Gardening for Butterflies

After my last post I received an excellent question: apart from leaving milkweed in my garden, "How else can we encourage the monarchs?"

Milkweed is known to be critical for monarchs as it is the only  plant upon which monarch caterpillars can feed. The adult monarch butterfly however, can feed on any nectar producing flowers. If you want to give them a nutritious pit stop, plant flowers in groups. This allows butterflies to hop from one flower to another using relatively little energy while getting a full meal. 

Here are five great flowers for attracting butterflies.

Coneflower

Purple Coneflower

Aster

Aster

Black Eyed Susan

Black Eyed Susan

Bee Balm

Bee Balm

Lupine

Lupines

This is a beginner's guide as the truth is any flower/plant is useful as a habitat or source of food for an insect. Clumps of grass are great shelter during rough weather, for example. There are flowering charts and extensive lists of flowers and plants that attract butterflies for those who want to be meticulous.  If you aren't interested in having a binder of study material rest assured that having a diversity of plant species is guaranteed to attract winged visitors. Hummingbirds will certainly be attracted by the red flowers of your bee balm.  The only way to go wrong when planning a butterfly garden would be to create a lawn or to use pesticides. 

Biodiversity is the best thing you can offer. Try having perennial flowers that will flower at different times during the season, so that there is always a nectar source. Indigenous weeds are awesome when your gardening budget is low, letting them grow to flower before pulling them up is a great way to create a mini habitat with a huge amount of biodiversity. Indeed, these plant might be host plants for caterpillars from other species of butterflies.

Simply put: have a garden! Your garden is a space you are sharing with wildlife and insects. It is a refuge for these species from the acres of conventional fields and from the pavement and buildings that cover our cities and suburbs. 

Lastly, do them one huge (obvious) favour; don’t cover the plants and soil with pesticides and herbicides. The land might be in your name, but the earth cannot belong to a person. Animals and insects constantly have their food poisoned for something as superficial as a 'perfect' rose bush.

Go forth and make Eden rise! Really, it is that easy.

Climate Change

"For more than forty years, the view of the Earth from space has been the unofficial logo of the environmental movement- featured on countless T-shirts, pins, and bumper stickers. It is the thing that we are supposed to protect at U.N. climate conferences, and that we are all called upon to "save" every Earth Day, as if it were an endangered species, or a starving child far away, or a pet in need of our ministrations. [...]

When we marvel at the blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to save the planet, we cast ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of a parent, the parent of the earth. But the opposite is the case. It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely."

-Naomi Klein
An excerpt from the book This Changes Every Thing - Capitalism vs. The Climate 

Seven

Fall is a time to take stock. I tried a few things this year and learned a few lessons that will allow me to move forward into more focused plantings.

1.     Asparagus loves my site/soil/climate. Now I am trying to decide how much more to plant next year,  whether I should invest in roots or start plants from seed, and how to prepare the soil in advance for a massive planting.

Asparagus in July. Next spring it will be possible to harvest two spears per plant.

Dwarf cherry, the leaves slowly died
 back until there was only this little
 tuft left. It lives, for now.

2.       Cherries and miniature kiwis are not suited to my site. While the plants still cling to life, the amount of trouble they are having surviving does not bode well. In the spring I will replant these plants in a different area and plant more worthwhile plants in their place. There is no point leaving the prime top-of-the-hill real estate to a group of plants that won’t bear fruit. Better to fill the space with fruit trees that have been doing well.

3.       Plums and apricots are fantastic. More of these will be planted. I love them- they are tough and not many local producers have these crops which means should I ever take them to the farmer’s market I won’t have competition.

4.       Strawberries are delicious, and I am still harvesting in October. There are a lot of strawberry producers in the area, though, so I will keep my production for personal consumption only.

5.       Praying mantises live in Canada! They, along with snakes, love my bit of land and I expect this has to do with leaving tall grasses. I will keep the areas directly below my trees tidy in the future, but will leave wild areas for biodiversity. This will also help wild pollinator species as I want to introduce more species of flowers to those areas.

This red currant produced
DELICIOUS and sweet berries!

6.       Some red currant varieties are delicious and sweet. They bear fruit the second year. I will plant more. Saskatoons taste good and bear the first year, but the skin breaks upon picking. This destroys their potential for even short term storage.

