoes this year!  The first 6 broccoli plants are ready to harvest...although the harvester is not ready to deal with them, yet!  The broccoli is a full month ahead of last year.

I've been trying to get out for walks along the trails this week, to see what's blooming.  The boys, of course, accompany me.  Blue, especially, enjoys a quick cool down in the pool of the draw every time we head back towards the house.

Once Blue has cooled himself down in this pool (which in MUCH less appealing than it looks in the above photo), he quite frankly reeks!  Being a young and energetic German shepherd, he is likely to wander off and get himself into trouble if I leave him out unattended.  So I rarely do so.  I've taken to hosing him down when we get back to the house, but it only helps to a certain degree.  Consequently every walk is now followed by a period of uncertainty in which I have to measure the total certainty of wet-stinky-dog-in-the-house versus the near certainty of young-idiot-dog-doing-something-like-visiting-the-neighbors'-horses-to-bark-at-them-in-the-hopes-of-getting-them-to-run.   In farm country, this latter behavior is grounds for rapid termination and therefore it's not to be taken lightly.  Usually near certainty wins out over total certainty before said dog is completely dry...so my house has taken on a definite eau de wet, muddy dog.  It is not a pleasant perfume, but Blue's enjoyment of his regular "bath" is so deep that I feel unwilling to deprive him of this relatively harmless ritual.  (And, truthfully, I'm not sure I could stop it, short of stopping the walks altogether.)

Moving on to a less odoriferous topic, I've seen my first snake of the season - a young garter snake in the back yard.  The dogs and cats didn't even notice it!  In fact, I was afraid Becker was going to lie down on top of it, but he ended up a foot away.  Then I had a hard time keeping Blue from stepping on it while he plagued his big brother, trying to get him to play a bit more actively.

(If you look carefully in the middle of the photo, you'll see a dark line leading away from the big shepherd - that's the snake, trying to "get the heck out of Dodge!")

This morning I saw my first hummingbird of the year, so I've put up the feeders and I'm hoping that we'll have a pair nest in the yard again this summer.  Since their nests are tiny and well camouflaged, I've never actually found one, but we've had a pair stay around all summer for the last several years, leading me to assume they are nesting somewhere nearby.

On a similar note, Greg reported that most of the nest boxes are occupied, including one that has a bluebird incubating eggs in it, but I'll have to post more about those later...after I've done a little more observing and maybe taken a couple photos.  The blooming and breeding season of 2012 is certainly off to a rip-roaring start this year - now I've got to see if I can possibly keep up!

The Simple Art of Weeding

I am a firm believer in hand weeding, when possible.  When I weed, I see my garden up close and personal, in a way that I almost never do otherwise.  It helps me to understand what's going on in the soil and with the microfauna that are so important to a well functioning natural area.  It's also relaxing, almost meditative, when I can let go and "get into the zone."

As many of you know, we spent much of last summer's heat and drought on our hands and knees planting buffalo grass plugs that I'd ordered with a complete lack of 20/20 foresight.  We've been thrilled this spring to see that most of those plugs survived both the bad timing of their planting and the winter.  I'm sure that this spring's more normal rainfall has helped immensely.

Unfortunately, this spring's more normal rainfall has also given the weed population a good start...and I've found myself feeling the necessity of hand weeding much of our buffalo grass area.

It's not that the buffalo grass won't make it just fine, as long as we don't water or fertilize.  Sooner or later, with no supplemental care other than mowing when the weeds get too high, the buffalo grass should triumph.  It's just that I want it to fill in as well and as soon as possible, because the areas we plugged are right by the house.

So I've been sitting on my rear end, hand pulling henbit and assorted other weeds for several hours a day over the last week or so.  (This is, by the way, too much weeding even for me, despite my like of the process!)  I thought I'd share a little of what I've been seeing as I weed, though, and in the process maybe encourage a few other hardy souls to resist the blandishments of the weed killers so sweetly advertised on television.

As I weed, I work on one small area at a time - about 30 inches by 30 inches.  Here is a shot of one such area as I'm about to begin weeding.  Note that there is a little area already done on the lower right-hand side of the photo.

As I carefully pull out the henbit and other weeds, usually slicing off the roots just below the surface, I start seeing some of this area's inhabitants.  Here is one of the 7 earthworms that were disturbed by my efforts in this little patch.  (Note:  I rarely hurt an earthworm because I'm not digging deeply, but the noise of the roots being disturbed must bother them, because they come to the surface regularly and try to glide away.)

