Where You Are Planted

Renounce the Rake to Nurture the Birds

2011-11-15T19:43:00.001-05:00

The Eastern Towhees returned to our garden this fall.

If you have never seen one before you can imagine a robin dressed for the prom in full tux. They are big, like mockingbirds, with suave-looking dark wings over top of orange and white chests. Although not rare or even threatened, they are an uncommon sight in an tiny urban yard like ours.

They are also entertaining hunters. We had fun watching from inside the window as they picked over leaves, kicking backwards to uncover tasty insect meals.

I found it very validating to see those birds again this season. You see, I spend a lot of time trying to convince people to plant nectar-rich flowers and seed-bearing perennials, and often tout the habitat value of the berries we leave on our shrubs all winter. But I think what might be attracting the largest amount of wildlife to our urban yard is something that costs us nothing and has allowed us to reclaim countless hours each fall: We gave up raking...

[CONTINUE READING ON THE VOICE NEWSPAPER WEBSITE...]

Want to Help Seneca Creek?

2011-10-31T16:15:00.000-04:00

Seneca Creek is the largest watershed located solely within the boundaries of Montgomery County, MD. Although the creek and its associated state park are lovely, they have their share of stressors and troubles.

Residents interested in protecting the waters of the Seneca Creek watershed are invited to a meeting with the Montgomery County Department of the Environment (DEP), the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB), the City of Gaithersburg and Seneca Creek Watershed Partners scheduled for November 2, 2011 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Izaak Walton League, Rockville Chapter, 18301 Waring Station Road Germantown, MD 20874.

Meeting attendees will learn more about the Seneca Creek Watershed Partners and the impacts of stormwater pollution. They'll explore the idea of forming a new watershed alliance focusing on the many sub-watersheds within the Seneca Creek system. Discussions will focus on the benefits of becoming involved in local stream protection, group membership and the impact volunteers can have on making significant improvements to the health of their local streams.

Staff will make a presentation about Seneca Creek's history, its current condition, as well as stream improvement projects on the horizon.

For more information contact Audra Lew (alew@icprb.org or 301.274.8110 or visit www.potomacriver.org

Get a Free Tree and Figure Out Where to Plant It

2011-09-29T09:07:00.001-04:00

It is no secret that I hate our local power company, PEPCO. They truly are one of the worst utilities in the region -- maybe in the country. They even earned the label "Most Hated Company in America" earlier this year!!! And they seem to be ripping consumers off so as to pay big dividends to their investors. I have spent many a storm in heat and snow awaiting their repair crews after outages, and I have railed many times at their terrible customer service, which often reads like a scene from the classic book Catch-22.

Pepco has also earned my ire due to over-aggressive tree trimming and removal this year. I suspect they are out there with those noisy chain saws killing our street trees because it will make them appear more reliable.

I have been told numerous times by energy watchdogs in my neighborhood that the real problem is not trees but rather a lack of long term investment in upgrades to infrastructure. Simply put: my one neighbor says that according to reports he's heard and seen the company hasn't kept up with replacing old transformers for new ones and now the problem has become evident in the form of mysterious power outages during light storms and sometimes on sunny days with no wind.

I don't know what to make of those accusations but I will say there are many times when walking the dog on sunny days I can literally hear the transformers hum when a small wind blows, and at night we sometimes see them flash for no reason, which is a bit like being in a movie with Vincent Price . We make jokes about turning on our porch lights and expecting to see him laughing MAWAhahahahah in our front yard when those green eerie flashes begin...

But.

Pepco is giving away free trees so what the hell. I'd say if you want a tree go for it. At least they are doing something good for a change.

I have to say, however, that this free tree business seems suspiciously like greenwashing, given accusations from the Montgomery Countryside Alliance earlier this summer. (Those photos are awful!!!!) And of course the benefits of properly maintaining a mature tree far outweigh those of planting new ones... so I wish they had left some of the trees in this county alone when they went out there trying to prove they were finally paying attention to the wires.

But again, a free tree is a free tree and times are tight.

Plus, when you register to get one they let you play with some cool planting software online which will help consumers plant the right tree in the right spot, as they say. That's a good thing, since so many people forget to account for utilities when they plant because they don't realize how big trees can get.

So go for it.

Just know that when that tree gets big you might have to guard against Pepco's aggressive trimming tactics, even if you do plant it in the right spot.

This Just In! Beautyberry Repels Mosquitoes!

2011-08-25T10:15:00.013-04:00

Everyone who visits my yard eventually hears me extol the virtues of that lovely native shrub known as American Beautyberry. I love it so much I have used it for years as my profile picture on this blog.

The little shrub I picked up from Sam Jones' Atlantic Star Nursery table at the National Arboretum's Lahr Symposium plant sale years ago has thrived and continues to delight me with its strange fall color and resilience to all kinds of wacky weather fluctuations. This is a hearty-but-pretty garden resident that has rewarded us with a fantastic view of purple berries each November with great reliability. What's odd is that almost no one plants it.

In fact, I would rate it as one of the most under-used and under-appreciated native shrubs in the Mid-Atlantic; despite being a shrub that needs no care in order to produce a fantastic crop of berries that many of our local birds hungrily enjoy eating almost no commercial large-scale nursery carries it and almost no one has heard of it. Instead, everyone talks about the supposed superiority of the Japanese Beautyberry, an opinion that I do not share. I think the Japanese version looks like an overdressed party goer -- gaudy and a bit too fussy and not complementary to the color of our native trees in fall.

That may all change now that the USDA has realized that this amazing native plant can help repel mosquitoes almost as well as DEET. It seems that just crushing the leaves of this shrub and rubbing them on your skin does the trick. Backwoodsmen throughout American seem to have known this for a very long time.

So as a gardener in an area overcome by mosquitoes, I say, move over, Japanese Beautyberry. The underdog is about to take over.

(I have to give credit to my blogging pal Betsy Franz for publicizing this research on her VERY cool blog, Metro DC Lawn and Garden. Betsy is always unearthing the most wonderful garden tidbits... pun very much intended. And her friendly, breezy style makes getting daily updates on the environment a real treat. See for yourself, subscribe to her blog and you will be dazzled.)

Meanwhile, I'm headed out to take a look at those little sprouts I noticed around my garden hose when we got back from vacation. They looked an awful lot like baby beautyberries. If so I think I may have some presents for my mosquito plagued gardening friends!

Visit from an Imperial Moth Inspires Search for the right Led Zep track

2011-08-05T09:34:00.000-04:00

We woke up this morning to find this lovely creature hanging off our living room window screen.

Although I've never actually seen one before, it looks like it could be an Imperial Moth. I can see where the name comes from -- this thing is regal beyond belief.

Strangely, its large size is making it seem quite vulnerable to us humans; it seems like a very easy target for all kinds of predators right now and there's a bit of wing missing in the shape of a beak. It seems as if it might have already had at least one skirmish with a bird some time recently.

We immediately searched around online for more info and I laughed out loud when I found a photo that someone else had posted of a European Imperial Moth sitting on an AC/DC disc. Although it was a great way to show the size and scale of a large moth, I wondered what motivated that particular CD selection.

Personally, I would have chosen something like Led Zep, especially one of their superlush, ultra-long tracks like Kashmir... "I'm a traveler of both time and space... Oooh, baby I've been flying.. My Shangri-La beneath the summer moon... I will return again..." Especially since this thing looks more laid back than angry and scream-y -- I'm just not getting an Angus Young vibe here. In fact, if I had Physical Graffiti on CD I'd take the photo myself, but I'm loathe to disturb the moth AND I only have the album on LP and I'm not sure where it is. (Wow, am I making myself look old here or what???)

Also, someone out there was apparently inspired to make the Imperial moth's wing pattern into the basis for a custom shoe. They are lovely wings, but put that pattern on shoes? Really? Go figure.

Either way, reading about it online is motivating me to go out and inspect the leaves of our trees closely -- I'd love to know if this thing was enjoying the tasty leaves of my maple tree when it was a caterpillar. The idea makes me very happy since I've gone to a lot of trouble in the last couple of years to protect that grand old tree from all kinds of potential threats. I'd be glad to know the moth is benefiting from my work.

Does it seem strange that I'd protect my trees in order to make them a meal for caterpillars? Gardeners have long been known for fighting off the bugs that want to eat their plants. But the way I see it, trees aren't supposed to just look nice to us humans. They are supposed to be an essential aspect of the eastern US ecosystem. Anyhow, I'm headed to the shelf to find that Doug Tallamy book for more info and inspiration. Maybe I can also find my stash of LPs and put them on while I read. I bet that would really scare the kids.

Now that's an Impressive Flora Database

2011-07-28T17:20:00.000-04:00

I'm not in Maine. I wish I was. Simple as that. July is a bit of an unpleasant armpit here in DC and this year it seems particularly, well, stinky. We are supposed to get ANOTHER day of record high temps tomorrow.

Anyway, I was especially wishing I was in Maine when I got an email promoting a new flora database which has just been posted online by the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. I have never been there, and I'm not sure why they wanted me to know about their database, but I was impressed nonetheless and I've bookmarked the site; I think this will prove to be as useful as MOBOT, that wonderful powerhouse of a database run by the Missouri Botanical Gardens. (Never been there either but boy do I use their website!)

In the case of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, the database's most useful feature is the "What's In Bloom"section, where you can put in any date and see both a photo of what is blooming at their gardens on that day AND a map of where you can find it in the gardens. Wow. I cannot imagine how many hours of labor that must have taken to create....! But lordy, how I wish every public garden could do that. I would surely wear out the battery of my smart phone with each visit to a new place.

Bees that like to go Surfing

2011-07-26T10:18:00.000-04:00

The last few days I've been watching bees surf in my pond.

I know, I know, it sounds odd, and I have no way to prove it since my video camera doesn't seem to be able to focus on a creature that small and that fast.

But here is what we are seeing:

Several bees, which seem to be a small kind of native bumble bee of some kind, fall delicately from the sky. Their descent is slow and precise; they remind me of the RAF parachutists landing on the fields of France in World War II movies. Unlike helicopters they do not make a noisy, wind-filled landing. Instead, it almost looks like they stop moving their wings above the pond and then carefully, slowly land on top of it.

Then, they spread out their legs on the tops of the teeny, tiny leaves of our duck weed. Once they've gained full equilibrium it looks as if they are drinking the water. Just as I lean into get a closer look they *POOF* lift off and go skyward again.

I have not been able to find any information about bees landing on the surface of water in this way, although lots and lots of people have videoed honeybees drinking. I also found some websites which mention that bees don't seem to favor excessive heat any more than humans. Most of the references to this dislike, however, mention how hard the honeybees have to work to keep the queen of their hive cool. Fanning is tiring when the heat gets above 100 degrees, I imagine, and we've just come off a long week of very excessive heat and humidity.

But what about the solitary bees I'm seeing? They wouldn't need to tend a queen, so maybe this is something they do all the time.

The whole thing of solitary bees drinking seems much less documented. In fact, I haven't found a single reference to it yet. I'm going to keep searching, and maybe also try to get a better video camera set up out by my pond. (If you have info, please post as a comment... I'd love to know more about this.)

In the meantime, I continue to marvel at the inter-connectedness of the ecosystem. I thought our pond would help birds and toads. But bees??? What a nice surprise -- it seems to help them, too.

What's In Bloom: Zinnias

2011-07-23T19:21:00.000-04:00

Right now I feel like a catfish in a skillet of hot oil. The thermometer read 103 this afternoon, and the humidity is awful.

But despite it all, these humble flowers in my backyard remain fresh and happy looking.

I've grown zinnias for years now. The pop up and thrive in the worst of DC's southern heat waves. But I've never had them look as beautiful as they do this year, and I think I know why.

This year I had no time to start seedlings under lights in the basement. We were digging out after our huge construction and renovation project which was completed in March, and I was desperate to get my garden back in shape. Money for things like expensive annuals was also scarce. So, my kids and I did as much direct seed planting as possible. And now I know: direct seeding zinnias is the way to go, because the seeds I sprinkled so casually with my kids in the garden have become absolute show stoppers, in even a my big, perennial-rich garden beds. (The chicken wire in the background of this picture protects our vegetable garden which is also doing well despite the heat... most of THAT was direct seeded too.)

Sorting through the box of seed packets which I saved after planting in May, I see that we paid $1.89 for the Cut and Come Again variety of zinnias from the Botanical Interests Company and $1.59 for the ones known as Button Box from Lake Valley Seeds. I think I bought them both at the hardware store. In return, we receive visits everyday from amazing butterflies, and the birds are going crazy for the seeds and petals on each bloom. The colors of the flowers mix with the colors of the goldfinches, to produce the most amazing view every evening -- extremely refreshing when the rest of the DC feels like a sticky fry up.

Stumped by This Urban Corn Mystery

2011-07-18T12:21:00.002-04:00

The mysterious corn is up and growing tall once again in our local park.

We don't know for sure where it comes from, but for the last two years, several plants have sprouted out of the stumps left by the county when some ancient trees were cut down due to disease.

Last years' plants got very tall and even produced a few ears of rather stunted-looking kernals in various hues of brown and yellow. This year, some other plant has been growing along side of the corn, and my daughter -- herself a budding gardener -- thinks they are beans. "Three sisters, Mom," she told me last week on our morning dog walk. "Now all we need is some squash!"

For some reason that made me think of time travel. What if some member of an ancient tribe suddenly found themselves beamed there in our park, next to the tennis courts and across from the speeding traffic trying to make its way to the Capital Beltway? They probably wouldn't think it was a good place to plant a crop. Maybe they'd hide their stash of seeds in that old stump, though, for later.

(I think I may have watched far too many episodes of Star Trek back in the 1970s...)

A more likely scenario is that squirrels raided some one's Halloween display last year, took the decorative Indian corn and tucked it away for the winter in that nice little hollow spot.

The bigger mystery is this: why do the lawn mower and string trimmer guys take down everything else and leave this behind? They often come to work with their enormous machines and trim our new trees to death, indiscriminately taking out all kinds of great things that are supposed to actually be there. Why are they leaving these corn plants behind so carefully?

When I posed this question out loud on that same dog walk last week, my son began yelling and laughing. "Because they must have been the ones who planted it!!! They'll be back at the end of the season to pick it!"

I doubt it, but I'm glad they left it. I like it watching the reactions of my neighbors each morning as I'm walking silently on the other side of the park when my kids don't happen to be with me. Everyone seems charmed by those plants. A lot of people stop to see how tall it has gotten each day. Like me, most people cannot resist reaching out to pull a section of the leaves between their fingers. Sometimes these neighbors, who are dressed in heels or wingtips as they make their way to the Metro, look around sheepishly to see if anyone is watching. I feign boredom and leave them to their private wonder, pretending I have not seem them looking at the corn, my gaze hidden behind sunglasses.

I wonder if everyone thinks they are the only ones paying attention to those plants and their well-being. Like seeing a butterfly on the Metro when no one else does, or watching a duck on the roof of a nearby office building when you have a windowed seat at your computer, there's a feeling of nature's triumph over human excess and urbanization, a moment when you feel like nature will out, no matter what we idiot humans try to do to mess up the joint. First, you are a bit embarrassed and wonder if you are being too precious about things.

You have to laugh when you find yourself in that place, mentally. (At least I always do.)

Then, next thing you know, you find yourself out on the street trying to help that duck's offspring get across the street safely or running up the escalator with your hands gently cupped around the wings of the butterfly, trying to get to the top of that damned long ride at Dupont Circle before the thing dies in your sweaty palms...

I am a better flower gardener than vegetable lady. I remember once being told that corn needs something to really produce. You have to remove the tassels? Or help pollinate it somehow? Maybe that's why last year's corn looked stunted...? I guess I'm off to Google that and find out.

I will stop at the planting of squash, however. There are limits to this odd kind of urban stewardship, and that's mine.

Besides, maybe that time-travelling Native American will come back and do it before I get a chance.

Possible Sewer Work Within the Rock Creek Stream Valley

2011-07-16T16:04:00.000-04:00

The Friends of Rock Creek have asked me to pass on an important message about a meeting to be held next week, on July 20 (see below).

The meeting will address possible sewer work to be done in the Rock Creek Stream Valley which may be done to address the problem of sewer overflows. Sewage seepage is one of the biggest problems we have in the urban creeks of the older, more established neighborhoods of Montgomery County, Maryland.

Essentially, the problem began about sixty years ago when many of the post war neighborhoods were built. As was common in many areas during the time, sewage lines were put in the area where there could be no building; that is, they were installed close to the stream valleys. At the time, planners were of the opinion that the sewers were far enough from the streams to still be accessible for repairs. Much of the material installed had a useful life of about sixty years. Some of it included things like terra cotta piping.

Well, sixty years has passed -- and then some. And now those pipes are giving out. Exacerbating the problem is soil erosion and creek migration. Creeks and streams are not as static as people liked to think in midcentury America. They move and change, and in some cases heavy development has made the streams run stronger, bigger and faster than ever before, too. So, those old pipes that used to be so modern and efficient are giving out. In some streams, including some in the Rock Creek watershed, sewage flows are especially a problem after large storm events.

"Under an EPA consent decree, WSSC is required to make improvements in the sewer infrastructure. This work will require extensive digging and construction in and along the Montgomery County portion of Rock Creek," states the flyer from FORCE. They are inviting (actually urging) the public to come learn about WSSC's plans and how they may affect each section of creek....We know that not everyone is interested in sewers, but we are--and hope you and others are too!"

Meeting details:

July 20, 7:30 pm
Meadowbrook Park Activity Building
901 Meadowbrook Lane
Chevy Chase, MD 20815

What is a RED field, anyway?

2011-07-13T09:09:00.002-04:00

There's an interesting report coming across the Environmental News Service this morning which examines how some municipalities hope to address surplus or vacant commercial properties. It seems that thousands of acres of US land sit unused in the form of things like abandoned or bankrupt strip malls and grocery stores.

Several groups are pushing to have these transformed into parks. They are calling it a redfields movement; like" brown" fields which once held industrial factories these places are called red because they sit empty after their owners' went into the "red" financially.

I couldn't help thinking of the David Byrne/Talking Heads song Nothing But Flowers, which includes the line "Once there were parking lots, Now it's a peaceful oasis, you got it, you got it, This was a Pizza Hut, Now it's all covered with daisies, you got it, you got it.." as I read through this story. I kept picturing Dairy Queen signs being bulldozed and a huge group of people in tie dye shirts following the construction crews, throwing flowers in their wake...

Then I woke up out of this happy reverie and my second thought was: who will manage those spaces? Parks need money for mowing, maintenance, safety, rangers, etc. Right now almost everyone I know is fighting their respective city hall or state legislature to keep their parks open and operating. Earlier this week, the NY Times had several photos of protesters fighting on behalf of Minnesota's state parks which were shuttered this month due to budget crises. And locally, those of us who would probably be in that crowd throwing flowers behind those imaginary construction crews find that instead we have become experts in that all-too-bureaucratic thing known as the county budget process... there's not enough money being spent to adequately address the needs of the parks we have.

In reality, it isn't like the parks can take care of themselves. Public lands need responsible, qualified managers who can oversee their safety, welfare and well-being. Unless there are some private benefactors somewhere who can sponsor these places and keep them running and safe I just don't see this being realistic --even though it breaks my heart to EVER doubt the value of adding MORE parkland to any system anywhere...we can't even convince our elected leaders to take care of what we already own.

Meanwhile, I will now have that song stuck in my head all day long. Not a bad thing at all.

You got it, you got it...

Become a Master Watershed Steward

2011-06-23T10:23:00.004-04:00

Below is an announcement from the organizers of the Master Watershed Academy. This a fantastic program and is a great way to help the Anacostia River in the Maryland-DC area.

Become a Master Watershed Steward in the National Capital Region!

Applications Open NOW - Deadline July 22nd

The fall course of the cutting edge National Capital Region-Watershed Stewards Academy will begin in September.

A 15-class course spanning 5 months, the Academy will be held primarily at the University of the District of Columbia at the Van Ness campus in DC right near Metro.

Through the course, we will help empower community activists and leaders help their neighbors change how they handle stormwater. Participants become Master Watershed Stewards by completing the course and taking on a Capstone Project that will begin to reduce pollution and runoff at its source, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Applicants will be drawn from the District, Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties. Course charge is $225, but scholarships are available.

The Academy is being run by a coalition of local and regional watershed nonprofit organizations.

If you want to expand your activism and deepen your knowledge base and resources about the environment as it pertains to watersheds and stormwater management and the quality of life of your community, we invite you to apply to the Watershed Stewards Academy.

Please visit www.ncr-wsa.org for questions and to apply.

Native Plant Database for Chesapeake Region Now Online

2011-06-20T16:41:00.004-04:00

Last week the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, and Image Matters LLC unveiled their new online Native Plant Center. The new site provides a very user-friendly way to identify and/or select native plant species for the Bay watershed.

