It’s still winter, but in mid-February it’s already about time to start planting some seeds. I couldn’t be more excited to get started on my butterfly garden’s third year. I’ll be digging new beds, prepping some annuals to add color and beef up the variety, and starting a few new perennials as well. Now seems like as good a time as any to recap the process so far and talk about the ways I hope to improve on the garden for 2017.
2015 saw a modest beginning to the garden. Some of the plants flourished and by summer I had a few lepidopteran visitors, but there wasn’t a ton of activity. I’m sure part of that is due to nature needing some time to adjust to the presence of my little island of native plants, but part of the problem was certainly also due to my rookie mistakes. I started with some common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) and tried some butterfly milkweed (A. tuberosa) as well but didn’t plant enough of the former and had no success growing the latter. My New England aster and golden alexander (Zizia aurea) did not really thrive, neither making it much past seedling stage. I left the Japanese honeysuckle the previous owner had allowed to grow up the fence, and this attracted hummingbirds to the yard but not butterflies (that I spotted, anyway). Partridge pea, bee balm, and green coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata) were really the stars that first year, alongside a couple of nice sunflowers. It was a nice start, and by June it added some significant beauty to the yard, but hindsight tells me it had a long way to go.
Last year was a lot more rewarding, with the wildlife seeming to explode into the yard from April all the way through October (as discussed in my first post about the garden). Of course, most notable were the butterflies and moths. I also started to see other insects I hadn’t before in great number and variety: beetles, flies, bees, mantises and more. I found a cool-looking green crab spider hiding in the coneflower and welcomed some small orb-weavers as well. I had a visit from a juvenile gray treefrog, and the number and variety of birds visiting my yard has already begun to increase. So what did I learn or accidentally do differently to see such a dramatic difference?
Lesson 1: More!
This lesson applied to everything: more space, more plant variety, more of each plant, more maintenance. It was great to establish some native plants in the garden, but one or two per species isn’t really enough to support a solid population of butterflies or attract them in enough numbers to make a difference. That said, the greater the plant diversity the greater the animal diversity will become. The only way to achieve both is to expand the physical space of the garden and that in turn requires more time and energy. The payoff has been well worth it. I guess one last “more” is more non-plant features. I’ve added a home-made puddler and a bench and expanded the rock pile, with more little changes to come.
Lesson 2: Barriers
Full disclosure: it was mostly the dogs who taught me this lesson. I put up a small fence within our existing fence to stop them from a) shitting in the garden and b) digging up my plants. It’s also helped with the deer. I have bird netting up to keep them out of the back yard, but that doesn’t always stop them. However, since I put up the inner fence I’ve seen no evidence of them breaching that second perimeter. I caught some eating whatever sunflower and morning glory leaves and flowers grew up over the fence, but last year that was the extent of it. In this immediate area, that is a major and hard-won victory.
Lesson 3: Go Natural, Go Native
This was the general intent all along, but it took some doing to fully implement. For example, there was a massive quantity of Japanese honeysuckle in the back corner when we bought the house. It was pretty, and smelled nice, but it’s an invasive species that’s ridiculously hard to control. So throughout the second year I systematically and with prejudice removed it. It did do a good job attracting hummingbirds to the yard, and after I took it down I hardly saw any, even at my feeder. But it did virtually nothing else except try to choke out my plants, my fence, my neighbor’s trees, the dogs, and the universe at large. In late 2015 we had to have a dead tree taken down, and that gifted me with an abundance of natural wood. I made a large bench (mostly) from it, and used more of it to border our fences and for benches around our fire ring (not inside the garden, but nearby). I used bark and twigs mostly from that tree as natural mulch underneath the bench and it has performed better than I’d hoped. By collecting leaves in the fall I’ve been able to mostly replace purchased straw as a winter cover for the beds.
Lesson 4: What’s a Weed?
The last thing I’ve picked up is how to tell a seedling weed from a desired plant. Of course, part of this is marking and remembering where you planted but it’s not quite that simple. Some perennials like to move around, and often one will find volunteer annuals coming up. I don’t know that I can really teach this skill – it’s just something I’ve picked up. I suppose it starts by learning the most common weeds in your area: for me ground ivy and garlic mustard are two big ones. The other side of the coin is to recognize the seedlings of the species you want. This is easier than you might think, and this way you can safely discard something you don’t recognize. That said, I’ll leave a lot of native “weeds” like violets, dandelions, and clovers alone where I can. I tend not to pull something until I have a fairly good idea what it is, unless the plants around it are particularly sensitive to the wrong neighbors.
With all of that said, what do I want to do with the garden this year? Well, it starts with lesson 1: more! I already dug some more beds in the late summer and fall of last year, and will begin digging more within the next week or so. Eventually the goal is to have no lawn within the fence I’ve put up, but I don’t think that will be doable in one more year. I’ll fill the space I do clear with more of a few existing plants (milkweeds, joe-pye weed, and purple coneflowers, in particular) and some new plants as well. I’d like to go big for some of the new plants – bushes like viburnums and/or buttonbush. I may also try adding some Dutchman’s pipes, though I hear they come with a foul odor. If I feel ambitious I may build a butterfly house from some of that remaining natural wood. I certainly plan to add a fruit feeder (haven’t settled on bought vs. home-made). I look forward to sharing the results.