Sweet Winter Fare Meal and Event

Honeybees photo courtesy of beneficialbugs.org

What sweeter way to begin the Winter Fare activities that with a honey brunch at Green Fields Market.

Sweet Honey and the Brunch!
Sunday, February 5 between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., Green Fields Market, Main St., Greenfield

Green Fields Market will feature local honey in a variety of dishes for this special brunch.   While you enjoy brunch, Shelburne’s Piti Theatre Company will be buzzing with information about their new production about bees (and the challenges they’re facing) To Bee or Not to Bee. Piti is launching a “10% For the Bees” Campaign in collaboration with Greening Greenfield and High Mowing Seeds, encouraging the replanting of 10% of business and home-owner lawns with bee- friendly habitat. The co-op will donate a percentage of brunch sales to the production which will premiere at the company’s SYRUP: One Sweet Performing Arts Festival, March 17th in Memorial Hall, Shelburne Falls. Support the production at www.indiegogo.com/bee or learn more at www.ptco.org/bee.

Then put this interesting movie on your Winter Fare calendar.

Film Showing: “King Corn”

Wednesday, February 8, 7 p.m., Sunderland Public Library, School St., Sunderland

King Corn is a documentary about two friends and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation: corn. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, Ian and Curt plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most productive, most subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat — and how we farm. (Duration: 90 minutes). Free. For information, contact Aaron Falbel at (413) 665-2642 or visit  www.sunderlandpubliclibrary.org.

Dan Conlon who I wrote about here told me that corn syrup is just as bad for bees as it is for humans. Beekeepers routinely feed sugar syrup to bees during the winter and very early spring if they see that honey supplies in the hive are low.  Cane sugar is pure sucrose, and the nectar that honeybees gather is principally sucrose so bees process it just as they do nectar.

Corn syrup, as we all know, is cheaper than sugar which is why it is used in so many of our processed foods and soft drinks. High fructose corn syrup is also cheap for those large bee companies to use, but the bees do not find it as delicious as sucrose. Aside from their taste preferences, corn syrup is a problem for bees because it crystallizes in the hive and becomes so hard that the bees cannot eat it.

Fortunately we have beekeepers in our area who give us great honey like Warm Colors Apiary,  and the Shelburne Honey Company located at Apex Orchards. Pretty sweet.

Native Alternatives to Invasives

Purple loosestrife along a Heath roadside

“Invasive species have the potential to completely alter habitats, disrupt natural cycles of disturbance and succession, and most importantly, greatly decrease overall biodiversity, pushing rare species to the brink of extinction. Many ecologists now feel that invasive species represent the greatest current and future threat to native plant and animal species worldwide, greater even than human population growth, land development and pollution.” William Cullina of the New England Wildflower Society

We do not have to travel far to see the power of invasive plants. Look at local wetlands filled with the plumy spikes of purple loosetrife. Drive along I-91 coming into Greenfield from the south in the fall and see all the Oriental bittersweet climbing trees along the highway. See the acres of Japanese knotweed blooming in the fall along the roadsides.

Where and how did these exotic invasives get their start? This simple question has a multifaceted answer.

Over the past 300 years non-native plants have found their way to North America in a variety of ways. Some have come accidentally. Agricultural weeds have come in grain shipments, or in the ballast of early ships. Others have been introduced by horticulturists, and even the government.

As recently as 25 years ago I ordered several Autumn Olive (Eleagnus umbellaata) shrubs from the Conservation district. They grew well for several years, but eventually died, probably because of the competition by the wild grape vines I am always fighting.  They died, but it took me a while to notice that they had seeded all over the sloping field to the east of the planting. I assume this is one of those un-intended consequences that befall all of us from time to time – but it is making a lot of work for us now.

Burning bush (Euonymus alatus) is a shrub that can still be found at nurseries even though it is on the invasive list of plants in Massachusetts. The brilliant red fall foliage and its dependability are the reasons for its popularity.

So what can gardeners do? We choose plants like burning bush and purple loosetrife because of their beauty and because they suit our site.

First, gardeners have to educate themselves about which plants must be avoided. They can check the list on the New England Wildflower Society website, www.newfs.org. This site will not only list invasive plants, it will suggest native plants that provide many of the same attributes.  For myself, I have never really liked burning bush, and my highbush blueberries give the same red fall foliage – and blueberries.

Other alternatives to burning bush include Cotinus obovatus, the American smoketree. Many people plant this large shrub because they like the plumey ‘smokes’ in the fall. The deep red color is there all season long. Sweetspire, Itea virginica, is a smaller shrub if you have less space, and Clethra alnifolia, summersweet, gives you wonderfully fragrant flowers in summer as well as autumnal color.

Loosestrife in Buffalo hellstrip

This summer I was in Buffalo to get a preview of the fantastic Buffalo Garden Walk tour. One of the ‘hell-strips’ that my colleagues exclaimed over included purple loosestrife, half of us not recognizing it among the mixed planting of phlox, echinaceas and other perennials. It is a beautiful plant but so dangerous. Alternatives of Lythrum salicaria and L. virgatum, include Gayfeather, Liatris pynostachya and Filipendula rubra otherwise known as Queen of the Prairie which is a good strong grower, but not invasive. If you have a wet site swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata with its clusters of pale to deep rose on tall stems might be an answer.