The online portal includes a fully-searchable database and online access to their incredibly popular booklet titled Native Plants for Wildlife Habitat and Conservation Landscaping: Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

That small booklet with the long title is often simply called that "orange booklet magazine thing that has all those native plants in it." Being able to access the publication online anytime will be a real boon for those of us who find ourselves in field, garden or hardware store asking questions about the plants in front of us. (My own hard copy of the booklet is quite dog-eared and coffee stained at this point, and has traveled the state in the passenger seat of my car as I went plant shopping.)

"Since its release in 2003, the demand for the resource has never waned," said Leopoldo Miranda Supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Chesapeake Bay Field Office, referring to the booklet in a recent Alliance press release.

He's not kidding. I once was at a native plant meeting where someone opened a box of them to give away for free and the audience members descended like hungry hungry birds to grab their copies. Having it freely available online is really great.

Hunting for Illusive Moth Caterpillars with John Dill

2011-06-15T10:51:00.009-04:00

(Photo of the infamous slug saddleback caterpillar, Archaria stimulea, courtesy of John Lill.)

I was in a bit of a panic. For weeks I had been promising the five-year-olds in my nature class that we’d study tent caterpillars, just as soon as we saw them emerge in late April or early May. Now the time had come. We were almost half way through the month of May, and the course was about to end for the semester. But the tent caterpillars had not been seen.

I had checked for them each day since late April. Tent caterpillars particularly like the native cherry leaves, and often you can find their huge webby tents in the park where those trees sprout up with abandon. But my morning walks this spring resulted in the discovery of only one bedraggled caterpillar, all alone… sans tent and tent mates.

Tent caterpillars, those little black insects with the sky-blue stripes down their backs are sometimes mistaken for the much more destructive gypsy moths. But they are also beloved by suburban children who like to gather them up on warm, sunny days and treat them like teddy bears. Perfect content for a nature class, I had assumed, because they are both benign and abundant.

What I didn’t anticipate was the variability of spring weather. The caterpillars don’t like to leave their tents when the weather stays cool and damp, and this spring that phrase pretty much described the entire month of May. Cool and damp. Those insects were only really out for a couple of weeks, and in many places their populations did not really reach their typical numbers. There weren’t the usual masses of them to be seen in many local parks.

A friend finally came to the rescue when her kids up in Germantown found lots of the caterpillars and brought them to my class where we watched them make cocoons and prepare to turn into moths, so I was saved.

John Lill, who studies caterpillars at George Washington University, has often had to face similar problems when he’s headed out to the woods with students. Caterpillars lives can be impacted by all kinds of variables and may sometimes prove very difficult to locate in any patch of woods or lawn.

This can be especially true for those which he refers to as the “ephemeral” species in our area. Until I heard him use that word for caterpillars I had only ever heard it used in reference to certain plants. But as Lill described it, there are some caterpillars which are like those spring wildflowers -- they only appear for a few short weeks each year before they quickly form cocoons and turn into moths. This category includes the beloved and friendly-looking tent caterpillar. It also includes the hickory-horned devil, a huge, green creature with red and black horns which Lill called the “holy grail of caterpillar scientists” because it is so difficult to find on local trees.

Lill discussed hunting for the hickory-horned devil and many other aspects of studying moth caterpillars in the eastern forests of the US at the May meeting of the Friends of Sligo Creek.

I really enjoyed his talk, but I couldn’t help feeling as if I were listening to Dr. Who describe aliens from outer space. There were descriptions of caterpillars who ambulate without obvious legs, and others which look like sea urchins and sting like jelly fish. There were some who give painful pricks with their spines to evade the mandibles of wasps. Others he’s been studying can secrete liquids from hidden holes in their skin, or are covered with white hairs that look and act like spun glass.

“I am completely obsessed with these lately,” Lill said with great warmth as he worked his way through photos of slug caterpillars. His enthusiasm was equal only to that of the five-year-olds in my nature class, so it was easy to assume he must be very popular when he visits classrooms each year throughout Montgomery County to teach students about his multi-legged study subjects.

When asked about collecting the insects with kids, Lill emphasized three things:

1) Only collect the caterpillars you find on foliage. Never take a caterpillar home from black top or sidewalks, because you will have a tough time figuring out what your study subject needs or likes to eat. Most caterpillars are very specific in their dietary needs and habits, and will restrict their munching to one or two kinds of plants or trees. Without the right kind of leaf they will quickly die.

2) Figuring out what they like to eat is important, because caterpillars can eat a lot in one day! In fact, some species can eat enough to gain more than 10,000 times their own body weight over the course of development. This would be, Lill says, “like a child becoming as large as an elephant just a few months after its birth.” You should gather a lot of fresh leaves on a frequent basis.

3) Poking air holes in the lid of a jar isn’t as important as most people think. In fact, the amount of air most caterpillars need is pretty small and the air can be refreshed each day just by opening and closing the container’s lid. But what caterpillars DO need desperately is moisture, which is often released in a jar with lots of air holes. Lill says you can even use a zipper style plastic bag to keep the caterpillar moist, happy and healthy. He also likes to use recycled plastic deli tubs for his study subjects in the lab and for his school visits.

Although the tent caterpillars I described earlier are only around for a short time each spring, there are many caterpillars which become more abundant as the summer wears on and fall approaches. Lill will lead a walk sometime in late summer for the Friends of Sligo Creek, in order to teach people about these dynamic creatures. Keep your eyes on the Friends of Sligo Creek website for more details.

This piece was published in the June 2011 Voice newspapers of Montgomery County, Maryland where Alison Gillespie is the author of the Sligo Naturalist column.

Take A Survey About PEPCO's Tree Trimming

2011-06-07T18:41:00.004-04:00

We've been lucky so far this season; the thunderstorms haven't knocked out the power for long periods of time like they did in the fall and summer of last year.

PEPCO, our local power company, has tried to blame the trees for all of those outages and many others which have taken place in the last few years, although several officials who have investigated have come to the conclusion that PEPCO's own poor management is probably the ultimate culprit.

Last week a letter to the editor of the Gazette newspapers brought the issue forward in a new way, and it seems the Montgomery Countryside Alliance is calling attention to the issue of PEPCO's severe trimming practices in our county's Agricultural Reserve.

Caren Madsen, one of the authors of the Gazette letter, sent around the message below and ask people to take the survey and forward the link:

"Before Pepco goes into more overdrive on trimming with summer storm season approaching, let's see what others around the county are saying. "

Here's the survey everyone, have at it:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PFTMS2K_Pepco_Tree-trimming

Film Screening and Lecture about Organic Lawns

2011-06-07T18:25:00.003-04:00

Here are two events being publicized by the Little Falls Watershed Association. (Although I've heard that Paul Tukey is a great speaker, I personally think the better bet of the two events below is probably the film screening.)

Renowned Environmentalist Paul Tukey discusses Organic Lawn Care:
The Safe Lawn: How & Why to Create a Beautiful, Natural Landscape
Monday, June 13 2011• 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Tenley-Friendship Library
4200 Wisconsin Avenue NW #117, Washington, D.C.
Presentation is FREE and open to the public

Free One-Night Screening and Appearance by Filmmaker Paul Tukey
“A Chemical Reaction: The Story of a True Green Revolution”
Tuesday, June 14, 2011•7:00 pm – 9:30 pm
Wayside Elementary School
10011 Glen Road, Potomac, MD

Acclaimed film is based on the first town in North America to ban lawn and garden pesticides.
If you have any questions or would like to attend please contact
Stephanie Wight
mwprmarketing@gmail.com

MoCo Street Tree Update

2011-06-05T17:26:00.003-04:00

I was thrilled to read an article in the most recent update from Conservation Montgomery about the street tree budget in Montgomery County.

As someone who has advocated hard for the street tree program, I had become very worried about the huge backlog of maintenance the county's Department of Transportation had acquired in the last two years. Without funding, trees inspections were not happening in a regular or timely manner either, which seemed like a big safety problem waiting to happen.

According to Conservation Montgomery, about $2 million in county street tree maintenance funding will be restored to the FY12 operating budget which was approved by the Council. Although that is a meager portion of the overall budget, it will help to alleviate the backlog of work which has built up regarding the county's 425,000 right-of-way trees. And in this tight budget time, it seems miraculous.

Visit Conservation Montgomery online to read more.

Honeysuckle As Sunblock Boost?

2011-06-05T17:16:00.004-04:00

In urban parks like Sligo Creek and the Northwest Branch, the fight against invasive exotic plants often produces huge amounts of leafy garbage, prompting land managers and volunteers alike to wish for some creative use for all of the so-called “yard waste.”

In the past this has led to garlic mustard recipe books and kudzu cook-offs, and even artwork made of vines. Such efforts, however, seem to barely make a dent in the huge amount of green stuff pulled from our parks in order to save the trees and native plants.

So I was really excited to read last week about a paper recently published by the American Chemical Society on a potential new use for honeysuckle. Writing in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, two Chinese researchers say they’ve found a way to use honeysuckle to boost fabric’s ability to block UV rays. This new discovery could potentially improve the design of so-called “sunblock shirts” by making them more effective and more sustainably produced.

The researchers note that honeysuckle has long been used to treat colds and fevers in Asia, and that it is currently also used as a food preservative. Some cosmetic makers also use the plant in products which are touted to make customer’s skin look younger.

There’s a down side to all of this, however. The initial research was conducted on fabric made of wool, and most of us are searching for sunblocking clothes which are both lightweight and UV protective.

Still, it would be nice to find a good use for all that stuff strangling the trees out there in the park. And I wonder what it smells like, too… sweet, or wooly?

June Concert Series at Brookside Gardens

2011-06-05T16:38:00.003-04:00

On Friday afternoon I went over to see this year’s Wings of Fancy Exhibit with some relatives who were in town for the day. I never get tired of Brookside or the butterflies, and we were even delighted to have a Baltimore Oriole land a few feet away from us in the raingarden as we walked by.

This June, Brookside will once again hold concerts each Tuesday night. These concerts are free!!! And I’m told that the garden staff is willing to bend their usual strict rules against bringing food – they’ll look the other way so long as you take all of your own trash home with you. So bring a picnic and a date! (And a garbage bag...)

For a full concert schedule, visit the park online:
http://www.montgomeryparks.org/brookside/

Support for MoCo Bag Bill

2011-04-29T13:04:00.003-04:00

Wouldn't it be great if you could change the local environment for the better with just a five minute email or phone call? Here's your chance!

We are down to the wire here in Montgomery County, Maryland, hoping for the county council to do the right thing and pass a local bag bill. Now is the time to call your council members and show your support of this legislation. They will vote early next week, so there is no time to waste.

The bill would essentially place a fee on the use of disposable bags in the county. A similar bill passed last year in neighboring DC was so wildly sucessful it even shocked the environmentalists.

Anyone who has ever walked a creek in this county knows the problem all too well; bags line the banks and clog the streams at each turn. Volunteers at some Anacostia Watershed Society clean ups have collected as many as 28,000 bags in the past in one day. Friends of Rock Creek (FORCE) say they collected more than 5,000 bags this month --just in Montgomery County!!

FORCE also notes that the revenues from a Montgomery County bag would probably garner an estimated $1.5 million in the first year. This money would be directed to the county’s Water Quality Protection Fund which pays for storm water management, watershed restoration, and litter cleanup. Additionally implementation of the legislation would save the county some of the $3 million that it currently spends on litter prevention and cleanup.

Want to learn more about the bill? Click here.

Contacting the council is easy. Your email need not be long, just a few sentences that say you support the bill will be sufficient.

Click here for the county council's contact info.

Nature Fair on May 1 at ANS

2011-04-19T14:26:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite local environmental non-profits, the Audubon Naturalist Society, will be holding a Nature Fair on Sunday, May 1 from 11am - 4pm.

This little fair is usually a lot of fun, with music, crafts and activities. This year they will also have visits from Scales and Tales and Wildlife Ambassadors, as well as a rock climbing wall, native plants and visits from some local authors.

For more info you can visit the ANS website or call 301-652-9188.

Locust Grove Nature Center to sell Native Plants

2011-04-13T18:16:00.003-04:00

Locust Grove Nature Center is offering a wide variety of native plants this spring.

To see what they have to offer, stop by any of the county nature centers for a list or email geri.drymalski@mncppc.org and ask for a complete list. Geri will be organizing the sale.

To purchase you MUST PREORDER by April 26 with a full payment. Plants will be delivered to Locust Grove, which is located at 7777 Democracy Boulevard in Bethesda, Maryland, on April 30.

New Gutters and Downspouts for My Rainbarrels

2011-04-11T13:27:00.002-04:00

Friday was an exciting day here in my backyard, because the end of our long renovation process was finally at hand and the gutters were up and working.

I guess to a lot of people, the gutters are not very important. But if you have rainbarrels you see the arrival of the guy known simply as “the gutterman” as a rather major event.

My old rain barrel set-up had not been optimal. I had taken a rather dull hack saw somewhat sloppily to the old downspouts in order to trim them to the right height for the barrels. Have you ever done this? It is one of the loudest, most screetchy sounds around, what with the metal rasping against metal, and the tubes of the aluminum pipes acting like ear trumpets to amplify the sound up to the top of the house… really I’m surprised we didn’t have a pack of wild dogs show up in response. I actually had to put in ear plugs to survive the process.

Although the end product from the noisy sawing worked well, my cutting line across the downspout was a bit jaggedy. Also, I seem to get a bit lazy about my garden once it turns cold. I could have set it up so that I could take the barrels away from the spouts and put piping back up each winter I didn’t feel like bothering.

The huge snowamaggendon winter of 2010 made me think twice about this arrangement. Most of the time a barrel left in a sunny location will do okay in Maryland during the winter, one of my two barrels sits in deep shade on the northern exposure of the house, so it froze solid and stayed that way for about a month. When the ice and snow melted from the roof, it caused a major back up through the pipe. Nothing was damaged, but the whole thing made me kinda nervous. I began to wish I had a simple way to disconnect or turn off the downspout during the winter without moving the barrels to a new location.

So when I realized we were going to need new gutters due to our construction on the back roof, I began searching around for a more elegant solution for both the sunny and the shade side of my house.

What I found was a Y shaped downspout diverter which has a small lever on the front. When it rains, you can choose to send the water either down the traditional straight spout or into your barrel. It seemed like a good idea-- in theory. The foreman of our renovation project looked skeptical, however, and so did my friends with rainbarrels. I asked around on listservs… no one had used the diverters… so I couldn’t get any feedback on their reliability.

Then the gutterman arrived. I handed him the y-shaped diverters, he shrugged. “Oh yeah, I’ve put these on a bunch of times. I know what these are.” Whew, I thought.

Now, the diverters are in place and working fine. We had a nice big rainstorm on Thursday, and stood on the backporch listening to the lovely sound of the barrels filling up for the first time since last fall. So far, so good. Friday we went outside and peeked inside to find barrels full of lovely spring rain.

Looking back, I think someone with a sharper hack saw and better home repair skills might find the installation of the diverters a snap. In addition to helping us manage the winter snow storms a bit better, I think these will also provide a great “vacation setting” for our gardens. Now that I see how they work in real life I realize they are not that big of a deal. Just something new, not something radical. That pretty much describes rainbarrels in general, doesn’t it?

The picture above shows my barrel, in place and full of fresh water with the new diverters in place.

Volunteers Needed for Chestnut Project this Weekend

2011-04-11T13:21:00.003-04:00

There are lots of ways to volunteer this weekend for both Arbor Day Events and Earth Day Events. Here's one that just popped into my inbox this morning: The American Chestnut Foundation's (ACF) has been developing a new blight-free American chestnut tree on a orchard that they are renting from Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. This Sunday, they need your help in measuring the diameter of these trees-in order to help move the goal of creating a blight-resistant strand a little farther. Join us this Sunday, April 17 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at ACF's orchard at Triadelphia Lake Road and Georgia Avenue, Brookeville. Park along Triadelphia Lake Road. We will provide all of the tools-we just need your help in saving the American Chesnut trees. 　　 Kimberley M. Knox, Community Outreach Manager Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission Office: (301) 206-8233 Cell: (240) 308-9134 For more info go to: http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/comm-env-calendar.faces

Urban Wildlife Gardening with Kids

2011-03-31T16:01:00.003-04:00

This Saturday I'll be talking about urban wildlife gardening for kids over at the Anacostia Watershed Society. Hope you can join me... the weather is supposed to be blah so maybe we can have some fun dreaming of what it will be like when spring actually arrives for real!

Here's a brief description of the talk... for the location info scroll to the bottom of the page:

When you dreamt of being a parent, you imagined chasing butterflies through meadows and counting acorns in the woods with your kids. Now, in present day reality, you find yourself living on a city lot the size of a postage stamp and worry that your child with grow up with "nature deficit disorder."

Join me for some ideas about meeting these challenges, as well as a practical list of plants that can turn even a tiny space into an arena for experiencing the wonder of nature.

Inexperienced gardeners are welcome and encouraged to attend.

Urban Wildlife Gardening with Kids

Saturday, April 2

10 am -12 pm

Anacostia Watershed Society

4302 Baltimore Avenue, Bladensburg, MD 20710

RSVP: Please send an e-mail to: info@anacostiaws.org if you plan to attend.

Plant Trees for the Anacostia River

2011-03-30T16:32:00.004-04:00

The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission and Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments are hosting a Tree Planting Event. Come help the Anacostia River by planting some trees.

Saturday, April 16th9 a.m. to Noon 6600 Kenilworth Ave

Riverdale, MD 20737(Behind the Elks Lodge)

Volunteers are needed to plant approximately 200 native trees and shrubs (holes will be pre-dug).

No experience necessary.

Location:The Anacostia River Park is along the Northeast Branch in Prince George's County. Traveling north on Kenilworth Avenue from River Road, the planting site is located behind the Elks Lodge. Parking is available in the M-NCPPC visitor parking lot located at 6600 Kenilworth Avenue (Riverdale, MD).

Questions? Contact Aubin Maynard at mailto:anacostia@mwcog.org or visit www.anacostia.net/tree_planting.html.

More Visions Needed for MNCPPC's Vision 2030

2011-03-05T19:21:00.004-05:00

My good friend and fellow MoCo environmentalist Kit Gage recently let me know that she'd contacted the people at our local parks department to let them know her thoughts about the Vision 2030 plan they'd drafted after reading an email I'd circulated on the topic.

Kit's own email on the topic was so good I thought I'd post it here, with her permission of course. (I know some out there will have an issue with her words about deer. I've got different ideas from Kit on the topic, but I post her words here as she wrote them.)

Here's what Kit told those on the Vision 2030 committee:

"Dear MNCPPC

I have looked over the Vision2030 statement, and as a heavy user of Sligo Creek Park, and active member of the Stormwater Committee of the Friends of Sligo Creek, I wanted to give a few comments on what I saw listed as peoples’ priorities as measured by survey, and the general priority list you all have put together. I am writing on my own behalf, but I expect my concerns are congruent with many of my cohort.

1. Without a more serious tree planting and invasives removal program, Sligo Creek Park and to a lesser extent other less degraded parks, will look very different by 2030 – many of the mature trees will be gone and relatively few native species will be left, given the overwhelming presence of ivy and other invasives that tend to preclude new tree growth. Norway Maples and other quicker growing invasive species will overwhelm the more slow growing natives.

2. Efforts to make new trails (which I support) that don’t’ take into account the need for significant tree and shrub planting and nurturing will just expose the dearth of trees and make warm weather use more difficult for lack of shade.

3. The MS4 and other stormwater requirements impact MNCPPC. You all are where the buck stops in terms of where the flood and drought and pollutants effects land in the county. A major education campaign to limit pollutant load, educate neighbors, especially adjoining neighbors, and implement some LID projects in your own areas – parking lots, buildings, walk-ways, roads, etc would seem at least prudent. In fact it’s probably essential for you all to address your MS4 requirements.

4. Education about the fact of the parks. Because skinny little parks abound in the county, they’re close to where lots of people live. MNCPPC and FOSC and other watershed groups spend some time having programs to help educate neighbors about why parks are so important, and not just as basketball and tennis courts, or ball fields. Given the changing population and changing language issues, it would seem a critical opportunity to do more education in the schools, more bi-lingual nature education in general, more education about stormwater and its impacts and implications.

5. Deer. Oy, deer. They’re eating everything. Remove them in all humane ways possible (including shooting), please.

6. I like that the existing community centers and facilities are simple, usable, and straightforward. No frills. Obvious maintenance needed here and there, but friendly for meetings, family events, and play. Where possible, please renovate using green methods and materials and alternative energy demonstration sites like solar panels where appropriate.

