Creating Habitats

It’s so friggin hot and humid out after all the rain, I could barely work, but I was determined.

I exhumed and repositioned the buried boardwalk (such as it is) in the “Thorny Badlands 2”, which turns out to be a very apt name for it, what with all the blackberry briars.  I almost needed a machete out there.  That’s just step 1 of a “12-step program” of restoring the “prairie” to some semblance of order before winter.  You can just make out the tall purple ironweed (Vernonia) above the towering weeds.  The goldenrod was covered with black pollinator wasps.

Next (because I love punishment) I weeded and cleaned up the sun perennial bed, then mulched it.  Happily, the butterfly weed (a native pollinator-friendly milkweed) had all these seed pods on it.  Success!  After that, I was done in.

Here we have:  California poppies finally coming into their own in the rock garden; an eggplant flower among the marigolds (I never get eggplants, just the occasional flower); a view of trees through the crape myrtle; and new heart shaped leaves on a redbud sapling, which have come up all over the yard.  I’ll eventually transplant all these volunteer native trees into groves.  When it cools down a little, that is.

I’m watching a monarch sampling all the flowers outside my window.  It’s seems like such a small, insignificant thing, but it’s one more success creating native species-friendly habitats.

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