Have you ever been having a terrible time with gardening, but once you got one plant, suddenly, everything seems so right?

This year, I planned to expand my nascent backyard garden.

I was going to grow 18 tomato plants instead of 5.

I was going to grow 5 hot pepper plants instead of one sweet one (which only produced one pepper that was promptly eaten before it ripened).

I was going to start a spring garden, taking advantage of that month or two between the snows retreating and the heat of the last frost date to grow an abundance of peas and lettuce.

But then life happened. The Canadian election was called, and I put all of my very limited energy into volunteering to promote progressive ideas and keep Canadian politics from drifting to the right.

I started fitfully and late, and I’ve never had so much trouble in my life germinating seeds. My favorite peppers — Anaheim — never came up at all, although I ended up with 2 of my new Black Hungarian peppers, so there’s hope yet.

Only one marigold came up in each of my 2 6-packs (infuriating, as the 6-packs take up so much space on my grow shelf), but I managed to germinate some more on a paper towel (still not enough to fill the flats). I’ve never grown my own marigolds before, but I didn’t think it would be that hard. The Internet agrees — marigolds are supposed to be easy.

None of my first round of greens even germinated. I’ve never had so much trouble in my life germinating lettuce! After two rounds, I’ve managed to grow a couple in 1 cell. (And after a long, long time, my new Red Orach has germinated.) The elevated planter is still empty. Even the few volunteers perished.

I was not having a good time.

But then, I incidentally fulfilled a great gardening dream of mine.

If you’ve read my forbidden fruits article, then you know I’ve craved red currants for the past two summers. You can’t buy them from a store here.

I’d given up on that idea happening this year; just too many other investments I need to make on limited funds. But then I happened to have the opportunity to check out a boxstore greenhouse when I found them — Red Lake red currant bushes!

So of course I bought one. They even ended up being cheaper than the bare root stocks I’d been eyeing.

(I also picked up 3 strawberry starts on sale, another plan that had been kicked to the summer.)

We brought them home, and it was like a switch being flicked.

While I’d been freaking out about being behind on my gardening, I was suddenly very pleased with it. It’s weird how much getting one berry bush can change that.

Have you ever had this experience? Has one plant ever changed your mood so suddenly?

—

So, if you’ve been around here for a while, you may have noticed this is a bit different from what I usually write. (And if you’re new here, hi! Welcome!) After volunteering, I decided that I needed to change things up. I can’t keep up the pace of writing two full 3,000 word essays a month. So I’m experimenting. Let me know what you like and would like to see more of.

Let’s Nerd Out About…

Emma from The Simple Environmentalist shares what she learned attending (and organizing) her first protest for public lands. Yep, the first protest she’s ever gone to is also the first one she organized. (She also has a lot of great videos environmentalism and activism, for all levels of ability and interest.)

And if you’re going to protest, then check out this video by WIRED on how governments spy on protestors.

from Grow Curious is learning how to live beside poison ivy, because while it is very toxic to humans, it is actually beneficial (kind of like wasps).

from Earth Hope shares what is missing from the news, and what the difference is between positive stories and solution-based news.

from Nerdy About Nature here in Canada highlights that protecting the environment is not a conservative vs progressive issue, although our politicians like to make it out as if it is. We might have had our most divisive election in Canadian history, but at least most of us can agree on this.

Konstantina Antoniadou from The Green Choice helped me pick out a hose and soaker hose for my garden with the most thorough article I’ve found. Finding even a lead-free hose that doesn’t implode in its first season seems to be an epic quest out of the Odyssey.

shares a much easier method of succession planting that doesn’t require intricate time management. This is what I’m trying this year. Watching this video made my brain pop.

✍ Join the Conversation

Has one plant ever changed your mood or outlook so suddenly?

How is your garden going so far?

Please share in the comments and take a look at what everyone else is saying! I look forward to reading them.

Happy growing!

Tanith

More beaver sightings followed. Many celebrated the news. After all, beavers bring with them the many benefits we’ve been discussing: better flood control from storms, water conservation during droughts, provide fire breaks, and increase biodiversity.

But many local land managers were not among them. They called for the beavers to be removed forthwith. They said they’re not actually native. They’re not the right species. They might be diseased. They were not wanted.

Meanwhile, land managers like farmers are the people who have the most to lose from climate change. It seems ridiculous to oppose the very creatures that could save their farms.

And yet, they’re not alone. The biggest challenge in beaver restoration is humans, particularly those who manage land, whether they’re homeowners, ranchers, or farmers.

It’s really tempting to just bypass their cooperation, saving us years in going back and forth. In the 1990s, Scottish Natural Heritage investigated the possibility of returning beavers, but they were stymied by farmers and fishermen. It seemed like reaching a decision would take decades. Then the beavers showed up, forcing everyone’s hands. And while the original beavers were not conclusively proven to be covert releases, after the first beavers were discovered, covert releases followed.

But we can’t just bulldoze forward without their cooperation. We need local support. We need land managers to make adjustments to coexist with beavers, rather than call for trappers to kill encroaching beavers, destroying dams, and calling on politicians to oppose protections for beavers and call for their eradication.

(This also isn’t to say that land managers are the only problem. Bureaucratic processes and offices are also a problem, but that’s another story.)

There is hope. We just need to understand and listen. According to a 2024 study following up nearly twenty years following the River Tay reintroduction, these land managers aren’t actually that opposed to beavers themselves. They’re much more mixed about beavers benefiting society in general.

They just believe that beavers aren’t good for them personally.

Let’s nerd out about why people hate beavers and how we can better coexist.

Why do people oppose beavers?

Land managers feel they’ve lost control

Beavers completely change the topography of the land, flooding fields and moving rivers, without any seeming care to others. No other species — besides one — can so completely alter the landscape.

(And people do say that we hate most in other people what we hate in ourselves.)

Beavers are nocturnal, often swimming in under the tunnel of darkness, and by the time the local humans notice they’re there, trees have been felled, rivers dammed, and ponds threatening to flood.

We humans have gotten used to being the only creatures who can wreak such mass changes. We hate when other people make choices that infringe on us, on the things we feel ownership over, without so much as a consultation — whether that’s government regulation, corporations, or beavers.

There’s already so much that land managers can’t control. As Nevada rancher Jon Griggs explained to Ben Goldfarb in Eager, “As stockmen, we want so much to control the things we can control, because there’s so much we can’t. We can’t control the weather. We can’t control our markets. We can’t control government regulation. But when beavers show up, we can control that.”

And it’s not just the beavers they’re asserting control over. The 2024 Tay River study found that killing beavers and destroying dams was a political statement. The fates of their farms seemed to rest in the hands of urban-dwelling government officials who didn’t know the first thing about farming. So they needed to take a stand and show them what they believed — that beavers didn’t belong.

While beaver killing rates dropped after the Scottish Parliament finally passed beaver protections nearly two decades later, they didn’t stop altogether. The researchers devised a method for interviewees to share how many beavers and dams they personally had destroyed without the researchers being able to tell in order to get a more accurate picture of the beaver deaths, but a few land managers were proud to share.

Land managers have a different vision of what the land should look like

While researching beavers in Saskatchewan, one statement really made me angry. A local man said that they needed to get rid of the beavers because that’s not how the river is supposed to be. The river is not supposed to be dammed.

I’d just finished reading two whole books about how ludicrous that is. The river is supposed to be dammed. Beavers are supposed to be moving up and down our prairie rivers, damming and flooding and leaving precious pond water for our expected droughts.

But we humans have short memories. Most of the people who settled here came after beavers were annihilated by trappers. And they came from Europe, where beavers had been a rare sight indeed for hundreds of years, with particular ideas on what land should look like. Across North America, new farmers found fertile ground in old beaver meadows and people built homes in floodplains, which was bound to be problematic.

Growing up here, with fields of wheat, canola, and alfalfa, it’s easy to think that this is what the land should look like. But conservationists have a different idea, and that’s where conservationists and land managers butt heads.

When conservationist Carol Evans first approached Griggs about restoring Susie Creek, he thought that they were crazy. Susie Creek watershed, where he grazed cattle, was a trickle of a river with a strip of a riparian zone. In short, his fields were more “moonscape” than field. Evans told him it could be so much more. But to Griggs, this was normal. “If anything,” he explained to Ben Goldfarb, “I thought that was a pretty dang good July because there was water in the creek at all. I took some convincing. I didn’t know the potential of it.”

As the River Tay study shows, land managers identify themselves as stewards of the land. They have a vision of what their land should look like and that their land needs careful intervention — and beavers are not exactly known to be careful.

Land managers have the most to lose and bear the costs

Meanwhile, beaver reintroduction tends to benefit society and nature at large, while land managers have the most to lose. Coexistence often requires spending a lot of money (although longer lasting), while trapping (while a temporary solution at best) is much less expensive.

Beaver ponds affect acres, not small patches of land, and when you only have a few acres to begin with, a beaver pond could lose you half your working land, never mind damage to roads and buildings.

Orchards lose trees, as beavers are happy to fell fruit trees.

And while larger ranches (many of the ones I’ve read about are hundreds or thousands of acres) can afford to lose these acres, ranchers in arid regions are loath to give up the precious strips of good forage along rivers. Everywhere else tends to dry up.

Meanwhile, changing up how one farms is always an expensive proposition. Farmers have to learn new methods for coexisting with beavers. Many farms run on slim margins to begin with, and the loss of land and fruit trees (even if temporary) and potential property damage could prove ruinous.

How can we better coexist with beavers?

So, knowing what land managers face and where they’re coming from, how can we work with land managers to better coexist with beavers so that we can all reap the benefits?

Recruit local ambassadors and show what land managers can gain from beavers

The Tay River land managers felt they were being told what to do by city dwelling people who have little to no understanding of farming and what their particular land is like (and won’t have to face the impacts).

So we need to recruit local farmers who can serve as test cases — and then help these land managers demonstrate to their neighbors what they themselves can gain.

Jon Griggs’ ranch serves as a great example. As mentioned above, he was skeptical. Nevada is a very arid land that can go long periods without rain, and when drought strikes, the only good forage is along the riverbanks. It’s not a surprise that livestock managers in US arid regions wholeheartedly resist any suggestion of keeping their cattle off riverbanks when it could cost them their herd, especially when many believe this is what their rivers should look like.

But despite his reservations, Griggs agreed to adopt rotational grazing, fencing off the riverbank during the peak growing season to allow willow, cottonwood, and other plants to grow big enough.

In just a few years, his ecosystem had completely changed. The small riparian zone surrounding the degraded riverbank expanded. Beavers returned and built dams and beaver ponds, conserving water during long dry periods, restoring ground water levels, and expanding the riparian zone. The river no longer dries up during the summer, lasting instead from spring to frost. Since then, he only lets the calves along the riverbank, who benefit the most from the high quality forage.

Jay Wilde is another cattle rancher who learned to work with beavers, instead of against them. In 1995, he had two problems: poor grazing and lack of water. After using rotational grazing to improve rangeland, he still had the problem of his creek drying up halfway through summer. Then he had an epiphany over his morning coffee — when the beavers disappeared from the creek, so did the water.

While just trying to relocate beavers didn’t work (for the reasons I covered here), he partnered with two professionals to build 19 BDAs in 2015. The beavers returned, and so did the water. As of 2019, Birch Creek lasts 42 days longer, until it freezes in October.

Since the reintroduction, Wilde has hosted dozens of workshops and talked to hundreds of other workshops with other livestock producers, as well as had articles written about his endeavors like this one in Beef Magazine.

We shouldn’t underestimate land managers. They often have years, decades, or even generations of knowledge of a particular land behind them. (Much like we need to listen to Indigenous peoples, who have even more generations of land knowledge). If we consult with them, if we listen to them about what they know and what they’re challenges are instead of trying to “force” change on them, we’ll all end up better for it.

Liz James gave a talk that I still remember to this day that illustrates this perfectly. She was charged to go to a village in Kenya to tell the Maasai people there that they needed to give up their cattle to survive. The Kenya government had parceled up the land for individual ownership, so they couldn’t move their cattle around any longer to find better forage. But she was terrified. Who was she to tell these people what to do? To give up something so integral to their culture, to their history, to their identity? To claim that a complete stranger to the people and the land knew better?

So instead, she listened. And because she listened instead of instructing, the local women warmed up to her and told her that they knew they couldn’t keep their cattle. But they had ideas on what they needed to do next. They just needed capital that didn’t come with exorbitant interest rates. So Liz James ran a crowdfunding campaign that would fund microloans, which once repaid, would go on to fund the next project.

Of course, the ability to go in and listen first, instead of lecture, is an incredibly valuable gift that we should not underestimate. We should cherish these people and try to develop it in ourselves.

Lectures and education can only go so far. When land managers see the possibilities, the benefits that they themselves and the land can gain, then they’ll be a lot more willing to listen.

Offer consultations and grants to cover expenses of beaver coexistence

Willingness is one thing, but there’s also a high cost — both in time and materials. Beaver coexistence methods are effective in the long term, but they’re often much pricier than grabbing a rifle or hiring a trapper, both in terms of money and labor.

For example, a case study for Cooking Lake/Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area in Alberta found that traditional management (trapping, dam removal) cost $19,624 per site while installing pond levelers cost only $1,934 per site, saving them 90%. Meanwhile, Billerica MA’s 43 pond levelers resulted in a 44% annual cost saving.

The solutions also need to be effectively set up. Ben Goldfarb describes in his book resistance to beaver deceivers because someone tried to set one up, didn’t do it properly, and so it didn’t work. Like everything in gardening, you need to understand how it works as well as how beaver works. Then, you need to be able to adapt the solution to the particular environment. They’re not one size fits all.

Having free consultations (with people who listen) and grants to cover expenses would go a long way to gain favor for beavers among local land managers, especially when recruiting for test cases.

But even better would be if we could pay land managers for the land beavers use. After all, while land managers can derive some benefits, the benefits of beavers are mainly in the public good. If we could pay for beaver-use, then land managers can make up for lost profits. And they may be a lot more willing to listen.

Introduce low-tech solutions that prevent property damage

While there’s a lot to learn about farming and coexisting with beavers, we already have a number of easy solutions that can mitigate beaver damage while gaining the rewards.

Culvert Protection Systems (AKA Beaver Deceivers) prevent culvert clogs

Culverts or the conduits or passageways built under roads, railroads, trails, and other places to allow rivers and streams to flow through, usually by a big steel pipe.

We humans love them because we can build infrastructure over rivers without blocking them and causing rivers.

Beavers love them too. Just imagine you’re a beaver who has left their lodge to seek out a new home, and you come across a road that blocks off have a river into a pond. And it’s almost perfect — there’s just this one hole you need to block off. Easy peasy. This place is perfect! So you dam up the culvert, and the resulting pond floods over the road. Perfect.

