An Old Job With New Twists

 “There’s more leaves out here than ever before!” my neighbor Mary exclaimed, as the yellow, orange and brown confetti rained down.  She should know, she’s lived here for 50-plus years.  I suspect it’s the frequent south winds blowing the autumn leaves in our direction, not unlike the winds of change which are getting us to re-think the ritual of putting the garden to bed.

The biggest change is neatness.  I’m accustomed to pulling up the remains of all annuals and chopping down every perennial stalk and stem, leaving the ground as flat as a nuclear bomb blast.  Tidiness removes diseased plant remains, makes the gardens less attractive to varmints like voles, and reduces the amount of work to do in spring.  But a plea for less grooming is now coming from those who know nature.  Pollinators and other creatures important to the planet’s function require places to spend the winter.  Red mason bees, leaf cutter bees and wool carder bees need to nest in cavities, so the hollow stems of plants like beebalm and ornamental grasses fit the bill.  Butterflies including the red-spotted purple, meadow fritillary and viceroy want to hide in seed pods, vegetation, and rolled-up leaves.  Hoverflies, which sound pesty but are actually important pollinators as well as aphid-eaters, must have the shelter of undisturbed soil or craggy tree bark to ride out the cold and snow.  As we become better attuned to the importance of these tiny and often unseen creatures, we’ve got to recognize their year-round needs.

Much more mundane is my take on garden hoses.  I used drain, roll up, and store each of the hoses, a laborious job, with the idea that water freezing inside would split them.  Then I got lazy, and decided one November to leave the long hose, which travels from the house to greenhouse, behind shrubs and under the sidewalk, in place.  It was an early 90’s model from the now defunct Frank’s Nursery chain, and its days were probably numbered anyway.  That was several autumns ago, and Frank’s hose, since undrained and totally neglected, is still working beautifully.  And while I still drain and store some of the others, I have one less pipe to put by.

Think politics is contentious?  Let me explain the fall mowing height issue.  North Dakota State University recommends your last lawn mowing of the season should cut the grass to two inches, to reduce matting and the disease called snow mold.  University of Kentucky takes a bolder stance, saying a lawn cut to a height of one and a half inches will have better color and quicker spring green-up.  But Wisconsin recommends keeping your lawn at its normal height of three inches.  Colorado State is having none of it, proclaiming “There is no reason to mow the turf shorter in late fall.”  Personally, I’m with Colorado.  While snow mold is worse on overly long grasses, mowing shorter than normal isn’t likely to help but will instead stress the lawn.  Mow your conscience.        

Spicebush: Pungent, Yet Modest

Spicebush!  I braked my mountain bike hard to take a closer look.  I was pleased to see dozens of Lindera benzoin scattered beneath the cottonwood trees, in a section of Schodack Island State Park not yet swamped by invasives.  The cottonwoods were bare, and the surrounding weeds still green, so the luminous yellow of the spicebushes gave them center stage on a cloudy fall day.  Bike botany, neat native plants, glorious autumn – by George, who could ask for anything more?

I first appreciated spicebush along another trail, the Bronx River Parkway, where it grows in profusion in the damp soil.  Indigenous to much of the eastern half of the country, it is a medium-sized understory shrub about twelve feet tall.  All parts of the plant have a strong aromatic odor, pleasing but perhaps a bit medicinal.  Flowering in very early spring, its clusters of small yellow blossoms are much more demure than brassy forsythia, but attractive nonetheless.  Spring flowers sell plants, but whereas you’ll find forsythia for sale in droves at the big boxes, spicebush is more difficult to discover in the nursery trade and sought out only by those in the know (such as me and you).  Someday, when the public gains a greater appreciation of our native flora, perhaps the sales figures on these two species will be reversed, with spicebush finding a place in just about every local landscape now occupied by a forsythia.

I’m happy to have a nursery-bought Lindera in my backyard, thriving in partial shade and soil of average moisture and fertility.  Although it is described as a facultative wetland dweller, meaning it usually lives where its feet are occasionally damp, mine came through last summer’s drought just fine.  Female spicebushes bear small red fruits in September, each about the size of a marble, but mine is decidedly barren.  It may be male, or perhaps just juvenile, but finding a confirmed female to plant nearby would be a worthwhile mission for next year.  And yes, I agree that being male and being juvenile are often one and the same thing.

Versatility also describes spicebush.  It can play a part in a shade garden, a rain garden, or a wildlife garden, too, since it’s fatty fruits feed birds like vireos, thrushes tanagers and robins.  The spicebush swallowtail butterfly, a beautiful creature of black, white and blue, lays eggs exclusively on spicebush and other plants in the Laurel Family and the larvae feed on the leaves.  The larvae sport large eye-spots, making them look like small snakes, so be prepared if you plant a spicebush.  Spicebush silkmoth, a large, handsome moth marked in browns and beiges, also uses it as a food source during its green and horny larval stage.  Native Americans and early settlers used the twigs and leaves for a spring tonic tea, found the fruits aided flatulence, bruises and rheumatism, and employed the bark to bring on sweats and expel worms.  For many, Lindera is the spice of life.   