Here is a ladybug beetle pupa, attached to a henbit leaf.  (After taking this photo, I put the leaf and the attached pupa into another area of the lawn, where it hopefully wouldn't be disturbed.)





One thing that has really surprised me as I've worked is all of the ladybug beetle larvae I've been seeing. If you look closely, here is one (almost in the center of the photo) trying to escape to calmer ground....

The earthworms and ladybug beetles are positive findings;  I'm also finding quite a few caterpillars.  Some are inchworms, many (I suspect) are cutworms.  The individual below is one such suspect.  That said, the individuals that I think are cutworms seem to be curled up around or near the henbit, not the grass.  And I see absolutely no sign of damage anywhere from their presence.

In the long run, I'm not too worried about their presence, because my experience leads me to believe that their predator will come - whether that's a bird, scrounging for food to feed its young, a predatory wasp, or even a mole.  Sometimes you have to let a population of prey build up enough to attract in its predator(s).

When I got done weeding this little patch (and I didn't think to time myself, so I don't know how long it took), here is what it looked like.  The buffalo plugs are the fine-leafed, lighter green grass;  the big, thick, dark clumps are leftover fescue.  I really ought to be weeding those out too, but Greg wants to leave them in and see how they do compared to the buffalo.

After this experience, though, I would highly recommend against any attempt to jointly grow buffalo grass and fescue - they are just too different in appearance to gracefully co-habitate.  Truthfully, the combination of the two looks ratty at best.

The last shot to share is this picture of a solitary bee hole, an earthworm and the weeding tool I like best.  I've wondered what these perfectly round, little holes in the ground were from and, after all the research I did last year on solitary bees, now I know!  It's great to think that I have such a thriving population of native pollinators living so unobtrusively in my (soon-to-be) lawn!

So, after this spring's weeding and last summer's plugging and watering, what conclusions have I come to about putting in a buffalo grass lawn?  It's a little early yet but, as of right now, my biggest regret is not hiring some young, healthy landscaper type last summer to plug it all in for us at one time.   Not only would that have saved us a lot of time, sweat and knee pain, it would have gotten the plugs in the ground while they were still in their prime.  By the time the plugs in the area I'm currently weeding were put in, they were at least half dead from being in a flat for almost 2 months - no matter how much I watered, I couldn't seem to keep enough water on them to keep them healthy.  It's truly amazing to me that the buffalo grass in the front lawn survived at all!

Buffalo Grass Update

We finished plugging the 27 flats (70 plugs apiece) of buffalo grass last weekend. I can't believe we did the WHOLE thing!


Anyway, here is the back courtyard area that we finished about a month ago. (If you check out the link, you'll see what it looked like then.) For the most part, the plugs have taken well and are beginning to expand outward a bit.

And here is the front yard, freshly plugged.


It's probably going to look a little odd for at least a year or two until we switch it entirely to buffalo grass. Right now we've left the fescue that's surviving and just plugged in around it. Since fescue and buffalo grass are worse than apples and oranges in terms of similarity, I don't imagine that it's going to be the most glamorous lawn in Sedgwick County, but hopefully it will hold the soil and be moderately green.

Fighting the Odds

The courtyard lawn looked rough last fall - full of weeds, patchy, generally yucky. So Greg just decided to nuke it all and start fresh this year.

With our trip to England and Norway in September, we missed our opportunity to plant fescue last fall.

Between the weather and my trip to San Antonio this spring, we missed our opportunity to plant fescue this spring.

So when I saw the sale on Prestige buffalo grass at High Country Gardens this June, I decided that I ought to take advantage of it. Buffalo grass has to be established in the heat of the summer. Once established, it requires almost no watering or mowing. It's native here. This is a greener-than-usual strain of it. And it was on sale. It seemed like all the signals were saying "Go for it!" So I did.

And the grass came. All 27 flats of 70 plugs apiece came. Those of you who are friends on Facebook suffered through our planting of it (as far as it went). Planting entailed bending over (or kneeling, or sitting on my butt on the ground) in full sun, digging a hole, filling it with water, loosening up the roots of the plug, planting it, watering it again, and repeating....900+ times. That means we got about half of the plugs put in before we gave up and just started trying to keep it all alive.

Full summer is one thing. THIS summer is something else. But we're slowly seeing some progress. After 3 weeks now, the grass plugs we planted seem to have taken hold. They are beginning to grow and send out a few runners. They stay healthy green longer and require watering less often. I know there are a few plugs on the periphery that we'll have to replace, but the majority look like they're going to make it. It's our main success story in the garden for the summer. It may not be much - but I'll take it!