Except then these pesky humans come along, setting traps for you and clearing out the dam.

The way that transportation departments have handled beavers blocking culverts is pretty ineffective. A good place to dam is only going to attract more beavers, causing an endless cycle of hiring trappers and people to clear the culverts and paying to fix the roads and railroads.

But we have the solution, and while it’s more expensive initially than clearing a culvert once, it pays for itself over time.

A Culvert Protection System has three parts. Two cages, one around the culvert itself and another about ten meters away. A pipe is set with one end in each cage. A beaver will try to dam the cage around the culvert, believing that’s where water is escaping from. Meanwhile, water actually flows through the other cage into the pipe and through the culvert unimpeded.

The trick is to effectively “deceive” the beaver in where water is leaving. Their brains have developed to pick up a particular flow rate.

Pond Levelers prevent flooding

Beavers dam up rivers to expand their territory. They only waddle 100m from the water’s edge to find wood and food. The bigger their pond, the bigger their range, the more resources they have access to.

But this generally causes problems with land owners, as they lose valuable fields or have their basements flooded. While hopefully the land owners can take advantage of some of this water storage, that’s not always the case.

That’s where pond levelers come in. Pond levelers help control the maximum water height, which helps keep flooding under control. It works similar to a beaver deceiver.

To keep water flowing over a dam, a pipe is installed that runs from the beaver pond and over the dam. As the water level rises, so does the water inside the pipe. Once it rises high enough, the excess water spills over the top of the pipe, onto the other side.

If the intake of the pipe can be over 30’ feet away, where the beavers are unlikely to look for it, the intake end doesn’t need a cage. But a cage can help protect the intake end of the pipe from being dammed.

Land managers can also redistribute the water somewhere else, like say if they wish to flood their orchards on the off season to raise ground levels, or have another place where a water storage pond would be more suitable.

Fencing prevents tree destruction

Another huge issue is beavers destroying trees — especially ornamental, agricultural, and beloved trees. But we’ve had the solution for that for years — just wrap the tree up so that they can’t chew through them. The Beaver Institute claims that if done properly, fencing a tree has a 100% success rate.

You can use chicken wire or hardware mesh, but the Beaver Institute recommends wire mesh for both longevity and improved aesthetics. The fence should be at least four feet high, and at least 2 feet higher than the highest snow level.

You could also use the sand-paint method, using a mix of exterior latex paint and sand to paint the trunks of full-grown trees. (This method doesn’t work on saplings.) When color matched, the paint is virtually invisible. It needs to be repainted every few years.

If you have an orchard to protect, you can simply fence off the entire area, like you would with deer. Keep the fence as low to the ground as possible. Beavers need at least 3 inches to get through, and they will dig under a gap. You only need to protect trees within 100m of water, as beavers won’t go that far from safety when foraging.

We can coexist with beavers. It’s just about good old human inventiveness and a willingness to listen and work together.

💬 Join the Conversation

Have you ever seen or used a beaver deceiver or pond leveler? Do you know of any other methods that can help us coexist with beavers?

Please share in the comments. We’d love to know!

Happy growing!

Tanith

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

George Holes, Gabriel Rowland, and Katherine Fox explore the reasons behind species reintroduction in Eager about beavers? Understanding opposition to species reintroduction, and its implications for conservation.

Again, I owe a lot to Ben Goldfarb and his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter* for peeks into real examples of beavers in action on ranches and coexistence solutions in action.

If you’d like a closer look into the fur trade and modern day trappers, Leila Philip’s Beaver Land: How One Weird Rodent Made America* follows her own personal journey becoming obsessed with beavers tied to the past — and what we’re able to do about beavers today. The idea for paying farmers for hosting beavers came from this book. I also learned that many beaver pond offshoots are such tiny streams that you wouldn’t be able to see them until you step on them and your foot squelches. Imagine if we could combine that with irrigating orchards and farm fields!

(* These links are Bookshop.org affiliate links. When you buy a book through my link, you’re not only supporting me with no added cost to yourself, but also supporting an independent bookstore.)

The Beaver Institute is full of resources! Here’s a full PDF guide on how to make and adapt pond levelers and culvert protection devices and a guide to protecting trees from beavers.

The Miistakis Institute Working With Beavers Program has compiled a list of case studies showing the cost savings that beaver coexistence tools provide.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of St Petersburg, Florida hosted Liz James and her speech, My Muzungu Eyes Are Improving. I only touched on a small part of her insights and highly recommend watching the rest.

Subscribe now

Dear Gardenerds,

In the early 1950s, the Idaho Fish and Game department airdropped over seventy beavers into the Chamberlain Basin in the zaniest beaver relocation ever.

Parachuting beavers wasn’t their initial plan. After WWII, people had discovered the beautiful and beaver-filled McCall and Payette lakes. With human clashes rising, and knowing the benefits beavers bring even back then, the Fish and Game department wanted to relocate the beavers rather than trap them. And they had the perfect relocation spot — Chamberlain Basin.

There was just one problem. The Chamberlain Basin was in the middle of the No Return Wilderness Area, far from any sort of human infrastructure, like roads.

They tried to use packhorses to carry the beaver cages, but neither beaver nor horse appreciated that idea. Beavers need to keep cool, dry, and unstressed — and that wasn’t happening on top of the constantly spooked horses.

That’s when state biologist Elmo Heter decided to try something absurd — parachutes. Tons of parachutes remained from the war effort and he was able to buy them cheaply.

The real problem came with the cages. Since there wouldn’t be humans around to release the beavers upon landing, he needed something that the beavers could open themselves. He first attempted using woven willow cages, which the beavers could gnaw through. Unfortunately, they could also gnaw through them while on the plane.

Instead, he developed a wooden box that would open upon impact. To test the box, he got the aid of an older male beaver Heter called Geronimo. Geronimo wasn’t injured in the tests, and his reward was to be the first relocated beaver, along with three young females.

(Some articles play this out to be so kind of harem fantasy, but beavers are monogamous. He did have a better shot at finding a mate with three options.)

But while the program was successful (and economical), beaver relocation and reintroduction isn’t as easy as grabbing beavers from where you don’t want them and moving them an area where you do.

Relocations face such challenges as:

• relocated beavers are immediately vulnerable, as there’s no structures to protect them from predators (whose populations are also rebounding),

• solitary beavers will swim hundreds of miles to find a mate, abandoning the chosen site altogether,

• badly degraded rivers and overgrazed riverbanks lack trees for beavers to build with,

• degraded rivers are too fast for beavers to build in,

• beavers have minds of their own (and humans aren’t that great yet at predicting what is suitable habitat), and

• humans. Always humans.

Thankfully, biologists and conservationists have come up with ways to smooth over these challenges.

Do we even need to relocate beavers at all?

Here’s the thing that vexes all of us — beavers have a mind of their own. They’ll build a dam flooding a parking lot. They’ll leave a “perfectly good” selected site. They’ll even just start reintroducing themselves into rivers and streams with no human help whatsoever. All they need is the right conditions, and they’ll return themselves.

So do we even need to relocate beavers at all?

No, and yes. In an ideal world, we’d simply set up the right conditions for beavers to reintroduce themselves to our target sites, using most of the suggestions below (only one is specific to relocations).

But in our actual world, land owners and managers want to get rid of encroaching beavers, whether by killing or by relocating them. While it’s better all around to mitigate problems with beavers than to relocate them (a good site is a good site, and beavers will keep moving in), relocating beavers at least means they have a chance to survive and selected sites can get beaver attention quicker.

5 Ways To Improve Beaver Restoration Outcomes

Build beaver lodge analogues in chosen sites before beavers are released

On an established site, with a lodge and beaver pond, beavers are pretty safe from predators. They build their lodge entrances underwater so they can leave and enter without being detected. They raise the water level to increase their foraging range. When faced with a predator, beavers don’t fight — they run for water.

But often, we’re relocating beavers to damaged, shallow streams. They don’t have any structures to hide in and the stream is often too shallow to provide adequate cover. A 2002 study on the success of transplanted beavers in Wyoming [PDF] found that 30% of reintroduced beavers died within 180 days due to predators, with 8 dying within seven days of release.

So the Methow Okanagan Beaver Project in Washington found a solution: build a fake beaver lodge. The beaver lodge analogues are much simpler than what the surviving beavers will eventually build, but it provides immediate shelter.

Protect riverbank trees from overgrazing by reintroducing predators or fencing off riverbanks

Yellowstone Park had a big problem. In the 1930s, native wolves were extirpated from the park to allow deer and elk to proliferate. After all, that’s what people want in a forest, right? The ability to hunt.

Well, it worked. Elk and deer proliferated, gobbling up young cottonwood, willow, and aspen shoots along the riverbanks. The rivers eroded.

Turns out, wolves are another keystone species. In 1995, the park reintroduced wolves. The trees rebounded and the beavers returned. Weirdly, Yellowstone Park reports that even though today the elk population is three times larger than what it was in 1968, the willow stands remain robust.

But we don’t necessarily need to reintroduce wolves. We just need to prevent grazing along riverbanks, especially when replanting saplings, and we can do that with temporary deer fencing. We just also need to be okay with beavers snapping up the saplings we replanted.

Match beavers with mates before releasing the pair into the wild

If you’ve ever been lounging near a beaver pond, you’ve probably been startled by the silence-shattering slap of a beaver tail. Beavers slap their tails on the water to warn other beavers of predators. The system is pretty good, as the tail slap can be heard at quite the distance. Nearby beavers can run and dive under the water.

A single beaver is vulnerable to predation. They have no one else looking out for them. It’s also very difficult to set up a beaver dam, lodge, and find food all by one’s self.

And even if the single beaver survives, beavers will swim for hundreds of miles in search of a mate — and they’ll probably find better territory along the way.

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to relocate beavers in family units. That’s why the Methow Beaver Project set up a beaver dating service. When single beavers arrive at their converted fish hatchery, they sex them and set them up with eligible beavers. Not just any beaver will do and it can take weeks to find a suitable match, if at all. Beavers can only remain so long at the facility before they begin to lose their wild instincts.

Once matched, the beaver couples are relocated as a pair to a beaver lodge analogue. The pair have each other to look out for danger as well as build and forage, and neither will need to leave to search out a mate.

Building beaver dam analogues (AKA post assisted wood structures) to start slowing rivers

Incised rivers run too fast. That’s one of the reasons why we want beavers to move in: to slow the water down. But as great engineers as they are, they’re still rather small mammals. Beavers struggle to build dams against the flow of swiftly moving water. When the river surges from snow melt or rain, whatever parts of the dam they’ve managed to erect will blow.

So Michael Pollock and ecologist Nick Bouwes devised a solution. They would temporarily “dam” the river until beavers could take over. While they first investigated hiring contractors to build a dam, the quotes were often prohibitively expensive. “The bids were coming back at fifty thousand dollars for one structure,” Bouwes explained in Ben Goldfarb’s Eager. “I’d just gotten done building a log home for that much.”

That’s when Bouwes found a thriftier solution: a hydraulic fence pounder. They could just pound logs into the stream. The logs would start slowing down sediment. It was backbreaking work, and challenging as well dragging it over rivers, but it worked. They installed 121 Beaver Dam Analogues (BDAs) and beavers returned, turning the analogues into real dams. By 2013, beavers had constructed 115 dams, fortified 60 BDAs, and even built dams outside their planned area.

Where the word “beaver” is staunchly divisive, advocates call the BDAs the benign “post-assisted wood structures.” Still, it can be difficult to get approval to build either.

Getting buy-in from local humans

But the biggest challenge isn’t even beavers or local habitat — it’s humans.

Whether it’s nearby people and managers not wanting beavers on their land, trappers trapping recently relocated beavers, local people destroying beaver lodges and dams, or state regulations banning beaver relocations outright, the biggest challenge that conservationists face are often humans.

Beavers are controversial, and while there’s many people who recognize their value and inherent worth, there’s many people with a hair trigger tolerance for beavers.

(Admittedly, it’s easier to support beavers when they’re not flooding half your property or cutting down the prized apple trees your grandfather planted.)

The truth is — the amount of beavers that an area can support isn’t actually the natural limit. It’s the cultural carrying capacity: how many beavers the people living there can tolerate.

And that is what the next instalment covers — how can we coexist with more beavers?

💬 Join the Conversation

Do you have a beaver reintroduction project nearby?

Have you seen beaver dam analogues in the wild?

Am I missing any beaver reintroduction improvements?

Share with us in the comments! We’d love to know.

Happy growing!

Tanith (she/her)

I am writing this and garden on Treaty 4 land, the traditional home of the Nehiyawak, Nahkawe, Nakota, Dakota, Lakota, and Métis nations.

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

Ben Goldfarb explains the ins and outs of beaver reintroduction and relocation in his fabulously informative book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Bookshop.org affiliate link). When I picked up this book, I’d only hoped for some more beaver facts to fill out my essay on why beavers are essential to the Plains. Reading his book inspired me to go so much further. Most of what I’ve learned is thanks to him. If you want to learn more about beaver restoration, read this book!

BC Wildlife Federation, in collaboration with First Nation communities and other organizations, launched The 10,000 Wetlands project, using beaver dam analogues to restore beavers to 8 sites across British Columbia.

wants to know why the British government is backpedaling on legalizing beaver reintroductions in the UK, even as he can see the benefits in his backyard (literally).

The Methow Okanagan Beaver Project in Washington explains their process for relocating beavers. While they aim to promote coexistence with free consultations (as more beavers will just move in), they offer relocations as a last resort. They’re looking for potential relocation sites, so contact them if you happen to have property there.

California took a big step forward for beavers in California with the passing of Assembly Bill 2196 in September 2024. The Maidu Summit Consortium with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reintroduced seven beavers to their ancestral land in 2023, with help of 10 years of advocacy work by the Tule River Tribe, who reintroduced beavers to their land in June 2024.

Samantha Wright explains how the parachuting relocation project worked, including diagrams of the beaver dropping box. The Times shows the recovered footage of the program.

While fencing can be an easy solution for keeping grazers out of healing riparian zones, they can be extremely dangerous for wildlife if done in the wrong way. That’s why Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks published a handy PDF guide for landowners for creating wildlife friendly fences. Just be mindful that the guide has graphic depictions of the worst case scenarios.

If you found this article interesting (and since you got to the bottom of this email, it’s extremely likely that you did), please forward this email or share via social media with the Gardenerds in your life. As they say, sharing is caring. 💖

Subscribe now

Dear Gardenerds,

Growing up on the Canadian prairies, I always thought of beavers (Castor canadensis) as something out there — far north in the Boreal forest or way over in Ontario and Quebec. Where forests and rivers are. The closest I’d ever gotten knowingly to a beaver here is a giant brick beaver statue. The closest I’d ever gotten to a living beaver was in Ontario.