More Bitter Than Sweet

Imagine an ornamental plant which grows quickly, with no insect pests or fungal diseases.  It produces highly attractive orange fruits in fall, perfect to pair with pumpkins and mums.  It requires no watering or fertilizer, grows in any soil, and thrives in sun or shade.  And best of all, deer don’t eat it!  Did these positive qualities run through someone’s mind as they brought the first plants of oriental bittersweet to the United States in the 1860’s?  Certainly they couldn’t have foreseen that this plant would grow into the environment-changer we live with today. 

Once you know oriental bittersweet, you’ll find it’s just about everywhere in our part of the Hudson Valley.  It’s a vine that can climb sixty feet or more into the trees, sometimes pulling them down as it spreads.  It grows on top of less aggressive vines, such as native Virginia creeper, smothering them, too.  It also forms dense thickets, leaving no room for woody plants or wildflowers to survive or regenerate.  It turns the landscape into a mass of indistinct, foliage-covered forms, making things look strange and degraded.  Oriental bittersweet covers natural places, like Schodack Island State Park and Papscanee Island Preserve.  Its abundant in cultivated landscapes too, often seen growing up chain link fences in the city and scaling spruces in the suburbs.  I’m pulling up seedlings like crazy at my place, trying to hold a line in the shifting sand.

A known problem in more than 33 states and covering thousands of acres nationally, how did oriental bittersweet become such a success?  A combination of traits make it bigger, faster and stronger than virtually anything in its path.  There are both male and female plants, as well as plants that bear both male and female flowers.  Abundant seeds are produced in fall, and these seeds are highly attractive to birds and small animals.  Migrating birds may retain what they eat for more than a month, so bittersweet seeds consumed here may be deposited hundreds of miles away.  Seeds germinate readily, grow quickly, and seedlings can produce flowers and seeds after just a year or two of growth.  Oriental bittersweet has hybridized with native American bittersweet to the point that scientists fear the native will become extinct.  Vines touching the ground can root and spread further, and cut vines re-grow quickly.  Climate models suggest that Oriental bittersweet is likely to benefit from warming temperatures and increasing precipitation in the Northeast, where it is predicted to increase and spread northward (watch out, Canada!).  And perhaps most cleverly, o.b.’s fall fruits are eye-candy to humans, who pick it, use it for their seasonal décor, then discard it in the backyard, aiding its march onward.  Truly, this is a cockroach-bedbug-Norway rat of a plant.

So is there any hope?  It seems unmanaged natural areas will be increasingly covered with oriental bittersweet indefinitely, making native woodlands invasive species ghettos.  In your own backyard, pull, dig and remove it any way you can.  Keep calm and garden on.

Calm Above, Trouble Below

All I wanted was some new photos for my lawn talk, but I got a bit more than that. Since my pictures of looking in a lawn for grubs date back to the film era, I headed into the backyard with my digital camera to get some new-century shots.  Scouting for grubs involves cutting out a one square foot section of turf, turning it over, and pawing through the soil in search of larvae.  Due to the droughty summer and my weedy lawn, I wasn’t expecting much, but a grub soon appeared; then more, and still more.  I stopped looking and counting after I had 13 Japanese beetle grubs writhing in a yogurt cup.  While a few grubs are of little concern, over eight per square foot can cause serious damage.  Lawns with high grub populations can turn to barren fields by spring.  This excited my inner entomologist while nauseating the horticulturist.

If you’ve somehow gotten this far in life and don’t know grubs, here’s the scoop.  Grubs are the larval stage of beetles, including Japanese beetles, Oriental beetles, and European chafers, the three most popular characters in the Capital District.  The adult mom beetles lay eggs in August, which quickly hatch into grubs.  The grubs are white, C-shaped, have six legs on the front end, and a brown head capsule.  They voraciously devour the roots of grass plants.  They survive winter underground, eat a little more in the spring, pupate, then emerge as the next generation of beetles in late June or early July.  

Crafting an action plan for an October gaggle of grubs is a head scratcher.  Beneficial nematodes, tiny eel-like creatures which can enter a grub and regurgitate a toxic bacteria, can provide good control in some instances, but are expensive and picky about their environmental conditions, making deployment a challenge.  A new nematode, developed by Rutgers University and given the scientific moniker Steinernema scarabaei, promises to be larger, hungrier, and easier to use.  Unfortunately, it is hard to find for sale, at least right now.  Another option, a “good guy” bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis variety galleriae, which I’ll call Btg, has also recently come onto the lawn care scene.  Once the Btg is injested by a grub, it produces a protein which causes the grub to starve to death.  Btg controlled 70% or more of the grubs in trials at the Ohio State University, and it is sold under the name GrubGONE.  Unfortunately, Btg is better used in August or early September.

That leaves us with lawn insecticides, with perhaps the only choice those labeled “fast-acting,” since most of the others move too slowly into the soil to grub-level.  But if you abhor the chemical route, there is always the “do nothing” option.  Right now, moles are dining on the grubs in my backyard, and they might be joined by birds or skunks.  If it turns into a feeding frenzy, the lawn will look like a fraternity house on Sunday morning, and I’ll be re-seeding next spring.