I’m clear that you’re facing daunting spending and staff cuts, wide-ranging needs, and clamoring priorities. Nonethess, I would urge you not to lose the essence of parks – outdoor natural spaces that in cities are otherwise not seen or understood. It’s incumbent on us to preserve what’s possible of the natural biome, and explain what it is and why it is to the surrounding populace not didactically but in an easily and readily accessible manner.

Thanks so much for your efforts to assess priorities and work to implement them.

-Kit Gage"

Victory for Victory Gardens in Montgomery County

2011-02-24T17:10:00.004-05:00

Okay, okay. I can't help but laugh at the announcement in last week's message from the Montgomery Victory Gardens people:

We won! We won! We won!

One can almost picture the nanny-nanny-boo-boos being levelled at the Montgomery County Public Schools on this one... and there are many who say they had it coming.

For more than a year, Gordon Clark and his crew at the MVG have been lobbying the county to make it okay to garden on school property. Things reached a somewhat ridiculous point when First Lady Michelle Obama even came and visited a MoCo school to promote gardening -- ridiculous since the county had long prohibited any kind of gardening on that same school property.

(One famous meeting with school officials included the complaint that gardens couldn't be located on school property because principals might get bird droppings on their nice cars. I am not making this up.)

Well, Gordon and his crew lobbied tirelessly and they won. Good for you, Gordon. Let us hope this is the first of many changes at MCPS.

To read a rather thin article about it in the Gazette go to this link:

http://www.gazette.net/stories/02162011/montnew190428_32542.php

To read more about MVGs efforts I suggest subscribing to Gordon's excellent weekly updates.

Guest post on the Metro DC Lawn and Garden Blog

2011-02-24T15:54:00.003-05:00

I was thrilled to get an invitation from Betsy Franz and the Metro DC Lawn and Garden Blog this month.

Betsy's blog is one of the best in the area for gardeners-- full of great info every time. I also really warmed to the idea of writing about native plants here at the end of winter.

Thanks, Betsy, for the invitation to be a part of your great online space!

(The picture above, by the way, is of the swamp sunflowers mentioned in the article. Although in my piece I talk about them as brown and dead at the end of winter here is what they look like in autumn in full bloom.)

Look Into the Murky Crystal Ball: MNCPPC's Vision 2030 Report

2011-02-24T15:36:00.004-05:00

(The following was originally published in the February edition of the Voice newspapers, of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington, Maryland as a part of my Sligo Naturalist column.)

Ever wish you could sit down in front of a crystal ball to see what the future will look like for our area? Last week I attended a feedback session hosted by the Maryland National Park and Planning Commission (MNCPPC). They were gathering final comments and reactions to Vision 2030, a plan which will ultimately guide how the county powers that be treat our parks and recreational facilities in the next 20 years.

Like many area residents, I’ve been alarmed by how deep the cuts have been for Parks and Rec during this most recent fiscal crisis. Because of that I’ve decided to pay close attention to Vision 2030 report.

But without sounding wonkish, what does that mean exactly?

Well, the night the Vision 2030 draft plan was unveiled provided ample evidence of how things can get skewed in this county and how they need improvement.

For example, the report shows (in both text and maps such as those on page 17) that there is an imbalance of programming whereby the farther out (and often wealthier) suburbs get a very disproportionate amount of recreational programs at their facilities.

This is no surprise to parents in the “downcounty” areas of Silver Spring and Wheaton. Ever try signing your child up for a dance or art class? It always seems like more than half of them are held in places like Potomac and Gaithersburg. Now we have real evidence that this is actually the case.

To correct this, one of the stated long-term goals for the county will be to place programs and facilities more evenly, and where there’s a majority of people and more transit access.

That’s good, I think.

There was also an effort made in the report to emphasize that the parks play an integral role in preserving and presenting cultural resources and historic sites to the public. And, a very real effort to address the problem that many services are not accessible to those who are socio-economically disadvantaged.

Again, I think those all are very good goals.

What worried me and many others who were at last week’s meeting, however, was how development-heavy and recreation-heavy the overall vision for the future of the parks seems in the report.

This prompted one attentive woman at the meeting to ask for a definition of what a park was in their report. Could a park experience be, she inquired, something as urban and structural as the new ice skating rink in downtown Silver Spring? The answer that came back was somewhat unclear: Yes, maybe, depending on how they counted it…

This is where my skepticism kicked in, as it did for many others. I like the new rink, I’m glad for it. But that ain’t no park in my book. If they are counting that as a park then right away I wonder how they are stacking this deck.

I’m not the only one apparently skeptical about the way MNCPPC and its consultants rated park use and experience. A few days after the meeting, Carole Ann Barth, a parks advocate from the Four Corners neighborhood emailed me. She’d read the report and had this thought:

“They have no credible data on how the parks are actually used, yet they presume to tell us what facilities are most needed. 100 people could visit a park individually or as families and spend hours picnicking, walking the dog, chatting with neighbors, throwing frisbees, bird watching, or engaging in hundreds of other so-called “passive activities.” All these people, however, would be invisible to Parks, because they only record the single small group of people who permitted a field for a couple of hours.”

Yes, I agree. Or the people who paid for a rental ticket for skates. But the rest of the people, as Carole says, remain invisible.

My concerns only grew as I continued to read the Executive Summary of Vision 2030 more closely. Goal 11, I noted, seeks to “Inventory, conserve, restore and enhance ecologically healthy and biologically diverse natural areas with a focus on Park Best Natural Areas, Biodiversity Areas, and Environmentally Sensitive Areas.” Furthermore the goal states a need to “prioritize Best Natural Areas and Biodiversity Areas based on their ecological value and biological diversity.”

That’s great. Really. I mean it. I want the wonderful bio-diverse parts of MoCo conserved, restored and enhanced before we go buggering them up as bad as we have managed to bugger up the rest of the county.

But I would *also* like it if the not-so-bio-diverse, not-so-environmentally sensitive areas get some badly needed attention. Namely, I’d like those places to get more new trees, and I’d like to see the mature trees that are there appreciated and maintained a protected as valuable resources. And I’d like to see those areas managed with ecosystem values in mind, not programming.

In all fairness, Vision 2030’s goal 11.5 does say that there is a need to develop “comprehensive restoration plans for down-County {sic} stream valley parks including Rock Creek, Sligo Creek and Little Falls.” Hooray! But will that ultimately include funding for things like the invasive plant removal and ongoing maintenance needed to address stormwater trouble in those creeks? Will that ultimately mean that some new parks and green spaces will be designated in the more dense areas? Will it mean aggressively planting trees, and making downcounty developers pay for replacement trees in downcounty parks?

Or will it mean more playgrounds, ball fields and ice rink facilities?

When are we going to acknowledge that forests and streams provide ecosystem services that go beyond their value as recreational venues? Its nice to walk along the creek and peruse new trails, but forests and canopy cover have an intrinsic value all their own that is a benefit to everyone in the county, not just the immediate users of said parks. That’s because every minute of every day those trees are filtering pollution, cleaning our air, providing shade and cooling in the summer and even protecting us from wind during storms. Sure, you can’t charge a program fee for them, but they mean a lot to all of us each time we breathe.

And right now a lot of the few remaining forest tracts in this section of the county are sitting on parkland. They are squeezed in between aging subdivisions and heavily used roads, and ravaged by regular root-scrubbings during storms due to poor stormwater practices. They are tangled in honeysuckle, mile-a-minute and ivy. They are suffering, they need stewardship. They need a commitment to sound land management.

The Vision 2030 report is supposed to guide us towards a sustainable future. But if we give up on our forests down here then we have essentially given up on the downcounty’s future health and well-being. If we chose not to take on the needed stewardship now in the present then we will ultimately give up on the whole watershed, including the Anacostia where so much of our pollution ends up and the Chesapeake Bay which is fed by the Anacostia and Potomac waters.

To that end, Vision 2030 included goal number four, which seeks to “provide an appropriate balance between stewardship and recreation.” But what, I ask, does the word “appropriate” mean? How do we define balanced? That it seems, is up for debate and a bit too open-ended for my comfort.

So I’m shouting out to you now. Take a look at Vision 2030 online. Read it carefully, get a cup of coffee first if that will help you stay awake. But read it. Then respond. Let the county know your thoughts. Because if we don’t weigh in now, the people who live here in 2030 will certainly be the worse for it, even if they do have a lot more places to take skating and art classes.

Planning the Urban Forest at ANS

2011-02-24T15:26:00.001-05:00

Conservation Montgomery, the new environmental group here in MoCo Maryland, is hosting something that looks kinda interesting:

Nationally-known land use planner Jim Schwab will speak on "Planning the Urban Forest" Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 7:15 at the Audubon NaturalistSociety Woodend Sanctuary, 8940 Jones Mill Road, Chevy Chase, MD 20815.

For more information: www.ConservationMontgomery.org

Adventist Hospital Pollutes the Creek (AGAIN!)

2011-01-29T13:17:00.007-05:00

Once again a steward of our neighborhood creek here in Montgomery County came upon pollution entering the watershed due to the negligence of someone associated with Washington Adventist Hospital. You can read her report in full here.

If you see any kind of pollution or dumping along the creek please use this helpful link on the Friends of Sligo Creek website to report the trouble. Much of the info here can be used to report problems along at Montgomery County waterway.

This story proves once again it is usually the local neighbors who actually walk the banks of the creek everyday and who know what is really going on. We are, essentially, the eyes and ears of our streams. It is up to us to alert officials to problems as they happen.

One of the biggest stressors on the creek is the enormous amount of urbanization along its banks and within the overall watershed. But this can also be one of the creek's biggest assets; there are more of us to see problems and see that they are addressed.

If you see trouble, please report it right away. As Marty Ittner reflects, it is sometimes prudent to first call the Fire Department if what you are seeing or smelling seems to be fuel.

But, given the fact that 911 is habitually overwhelmed to the point of giving a busy signal, driving straight to the fire station might actually get you faster service. (I only wish I was kidding.)

A Bill to Banish the Bags in Maryland

2011-01-17T16:30:00.009-05:00

Stopping those Urban Tumbleweeds:
The Sligo Naturalist for January 2011

December was a very windy month. I spent a lot of mornings walking my dog through an empty park with my collar turned up against the cold, watching the tumbleweeds roll across the abandoned soccer fields.

Only wait!… those weren’t tumbleweeds. They were plastic shopping bags!

One particularly blustery morning I worked with my kids to untangle no less than five of them from a single brambled corner of our local park. We hurried to catch them and dispose of them before they sailed towards our favorite tall oak trees. Sometimes the bags make their way to the highest branches there, mocking us with their crackly calling sounds for years.

The bags can be more than just noisy and unsightly; they are also increasingly seen as a potential health hazard. Many times they make their way to streams and rivers. In fact, some past trash clean-ups in our area have recorded close to 30,000 of them along the Anacostia’s banks – and that only includes the ones which volunteers were able to snag by hand and record for the official count. The ones that remain behind drape themselves across the shrubs that line river banks like parodies of weeping willow branches, sometimes strangling animals and suffocating aquatic animals who mistake them for prey.

What’s more, the plastic in the bags does not biodegrade -- it simply becomes part of the industrial flotsam which is now accumulating in the world’s oceans. There is growing scientific concern about the effect the plastic particles from bags and other kinds trash are having on the planet’s food webs. The fish eat the plastic… we eat the fish… we all consume the pollution.

So with all of these things in mind I heartily celebrated the January 1 anniversary of the new DC bag law. It has been one full year since the District imposed a five cent fee on all plastic bags given out in the city during retail transactions, and by all accounts the new law has been a resounding success. Retail bag use has declined by 80 percent since last winter.

Groups that work to clean the rivers have even noticed a reduction in trash. The Alice Ferguson Foundation, a group that works along the region’s rivers each year, saw a marked reduction in the amount of bags reported during their events last spring.

“Plastic bags were down sixty percent at the clean-ups,” Julie Lawson from the Maryland’s Trash Free Alliance told me. “That was only three months after the law went into effect.”

Initially, there was doubt about how it would all work, even from those in environmental quarters.

"I was really shocked at how effective the small fee was in DC. You wouldn't think that five cents a bag would change anyone's behavior. But apparently it really helped make people think twice about needing a bag," Michael Wilpers, President of the Friends of Sligo Creek (FOSC), said at the organization’s December meeting in Silver Spring.

FOSC had gathered that night to hear State Delegate Al Carr from District 18 discuss the possibility of enacting a similar bag law Maryland next year. Carr worked on a bill about bags last year in Annapolis, but was unable to get the support needed from other regions of the state. He suspects the fact that it was an election year during tight budget times made candidates blanch at the idea of imposing any kind of new fee on anything.

Carr and State Senator Jamie Raskin, however, have had tremendous constituent support in our local area for their proposed bill, which would place a five cent fee on all single-use plastic and paper bags distributed at carryout food establishments and liquor stores in the state. Raskin’s supporters even handed out reusable bags imprinted with his name to promote his support of bag reduction at parades and other events over the summer, and Carr thinks his own sponsorship of the bill helped him become the “top vote getter” in the general election in November.

“Support the bag bill and you’ll be supported by the voters,” Carr told me over the phone recently. He plans to take that message to Annapolis again this year, where he hopes to gain new support for the legislation.

Some have worried that a bag fee might disproportionally impact low income families in Maryland. To answer this concern, reusable bags would be distributed in neighborhoods where poverty remains a constant problem and the bag bill’s authors say a large portion of the money collected from a new bag law could be used to fund environmental restoration projects. The funds would most likely be made available through grants from the Chesapeake Bay Trust.

In urban areas like those around DC and Baltimore, it is often the impoverished communities which suffer the most from pollution’s many ills. To have the bag fees available for environmental projects in such locations would add an extra bonus to the bag reduction law.

Maryland’s Trash Free Alliance has started a blog (http://www.blogger.com/www.trashfreemaryland.org) about the bag bill for those who are seeking more up-to-date information as the legislative season gets under way this year.

When I visited the site last week I was really entertained by entries about activists in California who are working on bag reduction programs. You can find, for example, a link to a “mockumentary” narrated by actor Jeremy Irons about the “life” of a plastic bag in his state’s “wild urban environment.” You can also find pictures of protestors in San Jose who staged a protest at a city council meeting, complete with people dressed in Bag Monster costumes made entirely of plastic bags. What surprises me is that this same kind of political theater hasn’t happened in Takoma Park… at least not yet!

This article was originally published in the Voice newspapers of Silver Spring, Takoma Park and Kensington.

Beavers Trying to Dam Sligo Creek Again

2011-01-17T15:53:00.003-05:00

There’s evidence of beaver activity along the Sligo again. This time the animal has been spotted just behind the soccer fields, across from the Sligo Golf Course and south of Holy Cross Hospital.

Apparently it has been, well, busy. At least twenty small sized trees had been cut by the animal’s teeth as of last week, and several medium sized trees also showed evidence of incisor damage.

I took my kids out for a glance. We were hoping to see the actual beaver swimming around, but no such luck. What we did see was an obvious attempt at dam building, just above the pedestrian bridge that crosses the stream.

Owl Prowls Full

2011-01-17T15:45:00.003-05:00

Note to self: when you write about an upcoming program in Montgomery County, be sure to register for the program yourself before the article gets published!

I just tried to register for the Owl Prowl up in Wheaton and found we'd have to settle for the WAIT LIST. This month's prowl had been hotlinked from the article I'd submitted to Homeschool Montgomery this month.

Glad to know the program is popular now. A couple of months ago we were the only family in attendance.

Following Urban Owls in Silver Spring: The Sligo Naturalist

2011-01-09T16:54:00.005-05:00

I thought the dog had a serious nose whistle. Know what I mean by that? Like, when someone breathes in and out in their sleep and it makes a little breezy whistling noise? Not a full snore, mind you, kind of a teeny, tiny snore. A nose whistle.

But how, how was she able to make that noise??? I couldn’t figure it out. I was awake in bed with terrible insomnia, and she was in her little cozy dog bed. Was her nose against something hard, like the wall? It was such an ODD nose whistle.

There it was again.

But wait!! That wasn’t her. She was awake in the dark wagging her tail, wondering why I was staring at her. Suddenly, so was my very groggy husband whom I had accidentally awakened.

“Do you hear it?” I asked him. We both listened. Toot toot tooooo… Toot toot toooo…

“Uh, yeah, I think it’s an owl. Go back to sleep,” he said with exasperation.

The thing was, I wasn’t expecting to hear an owl out our window. We live awfully close to several urban arteries, and very close to the busiest section of the capital beltway. This ain’t Walton’s Mountain.

Whoo who whoooo…. it went again. Whoo cooks for you….

I was dying to get out of bed, but that would have been too disruptive and my poor husband had just gotten back to sleep. Could that REALLY be an owl in my yard? Gosh I was just dying to know. Now I really would never sleep. This was far too exciting.

I should not have been surprised. Several different neighbors have reported seeing owls in the last two years. One emailed videos of a large bird that did, indeed, seem to be a barred owl, splashing around in her bird bath. Another friend woke up one morning thinking she was hearing a domestic dispute in the empty house next door and instead found two owls sending jolly messages across the two sides of her back deck. She was unsure of what species but said they were pretty big. And just upstream, at the headwaters of the Sligo, people see and hear owls all the time.

Even so, I still mostly associate owl calls with camping in the mountains. For one thing, almost all of the local owl species like to nest in the hollowed out parts of old, dead trees. There just aren’t a lot of those in the close-in suburbs Montgomery County. For another thing, these birds are known to do best in large tracts of forest, which really is not a sentence any planner would use to describe Silver Spring these days.

But somehow the owls, like many other birds of prey, are adapting and continue to be out there among us. In fact, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, most barred owl populations seem to be increasing, placing them in the category of species which are of the “least concern.” And the birds seem to be living pretty happily in certain urban areas.

So maybe the only reason I don’t hear them so often is because I don’t really camp in my own back yard.

Last winter I became particularly fascinated by these tenacious birds, and I decided to go on one of Brookside Nature Center’s Owl Walks in December. About four other people came along, including one couple that seemed to be on a first date. (How cool is that?) We all bundled up and headed out into the dark with a naturalist who had some recorded owl calls in hand.

We hiked with flashlights in the lighted snowy woods, and tried not to giggle too much. It was kind of exhilarating, and I kept thinking of those goofy shows where people try to find Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest. Anyhow, once we got deep enough into the woods we turned off the lights and played the recordings of screech owls. Sure enough, a real owl in the distance answered. Eventually, the real owl even came closer, flying just about eighteen inches over our heads in the dark. We were able to spot its silhouette in the trees and caught a glance of it with a flashlight. It blinked, then quickly flew off.

Eastern Screech Owls have long been common in urban habitats and like the barred owls are considered a species of “least concern.” They are tiny – measuring in at anywhere between six and nine inches tall -- but tough. They can eat songbirds that are their equal in size and weight.

Their calls sound so much like a scream that it is easy to see how they got their name. I am sure anyone hearing that sound along a busy part of our watershed would certainly think they were hearing something quite frightful and human.

But they also make a really cool sound which isn’t scary at all. Its almost like a coo, trilled over and over. It is sometimes referred to as the Bounce Song. The screech owls, which are known pair up for life, use this song to call to their potential mates across the woods.

Like other owls they also have HUGE ears which are really just holes hidden deep under soft feathers at the sides of their heads. The holes are surprisingly unsymmetrical, which enables the owls to be excellent hunters.

The only thing that beats seeing and hearing an owl call in person is dissecting an owl pellet. If you want a really cool way to learn about owls at home, you can order these one online. The pellets (which arrive after being sanitized in a autoclave) are not poop; rather, they are the little tufted balls of the leftover stuff that the bird is not able to digest when it gulps down its prey. Fur, feathers, bones, teeth… these can all be found in the mix. It is possible to play forensic scientist and ID what the owl ate for dinner. There are loads of charts online that will help you figure it all out.

Really experienced birders also say you can find owl roosts by looking in the woods for these pellets on the ground near hollow trees. I’ve even met a few bird watchers who claim that they can tell you immediately what species of bird left what kind of pellet.

I’ll keep looking, although I doubt I could do that kind of expert ID at this point. I have learned, however, to hear the difference between a dog’s nose whistle and a barred owl, which will come in handy someday if I decide to go camping in my own backyard with the dog.

(This article was originally published in the Voice newspapers of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington in November 2010.)

Is "The Pill" increasing estrogen in drinking water?

2010-12-13T16:16:00.005-05:00

Is the pill increasing estrogen amounts in our drinking water?

A new report in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science and Technology says no.

Finding the source for estrogen in water has become a hot topic in the last few years, since increased hormones in the environment have been linked to many human health problems and the feminization of some fish species in urban rivers. Because more than 12 million women in the US currently take oral contraceptives, the connection between “The Pill” and estrogen and those problems seemed plausible and somewhat alarming.