It’s understandable why I thought that. When you think of beaver, you think trees. You think rivers. And while we have some rivers, we don’t have that many trees. The closest we get to a forest is a copse of aspen or shrubs.

But then, after stumbling across it for bison research, I read Beaver, Bison, Horse: The Traditional Knowledge and Ecology of the Northern Great Plains by R. Grace Morgan, and my understanding of the Plains ecosystem changed entirely.

I became a Beaver Believer.

Dr Morgan starts with a question: during the fur trade, why did Indigenous communities living on the Plains refuse to kill beavers even when it put them at a disadvantage?

White traders complained bitterly in their journals and letters about their refusal, and noted that any beaver skins trade by Plains Indigenous people usually came from other sources.

The Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy) protected beavers on their lands, killing any trappers who trespassed.

Even Indigenous communities that moved from woodland areas to the Plains adopted this taboo.

Through historical, ethnographic, archaeological, and ecological evidence, Dr Morgan demonstrates that Plains communities recognized beavers as a keystone species here on the Plains, upon whom all life (human, bison, mammal, fish, and plants) depended.

While beavers are plentiful in woodland areas, they are scarce on the Plains. Every beaver matters.

(Indigenous people in woodland areas also recognized beavers as keystone species, beavers were just a lot more plentiful — as was water.)

Let’s nerd out about why beavers are so essential even in semi-arid grassland ecosystems.

5 Reasons Why Beavers Are Essential On The Great Plains (And Other Semi-Arid Regions)

Beavers preserve water throughout intense droughts

We don’t get much rain here on the prairies. Qu’Appelle River is the closest major river to me, and it only gets an average annual rainfall of 35.5cm (14in) to 43cm (17in), depending on location. 90% of incoming water from its tributaries comes from snowmelt in March to May.

That’s… not a lot of water. But that’s just the average. In some years, we get less. We might not get enough snow during the winter, the snow melts prematurely during a Chinook, or we might go weeks without rain during the summer. Meanwhile, hot, dry summer weather raises water temperatures and increases evaporation in shallower rivers.

Droughts aren’t a question of “if”; it’s a question of “when.”

In 1988, during the worst drought of the 20th century, Dr Morgan set out to study beaver dams along two Qu’Appelle River tributary rivers. She found that even when these tributaries had dried up to a trickle, you could still find water in beaver ponds — perhaps the only surface water available for miles.

When beavers make beaver ponds, they make them as wide and deep as possible. While they can waddle up to 100m away from water to secure wood for building, they’re safest in the water. They’re built like alligators, with their ears, nose, and eyes aligned, so they can swim with their head barely above the surface. They can hold their breath for up to 15 minutes, and have a second pair of lips so they can chew or hold sticks in their mouths while holding their breath. To extend their safety, they build lodge entrances underwater. If the natural water level isn’t high enough, they’ll build a dam. The resulting beaver pond raises the water level and increases their foraging range.

(If they can’t maintain this water level, they abandon their lodge and head for deeper water.)

Deeper beaver ponds have another key benefit — they keep the water temperature more stable thanks to the extra volume of cooler water from deeper down. The shallower a stream, the more water will heat and evaporate. Every pond book you’ll ever read will advise the same thing — if you can dig deeper, even just for a section, do it. And that’s what beavers do naturally.

Beaver ponds reduce flooding risks

Based on how little rain we get, you’d think we wouldn’t have to deal with flooding.

We do.

In the spring, snow melt floods fields and streets.

In the summer, we don’t get gentle all day rain — we get a percussive force that floods underpasses in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, our soil is usually dried and unable to take on that much water. The rain runs over the soil and down our storm drains, swelling our rivers. (California had the same but more severe problem in 2023.)

Beaver ponds help control flooding, at least along rivers. Their dams slow rivers, giving water time to soak into the riparian zone, nourishing riparian plants and replenishing groundwater. Beaver ponds expand water storage and create wetlands. When floods hit, moistened soil can absorb water more readily than the dry upland soil.

Rain gardens work the same way — getting the water to slow down to sink into the soil, rather than rushing into the storm drain.

Beavers increase biodiversity by felling older trees and shrubs

Based on how few trees we have, you’d think that beavers would be the enemy of biodiversity — destroying any sapling before it can reproduce.

But beavers aren’t the enemies of trees.

Beavers prefer wood with large diameters, so they’ll cut down older trees and shrubs while leaving younger trees and shrubs to take their place — species that prove useful and delicious to other mammals. It’s similar to how bison mow down fast growing grass to allow herbaceous plants to flourish. And when those emerging shrubs grow up to shade out other species, the beaver returns to prune them.

Also, beavers coppice willow. After cutting down a mature willow tree, they’ll leave the willow trunk for three years to grow long, straight shoots before harvesting them for food caches.

Any willow or cottonwood branches that escape downstream will wind up on new shores, where they can root themselves to grow anew.

But beavers do more than just improve plant diversity. Insects and fish benefit when beavers slow down rivers. Instead of their babies being thrashed around in quick running rivers (especially as snow melt swooshes through in the spring, when everyone is procreating), they have gentler waters and shelter from predators among the branches of dams, food caches, and lodges.

(Beavers don’t eat fish. They only eat plants.)

When dams crumble, the materials wash down the river and get stuck, providing new shelter for fish and invertebrates in other places.

And don’t worry about fish getting stopped by dams. Beavers taught salmon to jump. Any creature that evolved here would have evolved to live with beavers, not in spite of them.

Beavers help recharge groundwater along riverbanks

Most of us have never seen a healthy river. We may think we have — we’ve seen rivers running straight or gently curving with banks of grass and maybe some willows. But that’s not actually how rivers are supposed to be. This is just what we’re left with, after centuries without beavers and misconceived management.

Rivers are meant to dance across their floodplains. They’re meant to be stoppered and slowed, creating ponds and wetlands, splitting into multiple streams or radically changing course.

As Ben Goldfarb writes in Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter:

We tend to imagine rivers as blue lines meandering through valleys like sine curves wending across graph paper. … A more historically accurate simile, however, might be a meal of spaghetti — its strands writhing, intertwining, and occasionally spilling off your plate. A geomorphologist would describe such a helter-skelter river as anabranching; we civilians would call it chaos.

But as pleasing as “sine curve” rivers are to the human eye, they have a terrible impact on the environment. Rivers running in a straight line will run so swiftly that they’ll erode the riverbed down to bedrock. This is called river incision, and it’s a huge problem across North America.

River incision causes groundwater levels to drop. As rivers descend, the slopes dry out and the riparian zone shrinks. Trees like willow and cottonwood die back, their roots no longer holding the riverbank against erosion. Once the river hits bedrock, there’s either no soil left to soak into or the swiftly running river carries off whatever fertile sediment is left to parts unknown. The riverbanks erode.

Beavers prevent river incision because they slow down rivers through dams, cause rivers to twist and turn, and give water a place to soak into riverbanks to nourish riparian trees and recharge groundwater.

Beaver ponds store and reduce nitrogen, phosphorus, and other farming pollutants

Drive away from any city in southern Saskatchewan and you’ll drive by acres of wheat and canola. Nutrient pollution (and nutrient loss from fields) is an ongoing problem. Excess nitrogen causes algae blooms (that deoxygenate the water and cause huge dead spots) while phosphorus causes toxic blue-green algae blooms (which have wracked the salt-water Little Manitou Lake for the past few years).

Snow melt is the major source of water to all rivers here, but it also causes the highest nutrient concentrations in watersheds, according to a 2017 study.

But beaver ponds could help us out as they store nitrogen, phosphorus, and other water pollutants, as a 1987 study in Southwestern Wyoming found.

Even better, beaver ponds can remove nitrogen entirely, converting nitrate into atmospheric nitrogen, instead of just storing it. A 2015 study in New England found that when adding nitrate to beaver pond soil cores, 22 to 39% of the nitrate denitrified. From their data, they predict that beaver ponds could remove between 5 to 45% of nitrate in water.

But this process depends on water temperature and how sediment, oxygen, and water settle, as one 2023 study found. Some areas in a beaver pond may increase nitrogen while others remove it. Fortunately for us humans, we don’t need laboratory tests to figure out if a beaver pond is helping or hurting. By learning which distinct geomorphic units (like backwater, margin, and riffle) cause either nitrification or denitrification, we can just examine the beaver pond for these features.

We also have this misconception that beaver ponds make rivers dirty, that if we remove beaver dams, our rivers will run clearer and fish will grow stronger. But without dams slowing down rivers, the rivers carry off sediment. Instead of clear water, we get murky brown water.

In gardening, we use the jar test to estimate our soil texture. You shovel soil into a jar, fill it with water, then shake it up into a mud brown slurry. That’s a fast-moving river.

Then you set it down and allow the water to calm. After a minute, the coarse sand settles. After two hours, silt settles. After twenty-four hours, the fine clay particles settle. The water above the layers is clearer.

That’s what beaver ponds do. They allow water to slow and give sediment time to drop away. You end up with much clearer water at the end.

And these beaver benefits aren’t just for the Canadian prairies — this applies to every arid and semi-arid region in North America, including deserts.

Dr Morgan notes that while she focused on the Northern Plains, Indigenous nations in other arid and semi-arid regions had similar strong taboos against killing beavers and protected them against trappers. Likewise across the ocean, the arid and semi-arid Ancient Persia fined anyone who killed a beaver.

Beavers are essential to all North American ecosystems (and Eurasian ones too), especially as we face increasingly severe droughts, flooding, and wildfire risks from climate change.

Today, Indigenous nations across ecosystems are leading the way in beaver protection and restoration.

But reintroducing beavers isn’t so simple. Beavers are actually some of the most vilified animals in North America. And that’s really saying something. I feel like half my research stumbles into the “people hate this plant or creature so much that they turn into murderous maniacs” category. That’s what the next two articles will explore.

That’s right. This isn’t a one-part or even a two-part series.

I didn’t set out to write a three-part series on beavers. I actually set out to write an article on bison. But here we are. Beaver Believers.

✍ Join the Conversation

Have you encountered beavers in the wild? What do you like most about beavers? Have I missed any beaver benefits? What cool facts do you know about beavers?

Leave a comment

Share in the comments! I’d loved to know.

Happy gardening!

Tanith

I am writing this and garden on Treaty 4 land, the traditional home of the Nehiyawak, Nahkawe, Nakota, Dakota, Lakota, and Métis nations.

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

📖 Beaver, Bison, Horse: The Traditional Knowledge and Ecology of the Northern Great Plains by R. Grace Morgan (Affiliate Link: Bookshop.org)

A fantastically thorough study of the effects beavers have on the Plains and the historical dynamics of the fur trade and the taboo against killing beavers. And if you have someone in your life that downplay Indigenous people’s ecological stewardship (like saying that they caused the extinction of megafauna ten thousands years ago — which isn’t true), this is a great book to hand them, as Indigenous ecologist Dr Cristina Eisenberg explains in the afterword. She also explains more about Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).

The Brilliance of the Beaver: Learning from an Anishnaabe World (Excerpts from a speech by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson)

Renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains what we need to learn from beavers. “Out of all of the beings that make up life on this planet,” she says, “to my ancestors, Amikwag embody the politics and the ethical practices of wisdom.”

And this isn’t about living in peace with nature. No, she’s talking about protests and creating blockades. Waking up each morning to shape the world we want to live in. Things seem very bleak right now. But we can’t give up or opt out. We need to keep going, like beavers.

Meet the Native American tribes working to restore beaver populations

A much too short clip showing the work that Indigenous people are doing to restore beavers.

Why beaver-like dams can protect communities from flooding – new research by Catherine Wilson, Elizabeth Follett, and Valentine Muhaweimana

We know intuitively that dams could slow water, but by how much? And how much more of an impact does 50 or 100 dams have? Taking place in the UK, this research proved that beaver dams work against flooding.

Beavers can do wonders for nature – but we should be realistic about these benefits extending to people by Joshua Larsen, Annegret Larsen, and Matthew Dennis

For all the positive effects that beavers have on ecosystems, they’re not miracle workers — and we shouldn’t set them up to be.

🎥 Beavers: The Biggest Dam Movie You Ever Saw (IMAX)

If you want to see beavers up close, Beavers is the short film for you. All the beavers were hand-raised (as wild beavers would be very upset about people carrying a giant camera after them) and some of the scenes take place in a special set. They make such adorable little noises.

If you found this article interesting (and since you got to the bottom of this email, it’s extremely likely that you did), please forward this email or share via social media with the Gardenerds in your life. As they say, sharing is caring. 💖

Share

Subscribe now

Dear Gardenerds,

When it comes to my three niblings, I have one go-to gift: books.

(BTW, nibling is a gender-neutral term for niece/nephew.)

Why books?

1. Kids need books in the home. When kids have access to a home library, they’re way more likely to read for pleasure. This results in developing a bigger vocabulary and doing better in school.

2. Home libraries foster curiosity and a love of learning, both things that will do them well in life. My super power is that I can get really interested in whatever topic is put in front of me (whether that’s math or figuring out CRMs), so I thrived in school and at work because I was interested. That’s the kind of ability I want my niblings to have.

3. Children’s books help me share the messages I want to teach my niblings better than I could, especially since I don’t get to spend much time with them.

4. It makes traditions and sets expectations (I’m a gift overspender). My husband and I choose one book for each kid for Christmas and birthdays. And so far, they’ve loved each of the books we’ve chosen (which feels really good). We could buy toys, but they already get new toys from other relatives. And I like having a tradition with them.

5. Books and learning are two things that I love, and regardless of the altruistic reasons above, I just want to share with them a thing that I love.

And since we’re all Gardenerds here, you might be thinking the same, whether it’s for your own children, niblings, grandchildren, or when donating gifts for children in low-income families. (Books are especially important for low-income families as they’re much less likely to have books in the home.)

So I read over 30 children’s books this year to find the best books to inspire young gardeners and nature lovers.

What are my qualifications? Well, I’m a gardenerd and reader with a good record for picking books for three particular children. But I’m not a parent or a teacher. These books aren’t kid-tested — they’re me-tested. I considered what would have interested me as a kid, what would interest the kids I’m buying books for, and whether the information is factually correct and communicated in an easy-to-understand and entertaining manner.

And I’ve got to say, after reading so many children’s books — children’s book authors are so amazing and highly skilled. They teach topics that I thought would be too advanced for kids in a kid-friendly way. (And most of these books will teach adults a thing or two as well in a much more condensed way.) They make me want to write children’s books.

Each book has two links: one for Bookshop.org (US/UK) and one for Indie Bookstores (Canada). Both options allow you to support local bookstores through one easy portal. When you buy on Bookshop.org through one of my links, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. (All recommendations are my own.)

If you’re looking to borrow instead of buy, you should be able to find all the books recommended at your local library. That’s where I found them. Many had multiple copies of each.

