Our weather turned very warm this week, and I have a couple of yard projects that required my attention so most things online related took a backseat while I dug and raked and planted. You see we have a problem where I live. We have no bees. We have no butterflies. This year our nesting bird population dropped.
Courtesy of Pixabay
When I moved here seven years ago, I had a Yellow Jacket nest in the ground, several paper wasp nests in the eaves, and honey bees everywhere. My first two or three years of blackberry crops were great. My garden was well pollinated, the Holly trees and rose bushes flourished.
Then we lost our bees. And our butterflies. We have no idea why.
The roses began to look scraggly. The blackberries were tiny and hard and had less than half the harvest of years before. Even the elm trees came under attack from a small beetle whose larvae are a favorite food of wasps.
We got together as a neighborhood, eight of us, and worked out what we could do with our own plots of land to bring back our six legged friends. Eight of us with land sizes ranging from a quarter acre to two acres got together and determined to plant a bee friendly habitat.
We stopped cutting and pulling our dandelions, and some other early growing flowers. We left a part of our yards grow wild. And it worked! On earth day I saw a butterfly hanging out on a dandelion in my backyard, the first butterfly I had seen in my yard in two years.
In the process of planting bee and butterfly friendly flowers I discovered that my yard was covered in a thick black plastic. On top of that was a mix of ground granite and sand. No wonder my yard flooded in the monsoon! No wonder very little would grow! I undertook the arduous task of removing that stuff. I still have a lot to go, but have managed to dig out (by hand) about 3/4 of my back yard.
This year I wanted to fix up my front yard for my winged friends. In addition to the black plastic, there was a layer of hardware cloth. And then a mix of ground granite and sand and THEN a heavy layer of landscape rock. I began removing it - putting the landscape rock in a woven basket to filter out the dirt leaving as much dirt in place as possible.
Then I had to take the cleaned rock and haul it bucket by bucket to a place where I could spread it to form a walkway barrier for the water that runs through my patio during the monsoon season.
I decided to put a small pool in the area I was working that would be insect and bird friendly.
And plant red clover as a cover crop to help enrich the soil and serve as food for bees. In another area I will plant marigolds and a bee/butterfly mix of seeds from my favorite heritage seed supplier. It is backbreaking work to try to reset even this small area so the soil will have air, and water and nutrients and be able to grow living plants as nature intended for soil to do. But late yesterday I finally got the last of the plastic and hardware cloth removed.
My plastic basin has stone walls so insects won't drown. A small solar fountain to keep the water circulating so it doesn't get bad and attract mosquitoes and other unwanted guests. Red clover planted around the fountain has begun to poke its leaves above ground.
The area behind it is finally ready for the new seed mix, and with our rapidly warming temperatures (easily a month earlier than normal!) I'll be planting those this weekend. And maybe in a couple of months this little corner of my world will look like this:
And if I see bees and butterflies visiting this little haven, I will do a happy dance to end all happy dances! Maybe my back and legs will have recovered from filtering and hauling rock by then.