But after conducting a survey of the most recent available scientific research on the topic, authors Amber Wise, Kacie O’Brien and Tracey Woodruff concluded that estrogen reaches drinking and surface waters from other sources. There’s a strong link, they found, between natural estrogens in soy and dairy products and the animal waste which is used without treatment on farm fields as fertilizer. (One assumes here that farm yard run off must be carrying the estrogens to local streams and rivers.)

Some of the research cited in the article suggests that animal manure accounts for 90 percent of the estrogens in the environment.

According to a press release published last week by the ACS, some sources examined in the paper went so far as to estimate that if just 1 percent of the estrogens in livestock waste reached waterways, it would comprise fifteen percent of the estrogen’s in the world’s total water supply.

(The article appears in the October 26 edition of the journal, which can be found on the ACS website. )

Explore Montgomery County's Urban Forest

2010-12-06T14:43:00.003-05:00

If you need a break in the middle of the madness that is December, you might check out these two walks. Both will focus on a different great piece of Montgomery County, Maryland’s urban forest.

On Saturday, December 11, at 10 a.m., arborist Richard Murray will lead a walk in Wheaton Regional which will explore tree architecture and branching patterns. He’ll also discuss how trees compensate for wounding and look at defect patterns in some mature trees in this large urban park. For more info you can contact Richard at treebiologynotebook@shannontree.com or visit the Maryland Native Plant Society website. (MDNPS is sponsoring this event.)

On Saturday, December 18 from 1 – 3 p.m. Diane Cameron will lead a walk for Conservation Montgomery in the McKenney Hills neighborhood. The McKenney Hills Forest is contiguous with an extensive adjacent forest owned by the Montgomery County’s Legacy Open Space Program. Together, the Legacy Open Space Forest and the McKenney Hills Forest constitute an interconnected forest ecosystem totaling 50 acres. This is by far the largest tract of mature forest for many miles around. Public and private experts have noted the uniqueness and spectacular quality of these woods which are within the Capitol View Branch of the Lower Rock Creek watershed. For more information visit the Conservation Mongtomery website or contact them at 240-793-4603. The walk will begin at the end of Hayden Drive, which ends in a cul-de-sac at the site of the future McKenney Hills Elementary School.

Watershed Stewards to host Training Session

2010-12-05T17:55:00.003-05:00

As we all put our gardens to bed for the winter, you might be thinking of things you’d do differently next year. If you are one of those enterprising souls who has put in a raingarden recently, the Watershed Stewards Academy of Anne Arundel County, MD would like to hear from you.

They are gathering a list of “lessons learned” about raingardens to share at their Rain Garden and Environmental Site Design and Sustainable Landscape Maintenance training for Landscape Professionals. All designers, installers and maintenance companies are welcome to attend this event, which will take place in January and February.

For more information or to register visit the Chesapeake Network website.

Landscape for Life Brings Sustainable Site Initiative Home

2010-11-11T17:58:00.004-05:00

New gardeners often complain about feeling overwhelmed by the process of getting started.

And while shopping at garden centers can be fun and kind of addictive, a really sustainable garden needs to go beyond being full of "curb appeal." Ideally, a sustainable garden will offer resources to wildlife, and a sustainable gardener will avoid practices that add to environmental damage or pollution.

But really, what the heck does that actually mean in YOUR own backyard?

For a person who barely has learned to tell English ivy from poison ivy it can all feel like a bothersome, tedious chore to find out.

Now the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center and the US Botanic Garden have collaborated to make the whole process a bit easier. Their new website, called Landscape for Life, helps average homeowners bring the Sustainable Site Initiative into their own backyards. The entire site is full of practical tips and lists. There are also lots of lovely photos to inspire anyone planning next year's garden.

It is also a great website for accomplished gardeners who have puzzling questions about new environmental challenges.

Chestnuts Making a Comeback

2010-10-20T16:28:00.003-04:00

Monday's Washington Post had a really cool article on those hoping to stage a comeback for the American Chestnut tree.

In the article, several researchers noted that if they succeeded they wouldn't likely live to see the fruits of their labors, literally, since it will take 75 to 100 years to know if the trees they are working on can be reestablished in the forests of the Eastern US.

I have often encouraged friends and neighbors to plant trees that won't be truly mature until long after we have all passed on. Not many people do that any more, although it used to be standard practice on farms because people planted with the fortunes of their children and grandchildren in mind and assumed their offspring would inherit the very earth around them. In a way, the article on Monday illustrated that same idea, only writ large.

Removing Rx From the Watershed with Federal Help

2010-10-20T16:09:00.005-04:00

According to my friends who service on the Montgomery County Water Quality Advisory Group, our county's recent effort to work with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on the collection of unused or leftover pharmaceuticals was a success. The collection event occured on September 25 in Rockville and Bethesda and 22 boxes of pharmaceuticals were collected.

It would be great to have the county participate in this type of event on a regular basis.

Pharmaceuticals in local waterways have been recently connected with many ecological problems, including intersex fish. (It is believed that the majority of what shows up in local watersheds is likely from human waste water.) Unused prescription drugs can also pose a safety hazard in many homes.

All that Beautiful Poison Ivy?

2010-10-14T16:21:00.007-04:00

Is is possible for something be to really annoying and beautiful at the same time?

There's no mistaking the annoyance factor of poison ivy. One brush with this vigorous native plant and you'll itch and itch.

But at the same time, it is one of the first plants to become really fantastically beautiful in the early fall. Sometimes one vine will stretch up and out for twenty five feet more, ablaze in shades of orange, yellow and scarlet red over the still-green trees.

Surely the birds might find it beautiful, since many find this vine's berries so nutrionally valuable. They don't itch from exposure, they just get a feast. Maybe the color even helps them locate those poison ivy feasts quickly during their long, hard migrations south.

Maybe. Just a hypothesis.

But seeing as how I'm not a bird, I'll enjoy my hypothesizing and poison ivy leaf-peeping from a distance, thanks.

Learn About Our Own Local Locavores.

2010-10-14T15:47:00.005-04:00

Calling all locavores and locavore-wannabes:

On Sunday, October 24, from 2:30 - 4:00pm Montgomery Victory Gardens will host an event celebrating "The Future of Food and Farming in Montgomery County" at Blueberry Gardens Farm in Ashton, just 12 miles north of downtown Silver Spring, a holistic healing center and the only organic blueberry farm in Montgomery County.

Montgomery Victory Gardens is the county's leading non-profit working to develop a healthy, sustainable, truly local food system. Gordon Clark, the project's director, will give a short presentation on local farming issues, including everything from school vegetable gardens to land use policy in our county's large but underutilized Agricultural Reserve.

Our featured guests at the event will be recording artists "emma's revolution!"

Suggested donation is $25, but all contributions are welcome - and are all 100% tax-deductible.

For directions and information visit the MVG website or call Ellen at 301-774-3636.

Seneca Creek State Park: Just Us and the Stink Bugs

2010-10-13T08:23:00.008-04:00

I have to confess that Christopher Columbus was far from our thoughts on Monday. But all the same we were grateful that the for his holiday when we headed out with the kids. The sky was cerulean and almost cloudless and although it was a bit warm in the sun, the shade was dry, cool and comfortable. A perfect day to hike.

In reality, hiking with kids is never easy. No matter what the weather, both of my kids joyfully take to the trail for about a mile or so, then there’s an awful lot of whining that must be quieted until we get back to the end of the trail loop.

So although visions of Shenandoah and the Skyline Drive danced in my head I quickly did a reality check: a long drive causes as much whining as a long hike, so that seemed like a doubly bad proposition.

Instead we headed up to Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg. Although this park is only a short distance from our house, we had never checked it out. Being a Baltimore girl I was always much more likely to head to Patapsco State Park when I wanted to get out in the woods and goof around. That just was more familiar.

What I learned on Monday, though, was that Seneca has a lot of offer, too, especially for a family with young kids. The lake is beautiful, and although we didn’t go for the fishing we saw a lot of families who were out with poles on Monday. As we took to the trails we found ourselves almost completely alone with the birds, including a few Pileated woodpeckers. Maybe Seneca is a kind of well-kept secret.

There is one kind of visitor that knows the place very well, though -- we were hounded by brown marmorated stink bugs for almost the entire hike. At one point I had at least ten of them on my shirt, as did each of my kids. There were smears of dead stink bugs on the parking lots, and as we drove off at the end of the day I had to pluck them off of my legs and shoes or risk stinking up the entire car.

I am not sure why I found this surprising. I kind of assumed that the stink bugs were mostly making themselves at home in suburban areas, where tidy, warm houses offer many places to tuck in on cold days. Our suburban neighborhood has seen its share of these invaders, but it was nothing compared to what we saw at Seneca.

In fact, it seemed like the deeper we went in the woods the more stink bugs we encountered. (We had the same experience at our favorite pick-your-own apple orchard last week as well, where the stink bugs had done a real number on the farmer’s lovely crops, putting corky pits into many of the nicest red apple skins.)

In spite of the stink bugs, we ended up walking for about three miles, which is actually pretty modest for our family hikes. And although those miles were pretty flat and easy, the kids did indeed whine for the last mile or so. And not because of the stink bugs.

My theory is that most of their whining on long hikes actually comes from an inability to fathom how much farther they have to go. I try to show them on the map but I think that they can’t really make relative comparisons for long distances. It just seems to them like it is never going to end. Then when it does they are always pretty proud of themselves. I think that the more they hike the more they will be able to mentally gauge the relativity of their endurance to a mile on a map.

Once we got home my theory seemed even more valid. While my husband and I both stretched out to take a rest on some big, comfy chairs, the kids saw some friends outside and went running up and down the block enthusiastically with their pals for several more hours. And I even heard them brag about the great hike we had just taken. So much for worrying that we’d exhausted them out in the woods!

Next time we go to Seneca I want to check out the historic one-room Seneca Schoolhouse Museum. Seems like it might make a great history field trip, especially if the stink bugs subside a bit.

Native Plant Sale in Baltimore

2010-10-04T19:41:00.004-04:00

The Herring Run Nursery up in Baltimore will host two more plant sales this fall on October 9 & 24.

I love this organization because they are doing great things with native plants in a very urban area of Baltimore, my hometown. Although it is a bit of a drive from DC, it is worth it when you consider that your plant purchases help a great local non-profit.

Their nursery has a sizable selection of native trees, shrubs, and vines and a limited selection of native perennials. Sale times are 12:00-4:00 PM for both dates. (For an up-to-date plant list you can visit their website or call 410-254-1577 ext 104.)

Bats Have Regional Accents

2010-09-30T12:40:00.003-04:00

This month's newsletter from Bat Conservation International highlighted some really fascinating new research. Bats have accents. Two animals of the same species from different regions may have very different sounding calls.

Past research has also noted the same phenomenon in birds. Southern-living chickadees, for example, have different accents than their northern counterparts. And cows in the UK were shown to also have regionally different moos.

Bat Conservation International always puts out a great newsletter, full of this kind of interesting info.

Why Are Those Chimney Sweep Signs Up in the Parks?

2010-09-21T16:04:00.005-04:00

Like a lot of other Montgomery County residents, I was wondering how the heck the Step In Time chimney sweep people were able to get away with posting signs all over the county parks.

I see a lot of signs like these put up illegally in the parks, but usually they are removed immediately by either county employees or anti-litter activists. The Step In Time signs, however, were placed high up, out of reach, on many different tennis courts and ball field back stops.

I just figured that they were posted so high and so well that they were harder to rip down. And with recent budget cuts I also figured the county was spreading its employees’ time thinner than ever, so maybe the county just hadn’t gotten to it yet.

Well, it turns out the budget connection goes like this: Step In Time is sponsoring portable toilets for some of the parks this year. Citizens who asked were told that the company was permitted to hang the signs in exchange for the sponsorship, much to the irritation of many park users who find them to be, in the words of one of my neighbors, “visual pollution.” Others have called into question the legality of such sign-posting, citing MNCPPC’s own rules and regulations.

I’m really curious to know what other people think about this.

Using Pet Poop to Light Parks: This is for Real

2010-09-20T10:33:00.001-04:00

This morning I came back from walking my dog in the park and found this interesting article posted on a local environmental listserv:

Pet Poop Fueling City Park Light, Sparks Conversation

Seems Matthew Mazzotta, an enterprising student from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has designed a device which uses the methane in dog waste to power a street light. How cool.

I envision these all over Montgomery County. We could put them near lighted tennis courts and ball fields, and along streets where lots of people walk their dogs.

Dog waste is a huge pollution problem in our watershed and in many other parts of the Chesapeake Bay region. Meanwhile, our budget has forced the county to offer ad sponsorship on portable toilets. This seems like a tidy solution to both problems.

How cool. How cool.

Making Way for Impending Construction

2010-09-19T14:10:00.003-04:00

I am not a happy gardener lately.

We are preparing here for some impending construction. A crumbling patio and a deteriorating roofline have made some repairs necessary. I always knew the day would come, but who can tell a gardener to wait for years? I made the most of our open sunshine-filled yard. I gardened with abandon.

Well, now the day has come. Actually, it probably will arrive next week in the form of a small excavator. In order to protect the trees in our yard and maintain the top soil, we’re carving out a carefully planned path for the machinery and destruction. We’ll be spreading out loads of wood chips and fencing off most of the planted areas so that clay and debris doesn’t get dumped there.

We spent long hours during August and September moving plants out of harm's way and heeling them in odd places. Like any crazed plant lover, I would like to save them all. Many of them are hard to come by in retail stores, and besides, I hate waste. My husband, a wonderful cook but terrible gardener, has better sense. He reels me in from compulsive plant insanity sometimes.

No matter what it is discouraging work. Getting your garden plants to grow in a orderly but artistic way is never easy. It takes years. Now I feel like a conductor silencing the choir. Seeming like puzzled divas, some of the plants flop over in their new locations.

Trees are the Answer, Not the Problem

2010-09-18T15:42:00.005-04:00

It is frightening to see a large tree fall.

I was walking once at Brookside Gardens on a beautiful sunny day in the middle of the autumn two years ago when I saw one go down in the forest along the horizon. It made an awful sound, and the weight of it made the ground shake around our feet for a moment. You feel a pit in your stomach when that happens. You feel small and helpless.

A lot of people recently experienced this first hand, when massive trees fell along our streets and in the parks. Two families in my own neighborhood even lived through the horrendous experience of having massive oaks fall directly on their homes. Everyone living in both homes came out safe and sound, thank God. The clean up efforts have been slow and hard and my heart goes out to them.

Yes, it is scary to watch trees fall, and also frustrating to experience power losses. I would not deny that.

But as politicians and Pepco argue over questions of management and the public grows increasingly frustrated, I’d like to reframe with a different perspective. We’ve lost a lot of trees this year, and now more than ever we need to be planting replacements.

When I hear people begin to talk as if the trees themselves are problem, I get worried. Trees are not the problem. In fact, I think that trees are the answer. Rather than see them as the cause of our human woes, we need to understand why they are here, acknowledge their importance in our landscape, and manage to somehow live our lives safely in their presence. Because without large trees we would really be in trouble.

Trees, many people know, help reduce air pollution and cool the air. The cooling occurs not only because trees provide enormous amounts of shade, but also because a mature tree actually moves water into the atmosphere.

What a lot people sometimes overlook, however, is that a forested landscape can also reduce the impact of water pollution and slow or reduce flooding in urban areas. That’s because when stormwater is able to move across tree roots, it is readily absorbed by the tree. The roots and the other living things in the soil and leaf litter act as excellent filters. They do this naturally and are quite effective at it.

Although water moves considerably slower through a forested landscape then through a cement-covered one, we’ve done a lot of work lately to fill our watershed with a huge amount of hard surface in the form of parking lots, roads and rooftops. This, in turn, has caused an increase in pollution and flooding, even when the storms aren’t unusual in intensity.

Where once there were fields and forests, there increasingly tends to be concrete and asphalt. Where once, the water moved as if it was moving through a sponge, it now moves as if poured from a smooth pitcher.

All of this is not good for the creeks, which get scoured out by the fast moving water and begin to erode. In the metaphor above, the pitcher is not clean but covered in oily and nutrient-rich pollutants which are washed into the stormdrains and then into our creeks. The abundance of things like fertilizers and pesticides from our lawns and streets can lead to anaerobic and toxic conditions. Our waterways become less inhabitable for fish, turtles, and other wildlife. The waterways, including the Chesapeake, become unhealthy.

“Dirty water kills,” Arlene Bruhn told me recently. She’s written the county council numerous times to advocate for more trees and better tree protection laws. Trees are essential to protecting our water supply, because we drink the Potomac’s water, she added.

Bruhn also reminded me that we’d had the hottest DC summer on record, meaning that we need as many shade trees as possible to help cool the city.

It makes sense, then, to protect the buffer zones of trees around creeks and plant more trees planted throughout our watershed. Does that mean we should plant trees any old place? No. What it means is that we need to be smart about where we plant and what we plant. It also means that we need to take care of what is already there.

“When you go to a garden center and see a tree in a little pot it is like looking at a little preschooler,” Mike Galvin, Deputy Director of Casey Trees told me recently. His organization works hard to get more trees planted in the city. “You need to say, what is this tree going to look like when it is mature, just like you try to think ahead to your kid’s future and how they are going to grow and get big.”

I liked Mike’s analogy. But sadly it reminded me of a story that an older friend here in Silver Spring told me last year. She recalled a time in the early 1950s, right after the houses were built in her neighborhood, when all of the people along one street bought some trees. We walked out one Saturday and planted them together, she recalled with warmth.

I appreciated the civic pride her story demonstrated, but I cringed when she pointed to the trees they had planted. Oaks, maples and gums were all there, directly under existing power lines in what is sometimes called the Right of Ways or ROW along the curblines.

Those trees then grew to be beautiful, treasured, big and dramatic. They also grew to be big problems for power line companies, well-managed or otherwise. And those trees often struggled to grow strong roots where the sidewalks existed. Those happy neighbors had definitely not thought ahead to the day when their baby trees would be mature.

In the decades since, we’ve struggled to do a bit better, with very little success. Municipal arborists now oversee ROW planting. Some developers have undergrounded lines as technology and innovation made this safer. Some who were really progressive even built developments which allowed for central green spaces full of trees. But many did not, opting instead to squeeze as many houses as possible into each space they developed. As a result we continue to lose our existing canopy at an ever increasing rate. New trees do not see to be a real priority for the county or the state.

We need to do a better job in the future. Homeowners can start by planting wisely. If you select a tree to plant, research and understand the tree before you begin. Don’t be afraid to pick a big one, but look up before you plant and see if there are powerlines there first.

If you don’t have space for the big, mature shade trees, pick one that will naturally stay small. Don’t pick a big species and try to train it to stay small. That only leads to pain for the tree and trouble for you or the next homeowner.

You can also work to maintain existing trees, both big and small. Too often, suburban folks tend to see trees as static, architectural features. Instead we need to understand that they are living, dynamic things that change and grow and sometimes begin to decline. They need regular attention in the form of professional pruning by a certified arborist.

The storms of summer have subsided for now, but I have no doubt we will face new ones again soon. Hopefully, we’ll at least get a healthy amount of rain. All those new seedlings I hope to see out there will need it.

This piece originally appeared in the Sept edition of the Voice newspapers of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington.

Keeping Rx Drugs out of the Waste Stream and Our Medicine Cabinets

2010-09-15T13:32:00.005-04:00

By now pretty much everyone has heard about the mutant animals that keep showing up in our nation’s rivers. Intersexed fish have been found in the Potomac, for example. These malformed animals are especially alarming because the area’s human residents draw their drinking water from the same said river.

While there is strong evidence that some of the malformations may be due to chemicals which are washing out of our lawns and from farmlands in the form of excess weed killers, there is also a great deal of research showing that our own wastewater plays a role in contaminating the watershed. That's because the meds we take eventually make their way into the waste stream with the rest of the sewage.

For years, law enforcement officials have also been asking people to flush unused prescription drugs down the toilet, since excess or leftover prescriptions form a safety threat if left sitting around unused in medicine cabinets. This unfortunately meant that an even larger number of dangerous things were making their way downstream via the toilet.

Considering all of this, I was really pleased to see an announcement from the city of Rockville last week. On Saturday, September 25, the city will join the national Take-Back Initiative, which is aimed at preventing pill abuse and theft. Such events can help stop the rise in addiction to prescription medications, while at the same time help to decrease the amount of chemicals entering our waterways.

For more information about this event, go to www.dea.gov or call 240-314-8922.

And the Survey Says: More Trees for Montgomery County

2010-09-14T15:43:00.005-04:00

Just in time for today's primaries, Conservation Montgomery has unveiled the results of their recent online survey about our county's environmental issues. It was the first act undertaken by the new fledgling group, formed by several of the county's most outspoken and passionate environmental activists. The survey, which was posted earlier this summer, was aimed at perhaps giving environmental topics a stronger voice in the elections.