Curious? Let’s nerd out about inspiring children’s books.

22+ Best Children’s Books For Inspiring Young Gardeners and Nature Lovers

Ages 0 to 3

My First Nature: Let’s Go Exploring

For the youngest readers, My First Nature is a fantastic board book with big photos of plants, animals, birds, and nature walk-related items.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Hello Humpback! by Roy Henry Vickers and Robert Budd

I picked this board book up for my own niblings when I visited Vancouver Island. It introduces young readers to creatures native to the Pacific Northwest and a First Nations art style. The art has a huge amount of contrast, which helps infants be able to see the pictures.

The author and illustrator have also made other similar board books that are well worth checking out.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Ages 3 to 6

We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Michaela Goade

A fictional young Anishinaabe girl shares what her Nakomis (Grandmother) taught her about the importance of water (both culturally and ecologically) and how she and other Indigenous people are standing up against big oil.

This picture book shows young readers why water is vital, introduces Indigenous culture and beliefs, and shows positive representation of Indigenous peoples. And it shows that kids can fight for water rights too.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Mother Aspen: A Story of How Forests Cooperate and Communicate by Annette LeBox and Crystal Smith

Can you teach kindergarteners about symbiotic relationships and mycorrhizae? Annette LeBox and Crystal Smith believe you can, and they did a great job showing in narrative form the life of a mother aspen and how they support all the animals, insects, and fungi around them. The book is based on Dr Suzanne Simard’s work showing that trees do communicate and form symbiotic relationships with mycorrhizae.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Ages 3 to 7

Be A Good Ancestor by Leona Prince and Gabrielle Prince and illustrated by Carla Joseph

To be a good ancestor means to make decisions now that positively affect the people who come after you. After all, we’re all products of our ancestors’ decisions.

It’s a beautiful book that incorporates Indigenous art styles. Each two page spread is written to invite reflection. It’s easy to go, “yep, be good neighbors, got it” and another to think about how to actually put that into action. That could be a great conversation to have with children — what do they think they can do right now to be a good ancestor.

I wish they had included pre- or backmatter like many other books on this list as I imagine a lot of non-Indigenous grown-ups may be wary of getting the inevitable questions children bring up wrong. I know I would be. That’s why I researched and included the above definition, and found this great interview with Leona Prince that delves further into the concepts via The Victoria Arts Festival of Authors.

I’ve put this book in ages 3 to 7 (technically it’s 3 to 5), although the publisher says that this is a worthwhile book for people no matter their age (and it is).

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story by Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry, and Alexis Bunten and illustrated by Garry Meeches Sr.

This picture book shares the tale of the first Thanksgiving as told through a Wampanoag perspective, as Weeâchumun (Corn) worries about the new arrivals being able to survive and convinces the Wampanoag to help them.

While the story introduces the Three Sisters (and Corn is a central character), it doesn’t go into detail. Check out the book’s website for a lesson plan teaching the Three Sisters.)

I really appreciate that it starts off with a short section to set the stage and a glossary with pronunciations of Wôpanâak words used in the story (especially handy for the grown-ups reading this book aloud to young children). Most other books put such vital information in the back. The back pages also include more information on Wampanoag peoples and a Wampanoag recipe you can make at home.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe For The Earth by Mary McKenna Siddals and illustrated by Ashley Wolff

A book that explains how to compost in funny rhymes? What more could you ask for? This is a really fun book to read aloud. The only note that I’d add is that I wished they made it more clear that you should only use lint in compost if it’s from biodegradable fabrics only — a hard ask in this day and age.

The art style is also fun, as it’s made up like a collage or paper dolls, reinforcing that idea of reusing. There’s also racial diversity among the child characters.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Outside Your Window: A First Book Of Nature by Nicola Davies and illustrated by Mark Hearld

As I mentioned in my book recommendations for adult gardenerds and in my own origin story, we have this idea that nature happens out there in wild places and not in our own streets and backyards (if you have one). I had hoped that this book would teach and be especially great for children in urban centers, it didn’t quite live up to this expectation — it’s not literally what a kid can see out their window.

However, this is an interesting book to read aloud that explores what’s going on in nature throughout each of the four seasons through little poems that flow between each other very well (making it the main difference with a similar book on this list, My Big Book of Outdoors).

The book is UK-based, so may not reflect what young ones can see if they live outside the UK.

Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Ages 4 to 8

Memory Garden by Zohreh Ghahremani and illustrated by Susie Ghahremani

Written and illustrated by a mother and daughter team, this picture book is about a child learning from her grandmother about Iranian gardening and culture through stories of the garden her grandmother had to leave behind. The illustrator intentionally made the garden the girl is in very realistic, while the Iranian garden is more stylistic to be what the girl is imagining.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

My First Indoor Garden by Philippe Asseray, illustrated by Charlène Tong, and translated by Grace McQuillan

Not every kid has access to a backyard or a community garden, so I wanted to include books that feature other kinds of gardening.

I expected this one to be a guide to taking care of houseplants like spider plants, which would be pretty handy. But it turned out to be much cooler than that. Young gardeners learn how to take care of Venus fly traps, transplant cactus plants without getting pricked, and grow and roast their own peanuts. (Honestly, I want to do this!)

This book is also good about informing young gardeners when to ask for grown-up help (and not specifying “parent” or “mom and dad”, as many kids don’t live with a parent). Some other how-to books weren’t, which made me hesitant to recommend them.

The series also includes My First Outdoor Garden, but I found that some of the translations were off. They used vegetables with root balls instead of the more common term seedlings. I just think that’s barreling towards misunderstandings and frustrations when trying to communicate with adult gardeners. But then again, this might be a common term elsewhere, so let me know! Do you use “root balls” or “seedlings”?

Other than that, it’s a pretty good book that shows what each gardening tool and how to set up your own appropriately sized garden bed (with grown-up help as needed). An appropriate sized garden is a lesson us grown-up gardeners struggle with (or is that just me?).

These books were translated from French, and so the growing seasons and plant choices (especially for the Outdoor Garden) are for a French climate.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Log Life by Amy Hevron

Log Life is a picture book that follows the life of a giant fir nurse log over a thousand years, from when it falls over during a powerful gust, to the animals, insects, and fungi that make it their home, to when a new fir tree that grew from the nurse log topples and starts the cycle all over again.

The many critters that appear aren’t labelled in the pages, but if you flip to the second last pages, you can find the names for all the creatures. Handy for the very expected question, “What’s that?”

The story takes place in the Pacific Northwest.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Shark Lady: The True Story Of How Eugenie Clark Became The Ocean’s Most Fearless Scientist by Jess Keating and illustrated by Marta Álvarez Miguéns

I used to work with an amateur shark photographer. He spent his holidays scuba diving and brought back tons of photos to share, and he was passionate about teaching others that sharks aren’t that dangerous and need to be protected. This picture book does the same and teaches children that while there are barriers, you can still overcome them, just like Eugenie Clark. And also that it’s okay to be passionate about something that isn’t “normal” or “appropriate”.

Eugenie Clark is Japanese-American.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Ages 5 to 8

Yasmin The Gardener by Saadia Faruqi and illustrated by Hatem Aly

This short Easy Reader follows Yasmin as she helps her dad plant their new garden and gets her own window box to plant. But the flowers she plants are wilting despite watering them. This book teaches a bit about gardening, but mainly it teaches children that they can figure out how to solve problems themselves.

Yasmin is Pakastani American and the books use Urdu words. There’s a glossary in the back. One confusing thing for children (and grown-ups) unfamiliar with Urdu is that nana means grandfather rather than grandmother (nani). (Something I stumbled over as well.)

This is just one book in a prolific series, with each book tackling a new career or hobby. According to my library employee husband, the Yasmin series is very popular with kids so it’s a great pick.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Yucky Worms by Vivian French and illustrated by Jessica Ahlberg

Yucky Worms is a picture book about a grandmother teaching her grandson all about why worms are awesome and not yucky things to throw away. It’s both so funny and very informative. Did you know that worms have bristles on their body, and they use them to hold their body in place as they move? I sure didn’t.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Over and Under the Pond by Kate Messner with art by Christopher Silas Neal

If you’ve been here a while, you know I appreciate a good pond — I spent 2 months writing about them! So I had to find a book that teaches kids about ponds. This picture book introduces a plant or creatures that depend on a pond on each spread. It’s not in-depth or fact-filled, but it is a very cozy read following an African-American mother and child as they canoe through a pond wondering what’s above and below the surface.

There’s also more “Over and Under” books for other biomes.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Ages 6 to 9

Secrets of the Sea: The Story of Jeanne Power, Revolutionary Marine Scientist by Evan Griffith and illustrated by Joanie Stone

Another picture book that teaches kids to stand up for themselves, this one shares the story of Jeanne Power (pronounced Zhawn VEE-a-pro POE-wear; if you’re reading aloud, the pronunciation is in the back with a more detailed biography of her life and more).

Jeanne Power was the first person (at least in Western culture) that studied living marine life by making an observation aquarium. Up to that point, natural philosophers (this was in the early 1800s) could only study dead marine animals because they couldn’t see them in their natural habitat. With her aquariums, she could watch Paper Nautilus octopus eggs hatch and grow, and settled the argument over whether they scavenged or grew their shells. (They grew them.) She also staunchly defended herself and her work against male scientists seeking to take credit.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Ages 7 to 10

The Secret World of Plants: Tales of more than 100 remarkable flowers, trees, and seeds by Ben Hoare

This is an incredibly beautiful, very thick hardcover book of plant facts that will amaze and inform whether you’re a child or a grown-up. You’ll learn that the bright pink bougainvillea “flowers” are actually leaves and that the leaves of giant rhubarb (not related to edible rhubarb) are wider than a double bed. If you want to spark curiosity about plants, this is the book to do it.

And for all that it’s a huge, full color, gold-foiled edged tome, it’s still pretty reasonably priced at $35 CDN.

This is just one book in the full DK series, which includes equally beautiful books on a wide variety of scientific topics. I also picked up Nature’s Treasures: Tales Of More Than 100 Extraordinary Objects From Nature, which includes sections on animals, plant/fungi/algae, minerals/rocks, and weird things made by nature like ambergris. This is a great book to cover a wide variety of bases. They also have one specifically on aquatic life.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

My Big Book of Outdoors by Tim Hopgood

So, this book is technically suggested for ages 7 to 9 (probably it’s meant for kids to read themselves), but I think it could be appropriate for younger children and as an alternative to Outside Your Window. Unlike Outside Your Window, there are fewer poems. It’s more like a field guide. For example, one spread shows what different bird eggs look like and another different tree leaves.

This one is also UK-based.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Friendship Garden: Green Thumbs-Up by Jenny Meyerhoff and illustrated by Éva Chatelain

This fiction chapter book follows eight-year-old plant- and bug-loving Anna who’s just moved to Chicago and is having trouble making new friends. She hates how grey Chicago is, with its lack of green space. But while working on a group project for making a persuasive speech, she stumbles upon a community garden — and one plot has been abandoned. She wants to make a gardening club, but she needs to persuade the adults to get the plot.

As I mentioned above, I was looking for books for kids who didn’t have backyards to garden in, and this one fits the bill. I’ve only read the first book, but there’s a whole series of different gardening adventures that she and her new friends go on. You can get the individual books or the boxset.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Ecology For Kids: Science Experiments And Activities Inspired By Awesome Ecologists, Past and Present by Liz Lee Heinecke

I absolutely loved this book. These are the kinds of experiments and science I would have loved to do when I was in elementary school.

This non-fiction book contains 25 profiles of instrumental ecologists (not just white men either) with their bio, field of focus, and their contributions to ecology. One of the profiles is for the scientist who coined the field of ecology.

An experiment related to each ecologist’s work follows each profile, like using blue ice cubes to see how ocean currents work or using mud and chia seeds to see how seeds can accidentally be introduced to new environments. The experiments include photos of each step, safety precautions young scientists should take, explanations of the science behind the experiment, and suggestions for taking the experiment further.

The Kitchen Pantry Scientist series also has similar books on chemistry, biology, physics, and math.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Ages 8 to 10

What Goes On Inside A Beaver Pond? by Becky Cushing Gop and illustrated by Carrie Shryock

This information-packed picture book follows a young female beaver over a year as she comes out of winter hibernation, swims to find a new lodge of her own, and repairs it with the help of another beaver. The author, an environmental educator and director of Mass Adubon West, included tons of extra sidebars showing the different species that live in or near the Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Massachusetts.

I think younger readers can appreciate it too (especially if they love animals) with an older reader to help them out. Some layouts are complicated and the word choice is more varied.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Rewilding: Bringing Wildlife Back Where It Belongs by David A. Steen and illustrated by Chiara Fedele

Rewilding, or reintroducing species to areas where they’ve disappeared, is a complex topic, and this book does not shy away from it. Biologist David A. Steen explains both why rewilding is vital but also the challenges and drawbacks, like needing support from the people living there (especially for predators like tigers!) and needing continued monitoring. Not all rewilding ideas make good rewilding projects.

The book features many rewilding projects across the world, successful, struggling, and to-be-determined. The book opens with rewilding Whooping Cranes, which has been met with failure after failure. That’s pretty gutsy. I probably would have started with a clear success story.

I think this is a great book, especially for kids who love animals, and for grown-ups too. I learned a lot.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

For younger kids and if you have a bigger budget, I suggest World Wildlife Fund’s Adopt A Species program (Canada | Worldwide). Kids get a certificate of adoption, a poster with specific facts, and a high-quality plushie of that animal. Before I got into the book gifting tradition, I got one for my animal-loving nibling, and they absolutely loved it. The plushies will survive a lot of play.

I also loved that I could choose to adopt local Canadian species and not just international animals, because they need protection too and may not get as much press — and I want my niblings to know about the animals more local to them.

✍ Join the Conversation

What books do you recommend for inspiring young gardenerds?

Do you know a good book on how to garden? Or better yet, one that features the gardening efforts of real kids? (I think that one would be really inspiring, showing kids and grown-ups just what they can do!)

Happy growing!

Tanith

I am writing this and garden on Treaty 4 land, the traditional home of the Nehiyawak, Nahkawe, Nakota, Dakota, Lakota, and Métis nations. Reading books like Keepunumuk, Be A Good Ancestor, and Water Protector fights back against harmful and pervasive narratives and stereotypes while showing positive representation — and helps Indigenous writers to be heard.

P.S. Here’s Your Extra Credit Reading!

Kids Who Grow Their Own Food: Facts, Notes, and Helpful Hints by Ann Alma

I really wish I could have recommended this book, but it seems to be out of print. You may be able to find a used copy though. The author followed around 10 kids (most of whom are between 10 and 14) throughout the gardening season, and shares what the kids did and why, with lots of quotes and gardening journal entries (they’re so diligent; I should get on this).

