Mason Bees Make Home

My bee house worked! About a month ago, I installed a bee house to attract native pollinating bees. Since then, an orchard mason bee or two have filled a couple of the holes with mud, eggs, pollen and nectar. You can see the two plugged holes in the center below.

Orchard mason bees make a series of mud cells in the hole, usually about 4-6 of them, each holding one larva. While honey bees can forage miles away from their hive for nectar and pollen, the mason bees stay relatively close to home, which is good for my yard (and a few of my neighbors too).

This is an orchard mason bee on the Texas persimmon (Diospyros texana) in my front yard, which has begun to bloom. The tiny bell-shaped flowers demure, but their sweet scent is heady and strong. The bees seem to like the tree too. They were abuzz all over the thing.

This is a wonderful tree with beautiful peeling gray bark on mature plants (a great alternative to crape myrtles for the bark, but not for showy flowers). I think this persimmon is a male, because I haven't yet seen any small black fruits form.

UPDATE (4/11/08): More holes are getting filled in, but they are the smallest holes. I wonder if it's a different species??

Been Stoned: A Diatribe

When recently thinking about what stones to use for our dry drainage creek—for which I wanted a natural look—I sought out rocks that I thought looked of the place. I could’ve picked New Mexico River Rock, Mexican Beach Pebbles, Ozark “Medium,” or Colorado Flat Cobble.

All beautiful in their own right, but from places so far away.

Instead, I chose Llano River Cobbles, purchased from Austin Landscape Supplies (which strangely, is in Georgetown). I discovered that the cobbles were quarried by Hill Country Aggregates, located about 70 miles west-northwest of Austin near Lake Buchanan. It's not super close and the ecosystem is definitely not blackland prairie, but I think the rocks will make a nice local-ish looking stream after everything is landscaped.

This all got me thinking about where the stones that we use for our gardens come from? How far away did they travel? How much gas did it take? How many PPM of carbon monoxide were thrown into the air during harvesting and transport? How much of an ecosystem was destroyed so that I could have my little drainage creek?

These questions, of course, are all related to the concept of "sustainable gardening." I suppose I define that loosely as using minimal resources and giving equal--if not more--back to the ecosystem. To me, sustainable implies some sort of equality (no "greater thans" or "less thans"). But sustainable, by definition, involves a human element. Without human intervention in any way, the garden wouldn't be a garden at all; it would be a natural area. Arguably, it is impossible to find ANY place that humans have not intervened. Stephen Hopper comments in in this fascinating article that the entire Earth is our garden (put that in your pipe and smoke it).

Anyway, it might be hard to swallow, but the minute we decide to put in hardscape, we’ve damaged an environment elsewhere to make our own more pleasant to the eye. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. Stone quarries (unless they are turned into resplendent gardens a la Butchart Gardens in British Columbia) are gaping wounds in the earth. Forests and prairies and wetlands are leveled and dug out. Creeks and rivers are harvested. Ecosystems are disrupted or destroyed.

There are pollution and petroleum costs of sculpting it, carting it and transporting it to its final destination. This is the case whether its true stone or bricks, cement or plastic.

Man, it can be overwhelming.

Some help may come by way of the future-looking, positive folks at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center with the Sustainable Sites Initiative. This will result in some guidelines for landscape architects to stay "green," from water use to stone versus brick, but I'm sure many of the those rules can trickle down to us smaller gardeners. In the end, they are hoping for a system that will be like LEED certification or integrated into LEED certification. It’s a step in the right direction, but I'm afraid it still isn't a recipe for guilt-free gardening.

In then meantime, I try not to wring my hands too much over the decisions I make, and I justify the environmental expense of those decisions by believing that I am doing something better for this patch of earth where I’ve given my self the status of manager (and sometimes "Employee of the Month"). I may be adding stone that wasn’t here and taking it away from its home, but perhaps by planting more natives, providing food and shelter for wild critters passing through the city, and getting rid of lawn, I’m doing something right, something sustainable.

Garden Patrol

A quick patrol around the garden on a spring afternoon after work...

The first purple coneflower blooms in the front

Young swiss chard is a beautiful beet red

Wispy flowers of our small lacey oak, Quercus laceyi, are lovely back-lit by the sun

Flowers of the sedge in the woodlands (I believe this is something called Scott's turf that we picked up from Barton Springs Nursery)

Peach blossoms have peaked and the leaves are starting to emerge. They too look nice back-lit by the afternoon sun

A columbine blooms in the front yard. I'm not sure which this one is...it was left by the previous owners.

Veggies Planted: Spring 08

Quick note to self (since this is a garden journal):
Planted tomato transplants, squash seeds, chard transplants and chives on Mar 7.

Virginia creeping

These young leaves of native virginia creeper vine are almost as red as they'll turn come fall. I've never really paid much attention to these plants at this stage, but they were a nice surprise on this gray, blustery day in Austin. I posted a while ago on a beautiful moth whose caterpillar feeds on virginia creeper--the Nessus sphinx.

On Demand: A Challenge

We just finished the arduous and un-gardening process of rehabing our only bathroom. Thankfully it didn't take all that much time, so we had only 2 weeks without a shower and sink and only a few days without a toilet (thank goodness for friends with guest rooms!).

But this indoor project seeped its way out in the form of a new, eco-fabulous, water-saving, on-demand, tankless water heater: the Takagi T-K Jr. It remains to be seen whether this little thing can handle all of our hot water needs, but we're trusting the plumber on that one. Fingers crossed.

We installed the water heater outside, both to open up closet space indoors and to help with the machine's carbon monoxide ventilation (they call that eco-friendly? I guess everything has its waste).

What that means is that it's now slapped against a wall right next to the peaceful patio, bench and herb garden. Our once machine-free zone has been invaded.

So what to do with it? That's my new challenge.

Right now, we're leaning toward a trellis, perhaps planted with crossvine which would bloom before the young desert willow in front of it. Once the willow grows larger, its multiple trunks could be well-highlighted by the evergreen behind. Another option would be to replace the desert willow with something bushy and evergreen (though that would cut visibility from the bathroom and kitchen windows to the garden).

Any thoughts from the blogosphere?

For the Birds and Bees

My friend Jimmy makes these screech owl boxes, and he gave us this one a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I think we just missed the season just before mating when the birds are hunting for nesting sites. Hopefully this will attract a screecher next year!

I built this wabi-sabi native bee and bug house for the burrowers. We have about 4,000 native bees in this country and many are extremely important pollinators. Non-native--but also critically important--honey bees, Apis mellifera, visit the garden all the time from hives that must be relatively close. But, I'm hoping this box will attract a more diverse pollinating crew, cuckoo bees and the like. For instructions on building your own, check out the Xerces Society [pdf].

Lime and Yellows

I did a quick tour around the garden yesterday and found a lot of lime and yellow colors.

Almost nothing beats the smell of citrus flowers, like these tiny ones on the Mexican lime.

New fronds of the wood fern are way more lime-colored in person. Plants always look good with water droplets on them (these are natural).

The dill proudly displays its yellow umbels tall above the diminishing winter veggie garden. I'm starting to pull out the old lettuces and broccolis to make room for warm season things like tomatoes, basil, beans and cucumbers.

This spiky native shrub, agarito (Berberis trifoliata), has sweet smelling yellow flowers that turn into plump red berries the birds love. I hope these will grow large to form a tiny thicket - a favorite habitat for mockingbirds. I lot of people plant non-native (Californian?) mahonia around here, but I think this native is just as good.