In general it seems that the environment plays pretty strong in the MoCo elections. Still, results of this kind of survey are always fascinating, even if I know that a lot the time the answers are a bit skewed by the fact that the only people who actually take the time to fill out such things are the people who actually care about the environment in the first place.

It feels like asking the perverbial choir to sing. But that's okay. We need more that kind of music, so to speak.

The thing that really grabbed my attention in the release was the final line:

"81.8% of the respondents said they are supportive of funding for the county street tree program to be fully restored in the Montgomery County budget."

As someone who testified at the last round of the county's budget sessions, I say bravo everyone. I agree. We do need more trees. Please. Let those elected officials hear that music, too. So if you haven't already voted, go now.

The Natural Capital, a blog for DC's urban dwelling nature lovers

2010-09-01T15:58:00.002-04:00

Wow! I just stumbled upon this cool blog, which is chock full of field trip ideas for grown ups and kids. Really incredible, and just my kind of thing.

The Natural Capital

Monarch Butterfly article appears on Homeschool Montgomery Blog

2010-08-31T10:42:00.003-04:00

I'm excited to announce that Homeschool Montgomery and Homeschool Frederick, two great online magazines in the area, have published an article of mine about monarch butterflies!

The timing was impecable. As soon as I finished reading my emails this morning I looked out the window and saw two monarch caterpillars on the milkweed. We also found several large black swallowtail caterpillars when we were cleaning the vegetable garden out last night.

More Native Plant Sale Info

2010-08-19T15:15:00.002-04:00

This weekend, as I noted earlier, will be kind of the kick off for Native Plant Sales in our region, as Irvine Nature Center up near Baltimore will have its local great event.

There are several other sales of note, however. Here's a basic round up. If you know of another feel free to let me know and I'll post it here.

Sept 10 & 11

Environmental Concern

St. Micheal's, MD

410-745-9620

http://www.wetland.org/

Sept 18

Greenspring Gardens VA

http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/gsgp/

703-642-5173

Sept 18

Chesapeake Ecology Center

Annapolis, MD

http://www.chesapeakeecologycenter.org/

There are also several more listed at the MD Native Plant website.

Sligo Creek's Flood waters surpass the gauge mark

2010-08-18T15:40:00.003-04:00

Last week another tremendous storm ripped its way through our region, leaving in its wake a barrage of downed branches and flooded streets, yards and basements.

Clair Garman, who maintains the Friends of Sligo Creek website, noted that the flow rate where the gauge sits just above Maple Avenue in Takoma Park went from the normal rate of 1.2 cubic feet per second at 6:15am to 2,350 cubic feet per second at 7:30am that morning. That's actually the maximum value that can be recorded by the device. Several who visited the site later pointed out that the storm surge probably surpassed that number, but the gauge simply couldn't record the measurements.

To see the data from that morning for yourself, go to the USGS waterdata site:
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/md/nwis/uv?cb_ooo65=on&cb_00060=on&form\at=html&period=1&site_no=01650800

Let the Shopping Begin: Native Plant Sale Season Opens

2010-08-12T12:06:00.005-04:00

This is likely to be the first of many such notices for the next couple of months. With fall being the best time to plant, everyone seems to be hosting plant sales.

Among them all, the one at Irvine is my favorite, though. Partly this is because I used to work there and actually at one point had to organize this event. But mostly it is because I really love the vendors that turn out at this sale. All top quality people with top quality plants and loads of great garden info to offer.

Irvine is just up the road aways, north of Baltimore. One bonus to going to this sale and seminar: you'll have a chance to see their new green building! Don't forget to bring a check book, since most vendors do not accept credit cards!

Note that if you pay to attend the Irvine Native Plant Seminar, you can get into the sale earlier.

Irvine Native Plant Sale

Saturday August 21, 2010

9am - 4pm

for more info you can also call: 443-738-9200

Turn In Your Stinky Old Mower, Get One that Runs on Batteries

2010-08-11T13:34:00.004-04:00

Those folks up in Baltimore are once again working to put more electric, battery-powered mowers into the hands of citizens. This Saturday they're teaming up with the Neuton company. For details go to:

http://www.cleanairpartners.net/

Past events have been so popular that this time they've rented out an area of Camden Yards Stadium parking lot, and they're taking reservations.

I only wish we could get an event like this going in Montgomery County!

Brookside Nature Center Still Closed From Storm Damage of July 25

2010-08-10T13:31:00.005-04:00

My friends at Brookside Nature Center in Wheaton say they hope to reopen this weekend. Their building has been closed since July 25, when a huge electrical storm made matchsticks of many trees in Wheaton Regional Park. The county was forced to cancel several summer day camp sessions at the park and many popular public programs in order to rebuild and dig out from the damage.

Brady Hartley, a MNCPPC naturalist who works at Brookside NC sent me a link to some photos she took the day after, when the storm subsided. Crews continue to work hard on the clean up, and she tells me that the roof damage has been repaired and carpenters are replacing the steps damaged by a fallen tree. They have made substantial progress since her photos were taken, which is a very good thing indeed.

Next door, Brookside Gardens also lost more than a dozen large trees. A prolonged power loss also meant that the popular Wings of Fancy exhibit was unable to open for four days. “The shut down has severely affected our visitor experience – disappointing many visitors wishing to see our fantastic butterfly exhibit and diminishing a significant source of revenue that helps us fund our garden and educational programs,” said an email sent out on the Thursday following the storm.

Ecologists call the storm that caused all this trouble a kind of “disturbance.” Ecological disturbance can come in many forms. Elephants, for example, rip up trees in Africa when they go on a rampage. Hurricanes criss-cross Florida in late summer sometimes. Fires, tornados, and even volcanoes erupting… all of these are “disturbance events” that help to transform ecosystems all over the globe.

The ecosystems which experience disturbance are full of opportunistic plants and animals. One of the most famous of these is the pines in the Western US that will only open to drop seeds once a fire has heated their cones to a certain temperature. Less famous here in the eastern Mid-Atlantic are those seeds and root stocks that wait and wait for sunshine. When a tree goes down, it opens up opportunity for them to sprout and take center stage, so to speak. Where once only shade loving plants would thrive, a tree seedling or flowering perennial suddenly makes it way out of the soil and begins to grow. Meadows open up and the cycle of forest succession turns around again. Where once it was dark cool shade, suddenly warm open sunshine provides nectar rich plants that butterflies and bees will not doubt soon enjoy. The next generation of trees reach out for the sunshine, too, and begin to take strong root.

To everything, turn, turn, turn there is a season, turn, turn turn…

But honestly, when you live in an urban area, though, tree losses due to storms are hard to witness, and no amount of soothing harmonies from the sixties seem to help ease the ache of watching a particularly lovely oak, hickory or maple that has been around for fifty years or more fall in a mere matter of moments.

If your yard only measures a few feet across and you spend a lot of time in the local park walking under the trees, you know them all like friends. The tree where the trail turned in an elbow angle, the hollow place 15 feet up where the flying squirrels raised their young, the hickory that filled a whole spot of the park with butter yellow leaves each October…. Watching them fall to the ground is upsetting. A heightened awareness of the fact that the forest is dynamic, ever-changing and on an agenda stretching beyond our lifetimes is a bit unsettling.

Because both Brookside and Wheaton Regional are both placed square in the middle of urban development, they provide respite for both animals eager to find habitat and humans anxious to find refreshment for the mind, soul and body. Their trees make life here a bit easier, a bit greener, a bit cleaner and a bit more bearable. Losing so many trees at once is not really something we want to happen on a frequent basis.

And while I have no doubt that interesting things will come up in the new pockets of sunshine, I also worry about the already tight budgets of our parks. There are no new pockets of revenue out there, ready to sprout. One can only hope for the best and advocate for the future of these two important community assets.

And I suppose, keep planting trees wherever and whenever possible.

New Garden Coaching website Is Up! Yay!

2010-07-24T15:33:00.004-04:00

I'm really excited to announce that my new garden coaching website is finally up and running, thanks to the help of Dan Kulpinski.

Dan, who is a fellow science writer, website designer and environmentalist, did an awesome job on the design. He also has his own kicking site, Greenlist DC, which is a great resource for all things environmental in the metro area.

Thanks Dan, for the great work!

African Blue Basil Performs

2010-07-24T14:12:00.006-04:00

B. emailed his confession: “My garden looks terrible – too hot to go out and work!”

I had to agree, it is too hot, and truth be told my own home garden looks terrible for the same reason. With the thermometer poking out over the 105 degree mark on the back fence all week, I have been loathe to even try anything out there other than picking squash each morning after breakfast.

Today, though, I tried to go out and do a brief moment of hand to hand combat with the crab grass that had sprung up near the AC unit. What had been a few tiny sprouts last week was now threatening to clog the vents of cooling fan. Still, I kept thinking of the phrase mad dogs and Englishmen… ten minutes in blistering heat and I thought for sure I’d faint. And the bits of tenacious crab grass which refused to be pulled out easily seemed to be waving somewhat smugly in the hot breeze as I retreated towards the back door.

On the way in, however, my attention was captured by the African blue basil. Right now, with the heat and humidity so awful that the going out the back door feels like walking into the oven, that basil looks resplendent. The purple bracts of flowers reach in all directions, and the bees seem to find its nectar irresistible. As I stood watching in the cicada-sizzled heat I counted more than fifteen on the plant in my daughter’s garden.

Along the side in my own herb row, the same species was so lovely I just had to stop on my way inside and pull my hand along the stem, just of the pleasure of the scent that it released into my palm.

Nothing smells as summer-ish as basil, but African blue is new to us this year. My daughter picked it out at the garden center because she liked the pretty, delicate coloring on the leaves. I’m glad for her sense of planting adventure; I probably would’ve gone on planting Sweet Genovese for the rest of my life and would have never known the pleasures of this lovely pollinator-attracting form.

The taste of this basil form is a bit tangier and spicier than the Italian forms of the same herb, but not so much that it becomes overpowering. We’ve made three rounds of pesto so far this month, and two of them included the African Blue in the mix with Sweet Genovese. The taste is nice and stays authentic to the idea of what pesto should be; no funky harshness creeps into overpower or compete with the garlic. My husband thinks the leaves would also be pretty on top of a salad, but we have yet to try that idea in real life.

But truly, it is the bees that make this plant the most worthwhile, especially for an urban wildlife gardener, like me. The little winged creatures flit from flower to flower and then onward to our veggie plants from sunrise to sunset without ceasing. Because a single individual plant only takes up about one square foot of the garden, it would be nice in any sunny DC garden, even those without veggies or other herbs. Unlike other basil types, this one does not need constant pruning in order to stay lovely because it doesn't go to seed. Its lovely purple flowers and indigo-edged foliage are really refreshing to the eye, especially on a hot day when not much else outside is.

The Doldrums of July and Witchy Fingered Plants

2010-06-29T13:43:00.001-04:00

Every year about this same time, I become completely annoyed by my garden.

All of the flowers of early summer, which looked so lovely a couple of weeks back, have now lost color and are starting to set seed. The late summer bloomers aren’t started quite yet. Meanwhile, the heat starts cooking here in DC and the cool season lawns all go dormant and turn brown.

This is the doldrums of native plant summer for me. Things that are tall and not blooming just looking like gigantic weeds. Things that are short look a bit forlorn with out blooms.

These frustrations were heavy on my mind when my friend M. from Peru came by to chat this afternoon. Tall, she said. Very, very tall. We stared at the particular plant in question, my Night Blooming primroses. They are tall -- but not by any stretch stately. And now, as we are about to embark upon July, they really do look like weeds.

Each night at dusk they become beautiful, as their fruit scented flowers unfurl like fairy umbrellas being popped open. In the early morning, the flowers linger a while and the bumble bees are insane and drunk out there, drinking up the yellow nectar.

In the first week of June those plants are still short and blend in with the rest of the plants during the day. But here in the midday heat of July they look like used tissues, limp and shriveled and awful. The tall, branching plants are covered in seed heads which remind me of witch fingers.

Within a week, I’ll cut them down and reclaim the garden. One or two I’ll leave; because the plant is biennial it will need to seed itself in for next year. But for now, we suffer through the witchy-fingered stage and wait for a refreshing rain storm.

What is this, M. asks delicately, going around the corner to the spot where the blueberries are still producing lovely purple orbs. She is delighted to see our vegetable garden, too, below the primroses, where squash and tomatoes are taking off in glorious, gluttonous abundance and our herbs are happier than ever. I cut basil, oregano, thyme for her.

She asks me how to say the name for chamomile in English, and wonders if it is the plant that helps you nap. We talk about making tea. The heat simmers with cicada sound all around us.

Iced tea is good too, I insist with a laugh. Let’s put in some mint.

Suddenly, above us, there’s a twittering of birds in the witchy fingers. A male and female goldfinch have arrived, pretty as could be. They land and eat seeds from the primroses before flying quickly off to another part of the garden. And I am left with M. to think of all the different meanings of the word “bewitched.”

Was that a Coyote I Saw in Wheaton?

2010-06-25T13:25:00.004-04:00

I was waiting for some friends to meet me at the head of a trail in Wheaton early this spring when I spotted what looked like a stray, light-colored german shepherd. Its long nose and downward pointing tale made me stop short. Was that a coyote? Before I could get a closer look to see if there was a collar around its neck or any other signs of domestication, the animal headed off into the deep woods and my friends arrived. We began our hike in the other direction and I was left to wonder what I had just witnessed.

A short time later I put out a journalist’s all call on several listservs around town: had anyone else seen a coyote lately? Where and when, and would they be willing to talk about it with me?

The reactions were interesting. I had expected a bit of fear, and actually wondered if I was going to cause anxiety by even asking the question. What I got instead was a buoyant enthusiasm more akin to Elvis sightings. Several people told me they thought they had seen one out their kitchen window, or while taking out the trash early one morning. Even more people sent messages back saying no, they hadn’t seen coyotes but they hoped those darned predators were out there feasting on the deer.

“Now I think people know they’re here,” Rob Gibbs told me later when I called him on the phone to talk about the topic in detail. “They aren’t shocked anymore.”

Gibbs, who serves as the Natural Resources Manager for Maryland National Capital Parks and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC) here in Montgomery County, has given several presentations on the topic for organizations such as the Neighbors of the Northwest Branch and the Friends of Sligo Creek.

As a regular part of his talks, he explains that the 35 pound coyotes which we are likely to see here in the Eastern US differ slightly from those that live out west. “As coyotes expanded their range east through Canada and the Southern US they occasionally interbred with wolves” says a M-NCPPC brochure on the topic.

Gibbs remarked that his agency wasn’t getting as many calls about coyote sightings as they used to, and also mentioned that there don’t seem to be more up county or down.

“We aren’t seeing other animals getting attacked or anything like that,” he said. “They’re sort of living in the shadows for the most part.”

Although many hope their frustrations with backyard suburban deer might be resolved by the presence of a large predator, it doesn’t seem to Gibbs or other area biologists that this will likely be the case.

“Looking at the data,” said George Timko, Assistant Deer Project Leader with Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, “we don’t see any impact of coyote on deer populations.”

The reason, Timko explains, is that the animals are opportunistic, eating everything from grasshoppers to cantaloupes, and even trash. For a short time each spring, they will prey upon fawns, but not in large enough numbers to change populations.

Maryland’s Annual Deer Report for 2008-2009 notes that decreases in deer numbers in the Western part of the state are more likely due to changes in hunting rules. “The vast majority of white-tailed deer give birth to fawns within a two to four week period in May and June, which overwhelms predators like coyotes and bears. During that time there are far more fawns on the ground than can be consumed by predators.”

Carol Bannerman, the Public Affairs Officer for the Wildlife Services office of the US Department of Agriculture in Riverdale, Maryland, works for an office that keeps careful track of predator nuisance calls. Calls about coyotes increased during the 2007-2008 time period. But Bannerman noted that the following year the calls decreased significantly in the state. She cautioned against using such numbers as a way to measure coyote populations.

It could be, she hypothesized during a recent phone call, that one of those reported sightings might be from someone who saw many coyotes at one time, for example. Or it could be that people are getting more and more used to the predators and just simply aren’t calling to report their sightings as often.

There has been, she said, a rise in concern about predators on farm animals such as lambs. “The question is,” she pointed out recently, “what is the animal?” It is not always clear whether the animal which has preyed upon the farm animal is a coyote.

Gibbs and Bannerman both expressed concern for the future relationship which might develop between Eastern coyotes and humans. The danger, it seems, is what might happen if the animals begin to associate people and their houses with food. This could have a very negative impact on coyotes and people both.

For this reason, the M-NCPPC is asking everyone to avoid feeding coyotes, either intentionally or unintentionally. They urge home owners to not leave pet food bowls outside, and keep garbage in tight lidded containers. They also say that dogs should always be walked on a leash for their own safety and that cats should be kept indoors. M-NCPPC also asks residents to always supervise children when on trails.

Frankly, there are many good reasons beyond coyote management to follow those guidelines. Rats love pet food, raccoons love our trash cans, and cats prey far too often on songbirds to live outdoors. And, as Bannerman points out, the chance of mixing saliva with one of those animals increases for your pet when you don’t follow those guidelines. So putting aside coyotes, this means that the risk of accidentally transmitting diseases to your cat or dog could increase dramatically.

As far as not letting children run ahead on the trail, this is always a good idea. Toddlers can quickly pick up poisonous mushrooms, run into patches of poison ivy or encounter dangers on the trail.

I look at the toddler years as a time when kids should be having fun *learning* how to be safe in the woods at the side of their parents, not miles ahead on the trail, out of sight. That is always true, whether coyotes are out there or not. I wouldn’t let my kids under five run miles ahead in the city, either. I use the same kinds of parental common sense in both places. I doubt that anyone who loves the outdoors would say that the dangers at this point outweigh the benefits of getting outside.

And what about the coyote I might have seen in Wheaton this spring? Rob Gibbs was dubious.

“We’ve had calls about a stray dog hanging around in that area frequently,” he said.

Why do I feel kind of bummed about that?

I’d love to hear about your coyote sightings, even if they are somewhat iffy. If you think you saw a coyote out there in our area, let me know where and when the sighting occurred. (On the other hand if you’ve seen Elvis, you are on your own.)

For more information, including where to report a nuisance sighting visit: www.aphis.usda.gov/lpa/pubs/fsheet_faq_notice/fs_wscoyote.pdf.

This piece was originally published in the June 2010 issue of the Voice newspapers of Silver Spring, Takoma, and Kensington. Editorial note: the photo used in this story was NOT taken in Wheaton, Maryland by the author.

CCLC Garden Contest Opens

2010-06-16T17:38:00.002-04:00

Have a garden full of natives worth bragging about? The Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council has just opened this year's garden contest. Maybe you should enter.

The CCLC wants to see gardens that work towards sustainability, which of course involves way more than just planting natives. Water usage, composting, and capturing run-off all figure pretty big on their list of priorities. (See their full list of the "Eight Essential Elements of
of Conservation Landscaping" )

Even if you don't enter, check out the link to the 2008 winners for some inspiration. Wow, do I love that one with the chickens.

Roadsides and Pollinators, a New Report

2010-06-07T14:04:00.009-04:00

When a report from the Xerces Society entitled Pollinators and Roadsides landed in my inbox recently, my initial reaction was to wince. I recalled the times I've found dead butterflies in the grill of my car after long trips. Its one of those things you really hate to see. So the idea of encouraging pollinator plantings along roads just didn't intuitively strike me as a very good idea.

Upon further inspection, however, I was won over by the evidence presented in this thoughtful report. According to many who have researched the topic, the many miles of available roadside might indeed make for excellent habitat, especially in rural areas where agricultural expansion has put intense pressure on many invertebrate species.

Roadsides, when properly managed, can be havens where reduced pesticide use and abundant sunshine can provide rich food sources, particularly when plantings of native, nectar-rich flowers are used. Grasses can provide nesting spaces for ground-dwelling native bees. And the routes the roads themselves take can even provide protective corridors for some species.

The report goes into specific details on the changes needed to mowing schedules in order to make roadside plantings a reality, a detail that many municipal land managers might find the most challenging aspect of such roadside spaces. It also details the types of plantings that might best succeed.

So what about the impact of traffic? According to those who have spent time doing careful observations along many types of roadways, carefully planted and maintained areas will not necessarily increase collisions for bees and butterflies. In fact, one study in Iowa found that more butterflies were killed along roads with grass than along those with prairie plantings.

The entire report (which is short and easy to read) can be viewed on the Xerces Society's website:

http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/roadside-guidelines_xerces-society1.pdf

Spicebush Caterpillars Arrive

2010-06-04T15:33:00.005-04:00

Yesterday we discovered that we had a very good-sized spicebush caterpillar on our bushes.

Spicebush caterpillars depend on two sources of food as caterpillars. They like sassafras leaves, and they love (you guessed it--) spicebush leaves. They eat and eat and grow and grow. What is fascinating about them is their faux eye spots, which make the little wigglers look more like snakes than caterpillars. They also are very good at hiding inside the leaves of the plant, which tend to roll up over their bodies like a protective tent.