If you know of a book like this, please let me know in the comments!

Can You Believe It? How To Spot Fake News and Find the Facts by Joyce Grant and illustrated by Kathleen Marcotte

This isn’t a nature or gardening book, but I had to include it anyway. Media literacy is such an important skill, and as far as I know, it’s not really taught at school. I took one media class in high school and it was an elective. Written for ages 9 to 12, it teaches kids what journalists do (and how they make sure their articles are factual), how to tell real news from clickbait and fake news, and how to quickly fact check.

Many adults could do with reading it too.

The Age Levels for Children’s Books You Should Know (via Journey to Kidlit)

Some of the suggested age ranges of the books above made me wonder: why is this book for older readers while this seemingly similar book is for younger? Although this post was written for aspiring children’s books authors, this article goes into pretty good detail on what content and word choices go into books for each age range.

How To Determine The Reading Level Of A Book (via Scholastic Parents)

But what if you’re buying books in person? Most children’s books don’t write the suggested age range on the cover. This article goes into more detail on how professionals determine reading levels, and how you can too.

Subscribe now

Hi Gardenerds,

A month ago, when writing about the different wildlife ponds we can add to our gardens, I wrote that most landscapes used to be dotted with little ponds, whether permanent or temporary (vernal). Most sources on wildlife ponds come from the UK, which I definitely believe used to be dotted with ponds.

But what about my semi-arid prairie ecosystem?

I used to say that southern Saskatchewan is the flattest place outside of the ocean on Earth, although I’ve since found out that’s actually the salt flats of Bolivia. But we’re pretty darn flat. And dry. We get 16 inches of precipitation a year, and snowmelt is the only source of our smallest rivers. Farms have sloughs, sure, but many are dug out by humans. Others are just depressions.

But outside of that? I just couldn’t imagine.

Then I got the chance to go to a documentary premier about rewilding Plains bison, Singing Back The Buffalo by Cree filmmaker and scholar Tasha Hubbard.

Now, I get excited about bison. I much prefer bison to beef. In another life, I might even have become a bison rancher and native prairie restorer. Even the thought of bison returning to the prairies makes me well up in tears.

So when I heard the free film theatre in town had a documentary on bison, I had to go — chronic illness flare be damned.

And there, I found the missing puzzle piece of prairie ponds.

Bison.

Bison wallow. They find or make a bit of exposed dirt, then roll around in them to get flies and shedding fur off. Over years and even centuries, bison continue to wallow there, deepening and expanding the wallows. When the snow melts and spring rains come, these wallows fill with water, creating vernal ponds that aid wildlife and humans on the prairies.

These wallows dotted the prairies, creating that pond connections. Even now, more than a hundred years after the last wild Plains bison was shot here in Saskatchewan, you can still find evidence of their wallows.

(The other key piece to water conservation on the prairies is beavers, but that’s a rabbit hole for another time.)

But bison do more than just create ponds. Like cottonwood trees, bison are a keystone species. Keystone species support every other species (plant, animal, and insect) in an ecosystem. When a keystone species disappears, no other species in the ecosystem can step up to take its place.

Without bison, we cannot truly restore the prairie and grassland ecosystems. That’s in part what rewilding is about. The other part is Reconciliation. Eradicating bison was meant to destroy the independence of the Indigenous peoples who relied on them. Restoring bison to the grasslands and under the care of Indigenous peoples helps build a better, more respectful relationship between us.

So let’s nerd out about bison.

What Are Bison

When I think of bison, I think of gigantic mammals roaming ponderously across the grassland prairies. But there are actually 3 species of bison that live in North America:

1. the Plains bison (Bison bison bison; historic range of most of North America, this is the species we most commonly think of),

2. the woods bison (Bison bison athabascae; historic range from northern Alberta to Alaska), and

3. the mountain bison (likely a hybrid no longer found; their historic range is the Rocky Mountains between the Plains bison and the woods bison).

While each Indigenous language had their own names for bison (the Cheyenne had 27!), British colonialists called them buffalo, because they look like other buffalo species, and the term spread. But they are in fact distinct species from buffalo, and so in the late 19th century, naturalists adopted the term bison (Latin for “wild ox”) instead. Both terms are appropriate and many Indigenous people still refer to them as buffalo.

Researchers estimate that pre-contact, there may have been between 30 to 60 million Plains bison. Post-contact, wild bison were systematically exterminated as part of the genocide of the Indigenous peoples. Plains bison provided the main food source for the Plains nations as well as a cultural symbol.

By the 1880s, only 281 bison Plains bison remained through conservation efforts by white settlers and Indigenous peoples, most on ranches or zoos, 23 of which comprised the wild herd in Yellowstone Park.

Even in the 1870s, people noticed the difference in wildlife. Once abundant birds like the Sprague’s lark virtually disappeared, and so did many of the dung and flesh eating insects that had relied on the bison.

Today, Plains bison are being brought back in two different ways.

First, ranchers are raising bison as an alternative to beef. In our capitalistic society, if an animal is profitable, we’ll take care of it. Some ranchers see this as a way to preserve bison while providing healthier meat (bison meat is healthier than beef, when grass-fed and grass-finished). For others, it’s about profitability. In this case, bison are more likely to be “finished” in a feedlot on grain instead of grass, which is much more stressful for bison than the long-domesticated cows to be packed into close quarters, and also makes the meat less healthy.

Second, conservation groups and Indigenous peoples are establishing and caring for new wild herds in conservation areas and reservations, many of which are not fenced in. This is much closer to how they would have lived for thousands of years. Herds in Indigenous care also provide meat for the Nation’s members. This second path is what Singing Back The Buffalo is all about.

Why Bison Are Foundational To Grassland Prairie Ecosystems

Bison increase plant diversity and help shrubs grow tall

When I studied organic farming with the EFAO, one Ontario rancher explained something that stuck in my head: instead of sowing better forage for their cows in a subpar pasture, they let the cows do it for him. The cows would eat the plants they liked best, the seeds would travel through their digestive system, then return to the land in a nicely fertile cow patty. Over time, those seeds would overtake the pasture.

I was going to say that the same principle is at work here, but there’s more to it than that. Bison aren’t selective eaters. They mow everything down with their enormous mouths, and act more like a lawn mower than a selective plant sower. And yet, that tendency actually increases biodiversity.

See, if you leave grassland alone, uneaten, unmowed, then the taller grass species will eventually shade out all the shorter grass species and forbs (forbs are herbaceous flowering plants, like clover, blanketflower, and sunflowers).

By mowing back taller grasses (bison prefer grass to forbs; cows are actually the opposite), all those other species have a better chance of getting sun and thriving.

But that’s just with grazing. Bison are heavy creatures. Their hooves disturb the earth just by walking and their fur carries seeds, which fall into the newly opened up earth where they can germinate.

Bison also give “fertilizer” deposits. This can be a problem with some livestock, as manure can build up to toxic levels as they stay in one place. But bison are roamers. Given enough room, they can walk miles in a day, spreading out their urine and dung.

But even on the occasions when manure builds up, it provides an ecological service. The nitrogen and mineral buildup is so high in the growing plants that herbivores don’t want to eat them.

This is a good thing.

A shrub starting out in life is tender and tasty to other animals — but if it’s unpalatable, then it can grow up to become a shrub. That shrub becomes shelter for birds (like meadowlarks) and tiny animals.

Bison protect open grasslands from forest encroachment

Ecosystems don’t stay the same. Ponds fill up and become meadows. Meadows become forests as saplings move further into the meadow to find sunlight.

And without bison, that’s exactly what happened. Grasslands that weren’t cultivated as farmland disappeared under shrubs and forests. Bison helped protect open grasslands against forest encroachment.

We might think of Plains bison as primarily in fields so big they stretch over the horizon, but their preferred winter grounds are among the shelters of trees and shrubs. Their grazing and disturbing the land keep saplings from moving into the prairies.

Bison also rub and horn trees, using the trees to help them shed their winter coats, scratch itches, or scent mark during the rutting season. This rubbing exposes the tree’s sap, which is used by many species, from pollinators like butterflies and bees, to birds, to squirrels.

Indigenous peoples also helped maintain open grasslands through slash and burn strategies. Bison love recently burned areas since the grass is more tender. Indigenous peoples used this to keep bison close to their winter camps, sheltered in or near the shrubby valleys or on forest edges.

Without the bison or Indigenous people to hold them back, the grassland area shrunk, and more aggressive bird species moved in and displaced grassland birds, whose population shrunk.

Bison make it easier for other herbivores to eat and take shelter

That mowing provides another service — it provides tender foliage for herbivores like deer, elk, and rabbits. It’s tastier and more tender than the old growth, higher in protein and nutrients (like eating microgreens vs fully grown lettuce), and more easily digested (more nutrition with less food).

During the winter, bison plow through the snowbanks in sedge meadows and grasslands. Snow builds up on the prairies, and small animals like hares find it difficult to traverse or even dig through for food. Bison provide trails that make it easier to move even for larger animals like deer and elk and uncover forage.

Bison wallows also make an impact beyond vernal ponds — they provide shelter from harsh winds. Deer and elk seek wallows to give birth, as they’re hidden from view in the depression, sheltered from harsh winds, and able to see predators long before they’re seen.

Bison fur provides an irreplaceable nesting material

And we can’t forget about bison fur. Bison fur is the most sought after nest building material on the Plains. Bison are enormous creatures that grow incredibly thick winter coats. One study found that female bison calves grew 2,800 hairs per square centimeter, while Hereford cow calves had just 659. All that hair needs to come off in spring — coincidentally, just when birds and small animals are building their nests. (Ain’t nature great?)

Birds will fly miles to find bison fur for their nests. But bison fur isn’t so sought after just because it’s plentiful, warm, and water-repelling. Biologist Bryan Coppedge discovered that when ground nests are lined with bison fur, 71% of ground nests survived detection from predators for 15 days. Those without only had a 57% chance of survival. This jump in survival rate makes a big impact in struggling populations.

Bison dung supports huge amounts of insects

You probably wouldn’t think that the endangered species of Mormon Metalmark butterfly, the greater sage grouse, or the Great Plains toad would be tied to the fate of bison dung, but they are.

In badland areas, ants would colonize new dung patties. Once their nest was established, they would forage for food — including the seeds of the critically important fewflower buckwheat (Eriogonum pauciflorum). The ants eat the elaiosomes (a fleshy structure that’s not needed for germination) and discard the rest of the seed into richly fertilized soil. The Mormon Metalmark butterfly and greater sage grouse both depend heavily on fewflower buckwheat. (The Great Plains toad would rather eat the ants.)

Without bison dung, the ants have died back, and so has everything dependent on them.

And that’s just one part of a greater story.

Thousands of flies, dung beetles, parasitic wasps, earthworms, springtails, and mites rely on bison dung and break it down into nutrients that feed the fungi and beneficial bacteria in the soil.

Necrophilous invertebrates feed on carrion and break down the bodies into soil nutrients.

And pollinators benefit from bison grazing down grass to allow their flowers to grow.

Cows Can’t Fill The Same Role

Well, actually, cattle can fill some of the role that bison provided. They provide meat to the people living on the land. They mow down plants and deposit fertilizer patties. In fact, for a few decades after the bison were extirpated across the Canadian prairies, their roles were fulfilled by huge cattle herds brought in to feed new settlers by cattle barons to roam across the land as the bison had.

Except that cows are not that cold hardy. Here on the Canadian prairies, it gets down to -30C for at least a week every winter, and two particularly frigid winters brought an end to the cattle baron era. The cows just couldn’t survive the winters.

Ranchers began to shelter their cows during the winter and release them into pastures during the spring once calving finished. Survival rates increased, which is great for the cows and the people reliant on them. But that’s not so great for the insects, birds, animals, and plant species that need their help.

Bison provided a key role during the winter and early spring, which sheltered cows just can’t do:

1. Bison plow trails through deep snow that other animals can use. As I mentioned above, we have on average 5 months of snow cover per year, and even though snow only accounts for a quarter of our rather low precipitation per year, it still builds up. It doesn’t melt for months. It’s difficult for people to get through, never mind hares. Bison plow trails through the protected areas, revealing forage and giving other smaller species an easier time.

2. The few bison that die provide much needed sustenance to predators during the famine months. It’s a harsh life during the winter, and a free meal can get predators through a tough time. Once spring arrives, other creatures can get in and decompose what’s left, providing a lot of food for a lot of creatures and sustenance to the surrounding plants. Of course, cattle could provide the same service (if cattle were allowed out), but it’s actually illegal to leave bodies out, even when it’s miles from anyone. (Which could be an issue for rewilding bison.)

3. Bison provide dung throughout the winter and spring that dung eating insects need. Spring is a critical time for many species. While cow patties build up in the compost heap, they’re not in the fields where they’re needed most. Bison also roam much further than cattle.

4. Bison are better able to find their own water than cows. Bison evolved on the Plains, where we get so little water, that they’ve become fantastic seekers of water. Not so with cows. Ranchers need to build more water systems into their fields, often crisscrossing the land with new ponds. That makes cows much more susceptible to drought and also ends up with cows polluting water sources with their manure.

(Tasha Hubbard also noted that some ranchers try to treat bison like cattle, but they’re not like cattle. While a cow herd only needs one or two males, a bison herd needs a lot more. Younger bulls provide a service to the herd by protecting them.)

Rewilding Bison

Rewilding projects aim to reintroduce key species back into habitats where they’ve gone missing.

It’s also funny that after seeing this documentary, news articles kept popping up about rewilding bison — except, not the Plains bison of North America. No, these stories were about rewilding their cousins, European bison (Bison bonasus), in the UK.

But trendemous efforts have been made over many decades here in North America, particularly by Indigenous activists, whether through reintroducing bison to provincial parks or into the care of Indigenous peoples, particularly through the Buffalo Treaty. As Tasha Hubbard noted in her post-screening Q&A, the peoples of the Plains are transforming from poundmakers to poundkeepers. Bison took care of their ancestors. Now it’s their turn to take care of bison.

But Indigenous nations on the Canadian side of the border have more difficulty in bringing back bison. Reservations in the US are larger than reserves in Canada, because the Canadian government split up land into smaller pieces to separate nations. Many reserves are too small for bison on their own, so intertribal cooperation is a must.

Rewilding bison with Indigenous peoples have a variety of significant effects, including providing a food source to aid in food security and improving mental health and addiction recovery. (Watch the documentary to learn more about these efforts.)

Just 140 years ago, there were only 281 North American bison in the world. Today, the largest herd outside of Yellowstone Park in North America is 2,200 bison. We’ve got a long way to go.

There is just so much to learn about bison and rewilding efforts here in North America. I relied heavily on The Ecological Buffalo: On The Trail of a Keystone Species by Wes Olson and Johane Janelle, which is linked below in the Extra Credit Reading.

