steph's garden

Have patience. There be LOTS o' pictures to fetch!
(Some of these make nice screen effects.)

The multi-level birdbath is not a work of art, but it invites a wide variety of birds in for a drink. Lots of those birds stay to snack on the bugs. The house-fly problem of the first summer diminished to nearly nothing the second summer after I added water features for the birds.

Two other denizens of the garden are Shelley and Mr. T , a pair of three-toed box turtles (which are actually tortoises, but we won't go there now). "The Kids" are "free-range" -- that is, they wander around the garden at will. The Kids dine on escargot (snails), grubs, worms, miscellaneous plants and weeds, and the odd leftover fruits and vegetables that would otherwise go to the compost bin. The snail population has been dropping each year. Sadly, I haven't seen Mr. T around in about a year. Possibly he's gone walk-about or has gone to Stovokor. Shelley frequently goes missing for a few months at a time then suddenly is just there.

The compost bin (actually, there are three bins and a couple of compost piles) is central to providing nutrients and tilth to the garden and its soil. The larger trimmings and prunings go through the chipper-shredder before going into the bin or, alternatively, being spread as mulch to "sheet-compost."

As part of the Integrated Pest Management effort I left a dead apple tree standing on the backyard to be a home to birds and beneficial insects. Sadly, one of the extremely dead branches broke off on winter, so I cut off the other dead branches to ensure that one of them wouldn't come crashing through my bedroom window some night. Mason bees continued to call the stump home for another year, but it's probably time to remove the stump and plant something new and more wildlife-friendly than a domesticated fruit tree. I'm thinking blue elderberry.

A while back the DogThing(TM) discovered that we have opossums. I discovered that opossums eat slugs, snails, cockroaches, mice, rats, etc. Opossums seem to have a serendipitous addition to our IPM, but they apparently left after a few months.

I've been looking at landscaping the place primarily in California natives, but sorting out what natives are the right ones for my area is a bit challenging. Why? Because the area where I live has been so urban/suburban-ized for so long that it's hard to tell what it used to be. Sometimes you can tell by neighborhood names, but "Rose Garden" and "Burbank" aren't very helpful. On the other hand, names like "Sherman Oaks" and "Willow Glen" are. Based on elevation maps I'm guessing that my neighborhood wasn't quite riparian nor quite Foothill woodlands nor quite Oak woodlands, but is somehow a mix.

As you might see from the pictures of the flowers, I've started adding natives slowly to the non-natives that were already here. I'm willing to keep non-natives that are performing well (without being invasive or obnoxious). One of the tenets of IPM is that the more diverse the plant population, the more diverse the fauna they will attract. The very diversity of the fauna helps keep them in check. This bug gets eaten by that bug which, in turn, gets eaten by some other bug or other beast. Monocultures (like acres of a single crop) tend to pull in a single pest and no other critters to help control it.

So, yes, I get bugs. I get all sorts of bugs! One day a four- or five-inch long Praying Mantis climbed up on my chair to read a book with me! I also get all sorts of birds. I haven't sprayed for anything but golden aphids (on the houseplants I keep outdoors) in almost five years. (I use water with a little dish liquid mixed in a spray bottle.) My flowers aren't show-perfect, but they're really nice and I don't have to do anything to keep them that way. I have no infestations -- well, not since the first year in the place anyway. The first year the place had no natives or bird baths and consisted mostly of exotics that had been manicured within an inch of their lives for years -- and had probably been sprayed to that point, too.

Now the fallen leaves collect under the trees. (Oh, sure, I corral the leaves into the beds -- off the lawn and walkways.) The cuttings are composted and recycled into the works. But I still want to add more natives and replace more of the exotics with natives.