Hello Gardeners
Have you heard the term ‘soft landings’?
Soft landings are diverse native plantings under keystone trees (or any other regionally appropriate native tree). These plantings provide critical shelter and habitat for one or more life cycle stages of moths, butterflies, and beneficial insects such as bumble bees, fireflies, lacewings, and beetles. In addition to plants, soft landings also include leaf litter, duff, and plant debris. -Heather Holm, see: Soft Landings
Many of you know that it isn’t necessary to rake the leaves off your lawn. A quick mowing without bagging with your lawn mower is beneficial as the chopped up dried leaves decompose and add nutrients to your lawn. But you can go a step further by providing soft landings under your trees which supports hundreds of insects and pollinators.
A recently published study, Removing autumn leaves in residential yards reduces the spring emergence of overwintering insects, found that in a one square meter of ground where the leaves were not removed, that 2,000 insects emerged from a period of March thru June. These were just butterflies and moths, beneficial parasitic wasps, spiders, beetles and flies. These are insects that help feed birds and reptiles, pollinate plants, and help keep non-beneficial insects in check. When the leaves were removed, they saw a decrease of 45% of emerging insects. Think about it—over 2,000 beneficial insects made their home in only a square meter!
The highlights of this study are:
-Autumn leaf raking decreased the abundance of spring emerging arthropods by 17 %.
-Raking leaves reduced Lepidoptera species richness by 40 % and abundance by 45 %.
-Raking changed the composition of Lepidoptera and parasitic wasp communities.
-Leaf mining moths and their associated parasitic wasps were most adversely affected.
-Retaining leaves supports arthropods in both high and low maintenance yard areas.
I encourage you to rethink how you ‘clean up’ your yard this fall. There’s a popular saying, ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’. Think globally by helping insects and other animals, including humans. Act locally, by providing soft landings and not maintaining a pristine lawn (and saving yourself some work).
Another Act Locally Opportunity!
Now is a great time to harvest most seeds as long as their seed heads or pods are dry. The seed library would love any native plant seeds or non-hybrid seeds from peas, beans, lettuce or tomatoes.
Though the seed library gets donations of commercial seed packets, I especially like getting locally grown seeds. These locally grown seeds have started adapting to our local environment and in time will grow better than produce, flowers and seeds from plants grown elsewhere in the country.
Future seed packaging events will be coming soon. We are now at the ‘possible questionable driving weather’ time of the year, so I will be trying for a Saturday date. I’ll send out an email when it is scheduled.
Pam
Local Greenhouses and Nurseries
As a request from our volunteers, I am adding a list of various local greenhouses or garden centers that sell plants. Many of these establishments do not use neonicotinoids on their plants that they grow. But the buyer should beware: they may sell plants that were grown previously at a different wholesaler which did use systemic pesticides. You should ask the growers at these establishments whether neonics were used on the plants you wish to purchase.
Neonicotinoids or ‘neonics’ are a systemic pesticides used on plants to kill insects. Unfortunately, these insecticides also harm pollinators as the insecticide gets into all parts of the plant including the pollen and nectar.
The only way to be sure a plant has not been treated with neonics is to buy certified organic seed and grow it yourself, or buy a certified organically grown plant.
More information here.
Goldman’s Greenhouse – East Bethel, MN
Website: Goldman's
MNL – Ecological restoration and native species landscaping, retail and whole sale seeds. Website: MNL
Outback Nursery – Hastings, MN
Seller of Minnesota native trees, shrubs and perennials.
Website: Outback
Prairie Moon Nursery – Winona, MN and order online
They have hundreds of varieties of native plant seeds, plants and bare root stock.
Website: Prairiemoon
Prairie Restorations – Scandia, MN
Seller of Minnesota native plants.
Website: Prairieresto
Contact info:
Email: wblseedlibrary@gmail.com
Website: https://wblseedlibrary.blogspot.com/