I hope I whetted your curiosity, and definitely check out the Extra Credit Reading to learn more, especially about the existing barriers to these efforts.

I also want to note that I’m not saying there’s no value in smaller conservation gardens that are too small for bison. I always believe that planting any native species and supporting any native insects at any capacity will make a positive impact. But if we want to conserve and restore larger grassland ecosystems, we need bison to help us.

Join the Conversation

Have you seen North American bison before? Have you tried bison meat? What do you think of rewilding?

Should I cover the role of beavers on the prairie? Would you like me to cover more prairie topics?

For having grown up on the Canadian prairies, beavers have always seemed like a creature that lives out there in the forested bits. Not something that played a huge role here on the prairies. But wow, was I wrong. In fact, they were so important that Plains nations refused to hunt them at all until the bison had declined.

Happy gardening!

Tanith

I am writing this and garden on Treaty 4 land, the traditional home of the Nehiyawak, Nahkawe, Nakota, Dakota, Lakota, and Métis nations. All of these nations relied on bison. For the youngest children of Turtle Island, the Métis, the rules of bison hunts developed into their judicial and democratic systems. While most Métis hunters were male, a few hunters were women.

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

Singing Back The Buffalo, A Film By Tasha Hubbard

If you have a chance to watch the full documentary, do so. They’re also putting together a cut for an episode of The Nature of Things, which focuses more on the ecology side.

Buffalo Treaty

The Buffalo Treaty is a treaty to establish an intertribal alliance to restore bison to 6.3 million acres of land in North America. This is the first cross-border treaty signed by Indigenous nations in 150 years. Each year, treaty members gather to discuss progress and allow more nations to sign. (Non-Indigenous organizations can also sign the treaty.)

InterTribal Buffalo Council

Want to help tribes restore bison? The ITBC help with developing conservation programs and training for Indigenous nations. (You do not need to be Indigenous to help.)

The Ecological Buffalo: On The Trail Of A Keystone Species by Wes Olson and Johane Janelle (*affiliate link to Bookshop.org (US/UK). If you buy through this link, I’ll get a commission at no extra charge for you. It’s a great way to support me, Let’s Nerd Out About Gardening, and independent bookstores. You may also be able to find it at your local library.)

What I wrote today is just a fraction of what you’ll find in this amazing book. It is incredibly thorough, although light on the human aspect of the ecosystem, and includes so many gorgeous photos. Along with learning about bison, you’ll also learn about a ton of native prairie species.

Returning relatives: Yellowstone sends more buffalo to tribes, fewer to slaughter by Billy Arnold (via Jackson Hole News & Guide)

Even just 15 years ago, when the Yellowstone Park herd grew too big, bison were shipped to slaughter. The reason? Brucellosis, a disease that induces miscarriages in cows. Cows once roamed Yellowstone Park and they introduced it to bison. Thanks to the hard work of many people, excess bison can now be quarantined for a shorter period before being sent to Indigenous nations to build their herds.

Bison Reintroduction as Reconciliation in Saskatchewan by Forrest Hisey, Chance Finegan, and Andrea Olive (via NiCHE)

A guide to how reintroducing bison is a necessary part of reconciliation, written by white settlers for settlers.

Bison are sacred to Native Americans − but each tribe has its own special relationship to them by Rosalyn R. LaPier (via The Conversation)

Written by an Indigenous scholar and member of the Blackfeet Tribe and Métis, Rosalyn R. LaPier discusses the different relationships different nations had with bison.

Subscribe now

Hi Gardenerds,

It’s that time of year again: gift-giving season.

But getting your favorite Gardenerds something for the garden can be daunting. Likely, they already have the tools and seeds that they need. So what do you get someone who already has it all?

If there’s one thing that a Gardenerd always needs, it’s new books. You can always use more books.

(If you don’t know, a Gardenerd is someone who loves to learn about gardening and nature, whether it has a practical use in their own gardens or they just love to delve down rabbit holes. If that’s you and you’re not already subscribed, then subscribe here.)

But this list isn’t just great for choosing gifts for other people. I hope you can also find new books that you’d love to read that help satisfy your own curiosity. (And can be easily found at libraries!)

These are all books that I’ve read and loved, on a variety of gardening, farming, and nature related topics, in no particular order. And I hope that you (and the Gardenerds in your life) enjoy them too.

Each book has two links: one for Bookshop.org (US/UK) and one for Indie Bookstores (Canada). Both options allow you to support local bookstores through one easy portal. When you buy on Bookshop.org through one of my links, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

If you’ve got children on your gift-giving list, I’m also putting together a hand-picked list of books to inspire Young Gardenerds, ages 0 to 10, so keep an eye out for that.

Let’s nerd out.

15 Gardenerd Approved Books For People Who Love Gardens and Nature

The Wildlife-Friendly Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Food in Harmony With Nature by Tammi Hartung

I mentioned this book when exploring whether wasps are actually evil incarnate. When you’re growing a wildlife garden, it’s easier to love all the wildlife that visits, but how do you coexist when you’re growing things you both want to eat?

Tammi Hartung has a ton of useful advice gleaned over decades of vegetable gardening in rural Colorado without fences. It started out of necessity: her partner’s job provided a house on a heritage museum surrounded by a nature preserve, but the museum wouldn’t allow her to protect her garden with fences. (Not that fences stop all wildlife anyway.) So she learned how to coexist with nature.

But even if you’re not struggling with wildlife in your garden, it’s a fascinating read as every technique starts by understanding that creature’s behavior.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

The Mushroom Hunters: A Hidden World of Food, Money, and (Mostly Legal) Adventure by Langdon Cook

I wrote about how easy it can be to actually grow your own mushrooms, but there’s so many more common gourmet mushrooms that can only be foraged.

Langdon Cook not only shares the exquisite details of each foraged mushroom but also sheds a light into the world of professional mushroom foragers and wholesale buyers. How does a chanterelle get from growing deep in a hardwood forest to your plate?

(Note: I read the 2013 version called The Mushroom Hunters: On The Trail of An Underground America, but it seems it’s gotten a makeover and new subtitle in 2023. As far as I can tell, it’s the same book.)

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Groundbreaking Food Gardens: 73 Plans That Will Change the Way You Grow Your Garden by Niki Jabbour

I’m not the best person at designing gardens. At least not aesthetic ones. Even my container garden was pretty haphazard. But I’m going to try my best to make my front yard into an edible and wildlife-friendly garden that won’t be a sprawling mess. But how the heck do I find the right layout? Surely, there had to be a gigantic book full of edible garden plans to obsess over.

And that’s what this book is. Niki Jabbour interviewed 73 gardeners on their gardening ethos (whether it’s a huge preserving garden, a tiny front-yard edible wildlife garden, or a victory garden) with actual layouts and plant lists. Not all of them have sizes and cardinal directions, but many do. You can also get a good idea of their zone, and they have gardens from the US, Canada, and UK.

And, even if you don’t need a garden design, you’ll learn a lot of different gardening techniques just by reading all the interview descriptions.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Grow Your Own Tea: The Complete Guide to Cultivating, Harvesting, and Preparing by Christine Parks

Usually, when there’s a book or article that entices you with “grow your own tea”, they mean herbal tea. Which has its place (I drink a lot of it), but it’s not… Tea. Camellia sinensis. This is one of the few guides I’ve found that actually delves into how to grow the plant in North America and then make it into your new favorite white, green, oolong or black tea.

Even if you’re never going to grow your own tea plant, if you love tea, this is a rabbit hole worth diving down.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

In environmental activism, we hear “give up this, give up that for the good of nature.” Charles Montgomery shows us we’re not giving up things. We’re getting rid of things that actually make us miserable and replacing them with human-friendly and eco-friendly urban design.

If you’re interested in how we can make happier lives through intertwining urban planning and nature, then you’ll like the newsletter by . He discusses just that using inspiration from Asian cities already putting these principles into practice.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Dancing with Bees: A Journey Back to Nature by Brigit Strawbridge Howard

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I love bees. And while we humans know a lot about honeybees, we don’t really know about the thousands of other bee species that keep our ecosystems going. Dancing with bees is part memoir and part education as she learns about and becomes an advocate for all those other bees in the UK.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants by Jane S. Smith

Have you ever heard of the Shasta daisy? What about Burbank potato? Or freestone peaches? Or plumcots? All these cultivars are thanks to one plant breeder: Luther Burbank.

Burbank used a seemingly simple but very complex and time-consuming method of plant breeding — he grew thousands of one plant variety, selected a few of them, grew thousands of more seedlings from those select few, and continued until he got a stable version of what he wanted. Few other people would have the patience to approach things this way, and the industry was moving towards genetic manipulation.

Also, while his Wikipedia article claims that Luther Burbank was pro-eugenics (that people should be carefully crossbred like plants), Jane S. Smith claims that he was not. His whole plant breeding ethos was to grow tons of plants with tons of different genetics and see what happened. Likewise, he saw North America as an huge opportunity, where people of different ethnicities who otherwise would not have met would meet and have children. He just had a lot of pro-eugenics biographers.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver by Diane Ott Whealy

Diane Ott Whealy tells the story of how she and her now ex-husband became farmers during 70s, and incidentally started the Seed Savers Exchange, one of the largest seed-saving organizations in North America. This is part personal memoir and part history of the Seed Savers Exchange.

Indie Bookstores (CAN)

The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild by Thomas D. Seeley

I mentioned above that we humans know a lot about honeybees — but that’s not strictly true. We know a lot about farmed honeybees, the ones that we build hives for and extract honey from, and scientific research reflects that.

But Thomas D. Seeley and his associates researched for decades about the behavior, social life, and survival strategies of wild bees. Why are wild bees surviving against all odds against the modern diseases threatening kept hives when kept hives can only keep going because of human intervention?

Basically, if you want to know everything about honeybees (whether or not you’re a beekeeper), this is the book to read. And if you are a beekeeper, he includes a lot of advice on switches you can make to help your bees survive easier and happier.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Barnheart by Jenna Woginrich

Even before I fell in love with gardening and farming, Jenna Woginrich captured my heart with Made From Scratch. Barnheart is probably my favorite. In this memoir, she recounts the story of developing her own farm on rented land as she yearns for a farm of her own.

also has a weekly newsletter where you can keep up with what’s going on with her .

Indie Bookstores (CAN)

(Bookshop.org doesn’t have it, but does have the next memoir Cold Antler Farm.)

Grounded: A Garden Journey to Abundance & Self-Sufficiency by Liz Zorab

This is the first book that I’ve read about someone like me — a person with a severely debilitating disease that somehow managed to grow her own food. And while she has a much more treatable diagnosis than I do, I lived for reading about someone facing the same challenges that I am — to see that it’s possible, even when you can only do a little at a time.

Even if you don’t have a chronic illness, it’s a great read about a woman later in life finding her life’s purpose.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, The Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders Of The Urban Wilderness by Nathanael Johnson

This is one of the books that lured me into becoming a Gardenerd. I was trying to learn what the trees and birds were around me, so of course I picked this up at the library. In Nathaenael’s case, it was his toddler pointing and asking what things were. He could only say “tree” so many times. So he researched their names, and on the way, fell down the Gardenerd rabbit hole.

Nature isn’t just “out there.” It’s around us, even in the middle of a city.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleden

Another book that sent me down the Gardenerd path. Just what is up with trees? Why does one tree decide to change colors and the same species next to it doesn’t? Do they communicate? How do they communicate? And why are forest-grown trees much stronger than park trees?

(That one is partly because trees benefit from the shade of other trees. It seems strange, because trees planted with full sun access shoot up much faster. But that extra time a sapling has while waiting decades for a break in the canopy allows it to get stronger with each tiny tree ring.)

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Are humans cursed to always be a destroyer of nature? Is nature a thing that can only happen when protected from our presence? Botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer says not at all.

We humans can be a positive part in the ecosystem. After all, sweetgrass dies out when it’s not harvested by humans. By harvesting it, we help it thrive.

And that’s not the only example.

Braiding Sweetgrass shares the intersection between her two perspectives of scientific research and Indigenous wisdom.

She has two other books, which I just discovered and will be reading. And if you want more Indigenous teachings, then check out Plants Have So Much To Give Us, All We Have To Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings by Mary Siisip Geniusz.

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

How Plants Work: The Science Behind The Amazing Things Plants Do by Linda Chalker-Scott

When writing any article involving plant myths, I check to see if Dr Linda Chalker-Scott has written about it first. (My other stop is Robert Pavlis’ Garden Myths blog.) With a PhD in horticulture, she knows what actually works and what myths we need to do away with. Like how we think we need to be constantly adding NPK to the soil — mostly, we don’t, as she explains. That’s a holdover from intensive farming practices that is unnecessary in our home gardens (unless you’re intensively vegetable gardening for long seasons).

Bookshop.org (US/UK) | Indie Bookstores (CAN)

✍Join the Conversation

What books would you recommend? What books should I add to this list?

What is the best gardening-related gift you’ve gotten and why did you love it?

Let us know in the comments!

Leave a comment

Happy Gardening!

Tanith

P.S. Your extra credit reading!

If you’re looking for even more book recommendations, check out:

• Nature’s Bookstack compiled by (via )

• The 12 Books That Will Make You A Better Gardener compiled by Karen Bertelsen (via The Art of Doing Stuff)

• Free Garden Books compiled by Robert Pavlis (via Garden Myths) - mainly free PDFs that are great resources.

• 8 Great Pacific Northwest Gardening Books (via A Tree Garden)

• Our Top Desert Gardening Books compiled by Donna DiFrancesco (via Water Use It Wisely)

• 25 Must-Read Books For The Prairie Gardener compiled by Kristen Raney (via Shifting Roots)

• 5 Books | Nature Writing compiled by many nature writers (via 5 Books) — you can find top 5 book recommendations from top nature writers on every subject here.

• The Top 13 Nature Books To Read compiled by Melissa (via With Love, Melissa)

• A Guide to the Top 10 Best Mushroom Growing Books compiled by Adam Sayner (via Grocycle)

Also, if you want to send holiday cards and want to support climate solutions, the David Suzuki Foundation (Canada) has released their holiday print card packs for 2024. The proceeds of each sale help support the foundation in their initiatives.

Subscribe now

Hi Gardenerds,

I’ve always been alarmed by yellow jacket wasps.

They love sugary drinks. They love to investigate your food.

And they will not leave you alone if you have either of the above.

(I think I even ruined one author’s public reading event in the park when my husband suggested we eat our lunch while listening — and wasps soon drove me to jump up and run out.)

At that point, it was just a phobia. Unjustified. Exaggerated.

It wasn’t until my one and only apple-picking excursion a few years ago that this phobia became completely justified, and my alarm turned into panic.