The climbing tree in front of the Buckland Library is a Norway maple. This has been identified as such an invasive species that many public gardens and parks like Central Park in New York City have cut down all their Norway maples. It was planted to give children a good climbing tree. With the new library addition and new landscape that tree will need to be removed, but I suspect it will be replaced – and this time with a non-invasive climbing tree. I have been told that mulberry trees (and there are fruitless varieties) are good for climbing, as are apple trees.  There are a lot of apple trees in Buckland orchards, so this might be an appropriate tree – especially if someone volunteers to prune it during its youth to accommodate young climbers.

Other good native trees for the domestic landscape include Yellowwood (Cladastrus kentukea) which has flowers in spring and golden fall color, several birches, river birch as well as paper and sweet birch. Crabapples and mountain ash feed the birds.

In his excellent book, Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in our Gardens, which I cannot recommend too highly, Douglas W. Tallamy makes the point that even suburban gardeners play an important part in providing food and shelter for the wildlife that we welcome into our gardens, and maintaining a healthy balanced ecosystem.

That sounds reasonable – and easy, but we have to provide food that native wildlife find edible. We also need to pay attention to feeding all stages of these creatures’ lives. Butterfly larvae need to eat too.

Using native plants does not limit us to a few uninteresting varieties, but we will need to be aware of their importance, and then educate ourselves. There are many resources on the Internet and at your library and bookstore. In addition to Tallamy’s book the Brooklyn Botanical Garden has an excellent small book Native Alternatiaves for Invasive Plants.  Happy reading.

Between the Rows  August 28, 2010

Buzzin’ of the Bees

The bumbleebees are buzzin’ in the wisteria blossoms, and all kinds of bugs are biting me around my eyes, behind my ears and in the middle of my back where I can swat or scratch. It got so bad that in the heat of the day yesterday, I retired to the house for iced tea and a dip into Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles (Knopf $29.95).

I was entranced the first time I picked up this book and began at A  for Air. In 1926 a little monoplane took off from Tallulah, Louisiana to collect insects from the high altitudes. That was the first attempt to use an airplane, but not the last. While statistics tend to put me to sleep this chapter counts the amazing numbers of insects, some as common as ladybugs, at 6000 feet. Some are wingless, but carried by air currents. At 15,ooo feet a ballooning spider was found.  ”Think of 26 million little animals flying unseen above one square mile of countryside. . . . a vault of insect laden air.”

But that is just an introduction to the insect world, which for Raffles in an introduction to many other facinating topics and a spur to his own thoughts and point of view as an anthropologist. He is interested in how humans interact with all manner of animals, including insects.

The twenty-six chapters or essays range between 2 to 44 pages, and cover insects from a variety of perspectives. In Chernobyl he writes about Cornelia Hesse-Honeggers painting of mutations in insects caused by radiation; in Fever/Dream he writes about malaria and his own attack; and in The Sound of Global Warming he writes about pinon engraver beetles.  Chapter headings like The Ineffable, Temptation and Zen and the Art of ZZZ’s take us to unexpected and fascinating places.  When the grandsons visit this summer I’ll be full of weird and wonderful facts. They love weird and wonderful things.

Raffles has said that writing this book as an ‘encyclopedia’ is bit of a joke, making fun of the idea that you can gather all the information about anything and put it in one place. But he is an anthropologist, not an entomologist, so he comes at insects in myriad ways, with references to artists, philosophers, novelists and the ways they approach the world, not only insects. The book (well footnoted if you are interested) ends with this: “Learn to live with imperfection. We’re all in this together. The miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.

I am still going to put on insect repellent when I go out in the garden today.

While Watching the Snow Fall . . .

Tarankanische (The Terrible Cockroach)

I’ve been browsing through the online Creepy Crawlies exhibit of children’s books from the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University. These books date as far back as the 1744 edition of Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book.

The Terrible Cockroach by the Russian Kornei Chukovski and illustrated by Sergeii Chekhonin, published in Leningrad 1925, tells the nonsense tale of a threatening cockroach who is so fierce that he terrifies all the animals who are out to enjoy a picnic. Even the elephants are helpless in his presence. Until, that is, until a sparrow comes and gobbles him up.

Other stores include snails, bedbugs, dung beetles, and a caterpillar garden in a variety of styles from the cartoonish to the scientific.

Creepy crawlies remain a topic for children’s book writers and illustrators. Jim Aylesworth’s Old Black Fly published in 1992 is a case in point.

Old Black Fly by Jim Aylsworth

I have Garden History Girl to thank for this wonderful link which includes other virtual exhibitions.  She know a lot about gardens and all the things you will find in gardens.

Looking at these illustrations is more fun that looking at the sastrugi in the Sunken Garden.

Sunken Garden 2-26

Can you imagine how long it will take the 6 foot drift to melt in the spring?