The butterflies which they eventually become are beautiful, with large dark wings the about the size of a tiger swallowtail.

Spicebush berries are very attactive to migrating songbirds, and the leaves are so wonderfully fragrant when crushed. Sometimes I pick a leaf while hiking in the woods and sniff it while I hike. It is like aromatherapy... the spicy scent fills my lungs and the sunshine fills my soul. The scent has thus become imprinted in my memory with happy, relaxed moments spent in the woods of the Mid-Atlantic.

As if there weren't enough other reasons to grow this plant, you can put one in your yard in full confidence that the deer won't touch it. That same fragrance in the leaves seem to make them pungent and distasteful to those ravenous creatures. And these shrubs are truly happinest in the shade, so they'll fill in the understory of your large oaks or maples easily.

The photo I managed to snap with my phone yesterday is not the best... I need to dig out my macro lenses and my dinosaur SLR from the closet now that the insect season has begun in full force. (One day I WILL save up enough cash to get the digital camera of my dreams... trouble is that everytime I have extra money I want to use it for plants instead!) In the meantime, if you want to see a really great photo of a spicebush caterpillar, visit this Birds & Blooms image.

What's in Bloom: VA Sweetspire aka Sideshow Bob

2010-05-25T14:38:00.005-04:00

“It’s a shrub that looks like Sideshow Bob, you know, from the Simpsons.” That was me speaking recently, trying to describe the appearance of the Virginia Sweetspire (Itea virginica) in my front yard.

My description did not do it justice, but honestly that was the first thing that popped into my mind. The way the tendrils of creamy white flowers hang down makes me think of Sideshow Bob’s haircut. Only pretty.

My photo, shown left, does not do the sweetspire justice, either.

But trust me, this one is a winner.

Those flowers, which are the exact color of classic butter pecan ice cream, are magnets to early season butterflies and native bees. They are also a wonderful foil for my Jackmanii clematis, which blooms on the fence in dark purple abundance right behind the sweetspire in late May. There's a reason they call it sweet; the fragrance before a rainstorm is especially unbelievable.

Sweetspire is becoming more popular. Its resilience has prompted even the big box hardware stores like Home Depot to sell it. But I am sad when I see it used in parched, dry parking lot locations outside of shopping centers. This plant is definitely happiest when it gets a bit of extra water, which makes it great along the edges of rain gardens. Or, in wet places like the foot of the slope in my yard. At this spot, all of the rain water gathers and used to make messy puddles. It seems to suck all that excess water away quickly, and seems to enjoy a certain lush growth in this spot that the parking lot plants do not seem to share.

(Although this bush will not thrive in super dry parking lots, sweetspire will do quite well in dry lawns with average soil. In one spot in our yard it helps to mask an ugly power line. So although it will tolerate the extra water, it doesn’t *need* it. It does need adequate moisture, however, so hellishly hot parking lot just doesn’t seem like the best application.)

Sweetspire has three nice seasons of color, and is truly a four season shrub. In May, we have the already mentioned blossoms. In summer, the leaves fill in empty parts of the garden with lush green growth. In fall, those leaves turn an outrageously lovely red color before falling to the ground. When the winter’s chill comes on, the bare branches of the sweetspire turn a shiny, dark red which really stands out in the snow.

The downside of sweetspire is its tendency to sucker. The new shoots are easy to dig out and give to friends, but this shrub will easily over take your fertile urban meadow or perennial border. Again, a lawn with average to rich soil makes the ideal location; to keep the suckering in check simply mow the new shoots back and let it meet up with the grass edge.

Odwalla Plant-A-Tree Program Begins on Tuesday

2010-05-24T12:27:00.002-04:00

The following message went happily viral on several MD listservs this week. I hope all you Marylanders out there get out the vote on Tuesday!

WHAT: On MAY 25th, Odwalla will be giving away $200,000 to plant trees in State Parks across the nation.

WHO: The Odwalla Plant a Tree Program is in its 3rd year, and in 2010 will be available to all 50 States. The program allows a person to “vote” for which state they want trees to be planted in, and each “vote” = $1 for your state parks to be used to plant trees.

HOW: You can the Odwalla Plant-A-Tree website and choose which state you want to vote for. No purchase necessary.

Just copy the above web address to your internet browser and vote.

What's in Bloom: False Indigo

2010-05-20T15:50:00.003-04:00

I realized the other day that a lot blue and purple things were blooming all at once in my garden, including lavender, catmint, sage, meadow sage, Jacob’s ladder, spiderwort and irises. I would like to say this was planned carefully by me, this show of complementary colors. But actually, the whole thing was really a serendipitous accident. I think mostly I just like cool colors, and a lot of them happen to bloom at the same time of year.

This has been an especially spectacular year for my False Indigo (Baptisia australis). It has been blooming for weeks now, and its brilliant blue blossoms have attracted the attention of a trio of red admiral butterflies that have been hanging around the last few days or so.

False indigo is a great plant for the urban DC garden. I have seen it hold up through terrible droughts, and flourish in wet rainy seasons. It is not picky about soil and will adapt to many poor, gravelly locations. Butterflies and bees both seem to like its nectar, and it needs no staking. It does not seem to have any significant pest problems in the city, nor does it fall ill from any common diseases.

Its in the pea family, which means it’s also a nitrogen fixer. Its flowers are wonderful, but later in the summer the dark black seed pods produce another season of interest. My kids always love those seeds; they have been used hundreds of times as fake money during sessions of “store” in my back yard because they seem to remind children of coins somehow. The seeds come loose once the fall arrives, and “jingle” around inside the pods, which is part of their appeal, I guess.

The spot it occupies at the silt-y edge of our aging patio would probably not host much else, and few other plants would do such a great job of deflecting and shielding the rest of the garden from my son’s soccer and baseballs, which seem destined to careen into the plants about three times an hour. With the False Indigo in place, none of the fragile plants further back in the garden get harmed. I could easily picture this plant doing really well at the edge of a busy sidewalk on a hot, sunny corner, where busy pedestrians would probably stop to admire its fantastic vivid color all through the month of May.

False indigo’s one and only fault seems to be its enormous size. My one little quart-sized plant has grown in just a few short years to resemble a good sized shrub. If I was to measure from above from the tip of one side to the tip of the other the diameter would probably be about four feet across. When planting this one, think as if you are planting an enormous blue azalea and you’ll be okay for size.

Caterpillar Hunt Scheduled for this Weekend

2010-05-18T08:29:00.002-04:00

From the Friends of Sligo Creek:

Caterpillar Hunt
Saturday, May 22, 10am-noon

Hillwood Manor Park

(lower Sligo)

Takoma Park, MD

Bring the family for this popular outing led by insect ecologist John Lill as we look for caterpillars and other signs of insect life in lower Sligo. We'll first get introduced to caterpillar life and where to find them. Then John will distribute containers and we'll fan out into the woods to look for inchworms, cankerworms, leaf rollers, tent caterpillars, owlet moth caterpillars, and more, as well as insect egg cases, leaf galls, and cocoons. We'll return to the picnic tables to have our finds identified by John and to learn more about their lives.

(Takes place in case of light rain, but canceled in a downpour.)

In addition to moth and butterfly caterpillars, we'll also look for adult insects, cocoons, insect galls, egg masses, and egg cases.

For more information e-mail naturalhistory@fosc.org.

Vespas and a Different Kind of Ivy League

2010-05-17T14:08:00.005-04:00

I love reading through web updates from local stream stewardship groups. While the websites of big environmental organizations will tell you all kinds of important information, they rarely give you that funny, slice-of-life feeling that sometimes really motivates you to care about taking care of the earth.

Last week I got a really great, really funny update from the Friends of Rock Creek (FORCE) that made me want to get on over to their park for a bike ride or a clean up. It was full of great tidbits and links to their website and really made volunteering for their organization sound like fun.

Executive Director Beth Mullin, for example, wrote that their recent trash clean-up yielded some interesting items, including an entire car and a Vespa scooter. Which of course begs the question, who the heck rides their Vespa scooter into Rock Creek and forgets about it? (The romantic novelist trapped inside my head began drafting plotlines immediately. Picture, if you will, a scorned lover who steals his ex's scooter in a drunken rage in the middle of the night.... da da da dum...)

Other updates proved equally lively, such as the note that the staff of the British embassy had recently worked with their family members to clear a section of the park of, you guessed it, English Ivy. I loved imagining them all out there, clearing away the very thing that reminded them all of home.... then taking a break for a quick cuppa. Knowing how hard it is to get rid of the ivy, I know they deserved one!

Anyway, if you haven't ever checked out FORCE, take a look at their website. They are up to loads of good work and their updates are very fun to read as well.

The Sligo Naturalist: Carpenter Bees

2010-05-13T19:28:00.002-04:00

Standing in the park near the big wooden pirate ship, I watched as a little girl and her father were both running away from two large, noisy bees. As the girl screamed, the father tried to retain as much of his dignity as possible. “Let’s just play over here where the big old bees won’t bother us,” he said, brushing mulch off his shirt and hurriedly running away.

The dad seemed a tad embarrassed and so I pretended not to notice, although a part of me wanted to say something friendly. When it happened a second time with another parent and child, I couldn’t help myself.

“They’re just carpenter bees,” I called out from the bench with a smile. “They like the wood, they won’t sting you.”

The mom in question this time stopped and looked at me blankly.

“Really,” I continued on. “When my dad was a kid he even used to catch them and tie a piece of thread to one of their legs and walk them like a dog, or a kite,” I offered to ease her anxiety. “He liked to show off to the other kids that way. He never got stung, though.”

I was all caught up in my own story, imagining my dad as a young kid growing up many decades ago in North Carolina… when I realized suddenly that I had shared too much. Now this woman thought I was weird, and she still didn’t like the bees.

(This happens sometimes when you like insects. Facts you find fascinating really make you seem quite eccentric by many bug-hater standards. I’d like to say I’ve gotten used to it, but I still find myself in these situations quite a bit. The more I learn about insects, the more often this happens.)

A lot of people are afraid of all bees, and because carpenter bees are so big people assume they will form a terrifying swarm then sting the hell out of anyone who comes close.

But there really is not much need to fear a dundering carpenter bee. The females will sting, but only if they are actually picked up. The males can’t sting at all, and they are the ones that mostly fly at people’s faces in an aggressive manner on spring days. It is all a bluff, though, and what they really want is for you to stay away from the tunnels they have dug in the wood where the females can lay their eggs.

The big conflict arises when the bees take up residence in wooden playground sets, porches or decks. The females are simply going in and out of the tunnels, and the males try to protect them. The bees are so big and so noisy, it really alarms the kids who come to play.

The tunnels they excavate can turn solid wood flimsy if they bees aren’t removed or controlled. Unlike termites, they aren’t really eating the wood, simply digging it out. You can often tell you have an infestation because you’ll find a little puddle of saw dust below their chosen nest spot. Painting wood is the best way to deter their interest in your wooden walls and beams, but often treated wood cannot be effectively coated and will attract them anyway.

Carpenter bees are native to the US, but there seems to be some disagreement over their benefits to US gardeners. While many can be seen at my flowers all summer long, I’ve always been told that their pollination services were not so great. Because they are such a large size, they can’t access the nectar in many tubular flowers. Instead, they slit a hole in the side of the corolla and “rob” the flower without pollinating it. On the other hand, they have very strong thoracic muscles which they sometimes use near a flower, which “buzzes” the pollen out.

It might be the case that these particular bees have not been researched very much. It has only been in the last decade or so that so called “alternative” pollinators have merited much agricultural study and so it seems kind of unclear exactly how valuable these bees are to home growers. As honeybees suffer from mysterious deaths and economically devastating diseases and mites, all other bees have become more appreciated in general.

That said, a lot of the cooperative extension literature on the carpenter bees categorizes them as not particularly important for pollination. The US Forest Service website, on the other hand, classifies them as “excellent pollinators of eggplant, tomato and other vegetables and flowers.” Seems that in some ways the jury is still out on their overall pollination value, but that for some of the flatter flowers they can be beneficial.

I always try to avoid spraying pesticides in my yard, and do what I can to help the native pollinators. But I didn’t hesitate to control carpenter bees when they moved into our porch ceiling a few years ago. As with termites, I don’t mind the presence of the carpenter bees in nature or my garden and I understand the role they play in the ecosystem. I just don’t want to share my house with them. Too potentially expensive to repair the damage.

Even so, there’s something funny about carpenter bees to me, and I wouldn’t want them to entirely disappear from my garden. They aren’t exactly gentle giants, but their appearance is kind of humorous for some reason.

I understand why my dad would “walk” them when he was a kid. They are so large and odd that you can’t help but think of them as something other than insect-like, even when they are doing very typical insect things like buzzing around in the garden. I don’t think I’d ever try to walk one myself, but I wish I could’ve been there all those decades ago to watch when he did it. I would have had a good laugh.

This posting originally appeared in the May 2010 edition of the Voice newspapers of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington.

Gaging Your Trees' Need for Water

2010-05-12T19:42:00.010-04:00

There's a gentle rain falling outside my window right now. My rainbarrels are filling up fast, and I'm hoping the sunflower seeds that we planted over the weekend are getting really well soaked out there. The birds seem ecstatic, and are flying from branch to branch while chattering to one another.

Like the birds, I love a spring rain storm, especially after a dry week like the one we've just had. Everything looks so refreshed, and I always sleep best on the nights when there's a steady rain hitting the roof.

It is also nice for the garden and trees. Its been really dry, and I know any tree or shrub planted in the last three years or so really needs water. Remembering to water can be a problem, though, for both me and my garden clients.

Enter Casey Trees, a great organization here in DC dedicated to returning our metro area to the Tree City it used to be long ago. Over the weekend they posted a really great Facebook notice: It is dry, they warned, time to water your trees.

"Young and mature trees require 25 gallons of water - approximately 1.5 inches of rainfall - per week to grow healthy and strong. In times of little or no rainfall, and especially during the hot summer months, trees need your help in getting the recommended 25 gallons of water per week," says their notice.

Rather than just scold or warn, though, the Casey Tree people promise that if you pledge to water your trees they will send you automatic reminders when the conditions get dry in DC. Pretty cool, and you can even get a free rain gauge in the process. All you have to do is sign up on their website.

The people at Casey Trees also have a reason to be very proud this season, by the way. According to their latest press release, also posted on Facebook, the organization has planted 406 new trees at 23 tree planting events this spring through its Community Tree Planting Program. Those trees were added in all 8 Wards of DC and planted with the help of almost 700 adult and 400 children volunteers.

The organization estimates the value of the donated labor exceeds $63,000. What they don't say, but I know to be a fact, is that the value of those trees over time will far exceed that dollar amount. The amount of evapotranspiration which will cool the air of the city, the pollution reduction, the carbon sequestration and the stormwater filtration --- all the things provided by those living resources would be almost impossible to measure.

But to function and provide those services, trees need to be growing strong. Thus the importance of reminding everyone to water.

Birdwatchers poised to help with Oil Spill in the Gulf

2010-05-10T13:55:00.006-04:00

The stories coming out of the Gulf of Florida about the BP Oil Spill are so bad that I can't bear to watch the news anymore. I find myself scanning the headlines and paragraphs about the issue in the newspaper to see if there's any improvement, before shaking my head and moving on.

I was just lucky enough to visit a fantastic and beautiful place in Florida called Sanibel Island earlier this year. I stood on the beach, staring at the turquoise waters and felt this sense of grateful, humble smallness. I searched for shells of purple, blue, pink and brown with kids.

I think a lot about that special place now. We were so over joyed to see Roseate Spoonbills, the White Pelicans, the herons. Will the magic of such spaces be ruined by the oil spill? How many birds will be lost?

I was horrified by the notion, put forth by some prominent polticians earlier this year, that drilling in the Gulf was not a risky operation at all times. I really feel that we should be investing in more sustainable energy options, instead.

In light of such hopelessness, I was heartened by an online press release from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which landed in my box late last week entitled "As Oil Spreads, Citizen-Science Network Keeps Tabs on Birds." Birders, it seems, are poised to help all along the shore.

I wish them all the best.

I also wish the damned oil would stop pouring forth.

Fledgling at the Window

2010-05-05T18:15:00.003-04:00

There’s a fledgling bird outside the window right now.

I’ve been watching it, tenuously, for about an hour. At first the poor wizened, goblin-like thing was perched in the topmost branches of my winterberry bushes. Then, somehow, it managed to fling itself a few feet forward to the empty nest box. Its face still only has little pin feathers in a fuzzy pattern around its eyes, and its legs are not yet developed enough to really hold it. It peaks around, and around, and then seems to sigh.

I’m trying very hard not to take sides in this. I am trying very hard not to become attached. Survival of the fittest and all that. Food web and all that. Nature is doing its thing out there. The mother bird, a large, loud grackle, flew at my head when I went out to quietly try to snap a picture with my camera.

Don’t worry, I thought. I’m not the one you should be looking out for, Mama Grackle. It’s that hungry hawk that’s always darting around out here. And oh, Lordy, tonight keep a look out for those greedy raccoons. They’ve nabbed two full nests of eggs in the last two weeks. First, the mourning dove was attacked and all the eggs she’d been sitting on in the bridal veil spirea were gone. Then, just last night the thief took the eggs which the tiny song sparrow had been warming on her nest outside our dining room.

But I’m not taking sides. I swear. Hawks need to eat. Raccoons need to eat. I get it.

Still, I stand at the kitchen doing dishes, wondering how the bird is and dreading that I might see the hawk descend at any minute.

What's in Bloom (despite the frost this morning): Trumpet Honeysuckle

2010-04-28T08:57:00.006-04:00

This morning we had both ice and frost: ice on the top of my kids' wagon, and frost all around the shady areas of the park. But the trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) is blooming like never before. Hundreds of little tublar flowers, red and yellow and orange... Now if the hummingbirds would just show up, it would begin to feel like spring again instead of November...

Trumpet honeysuckle is native, and great for disguising an ugly fence or ancient tree stump. Semi-evergreen leaves form the perfect blue-green contrast to the fantastic, electric blooms.

Fun Family Fungus: Growing Shitakes with the Kids

2010-04-27T21:26:00.004-04:00

It was my six-year-old daughter’s idea to grow mushrooms. We were sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by seed catalogs and gardening books, dreaming of spring. It was early March, and the weather outside was dreadfully grey and gloomy.

Her dream was to grow all of her favorite foods. She envisioned a warm summer day of harvest. I’m a gardener who wants my kids to eat right, and I wanted to indulge her fruit and veggie whims. I want to share my love of gardening, but growing things also seems to get my kids interested in eating them. The same child that eschews salad on a plate will sneak into the garden to pick lettuce leaves fresh from the dirt and munch out decadently, and brag about it to friends.

Plums? Can we grow plums? she asked.

No, I answered.

Kiwi? she asked.

No, I answered.

Apples? she asked. Olives? Grapes? Almonds?

No, no and no, I answered.

* sigh *

Despite the fact that we live on a tiny urban lot, we squeeze a lot of growing out of this place. There are raspberries and blueberries, and usually lettuces, tomatoes or peppers. We’ve got herbs and flowers. (We tried melons, but the raccoons got to them before we did.)

Still, my daughter wanted more. Putting down the catalog she stretched out flat on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, imagining feasts in her head. What about mushrooms? she asked, closing her eyes momentarily, dreamily.

YES! HEY YES! I shouted, startling her out of her reverie. WE CAN GROW MUSHROOMS!

I ran upstairs and came down waving the Cook’s Garden catalog around in the air triumphantly. We can grow mushrooms, I shouted. My husband, who had been cooking dinner in the kitchen came out with his hands still wet. Could you do some of the really expensive ones, like shitake? Wow, to have shitakes ready whenever I wanted them, he said with a grin. That would be really something.

Our excitement even spilled into the next room where my eight-year-old son, who never eats mushrooms, was sprawled out reading baseball books. I think he imagined our dank downstairs would turn into a grotto, with mushrooms hanging off the cinder block walls. That alone made the whole thing seem cool.

A flip of pages, a click of fingers on the keyboard, and we were set. Weeks later when the kit arrived, it was all pretty straightforward and easy. The box itself was carefully cut open and with the help of a plastic bag, transformed into a tiny greenhouse. No growing on the walls, as my son had imagined.

Instead, we found a little log inside our package which had been inoculated with the correct fungus for shitakes. It looked completely unappetizing at this stage, like a fake roast beef. Hesitantly, my kids dared each other to touch it.

Then, following the directions, we soaked the log in a bucket of clean water for four hours. Then the log was placed in its little greenhouse and put down in the dark, cool basement, just next to the washing machine.

About three weeks later, my husband surprised us by coming up the stairs with his hands entirely full. We were ready to make something yummy to eat!