I wasn’t even around any apples or wasps. At this point in the season, the barn used for buying picked apples was thick with wasps. More wasps darted around the few fallen apples rotting on the ground.

But I was walking on the trail outside the orchards, well away from any of this, carrying my months-old niece.

And a wasp stung me.

On my leg.

Out of nowhere.

For no comprehensible reason whatsoever.

The pain seared through my leg.

(Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to calmly ask someone to hold the baby before reacting to the pain.)

My body hated the sting. It swelled up. I ran a fever for a few days. It feels melodramatic, since I was still healthy then and should not need multiple days to recover from a single wasp sting. But I did.

Since then, I freak out whenever a wasp buzzes near me. My husband has to talk me down. I sometimes even huddle in a ball. (Sometimes, I find out that it’s not even a wasp but a black fly.) I don’t dare to swat away the wasp, as I know it’ll seek revenge.

This may seem like an entirely out of proportion reaction. A phobia. But I know now that wasps are evil. They are aggressive.

Honey bees sting when they’re threatened.

Wasps sting out of maliciousness.

There is no place in this world for yellow jacket wasps.

And I’m not alone in this fear/hate. If you think wasp nest, your next thought is probably “how to get rid of.” There’s even a Reddit for people who hate wasps.

Except…

Except this is “Let’s Nerd Out” and not “Let’s go with our gut reaction without any research at all.” Thanks to research, I came to not hate the cottonwood tree next door. So what if I learned about yellow jacket wasps? Could they actually be useful in the garden and the ecosystem? Could I learn to chill out?

Or better yet, I could learn that my fears are completely justified, and it’s people who are blasé about wasps who are wrong.

So let’s nerd out about yellow jacket wasps.

(Also, I should mention that this fear doesn’t include parasitic wasps, which are actually quite cute, except for the horror-show of what they do to caterpillars.)

(Apparently yellow jackets is the term most commonly used in North America for these types of wasps, but where I’m from, we just call them wasps. So I may be using these terms interchangeably.)

Yellow jacket wasps are actually scary, according to science

Initially, research failed me.

The first thing that popped up in my search were a ton of wasp photos that gave me a visceral reaction and I almost shut the whole thing down. That’s why there won’t be as many pictures as usual.

The second thing that came up is that according to the experts, all my worst fears about yellow jackets are true.

#1 Wasps Will Attack You If They Feel Threatened (Like If You Happen To Swat At Them)

So my fear is true, according to science. Okay, maybe they’ll fly away if you swat at them. But when they feel threatened, they will attack.

But it gets worse.

#2 When threatened, wasps will release a scent marker that attracts nestmates as reinforcements.

So you swatted at a wasp, and it feels threatened. Not only will it try to attack you, but any of its nearby nestmates will also try to attack you.

And it still gets worse.

#3 Unlike bees, yellow jacket wasps can sting multiple times.

When a bee stings you, their stinger gets torn out and the bee dies. Not so with yellow jackets. They can attack you when they personally feel threatened because they won’t die attacking you. And they can keep stinging you.

#4 They get more agitated in the fall, at the same time they’re getting more attracted to human activity.

As fall approaches, all the larvae grow up, and the adult wasps switch from searching for protein to feed their larvae to searching out sources of sugar, whether from nectar or that bubble tea you’re trying to drink as you sit on a café patio trying to enjoy the weather before winter rolls in. Not to be too specific.

This is also when their queen dies, leading to the fall of their social order in the nest.

Both circumstances leave wasps much more agitated than usual (#relatable), so they’re much more aggressive and likely to attack just when they get more in human space because of our love of sugary drinks.

That wasn’t… great. Or ideal as I intended to write an essay about how my fears were wrong.

But we’re only peering down into this rabbit hole from outside. So let’s dive deeper.

3 Reasons Why Wasps Are Necessary To Gardens And Ecosystems

#1 Wasps prey on invertebrates, many of which are garden pests (like aphids and tomato hornworms)

Yellow jackets are social wasps, building up a nest to care for larvae to ultimately raise new queens that survive the winter to begin a new nest. Their larvae feed on high-protein foods, like insects or even fish.

And what happens to be high-protein that’s crawling around your garden?

Insect pests.

In the past decade, gardeners have recognized that parasitic wasps are handy in the garden. But they, like other solitary wasps, tend to only dine on a single order, genus, or family of insects.

Social wasps, like yellow jackets, aren’t exclusive. Yellow jackets prey on 15 different orders! Not families, but the level above. They will probably kill any insect that attack your garden (along with beneficial insects, but that’s true of most beneficial predators.)

Luckily, the time they’re raising larvae also happens to be the time that pest populations explode.

#2 Wasps actually pollinate too.

While yellow jackets are prodigious hunters, the adults don’t actually eat insects. They prefer sugary carbohydrates, like nectar or my bubble tea. When yellow jackets are raising their young, you may only occasionally see an adult flitting around on flowers for a nectar snack. But that’s because the larvae actually secrete a sugary liquid that feeds the adults.

When they’re done raising larvae (or in the early spring, before there are enough larvae), the adults have to seek out their own source of food. As they move between flowers, they accidentally carry pollen between them. They’re not nearly as effective at pollinating as bees, though.

When I put out the water tray this summer, I only spotted two wasps drinking from it. I watched the wasps zigzagging over the prostrate knotweed, then crawling around it. They might have been going for the tiny flowers that I only realized were there much later, or they might have been delving between them on the hunt for insects.

At my last garden, my little patio became almost unusable in late August and September as wasps descended on the lettuce and calendula’s yellow flowers, desperate for food.

#3 Wasps provide a handy snack for migrating birds and nocturnal critters

Migrating is energy intensive. Most birds only have short periods of time when they can actually hunt. And yellow jacket wasps (while scary for us humans) are full of protein, and they make a handy snack.

They can also feed woodpeckers, raccoons, skunks, and opossums as well.

The wasp nests even provide squirrels a handy snack, once the hive has died for the year. Wasps won’t reuse a nest, so if you’ve got a nest on your property where you’re not in harm’s way, you may as well just leave it. Squirrels will happily devour the remaining nest.

What is the point of wasps?

There’s something that all these defenses have in common.

As I tried to prove that wasps have some redeeming value, even if they are confirmed scary, I came across professor of behavioral ecology Dr Seirian Sumner’s defense of her beloved study of wasps, and it illuminated something that I have just been doing.

People hate wasps. Even scientists do, with many choosing to focus on bees and butterflies instead of wasps. So she, a colleague, and an undergraduate student sent out a study to figure out why. Why do we love bees but hate wasps?

She wrote:

“The shocking result was that no one seemed to know that wasps are important predators. We were quite surprised, especially as the very same respondents had a clear appreciation of the ecological role that bees fill as pollinators. People hate wasps because they don’t understand the important role they have in ecosystems. No wonder I am regularly asked: “What’s the point of wasps?”

… Most people don’t care about behavior, they care about what wasps can do for them.”

That’s how I talked about wasps above — did their benefits to me, the human, outweigh their risks to me?

That’s how I talked about leafcutter bees — they’re ignored compared to honey and mason bees, but with alfalfa leafcutter bees having such a large effect on the alfalfa seed industry, people have done the research.

That’s how I talked about cottonwood trees — they’re hated because of the mess they cause us humans but we should love them because their cotton fluff seeds clean the air of pollen for us poor human allergy-sufferers.

If I could throw out facts like “Yellow jacket wasps can kill up to fifty insect pests a day” or “Yellow jacket wasps add $20US billion to the economy through reducing crop losses,” the kinds of facts that I could throw out about leafcutter bees, it’d go much further in convincing me that wasps are worth putting up with the fright.

But, as Sumner goes on to write, we don’t have those statistics for wasps. No one has done the research, and few people care to because wasps are scary and hated.

Because they’re scary and hated, we rush to soak them in dangerous pesticides and pour gasoline in their tunnel nests, even when they’re not a direct threat to us. Not only are we removing their role in our ecosystem, as pests proliferate with fewer predators to keep them in line so that we have to use more environmentally dangerous pesticides, but we also actively destroy the environment trying to get rid of them.

Because we think they’re a threat.

Because we don’t think they benefit us.

Because we don’t appreciate wasps for just being as they are.

Why do we hate wasps so much?

Okay, so yes, it might seem pretty obvious. I did just cover that wasps really are aggressive and will sting you multiple times. And those stings hurt. We consider them a threat or an annoyance. But a ton of other things threaten us that don’t inspire such hate.

I think it’s like with squirrels, another “threat” that moves even nature lovers to “choose violence.” When trying to figure out how to keep the red squirrel from digging up my planters, I read so many Reddit threads where people ask how to keep squirrels from eating all their plants, only to get a bunch of comments suggesting buying a gun to shoot them.

I don’t know about you, but I would honestly be really frightened if a neighbor started shooting at squirrels in their backyard. It would be so easy to accidentally damage something or hurt a neighbor or their dogs. I doubt that most people picking up a gun for the first time are going to be master markspeople.

But when the red squirrel dug holes among my newly planted chard, I felt inside that it was doing this to hurt me. To mess up my work. It’s easy to take that next thought, to terrorize a squirrel or to shoot it, because it feels like a threat.

And I don’t think I’m particularly violent or bloodthirsty. I think squirrels are cute. Before I had problems with squirrels in my garden, I love watching them dart around and flick their tails, like I enjoy watching birds.

And also, the squirrel isn’t actually hurting me. It’s not causing me pain. It’s just undoing all the work that I, a person with chronic illness, can manage in a gardening session (which is painful).

But there’s still that feeling. That impulse.

It hurt me. It did this on purpose. It’s out to get me.

But I can choose not to follow that impulse. I choose to think about it from a squirrel’s perspective. I learned about red squirrels and how to work with their instincts and desires. I read The Wildlife-Friendly Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Food in Harmony with Nature by Tammi Hartung, which I think is a one-of-a-kind book and so very helpful in figuring out how to adjust our thinking to more easily coexist with nature instead of warring with it. (But she even admits that she needed to build up her comfort level around yellow jackets.)

That they’re starving or on the verge of starving. If they don’t find enough food, they can’t go buy groceries. I want to grow my own food, but if a crop fails, I can just buy it, no matter my personal feelings.

They dig in the planters because the soil is soft. Because maybe they found someone else’s pot with yummy bulbs in it. Because maybe they want to make a decoy, make it look like something were buried there so that other creatures don’t find their real caches. (Red squirrels make decoys, y’all.)

I can justify the squirrels. They bury seeds, and that which they don’t eat become new plants. They dig in my planters, but they’re mixing the straw mulch into the soil where it can decompose faster. They’re gardeners too.

But I don’t feel like I need to justify their existence as much as I do wasps. They’re living creatures with their own wants and needs and short lives that they make the most of. Wasps are insects, and while most of us have never actually shot at a mammal like a squirrel, most of us have squashed bugs that came into our house.

We as a society also tend to despise wild creatures (and plants) who benefit from our human society. Just think rock pigeons, the scourges of inner cities. Just a couple hundred years ago, when rock pigeons were rare birds living in cliffsides away from people, people built roosts in order to attract them. They weren’t scum, they were valued. But then we built up our cities with towering, cliff-like buildings and food left out on the street, and the rock pigeons stayed and proliferated. We came to hate them.

Squirrels also benefited from our suburb building habits. I don’t think there were red or grey squirrels here a hundred years ago because there weren’t dense lines of trees here back then. We planted them.

And so do racoons. Wasps love the sugary drinks and meat sandwiches we humans love to eat outside during the summer, and we build so many eaves to hang their nests from.

But we don’t want nature that coexists with us (or that we need to adapt to). We want nature out there, in the places “untouched” by humans. We value that nature, that we have to go out to see, that we can choose when we have to deal with them and leave when we’re done.

If wasps didn’t so directly benefit from us, would we hate them?

Or maybe I’m just overthinking this, because if wasps weren’t attracted to us and our drinks, then we wouldn’t be threatened or put out.

Now, I don’t think it’s bad that we think of how things benefit us, rather than just admiring them for their inherent worth. Knowing this helps advocates like Sumner know how to shift people’s perspectives.

I don’t even think it’s bad that I started this off with trying to figure out why I should like wasps. I want to be less afraid of them and not have panic attacks in my backyard, and knowing that they’re not “out to get me” helps with that.

Maybe even seeing all the photos will desensitize them to me, and knowing some of their ecology and social habits will explain their behavior so I can choose to react in a different way.

But it’s also to remember that base impulse. It’s my brain’s way of saying “danger” or “threat”, but it’s not necessarily true. We can think differently, and we should take another moment to figure out if a) we actually need to be worried about this creature and b) what are non-harmful ways to change this behavior.

And we do this by learning.

That’s why I write Let’s Nerd Out About Gardening.

And I hope that’s why you keep reading.

To round out this essay, here are some reasons why you may find wasps fascinating in themselves:

1. Wasp nest paper is actually pretty (even though I have a cringe reaction to seeing it). Wasps build their nests by chewing wood fibers mixed with saliva. Inside the nest, they make paper cells that look like honeybee comb.

2. There are two types of yellow jacket wasps, one that hangs their nests from eaves and branches (ie aerial nesting) and another that builds their nests in rodent tunnels (ie ground nesting). Even when building inside a rodent nest, ground nesting wasps surround the nest with paper so that there’s only one entrance. I guess that could be another human benefit — a mouse isn’t likely to take up residence if it’s full of aggressive wasps.

3. Yellow jacket wasps only survive for a single season, dying out during frosts, except for baby queens who will live for about a year. In places that don’t get a good frost, a wasp colony may survive several years.

4. Other insects mimic yellow jacket markings, as most things don’t want to mess with yellow jackets.

5. Yellow jacket wasps are only active during the day.

6. Queens raise their first batch of larvae themselves. Once that first batch grows up into worker wasps, the queen focuses entirely on laying eggs. Queens get all the sperm they need from the previous year’s mating flight pre-hibernation, which they use to lay female eggs. The male drone eggs are unfertilized. Like with honey bees, drones only exist to fertilize the newly developed queen bees. They don’t even have a stinger (yay!).

✍ Join The Discussion

How do you feel about wasps? Are you afraid of them? Do you hate them? Do they not particularly bother you unless they’re going for your bubble tea?

Is there a “pest” around you that you hate? Have you researched it? What benefits do those pests have?

(I mean, it could be as simple as if there are aphids, then the beneficial predators eat them and not each other.)

Happy gardening!

Tanith

P.S. Here’s Your Extra Credit Reading!

Wasps: why I love them, and why you should too by Dr Seirian Sumner (via The Conversation)

This is the article I talked about above. Dr Sumner explains that while she finds wasp ecology fascinating in itself, people kept asking why wasps and not something “useful” like bees and butterflies. This is a great article that goes into the human benefits of wasps across the spectrum, not just yellow jackets. (There’s even a wasp that preys on cockroaches specifically.)