7.       Since the field has no irrigation, there is no point in preparing a vegetable garden with non-drought tolerant crops. Most of my vegetables did not grow. 

I love my project. I love that I can make mistakes and learn and always keep dreaming of potential futures the project could have. I was afraid of taking this risk, but it is the most worthwhile risk I have ever taken.

Have a lovely week.

Apricots have beautiful red tinted foliage all summer long.

Munching on grape leaves, this is one fat caterpillar.

The Farm vs. The Garden

What is a farm and what is a garden?

A farm should be profitable, first of all, and efficient. Straight rows, evenly spaced, soil tilled into a perfect seed bed in order to produce a uniform crop. Orchards are made up of trees in straight lines and the width between the rows reflects tractor size and manoeuvrability as much as it reflects plant requirements. Animals are fed a standard diet and more or less confined to a designated area. There is nothing growing on a farm that does not serve a purpose.

That, at least, is my impression of farms. I love them, and always have. I've worked on loads of farms and dearly wish I had found a nice farm lad to be my husband so that I could live and work on my own farm. 

Don't get the impression that I don't think I am capable of starting and running my own farm without a man involved. Of course I could, and if that's your dream (irregardless of gender or marital status) I encourage you to jump in. 

What is holding me back is that I do not like to limit myself to the analytical thinking required to make a farm efficient and profitable. When I'm at work I'm a huge fan of the "work smarter, not harder" approach, but when it comes to my dreams I want to create a place where food is plentiful, nature is welcome, and puttering is encouraged.

Eden's Rise is a productive garden. Fruit, flowers that are known to be good for wild bees, herbs, and some annual vegetables will all grow here. This year so far I've accomplished three of those four goals, though on a tiny scale. Next year Eden's Rise will be unrecognisable as the little fallow field it once was. 

This fall I am planting 155 more fruiting shrubs and ~200 mixed flower bulbs. In the spring will come ~40 more fruit trees, and possibly some nuts as well. Then, I have a plan for companion planting vegetables, flowers, and herbs below the fruit trees using the permaculture principles of plant guilds. I have begun digging swales and seeding the lower portion in clover to increase soil nitrogen and hopefully the deep roots will break up some of the bedrock. I also need to set about establishing some more permanent raised beds for vegetable and herb production. The raised bed designated for wild flowers will be reseeded again in the spring and hopefully next year a three month long drought will not once again kill all the newly sprouted plants. And all this while trying to plant in a way that is visually appealing. 

Eden's Rise aims to blur the lines between utility and beauty. 

What is a farm and what is a garden? Both are amazing proofs of humanity's ability to influence and change our landscapes and environment. But can a farm be productive and efficient while being beautiful? Can a garden be beautiful while still being efficient and productive? 

Have a lovely week.

Why Garden?

It's a lot of work; so why garden?

It would be easier not to plant all these trees. In the supermarket we can buy local fruit and exotic fruit of all shapes and colours. But they have about 1/4 of the taste and texture compared to eating them ripe off the tree. That's one reason people garden. Taste. 

This is pretty much the entire harvest for 2016, so why bother?

You could spend Sunday mornings laying in bed until noon while watching a Netflix show and eating Nutella straight from the jar (tempting) instead of working 6 hours lugging water, raking, weeding, digging, and generally 'working'. This physical exertion gives you strength, a well earned hunger, and energy that can only come from regular exercise. You might garden for your health.

When you shop for seeds, bulbs, plants; fruit, vegetable, or floral- you have so many options to choose from. You can plant huge flowers of all colours, try 20 varieties of tomato, grow something you've never heard of for the chance to try an unknown berry in several years' time. You can garden for variety and discovery.


If you read this blog, you're likely a gardener yourself. What's your reason for gardening? Have you ever even stopped to wonder why you do it?


My reason is pure and simple: I enjoy it. 

I dig and sweat in the sun on a cool morning. I hear the birds sing. I look up to see a herd of wild turkeys watching me, or a weasel carrying a rodent half its size. I hear the wind and the hum of bees and forget about time, people, stress, traffic, internet, deadlines. I reconnect to the true meaning of life, to nature. 

It isn't work to me, I wouldn't want to be doing anything else. 

You can leave your comments below, I would love to hear about your own adventures into gardening! 

Have a lovely week.