The shitakes grow incredibly quickly and get bigger almost overnight. My kids like to go down in the dark to visit them, and sometimes give them a spritz of clean water to refresh the fungus. We find that we stare at the little log a lot and dote on its progress as we dream of future dinners.

The directions that came with the box say that once production slows down we can refresh the log by soaking it with water and a teaspoon of salt. I am wondering how long the log will last, but also well aware that we would pay several times more money for such mushrooms at a market or store.

I was also delighted to see that we are on a kind of gardener’s cutting edge with this project; the New York Times noted that many farmers’ markets are offering mushrooms which have been grown in some very urban environments in a dining article about two weeks after we’d started our effort.

I was also reflecting recently on the fact that – although I sometimes miss the days of wonder which pervaded the toddler years of childhood – I am very much enjoying the ever enlarging intellect of my children. Just a couple of years ago, the fungus project would have been unthinkable. It is very difficult indeed to tell a three year old that it is okay to eat one kind of fungus but not another. Every venture into the woods would have been harrowing, with my kids wanting to pluck mushrooms from random logs to eat.

Now, they look over fungus pictures in books and plan to make a science project out of the effort. They get it, for sure. I know they would never dare to touch a mushroom found out in the wild, much less eat it. Stories of people who have died eating incorrectly identified wild mushrooms fascinate them instead of freaking them out, and at the ages of six and eight they seem more than able to understand the difference between the things we grow intentionally and the things we find in the forest and avoid eating.

Maybe one day we’ll own a huge place and grow grapes and plums and apples. Maybe. But in the meantime, I think we’re pleased with our efforts in the here and now. Our homemade pizzas have never tasted so gourmet, and who knew a log in the basement could provide such wonderful treats?

Birds, Mammals and Wildflowers on Call

2010-04-22T14:59:00.006-04:00

Cornell University has just created and released something that seems like a very cool idea.

You can now get an app which will give you access to a compilation of 310 songs and calls for 57 species of warblers. The sounds are from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library and are part of the largest archive of wildlife sounds in the world.

Amazingly, the last time these were released in one collection they came in LP format in 1985.

I'm not really a huge birder. I don't keep a life list or anything. But I love to know what I'm seeing and hearing when I'm out hiking, and one of the biggest obstacles to my ability to ID things has always been an incredibly awful musical memory. My theory is that the same gene which causes me to not remember the tune to my favorite songs keeps me from knowing the warblers really well.

This new app is just the ticket for me. Now I can tell which bird is making that lovely sound up in the trees.

I think while I'm downloading that one I'll also go for some of the guide apps put out by Audubon. Although they are a bit pricer than many common phone apps, they are still cheaper than some of the books.

I also like the idea that I can lighten my backpack. I used to always have to choose only one guide to bring along on each hike and even that was bulky and impractical on hot days. But with these on my phone I can have birds, flowers and mammals all at my fingertips.

Happy Earth Day, Everyone. Enjoy the Pink Candy Effect

2010-04-22T08:49:00.007-04:00

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day. But you probably already knew that.

I am a bit ambivilent about the whole thing, to tell you the truth.

Earlier this week I did watch a really fascinating PBS show about it called Earth Days. That was pretty cool. And of course we've been out there picking up litter, and all that. My kids are onboard. They know it matters.

But I sometimes I find myself loathe to join in the celebration at this time of year.

As a communications professional, I totally understand the desire to make an "event" out of taking care of the earth. It is a "happening," a thing that might net you coverage and raise awareness. It is a way to build momentum.

There have been times, however, when I've thought that the once a year celebration might have the opposite effect. That is to say -- perhaps people sometimes feel they can check of their concern for the earth as a one-day-only thing. Like Valentines Day, it may be that people feel as if they don't have to take their sweetie pie out the rest of the year because they bought a really big bouquet of flowers on Feb 14. Done. 'Nuff said.

This same kind of hunch prompted one of the original organizers to long ago make the bold statement that "every day is earth day."

But this morning as I took my dog on her usual walk and made my way through the dense, unexpected April fog that blanketed our park, I realized I was not feeling cynical about the whole thing. Not one bit.

Just like Valentines Day, I've reached a point in life where I appreciate the excuse to set aside some time to contemplate the topic, and in the same way I appreciate the pretty pink candies people give out in the middle of February's gloom, I appreciate the way that people who never talk about the environment at all seem eager to wish me a "Happy Earth Day" as they make plans to join in a trash clean up or pull invasive weeds. Like the pink candies, they are a bright spot in the gloom which can sometimes pervade environmental awareness.

So with that thought in mind, I wish all of you a Happy Earth Day. (And hey, if you eat any pink candies, just be sure to recycle the package, okay?)

Native Plant Sale in York, PA

2010-04-19T17:41:00.003-04:00

This one's a bit far afield, but sometimes those roadtrips can be fun:

Spring Native Plant Fest & Sale

MAEscapes

Saturday, May 15, 2010

9am till 2pm

Includes vendors such as Doyle Farm, Heartwood, Kollar, Natural Landscapes and Spring Haven Nurseries.

Also, Catherine Zimmerman, author of Urban & Suburban Meadows will be there. Sounds pretty cool.

Parkfairfax Native Plant Sale

2010-04-19T17:23:00.002-04:00

Coming up this weekend: the Parkfairfax Native Plant Sale. I blogged about it last year, too.

Worth the drive, but REALLY far from Montgomery County.

Saturday

April 24, 2010

9am -2pm

3601 Valley Drive Parking Lot

Ed is famous (again) for his good green works

2010-04-18T14:57:00.001-04:00

Once again, my good pal Ed Murtagh is famous for his good green works.

In an awesome Washington Post article earlier this week, Ed was featured in the lead of the article.

Very cool!

Testimony about the Tree Budget

2010-04-12T16:52:00.005-04:00

Last week, Montgomery county council members sat through four straight days of testimony about the proposed budget for the coming year. Mostly, the focus was upon the nightmarish cuts we are all about to experience.

We are not a county used to cuts. We are used to words like excellence, expenditures, and growth.

As soon as I heard about the budget hearings, I knew I had to testify about the tree budget.

While I sat there with my pal Ed and waited my turn to talk, I realized one thing. It would be very tiring to be a council member. Funny, but most of the time they actually seemed to really be paying attention to what was being discussed. I'm not sure why that exactly surprised me.

But picture it: I was third to the last on the list of four days worth of testimony. *I* got tired listening. I had only been there a couple of hours. Kudos to the council members for hanging in there. Its not like this is what they had in mind when they ran for council, I'm sure.

The hours were tiring, boring and sometimes really quite heart-wrenching. There are a lot of great programs being cut.

In light of all that, I still figured I had to go. I had to speak. Feeling very much like a lorax, I had to go and say something. The tree budget is tiny. Zeroing it out at this point won't gain much for the greater budget but will cost us all in the long run. We'll pay for increased stormwater problems. We'll pay for higher energy bills, and we'll pay with higher asthma rates.

My biggest concern is that the wealthy neighborhoods will continue to get trees with private funds while the neighborhoods already suffering from urban blight will nothing.

If I had to choose some areas to cut, I'd rather see some of the extraneous top executives that sit at the highest offices over at MC Public Schools get cut than see the trees go. (MCPS seems mighty top heavy to me. Mighty top heavy. What is the deal with that PR and Communication office that costs us millions, by the way? Do they really need that much money to keep the spin going? If the schools are doing well, shouldn't that simply be enough? Why do we have to have a multi-million dollar office to promote it? But alas, this is no education blog... and the Parents' Coalition does a much better job of ranting about that than I ever could...)

Beyond the tree planting budget there have been rumors floating around that the street tree trimming budget might also get -- well -- trimmed. I'm not sure about the truth of that, but I would really urge the council to reconsider that if it should come about.... putting off maintenance is really a risky idea. Dangerous and potentially expensive. But I detail that below.

Here's the testimony I read to the council on April 8. (And thanks once again to Ed for sitting through all that with me. )

****

Good evening, members of the council. I’m a resident of Silver Spring and tonight I’ve come to ask that you fully fund the street tree planting budget for FY 2011 to at least the level which was originally proposed for FY 2010: that is, $247,000. I’m also asking that you please make every effort to avoid cutting funds to tree maintenance programs throughout the county.

Trees play an integral role in our county’s efforts to fight environmental ills.

They can:

- beautify our neighborhoods and raise property values
- cleanse the air of pollution

- lower our energy costs, and
- provide habitat for wildlife.

But at a time when our county and state are facing tough stormwater problems, trees can also provide an inexpensive solution to creek flooding by soaking up hundreds of gallons of rain water. According to some recent federal studies, a medium-sized tree can filter as much as 2,380 gallons of water a year. Controlling stormwater has become a priority of our entire state as we all seek ways to restore health to our streams, rivers and the Chesapeake.

Cutting the street tree program will place a particularly hard burden upon the older, more urbanized neighborhoods of our county. In those areas, mature street trees are dying in large numbers and need to be replaced. Legally, homeowners cannot plant trees in a Right-of-Way. Only state and county arborists can do that. Without funding, those replacements will not be made.

In the past, the street tree program also offered a way that homeowners of modest means could contribute to neighborhood beautification and environmental protection efforts. And in some dense, urban places, the Right-of-Ways where street trees are planted offer some of the only space where a tree can be placed. Without the street tree planting program, some of those same areas will become urban heat islands.

The budget for the street tree program was already very lean before the most recent cuts took place. Thousands of trees along our streets demand care. It seems that the proposed cuts may eliminate or substantially reduce pruning operations. This would be both wasteful and dangerous. Wasteful, because without regular attention and pruning, small problems on existing trees can turn into large problems very quickly. By investing in the health of these trees now, we will avoid more expensive problems in the future.

The money needed for the street tree program and arboriculture programs through out the county is relatively small, but can have a big long-term impact. Our governor, Martin O’Malley, has implored us all to plant a million trees this year. I hope that we in Montgomery County will do our part to fund the public side of this challenge. Trees are an important investment for our county, and benefit us all. Investing in the health and safety of trees is a civic duty which we should not ignore.

Thank you very much for your time and attention.

****

More on Stormwater... I can't let it go...

2010-04-10T11:14:00.006-04:00

I can't seem to let the stormwater thing go. I know it is time to move on, but I'm still incredibly irked that the stormwater story in Annapolis this spring ended the way it did.

A few days ago I explained why I was so passionate about a topic that seems pretty boring and unrelated to gardening and wildlife. I was sent an email that was pretty interesting last week regarding the same topic. That email, which I partly reprint below with permission, explains why some other people are so passionate about it, too.

For you to see, I forward this from the AWCAC:

"Testimony on Emergency Stormwater Regulations

Position: Against

The Anacostia Watershed Citizens Advisory Committee exists to provide citizen input into the multi-jurisdictional effort to restore the Anacostia River. This effort is known as the Anacostia Watershed Restoration Partnership (http://www.anacostia.net/) and is coordinated by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

On April 19th, the Partnership is scheduled to release an Anacostia Restoration Plan which includes numerous policy recommendations which are necessary to be followed for the Anacostia River to be restored. The Plan directly states, “The Maryland Stormwater Act of 2007 focus on using smaller ESD practices, which in many cases are practicable as a means of retrofitting to tight spaces, is very significant for the Anacostia.”

Uncontrolled stormwater from Maryland has done massive damage to Anacostia Watershed streams, resulting in spiralling costs to the State. Unless the Maryland begins strict control of stormwater volume as soon as possible, the damage and costs to the State will continue to increase. These emergency regulations will delay efforts to restore the Anacostia. "

Native Plant Sale in Takoma Park this Saturday

2010-04-10T11:11:00.003-04:00

I've been told that there will be a native plant sale this weekend in Takoma Park.

What: Native Plant Sale When: April 17, 2010

Rain Date: April 24, 2010

Where: 7125 Willow Ave. Takoma Park, MD 20912

Time: 1 pm - 4 pm

Sounds fun!

A Real Loss for the Bay: Stormwater Emergency Regs Become a Reality

2010-04-10T10:25:00.008-04:00

So the "emergency" stormwater regs went through. Ugh. So much for fighting the Holmes Bill.

Here's the news wrap up:

WYPR in Baltimore gave this summary

Senate Panel Approves Controversial Storm Water Regulations

The Baltimore Sun

House-Senate panel OKs easing pollution curbs
Developers of projects under way get more leeway on limiting runoff

A few friends who follow my blog via Facebook have asked why someone that gardens cares so passionately about stormwater.

I'd answer this way: for years and years people like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the state of Maryland and the EPA have been asking us to please garden responsibly. I fully embraced the notion of conservation gardening from the start. We should all try to go organic, plant trees, remove invasives exotics, plant native plants and reduce our yard's run-off.

But why, I wonder, are we constantly holding homeowners to this high standard but letting developers get away with continued pollution?

There is nothing more frustrating than spending your own, cold, hard, cash AND TIME to implement things like raingardens and rainbarrels in your own yard only to walk down the street and see that some major new building is do far more harm in run-off than your little garden could possibly counterbalance.

It is like pushing a rock up hill. Repeatedly.

And it is unfair, I think, to ask homeowners and farmers to bear the brunt of these burdens while developers get away with doing far, far less. Especially since development in the state of Maryland has sprawled out across our watershed exponentially for decades.

I watch the creeks near my urban home get blasted after each storm and see how that can set off a chain of pollution events and ruin the potential recovery of that the Bay. I can't help that collectively we are doing too little, too late for the Chesapeake.

That's why.

Vernal Pool Parties

2010-04-08T14:05:00.006-04:00

I was at a professional meeting in January when someone asked this very interesting question: If you had one chance to show someone what you treasure about the Chesapeake watershed, where would you take them?

Here was my answer:

I’d take my kids out on a warm evening in early April, when the woods come alive with panoramic activity. Get your boots, kids. Tonight we will go exploring.

And as the sun began to make its descent, we’d drive off to find a great spot near a creek. Maybe a spot with wet, muddy areas full of frogs who are laying eggs. A spot where some salamanders might linger in the warm night air. A spot where we can shine a flash light and listen for owls once it turns dark, or hopefully be exposed to the deafening chorus that spring peepers like to make when they start mating.

That’s the part of the Chesapeake I treasure the most: the streams and their valleys.

Sure, I love the harbor fronts of Annapolis and Baltimore. I like eating crabs, and I could spend endless days exploring the Eastern Shore. But despite growing up in Maryland, I’ve never been sailing out there myself. Mostly I’ve only watched the boats cross under the Bay Bridge on my way to the beach.

I was a suburban kid, who grew up in a bland little housing development that bordered the woods and fields of the uplands. We were not a sailing family. Our piece of the watershed, the place where we first shook hands with the Bay, was up in the creeks.

Those little muddy waterways were the most interesting thing that rather generic, cookie-cutter housing development had to offer. I remember finding crayfish and hunting for cool rocks. I remember sledding down hill and falling in and laughing till I cried. I remember the sound of the water burbling. That was where I wanted to be all the time: at the creek which flowed behind my friends' houses.

There used to be a lot more spots like that around. It is hard now to find places to enjoy the creeks the way that I enjoyed them back then. Sadly, I also know just how bad the water quality in many of the most accessible creeks has become. The numbers on fecal contamination aren’t good, and there are more toxins in some creeks than I’d like to consider. (The water quality wasn’t even great when I was a kid. One of my earliest “environmental awareness moments” was being furious that someone had poured something mysterious and bright green… maybe antifreeze?... into our neighborhood creek one afternoon.)

But some sweet spots still do exist, and as the spring unfurls like a warm lovely banner you can get out there and be a part of it all. You go in winter-weary, and you come out having experienced the wonderment of warmth as it wakes up the earth. With any luck you are muddy, a bit cold and smiling. You are invigorated and strangely humbled.

There is no better time than April for this kind of adventure. Even if you haven’t ever explored this watershed’s woods ever before, I guarantee you will find something incredible.

I can’t wait to get out there, myself because I’m hoping that all of the snow we got this winter will add up to some great vernal pool activity this spring.

Vernal pools are those little pockets of water that pop up only in the spring time. They fill up with water and become temporary wildlife hotspots, but by mid summer they dry out and disappear. Because they are not permanent they do not contain fish, making them ideal breeding areas for several amazing kinds of amphibians. The frogs and toads lay eggs without fear of becoming a fish’s dinner.

Rock Creek and the Northwest Branch both have incredible pockets of biodiversity in and around their deeper stream valleys, farther away from urban encroachment. Look carefully as you hike and you can find some wonderful vernal pools to view during the soggy spring season. Peer over the edge of the water in those little pond-like areas and you just might see clumps of frog eggs or even tadpoles swimming around. You might find a salamander or two, as well. On a really lucky day you might also bump into a box turtle along the trail, or hear the flute like call of a migrating warbler making its way north.

If you have trouble locating vernal pool areas on your own, you can sign up for a walk with the MNCPPC naturalists who work at any one of the local nature centers. Some of their walks specifically feature vernal pool explorations. Farther south in DC, the National Park Service also offers a full spectrum of interesting hikes in the lower regions of the park. And even farther afield, the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary in Lothian offers some incredible opportunities to learn about vernal pools and their residents this spring.

Many of the same areas of these parks that host vernal pools are also home to colorful native wildflowers. In April, you can find an amazing array of plants which are only here in spring. Known as ephemerals, these plants emerge quickly at the end of winter, bloom and sometimes set seed in the matter of just a few short weeks. Then they wither and disappear, going completely underground again until the next year. These include Spring Beauties, Virginia Bluebells, Trout Lilies and Mayapples.

Again, the same parks listed above offer ample opportunities to join naturalists for wildflower walks. The non-profit Audubon Naturalist Society in Chevy Chase also offers some fantastic walks, including a few that are led by Cris Fleming, the author of a well-loved local guidebook, Finding Wildflowers in the Washington-Baltimore Area.

(If you find that all of the naturalist-led field trips are full you can always buy Cris’ excellent book and head out on your own this spring. She really gives you detailed information and makes it easy.)

No matter whether you go out -- in the daytime or the evening, whether alone or with a naturalist -- please remember to respect the specialness of the vernal pools and wildflowers. That corny, old expression that has long been posted at park entrances still rings true: take only memories, leave only footprints. Don’t pick the flowers or harass the animals. Don’t try to take any home any frogs as science experiments or turtles as potential pets. All of those actions can cause real and lasting damage and ruin the park for everyone else --including the animals. And neither the animals or the wildflowers will give you any pleasure once they’ve died at your house.

Instead, consider yourself a guest at their posh woodland party and enjoy their insanely good music from a polite distance. That party only lasts for a few short weeks and is worth attending.

(This posting originally appeared in the April 2010 edition of the Voice newspapers, which prints my column entitled "The Sligo Naturalist" each month.)

Save the Forest for the Trees: Join the Garlic Mustard Challenge

2010-04-05T09:36:00.004-04:00

Save the forest for the trees, help pull the invasive exotic plant known as Garlic Mustard out of the parks April 18-25 during Montgomery County's Garlic Mustard Challenge.

Garlic mustard looks pretty, smells bad, and can inhibit the growth of many of the beneficial fungi that live in the root zones of healthy, mature trees. The plant can carpet the forest floor in early April, outcompeting other plants, including many native wildflowers. The native wildflowers are beautiful, but also provide many important food sources to native animals that co-evolved with the flowers for thousands of years.

Pulling is easy, and if done correctly can eradicate, at least temporarily, the plant from the forest.

For more info on how to participate in Montgomery County's event, go to:

http://www.montgomeryparks.org/PPSD/Natural_Resources_Stewardship/Veg_Management/weed_warriors/2010_garlic_mustard_contest.shtm

Photo courtesy of Lynette Scaffidi

Eric Hartley: Compromise slowly killing Chesapeake • Top Stories (www.HometownAnnapolis.com - The Capital)

2010-04-02T13:44:00.001-04:00

Eric Hartley: Compromise slowly killing Chesapeake • Top Stories (www.HometownAnnapolis.com - The Capital)

Posted using ShareThis

Advocates Trying to Fight the Holmes Bill (HB 1125)

2010-03-31T09:41:00.006-04:00

Teams of people are visiting Annapolis this week, to push back against the Holmes Bill (HB 1125).

Advocates are asking anyone who cares about the Chesapeake to call their state senator and tell them you don’t support the proposed legislation.

I think that Diane Cameron of the Audubon Naturalist Society said it best last week:

“We all pay the costs of damaged infrastructure resulting from weak stormwater standards. If we allow projects to be built this year without adequate stormwater controls, and allow developers to avoid paying their share of the cost of stormwater prevention, we will all pay more next year for the many costs of dirty water: dead zones in the Bay and blown‐out streams in every County in the State.” (To read her full click here .)

This year was to be the year that all of Maryland began to see the changes the Stormwater Act would have made. But if the Holmes bill passes in the Senate then many of those protections will be severely loosened to the point of being almost non-existent.

