Fall Gardening for Wildlife
Oct. 14th, 2020 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithFall is not a time when most people think about gardening, other than planting bulbs, but this is a prime time for wildlife gardening.
It's important to avoid tidying your yard too much, because that destroys habitat for wildlife. Things you can do:
* Are you lazy? Leave it where it falls! Wildlife loves a carefree yard.
* Make a leaf pile, or mulch trees and flowerbeds with leaves. I always get a few wheelbarrows to put over my flowerbeds. This provides insulation as well as wildlife benefits. Fallen leaves have many uses. If you don't have trees, plant comfrey, a miner plant that makes huge leaves you can slash-and-drop several times over the growing season.
* Make a brush pile. Create a log cabin core of bigger branches and then pile twigs on top. This attracts birds and small mammals.
* Make a mulch pile using chips of wood or bark. This mimics a natural forest floor. It also hosts a detritus food web. Mine is 3 days to apex. \o/ If you have big slabs of bark, stack them criss-cross for hibernating insects. I have ladybugs out the wazoo here at Fieldhaven, so whenever I see bark slabs I do this.
* Make a fallen log garden. The bigger the better, but anything thick enough to last a few years will do. Plant some forest wildflowers around it, or ferns -- anything that likes a moist shady spot. A log is a haven for wildlife. You can also stack smaller logs into a pile. Our log pile consists of tree trunk sections that we never got around to splitting all of for firewood before they rotted.
* A patch of bare earth is good for everything from burrowing insects to dustbathing birds. Look for a patch in deep dry shade that doesn't grow much if anything. To make it nice you can put a border of stone or brick, or just leave it as it is. My birds like to dustbathe on the patio, in the firepit, in the driveway, and a few other places.
* Leave the seed heads and pods in your wildflower garden. They provide food and cover for various species. Of course, you can also collect seeds to plant more wildflowers. I can't be arsed to do all the cold storage steps, so I usually just plant them in the ground. Some will get eaten, but that's okay too.
It's important to avoid tidying your yard too much, because that destroys habitat for wildlife. Things you can do:
* Are you lazy? Leave it where it falls! Wildlife loves a carefree yard.
* Make a leaf pile, or mulch trees and flowerbeds with leaves. I always get a few wheelbarrows to put over my flowerbeds. This provides insulation as well as wildlife benefits. Fallen leaves have many uses. If you don't have trees, plant comfrey, a miner plant that makes huge leaves you can slash-and-drop several times over the growing season.
* Make a brush pile. Create a log cabin core of bigger branches and then pile twigs on top. This attracts birds and small mammals.
* Make a mulch pile using chips of wood or bark. This mimics a natural forest floor. It also hosts a detritus food web. Mine is 3 days to apex. \o/ If you have big slabs of bark, stack them criss-cross for hibernating insects. I have ladybugs out the wazoo here at Fieldhaven, so whenever I see bark slabs I do this.
* Make a fallen log garden. The bigger the better, but anything thick enough to last a few years will do. Plant some forest wildflowers around it, or ferns -- anything that likes a moist shady spot. A log is a haven for wildlife. You can also stack smaller logs into a pile. Our log pile consists of tree trunk sections that we never got around to splitting all of for firewood before they rotted.
* A patch of bare earth is good for everything from burrowing insects to dustbathing birds. Look for a patch in deep dry shade that doesn't grow much if anything. To make it nice you can put a border of stone or brick, or just leave it as it is. My birds like to dustbathe on the patio, in the firepit, in the driveway, and a few other places.
* Leave the seed heads and pods in your wildflower garden. They provide food and cover for various species. Of course, you can also collect seeds to plant more wildflowers. I can't be arsed to do all the cold storage steps, so I usually just plant them in the ground. Some will get eaten, but that's okay too.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-10-14 09:50 am (UTC)I like how wildlife gardening is basically, get f**k out of the way and leave nature alone.
It's surprising how many people find that a difficult concept to understand.
Thoughts
Date: 2020-10-14 10:45 am (UTC)There are a few exceptions -- nature takes about a century to make an inch of topsoil, but an industrious human can make a cubic yard in a couple of weeks and a lazy one can do it in about a year. But mostly, less is more.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2020-10-14 12:20 pm (UTC)Humans can help speed things up true... but it's bloody difficult to improve on it, and frankly, speeding things up is just us making nature march to our beat.
Plus, there might be darn good reason why it takes a century to make an inch of top soil, and forcing it to go faster might be creating trouble later on. Goddess knows, that's happened often enough when we thought we knew better.
Still, I think we should probably rebuild our cities to make them greener, concentrate farming into aeroponics or hydroponics in vertical farms [use all those office blocks that are probably obsolete now.] and leave the rest of the world to go wild. If we build the cities so they spread out in a sort of snowflake pattern with wild corridors between the urban districts, people even get to see more wild-life, albeit is a somewhat modified wild-park form, with the true wilderness between cities.
Imagine, all those redundant farms, re-wilded and dotted with villages and huge metropolises of city cores, surrounded by thick bands of verdant green wild-parkland striped with housing. [and of course, given the distributed nature, decent public transport to the point where private cars are nearly obsolete.]