Here’s the background:

On Friday, March 26, 127 Maryland State delegates voted to pass the Holmes bill, despite the fact that some of the people who have worked hardest and longest for the Bay’s restoration efforts have vocally opposed it.

The Baltimore Sun’s B’More Green Blog did the kind of reporting on the bill that all of the papers should have done. If you can only read one story about the entire thing, this is the one to read.

The Baltimore Sun’s regular coverage can be found here.

The Washington Post also ran a story from a different angle:

WTOP radio also covered it.

The Capital (in Annapolis) also covered the controversy.

The Anacostia Watershed Society has called the votes for the Holmes Bill “bad for the Anacostia and bad for the Bay.” As the bill begins its way through the Senate, AWS and many other organizations all over the state are frantically calling upon their members and supporters to contact state senators NOW to show opposition towards this piece of legislation.

To read the AWS action alert includes a list of key Senators that should be contacted.

Audubon Naturalist Society’s Diane Cameron, stated in her testimony against the bill that “weak stormwater standards Are costing us billions.” You can read her full testimony on the ANS website or visit:

http://www.audubonnaturalist.org/Images2/campaigns/24march2010camerondirtywaterbilltestimony.pdf

Upcoming Meeting about Forest Management in the Anacostia

2010-03-29T12:09:00.005-04:00

On Tuesday April 20 the Friends of Sligo Creek program meeting will focus on "The Anacostia Watershed Forest Management and Protection Strategy."

This report (http://www.mwcog.org/store/item.asp?PUBLICATION_ID=237) has advice for public officials watershed issues, including forest preservation, invasive plants, nuisance wildlife, and street trees. In light of Montgomery County's plans to eliminate the tree budget, this seems like a very timely topic.

The principle author of the Strategy, John Galli of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, talk about why it was made, what it says, and how it can be used by citizens.

Location: Long Branch Community Center, 8700 PineyBranch Road.

Come at 7:15 for chatting. Discussion starts at 7:30. Refreshments will be served.

Montgomery Victory Gardens Worth Check Out

2010-03-26T19:46:00.004-04:00

Last month at Brookside Garden's Green Matter Symposium, I learned a lot about the local vegetable garden scene. There's a surprising amount of passionate advocacy going on in this area regarding the growing of good, local food.

I don't really write much about my own adventures in edible gardening, although actually I love growing vegetables and fruits. There's something sublime about picking raspberries in your pajamas on a warm summer morning with your kids, and something truly decadent about eating salad fresh from your own backyard. I have such a small garden that I can only grow a few things each year... but I truly love the experience. I just don't have much expertise in it.

Anyway.

One of the groups that I discovered at Green Matters was Montgomery Victory Gardens. I like what they do, and even more I like their weekly emails, which are chock full of really interesting stories about people who are trying to get more fresh, local food in to the hands of everyone in Montgomery County.

This week, for example, they have interesting news about some important congressional bills now being considered which could expand the availability of local farm food to school kids. Really worth checking out.

I'm Giving a Talk on Urban Gardening for Wildlife this Saturday

2010-03-26T08:40:00.003-04:00

I'm giving a talk at the the Anacostia Watershed Society this weekend.

Here are the details, as posted by AWS:

"Urban Wildlife Gardening in the Anacostia Watershed"
Part One of Our Spring Gardening Lecture Series
Date: Saturday, March 27, 2010
Time: 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Location: AWS Office
The George Washington House
4302 Baltimore Avenue
Bladensburg, MD 20710

Cost: Free to AWS members! Another perk of being an AWS member.

RSVP: To RSVP contact Meg Mackin at mmackin@anacostiaws.org

Building a backyard habitat for wildlife in the city can bring rewards for both the watershed and the gardener. Alison Gillespie will discuss how to create an urban oasis where many kinds of birds, butterflies and bees can thrive. She will also discuss some of the special challenges that urban landowners face, and review some of the techniques conservation gardeners employ to help their local watersheds. Attendees will also have the chance to venture outside as Alison explores the native plants and rain gardens around the George Washington House.

It's a day for native plants! Streamline your spring plant shopping by coming to the Friends of the National Arboretum Native Plant Sale. This group sale features regional nurseries offering an extensive selection of native plants, and growers will be on hand to offer garden information. Most vendors accept cash or checks only. Free admission.

Visit the native plant sale at the National Arboretum in the morning and then take the short drive over to AWS for my talk!

Forget the Robins, It was the Monarch Butterflies that Suffered this Winter

2010-03-24T09:22:00.006-04:00

Everyone has been asking me about the robins, but it seems it wasn't the orange, black and brown birds that suffered. It was the butterflies of those same colors.

Reuters reports this morning that the same storms which brought so much snow to the US this February brought unusual, drenching rains to Mexico. The wet weather had a very damaging effect on the monarch populations which reside there each winter.

Depressingly, one of the researchers says he fears he may outlive the entire species. He is already 78 years old.

For the full story, go to:

http://planetark.org/wen/57236

With hopeful thoughts I'm pasting a picture of one of the monarch caterpillars we found in the back yard last year.

I guess in the US one of the best things we can do is provide a home to those monarchs that remain. Keeping planting that milkweed everyone.

Fight the Holmes Dirty Water Bill, Keep Stormwater Regs Strong

2010-03-23T19:22:00.004-04:00

The internet is on fire tonight with info about the Holmes Bill going down in Annapolis.

I'm cutting and pasting what has been sent to me from the Anacostia Watershed Society. I also got pretty much the same email from the Potomac Conservancy, and any number of other organizations out there. I'm cheering them all on.

Stormwater ain't glamorous. But the tightness of the Stormwater Act of 2007 holds great promise for bringing this problem under control, at least a little bit.

As the AWS email says, we've asked others in the Chesapeake to play their part in the clean up. Now it is time for the developers to join the effort and do their part, too.

From AWS:

"Wednesday, March 24 at 11AM there will be a press conference in the Maryland State House room H-124 featuring a trio of environmental elder statesmen: former US Congressman Wayne Gilchrest, former US Senator Joseph Tydings, and former Maryland Governor Harry Hughes.

These three will be speaking out against the developer's efforts in the General Assembly to weaken the 2007 Stormwater Management Act. Despite having three years to get ready for the Act's May 4, 2010 effective date, the developers are crying that the sky is falling and are asking that their industry be allowed to continue its special exception to pollute our rivers and Chesapeake Bay. We have asked farmers, wastewater treatment, and industry to do their parts for clean water - it is time for the developers to do their fair share....

Write one of our Anacostia Senators, Paul Pinsky (22nd) (paul.pinsky@senate.state.md.us) and tell him that you will stand with him to oppose the "emergency regulations" sent to his AELR committee that would roll back significant provisions of the 2007 Stormwater Act.Write members of the House Environmental Matters Committee (http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/mdmanual/06hse/html/com/04env.html) and tell them to oppose HB1125, Delegate Holmes' dirty water bill.

In particular, contact these members of the Anacostia delegation:Delegate Al Carr (18th) - alfred.carr@house.state.md.usDelegate Tom Hucker (20th) - thomas.hucker@house.state.md.usDelegate Barbara Frush (21st) - barbara_frush@house.state.md.usDelegate Anne Healey (22nd) - anne_healey@house.state.md.usDelegate Doyle Niemann (47th) - doyle.niemann@house.state.md.usAsk all of your elected officials to stand up for clean water and vote no on dirty water bills and proposals that would weaken the Stormwater Management Act of 2007! (www.msa.md.gov/msa/mdmanual/07leg/html/ga.html)

Background: Maryland needs clean water. We need to protect and restore the Chesapeake Bay and other waters, even as the state continues to grow and develop. Three years ago, the Maryland General Assembly enacted the Stormwater Management Act of 2007 - a strong clean water law that requires developers to design sites to retain and reuse rainwater. The Stormwater Management Act requires use of green techniques like street trees; green roofs; and permeable pavements to slow down, spread out, and soak in stormwater rather than funneling it into our streams. Now, developers and their allies want to weaken this clean water law, with dirty water amendments that would allow projects to be built using obsolete techniques that will continue to kill our streams.

Developers want to weaken the Stormwater Management Act, so they can continue business as usual - to keep funneling polluted stormwater runoff into our streams and to let the public pick up the tab in the form of erosion, continued dead zones in the Bay; damage to public infrastructure; and future "stormwater retrofit projects."Existing damage from stormwater to Maryland's streams - erosion damage that is yet unaddressed - has been estimated to cost the public $12 billion in unmet restoration costs. This price tag will continue to mount if the dirty water legislation is allowed to weaken the Stormwater Management Act. Let's not let that happen."

Did the Crazy-Bad Winter Hurt the Robins?

2010-03-22T13:53:00.004-04:00

(The following piece originally appeared March 1 in the Voice newspapers of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington in Maryland. I write the monthly Sligo Naturalist column for the Voice. The snow has melted in the last 21 days. But the memory of that snow lingers on, and on, and on... and the questions I get about robins persist, too. So I thought better late than never to post it here.)

Things are slowly emerging from the snow and like urban archeologists we see some of our missing stuff out in the sooty, icy drifts, where things became immobilized several weeks ago by the twin blizzards. (Oh, so that’s where the other snow shovel went. And hey, I was wondering where the purple sled had gone. I think that shiny thing is an earring… we’ll just have to wait until it melts a bit more to get it out…maybe this ice pick from the kitchen will help to dislodge it…)

When I walk the dog, I mostly find litter, smashed into the frozen banks where it blew during the high windstorms. Loads of beer cans and beer bottles, fast food wrappers, dozens and dozens of plastic bags – I pick them all up while I walk the dog and arrive home with a sack full of trashy storm souvenirs.

One night I looked out before going to bed and saw a bright red, disposable plastic cup on the sidewalk. By the time I got out there in the morning to pick it up, some one had used it to carve a smiley face completely of circles in the grimy, grey snow bank by the curb. Wise guy.

While we continue to wait for the snow to vanish (and despair that another storm might drop more upon us in March), people desperately cling to signs of spring. We are not a region that is accustomed to real winters. We usually have a lot more thaw periods in January and February than we got this year. We want proof this will soon end.

Everywhere I go, for instance, people want to talk about robins. Why have such huge flocks descended on their yards? Why are they eating all of the holly berries? Are they okay? Will they freeze or starve because they can’t eat enough worms from the frozen ground?

I have theories, and a few scientific answers.

First of all, the robins that we are seeing out there are not that unusual. They often flock together in winter before dispersing to mate in the spring. A few years ago, during a very mild early March, I looked out to find more 30 robins were gathered around the birdbath, noisily drinking and bathing. Flocks are not that unusual.

People keeping telling me that they’ve never seen them in such huge numbers, but I keep wondering if that’s because we were all stuck at home more with out much to do during the long weeks of blustery February. Also, robins are pretty good at blending in most of the time, but I think the unusual abundance and persistence of snow has made them more visible. The brown and orange feathers really contrast against the white snow this year.

There are always robins that spend the winter with us here in Maryland. Although it seems we were all taught to look for robins as “the first sign of spring” there is little to back up this harbinger. Some robins move back and forth. We may be looking out the window right now at a bird which is on its way northward to a place in New England where it will spend the summer. But there are some robins that stay here during each winter.

Robins like to eat berries in the winter, but then switch to worms in the spring once the ground softens. It could be that the real sign is not the robins themselves but the worms they are finally able to eat. But since we get so many mild winters here it is possible to actually see them eating like that, even in the January, so even this is not an accurate assessment of spring’s arrival.

Robins also like to stay in the tops of trees during winter, although during storms they may spend more time near the ground due to wind. So during the storms we may have seen them down at the ground more.

Many people have also asked me if the robins are here early this year because of climate change. I’m glad to hear the question. I’ve been worried that maybe people would be inclined to think this winter’s storms offered some kind of proof that climate change was no longer a concern. (Don’t get me started on a rant about the Fox News foolishness of that very unscientific, anti-intellectual way of thinking. It is not pretty and usually involves bellowing on my part. Instead, you can check out this link to a story about climate change and the snow which appeared in the New York Times for some interesting information. )

There are not really that many straightforward answers specific to robins, however, because the research on these birds and climate change is pretty thin at this point and robins are considered a species of low conservation concern. There are a lot of them around, and they tend to thrive in urban and suburban areas. No one is really thinking that they’ll go extinct or anything if climate change occurs.

It is generally assumed that the impact of climate change for many bird species, including robins, will be to change the birds’ range. They may, for example, appear farther north earlier in the spring and the areas they inhabit in the southern part of the US may recede as the average temperatures continue to rise each decade. Some work a few years ago indicated that some western robins were migrating southward sooner in the Rocky Mountain regions as food became more available to them earlier each spring. But a 2004 study which analyzed fifty years of data about birds in North America found that unlike other bird species such as sparrows, the date the robins laid their eggs and the clutch sizes of the eggs did not really change significantly over the years included in the research.

I guess it is also important to realize that one year of observation does not constitute a trend. So even if the birds did do something unusual this year, it would not necessarily signal a massive change in the entire species’ behavior.

I like the robins, though, and I am glad to see them, even if they don’t have a really strong connection to the beginning of spring. As I stand outside picking away at the ice fossils on the edges of my garden, I like hearing their song mix with the flute-ish call of the blue jays, and the busy chatter of the chickadees that are searching for nesting spots. I think I’ve learned to train my ear to hear those things over and above the noise of sirens, beltway traffic, and helicopters. And maybe that’s why everyone else is so focused on the robins around here, too -- they’re familiar, and easy to remember. Their ability to pull out the worms when the ground warms is reassuring no matter when you witness it.

Why Doesn't My Mason Bee House Work?

2010-03-21T17:40:00.003-04:00

I have many garden success stories, but one great failure so far. I cannot seem to get the Orchard Mason Bees to live in my bee house.

I’ve tried for two years in a row without any luck. I bought the little plastic tube from one of the garden supply companies and hung it on the fence. It is filled with paper straws that are supposed to be really attractive to these fantastic little pollinators, but for two years I got nuthin’. Meanwhile, I’ve seen the mason bees in my yard, and been told by friends at the Nature Centers that they get bees no problem in the same kinds of set-ups.

I read the MD DNR website about the topic, and I think I know why the bees haven’t taken up residence with me. The home we have for them lacks an over hang or eave. I think if I build one or find one with a roof, I’ll be ready. Ideally, you should be able to tuck the whole thing under a porch awning or something. Too bad I don’t have one that will do.

I guess I can’t really call the lack of nesting bees a failure, really. My garden is home to hundreds of pollinating insects, including many species of bees. I find some nesting in many places around the house. Last year we had one tiny little one that nested in the brick wall, in a hole once occupied by a nail or screw. That little one may have even been an mason bee.

But I’d love a whole horde of them going in and out of one large home. So wish me luck. Maybe I can find a really nice house for sale. Maybe I'll get ambitious and make one.

I need to get busy on this project NOW, though, as my friend Christine reminded me this afternoon. Her bees already busy nesting in the box that she and her son built last year. I’m pretty sure that after this week the chances of getting them to successfully nest will not be so great.

Come on Spring. We've waited long enough.

2010-03-16T09:51:00.005-04:00

If the sun doesn’t come out soon I feel as if I will go completely insane.

We have had, for about a week now, nothing but grey, dark skies and drizzle. Today they are predicting sun, with a few clouds in the afternoon. Let’s hope it actually happens. Let’s hope the sunny days the weather channel promised for the weekend really come true.

I told my kids: if the sun does come out, our garden is poised to explode into spring. Like a pop-up greeting card, I imagine that a little heat and a little light will cause the tiny shoots which are peeking out above the leaves and mulch to come completely to life.

We’ve got daffodils and tulip leaves shooting up. The shrubs are all showing buds. I can see the very beginning of my wild, native ginger, reaching its tough little stems across the side gardens under the side of the house. No leaves yet. It reminds me of a small elf waking up and stretching. No sign of my Virginia bluebells. Once they pop I know spring is here to stay. Fiddleheads of ferns are not yet showing either. I walk around the yard, checking each of the spots where I know spring ephemerals wait to ephermalize. Watched pots don't boil. Watched wildflowers sometimes surprise you, though.

Sigh.

Come on spring, come on. We’ve waited long enough.

First Sign of Spring

2010-03-11T14:11:00.002-05:00

The Voice newspapers of Takoma Park, Silver Spring, and Kensington are holding a "First Sign of Spring" contest. This is the same newspaper that has been home to my Sligo Naturalist column for the past decade. Here are the details:

"Sick of snow? Me too!Show Us The First Signs of Spring and Win a Prize!The Voice is holding a photo contest this month. We are looking for the first signs of spring in our local community. It is free to enter. Just send your high-resolution digital image to DCGardenPhotos@aol.com. Please put “Voice Contest” in the subject line. In the body of the email, you must include your name, address, phone, email, and age (if you are under 18). The deadline is Friday, March 26.We will have an adult and a youth category. Winners will get Voice t-shirts, Washington Gardener Magazine subscriptions, and be published in the April issue of The Voice.Please spread the word."

Where You Are Planted

Renounce the Rake to Nurture the Birds

Want to Help Seneca Creek?

Get a Free Tree and Figure Out Where to Plant It

This Just In! Beautyberry Repels Mosquitoes!

Visit from an Imperial Moth Inspires Search for the right Led Zep track

Now *that's* an Impressive Flora Database

Bees that like to go Surfing

What's In Bloom: Zinnias

Stumped by This Urban Corn Mystery

Possible Sewer Work Within the Rock Creek Stream Valley

What is a RED field, anyway?

Become a Master Watershed Steward

Native Plant Database for Chesapeake Region Now Online

Hunting for Illusive Moth Caterpillars with John Dill

Take A Survey About PEPCO's Tree Trimming

Film Screening and Lecture about Organic Lawns

MoCo Street Tree Update

Honeysuckle As Sunblock Boost?

June Concert Series at Brookside Gardens

Support for MoCo Bag Bill

Nature Fair on May 1 at ANS

Locust Grove Nature Center to sell Native Plants

New Gutters and Downspouts for My Rainbarrels

Volunteers Needed for Chestnut Project this Weekend

Urban Wildlife Gardening with Kids

Plant Trees for the Anacostia River

More Visions Needed for MNCPPC's Vision 2030

Victory for Victory Gardens in Montgomery County

Guest post on the Metro DC Lawn and Garden Blog

Look Into the Murky Crystal Ball: MNCPPC's Vision 2030 Report

Planning the Urban Forest at ANS

Adventist Hospital Pollutes the Creek (AGAIN!)

A Bill to Banish the Bags in Maryland

Beavers Trying to Dam Sligo Creek Again

Owl Prowls Full

Following Urban Owls in Silver Spring: The Sligo Naturalist

Is "The Pill" increasing estrogen in drinking water?

Explore Montgomery County's Urban Forest

Watershed Stewards to host Training Session

Landscape for Life Brings Sustainable Site Initiative Home

Chestnuts Making a Comeback

Removing Rx From the Watershed with Federal Help

All that Beautiful Poison Ivy?

Learn About Our Own Local Locavores.

Seneca Creek State Park: Just Us and the Stink Bugs

Native Plant Sale in Baltimore

Bats Have Regional Accents

Why Are Those Chimney Sweep Signs Up in the Parks?

Using Pet Poop to Light Parks: This is for Real

Making Way for Impending Construction

Trees are the Answer, Not the Problem

Keeping Rx Drugs out of the Waste Stream and Our Medicine Cabinets

And the Survey Says: More Trees for Montgomery County

The Natural Capital, a blog for DC's urban dwelling nature lovers

Monarch Butterfly article appears on Homeschool Montgomery Blog

More Native Plant Sale Info

Sligo Creek's Flood waters surpass the gauge mark

Let the Shopping Begin: Native Plant Sale Season Opens

Turn In Your Stinky Old Mower, Get One that Runs on Batteries

Brookside Nature Center Still Closed From Storm Damage of July 25

New Garden Coaching website Is Up! Yay!

African Blue Basil Performs

The Doldrums of July and Witchy Fingered Plants

Was that a Coyote I Saw in Wheaton?

CCLC Garden Contest Opens

Roadsides and Pollinators, a New Report

Spicebush Caterpillars Arrive

What's in Bloom: VA Sweetspire aka Sideshow Bob

Odwalla Plant-A-Tree Program Begins on Tuesday

What's in Bloom: False Indigo

Caterpillar Hunt Scheduled for this Weekend

Vespas and a Different Kind of Ivy League

The Sligo Naturalist: Carpenter Bees

Gaging Your Trees' Need for Water

Birdwatchers poised to help with Oil Spill in the Gulf

Fledgling at the Window

What's in Bloom (despite the frost this morning): Trumpet Honeysuckle

Fun Family Fungus: Growing Shitakes with the Kids

Birds, Mammals and Wildflowers on Call

Now that's an Impressive Flora Database