She also mentions that wasp larvae could provide a human food source and wasp venom may have potential in medical research.

Remedy for yellow jackets? Try a spoonful of peanut butter by Jeff VanderMeer (via Tallahassee Democrat)

Many wasp nest removal “solutions” are actually ineffective or even dangerous. But naturalist Jeff VanderMeer has a simple, eco-friendly solution for ground nest removal: if you have raccoons, skunks, or opossums, then put a bit of peanut butter next to a tunneled nest’s entrance. These little trouble-makers love the taste of wasps, and once they find the entrance thanks to the peanut butter, they’ll dig the whole thing up during the night when the wasps are inactive.

What’s really the point of wasps? by Professor Adam Hart (via BBC)

Professor Adam Hart explains that wasps there’s over 9,000 species in the UK alone, and are divided between the solitary wasps (that we rarely notice) and social wasps (like yellow jackets).

Yellow jackets: A Look at Opportunistic Raiders of Honey Bee Hives by Edward Riccuiti (via Entomology Today)

Yes, yellow jackets will attack beehives. Beehives are filled with good stuff, from yummy honey to yummy bees to yummy larvae. With a healthy hive, a yellow jacket may hang around the entrance to kill exiting bees for food. But honey bees are more than capable of ganging up on one or two. If the hive is in decline, though, the yellow jackets can do a lot more unopposed.

According to Dr Justin O. Schmidt, though, we don’t have to worry about yellow jackets destroying hives. It doesn’t happen all that much. But as commenters point out, it does happen — and it’s devastating when it’s your hive. It may just be the case that when there are too many wasps and not enough food, they get bolder and more aggressive (as we know happens) and even healthy hives may struggle to defend themselves.

• find yourself lost down rabbit holes researching plants you’ll never grow?

• wonder what that strange “weed” growing in the sidewalk cracks actually is?

• marvel over the details, the why, instead of just the headline?

• delight in learning the unexpected, like that ants herd aphids for honeydew, or that plants can communicate threats through releasing volatile organic compounds into the air?

• find yourself immediately researching the above two facts?

If this is you, then you’ve found the right place. Welcome!

Hi, I’m Tanith (pronounced Tay-nef) and I am a Gardenerd. Life is at its best when I’m learning — especially when I learn things that I never would have thought were true.

And when you’re a gardener and nature enthusiast, there’s no end to the rabbit holes to explore.

But sometimes you get stuck. Unpiqued. You can’t learn about something you don’t know exists. You may not know where to start. You need inspiration.

Or you find something out that’s so fascinating that you want to share it with everyone, but you don’t have anyone (or enough people) to share it with.

That’s why I came up with Let’s Nerd Out About Gardening.

Let’s Nerd Out About Gardening is a community for curious people like you who love to dive into rabbit holes about gardening and nature, a place to get your curiosity piqued and discover something amazing, to become a better gardener and better world citizen by understanding what’s going on in your own backyard, and to share your own passion with other Gardenerds.

Together, we’ll become better gardeners and better nature stewards one rabbit hole at a time.

(Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a gardener to be a Gardenerd. You just need to be curious.)

So what can you expect from this newsletter?

When you subscribe, you’ll get new articles delivered straight to your inbox twice-per-month that include:

• Research-backed deep-dives into nature and gardening topics that are as diverse as they are intriguing.

• Thoughtfully curated articles, videos, and books to delve even deeper into each topic.

• Passionate community discussions where you can share your knowledge and passion with like-minded people.

Together, we’ll learn about:

• unusual, forgotten, and obscure plants and insects, like:

  • 3 once-popular fruits that are making a comeback in home gardens,

  • 3 unusual aquatic plants I never would have suspected grow in my home province, and

  • 6 amazing things about the obscure leafcutter bees.

• whether commonly hated plants and creatures actually have redeeming qualities, like:

  • why the much-vilified cottonwood tree is actually an eco-treasure for humans and nature alike.

• simple actions in the garden that make a big environmental impact, like:

  • how microgreens are helping solve food insecurity,

  • how adding a wildlife pond can support beneficial insects and keep squirrels out of your tomatoes, and

  • how growing vines on buildings lowers energy demands without damaging the building.

What this newsletter isn’t

You’re not in the right place if you’re looking for:

• how-to articles on basic gardening topics or garden design. Instead, I write about new inspiring ideas and unusual topics that maybe you’ll use, maybe you won’t, but you’ll be all the richer for knowing.

• climate-change panic or bleakness. Instead, I offer practical low-tech, simple solutions you can take to help the environment and yourself, no matter how big your garden is.

• unsubstantiated hype or claims. Instead, I delve into research and use knowledgeable sources. I won’t talk about humus (now disproved) or try to sell you miracle additives for your garden. And I include scientific names when mentioning plants and insects, so you don’t mix them up with others with the same common name.

Who I am

In 2019, I was stuck. I’d just finished up a year of round-the-world travel with my husband, and I had no idea what I wanted to do.

When you travel, you can’t help but learn new things even just when grocery shopping. You think you know what a place is like from watching movies and reading books, but when you arrive, you find out that it’s actually very different — and way better.

Back in Canada, where everything is so familiar even across the country, I lost that. I needed something to keep that curiosity and wonder alive.

But you don’t need to travel to uncover new worlds. It turns out that there were whole worlds I knew nothing about, and they were close at hand.

I found them in my backyard and in local parks.

(I’m talking about nature.)

I realized that beyond a few obvious specimens (like maples), I couldn’t name any of the trees, riverside flowers, or tiny birds flitting past me in the trees (those are all sparrows, right?).

So I picked up books and apps and started learning what they were called.

I discovered the “sparrows” darting through the trees were actually the distinctive bandit-masked Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum), and they’re one of the few birds that specialize in fruit (and they love to dash into you-pick strawberry fields for a quick meal, the first time I positively identified them without having to look them up).

I learned that many of the conifers growing alongside the rivers were actually Eastern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis), related to the ancient towering Western red cedar (Thuja plicata) of BC, although a lot shorter because the east coast gets hit with a lot more damaging storms than the west coast.

I learned that the white “butterflies” I’d seen all my life were actually white cabbage moths or cabbage white butterflies (Pieris rapae), and while innocuous in most backyards, they love to eat the kale I’d planted. (They’re also diurnal butterflies, and not moths, but we call them cabbage moths in North America.)

Once I saw them, once I knew their names, I couldn’t unsee them.

And I wanted more.

Since then, I:

• fell in love with regenerative vegetable gardening, and completed the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO)’s New Farmer Training Program. After a few years of container gardening, I’m now working on my first permanent vegetable gardens in Canadian Zone 3 (aka the extremely cold, really short growing season prairie zone).

• became a freelance garden writer, getting paid to delve into rabbit holes and share all the juicy tidbits I found. I love to take complex subjects and break them down so that they’re easy to understand, and teach people how to garden from a regenerative perspective.

• notice nature more in my backyard, whether it’s a Downy Woodpecker hopping up a tree trunk, hover flies pollinating my tomatoes, or strawberry blight growing in sidewalk cracks. With CFS/ME, I can’t exactly go hiking to see the “interesting” and “wild” nature. Instead, I got better at seeing the nature around me.

• enjoy gardening more and get angry less. Gardening is supposed to be a fun hobby that I enjoy spending my limited energy on. Delving deep into the things that plague me (whether squirrels, wasps, or cottonwood trees) teaches me not to listen to my knee-jerk reactions and instead how to work with them in a way that benefits us both. Yes, I still get frustrated, but at least I can head off some problems at the pass and do better in my wildlife-friendly gardening efforts.

And that’s the experience I want to bring to Let’s Nerd Out About Gardening.

I want to help us all become better gardeners and better nature stewards one serendipitous rabbit hole at a time.

Come nerd out about gardening and nature. Become a Gardenerd today!

Subscribe now

✍ Join the Conversation:

What is your Gardenerd origin story?

What are the best/most interesting rabbit holes you’ve jumped down?

Let me know in the comments!

Leave a comment

Happy gardening!

Tanith

Subscribe now

Hello Gardenerds!

In my last post, I shared 3 native aquatic and wetland plants that I was shocked to find grew in my own home province (or that existed at all).

But I actually found a bunch more that I didn’t get a chance to include — partly because of vacation time, partly because I worry that these emails get pretty long. I keep getting the “this post is going to get cut off in email” warnings. (And you may not be hyped to get a 2,000 word post in your email every two weeks.)

So I broke this down into two emails, and there’s still more I would include.

Let’s nerd out about native aquatic plants again.

(And again, thanks to Heinjo Lahring’s Water and Wetland Plants of the Prairie Provinces.)

4 More Surprising Native Aquatic Plants

Common Scouring-rush (Equisetum hyemale)

Don’t you just love it when the common name is super descriptive?

Common Scouring-rush is used for — you guessed it — scouring!

That’s because this horsetail has a high silicon content, making up 5 - 10% of its dry weight. That high silicon content makes it a great natural abrasive for cleaning pots and pans or polishing wood finishes. People still use it today.

Technically, they are edible, and you can eat young shoots like you would asparagus. But it comes with a lot of warnings: Never eat mature plants or plants growing near fertilized fields, ditches, or nitrogen-contaminated water, as high levels of nitrates make them toxic. They can poison livestock (especially horses) in high quantities. If you’re looking for something edible, you’ll probably prefer the next plant.

This plant also has ancient roots, being related to the giant Calamite “trees” from the Carboniferous era. We have Calamites to thank for coal today, for better or worse.

While most of the plants that caught my eye are shrubs and herbs, the Common Scouring-rush is a Pteridophyte or fern ally. They don’t grow flowers. Instead, they reproduce via spores.

Arum-Leaved Arrowhead (Sagittaria cuneata)

Heinjo Lahring’s book isn’t actually the first time that I found out about this water plant — Eric Toensmeier’s Perennial Vegetables is. And it caught my eye because only two perennial root vegetables will survive this far north (some yam varieties being the other).

And it’s an emergent water plant.

(Well, okay, technically Toensmeier wrote about Broad-leaved Arrowhead (Sagittaria latifolia), also known as Wapato, which is more often talked about but not found as much on the western prairies where I am. But they’re pretty similar.)

It produces a tuber that you can eat pretty much like you would potatoes, although they taste more like chestnuts when cooked. They are apparently delicious, and I’m excited to try to get my hands on some.

While it’s easy to grow — you can grow them in a kiddy pool — harvesting can be challenging. You can’t just pull up the stem, as the stem will break off and the tubers don’t grow near the stem.

Traditionally, Indigenous women harvested them by disturbing the tubers with their feet. The tubers are light and will float up to the top if they’re not weighed down. Sounds easy (in theory) but it can mean wading in frigid water — sometimes up to your neck.

Above the water, they’re pretty distinctive to look at, with arrowhead shaped leaves, giving it both its common name and its genus name Saggitaria, meaning arrow-shaped. It produces showy white flowers that you can enjoy, with male flowers at the top and female flowers lower down the stem. They’re a win all around.

Fragrant White Waterlily (Nymphaea odorata)

The native Fragrant White Waterlily is actually highly prized among pond enthusiasts, thanks to its strong fragrance and picture-perfect white waterlily flowers. It graces the covers of Robert Pavlis’ Building Natural Ponds and Heinjo Lahring’s Water and Wetland Plants.

It seems to good to be true. And it is. Sort of.

As I was doing more research, an article popped up claiming that this waterlily is invasive in BC. The Invasive Species Council of BC advised that it is not to be planted in any garden, as it has escaped cultivation and its thick roots choke out native aquatic species and impedes the movement of aquatic animals. (It being hardy to Zone 1 doesn’t help.)

But my guide listed it as native to Saskatchewan. What gives? Was I promoting an invasive species? (And how can it be invasive if it’s native??? And supports native wildlife??? Muskrats, beavers, deer, and porcupines all dine on its rhizomes.)

According to the University of Saskatchewan’s Virtual Herbarium of Plants At Risk in Saskatchewan, the Fragrant White Waterlily is found in one single location in the province, as this is its western-most natural habitat.

It only appears in a few more places in Manitoba before becoming more common in Ontario, where it’s not considered invasive. They’re worried about look-a-like European Frog-Bit (Hydrocharis morsus-ranae), which is wreaking havoc in local waterways after being introduced as an ornamental. Just like Fragrant White Waterlily in BC.

This just shows that when choosing pond plants, we should:

1. check locally whether a plant is considered invasive, even if we see that it’s native to our country.

2. choose non-invasive native plants, because you never know if that introduced ornamental will escape its confinement. And never plant it in natural waterways, especially those connected to other waterways, as it will definitely spread.

But before we move on, the waterlily also has one other interesting feature.

Usually, roots are the ones bringing in oxygen, even in aquatic plants. But not so with waterlilies. The leaf stomata are on the top of the leaf (instead of under the leaf like most non-aquatic plants), and the long petioles (leaf stems) have four air passages used to take oxygen to the roots. If they’re not rooted down, the air passages make the stems very buoyant.

Yellow Pondlily (Nuphar variegata)

Yellow Pondlily is a native alternative for Fragrant White Waterlily, and you may even prefer it. The flowers don’t have that classic Monet waterlily look, but that doesn’t mean they’re inferior. They have the classic floating lily pads that look great while providing habitat and their flowers are very interesting, with big gold petals surrounding what looks like a second, smaller flower.

(And yes, it really did take me a while to figure out that the flower difference is because it’s a pondlily (Nuphar) and not a waterlily (Nymphaea). I was just looking at the family name, Nymphaeaceae or waterlily family.)

Like Fragrant White Waterlily, Yellow Pondlily supports a lot of wildlife, from muskrats and beavers enjoying its rhizomes to waterfowl enjoying its seeds.

But unlike the Waterlily, for which only the flowers are harvested for human consumption, all parts of Yellow Pondlily provide food. You can cook the leaves like spinach, the seeds can be roasted and ground into flour or boiled in soups. You can even “pop” the seeds, a bit like popcorn.

It’s also hardier (Zone 0), although to survive my kinds of winter, it needs to be planted 0.5 to 3m deep.

✍ Join The Conversation

Are there any plants around you that are native to your country but are invasive in your region?

What kind of aquatic water or pond lilies do you have growing in your region?

Share with us in the comments! We’d love to know!

Leave a comment

This is (probably) the last pond-related post I’ll be doing for a while. Thanks so much for following on this journey!

Red Squirrel update: A few weeks ago, I spotted the red squirrel digging in my potted sweet pepper just before dusk. The potted sweet pepper that I’d placed within the “halo” of marigolds around my tomato plants. Now, this could be because the marigolds have seriously declined and few have flowers. But I’m starting to think it just doesn’t like tomatoes. (Or again, they only eat them for the water.)

So I’m going to have my wildlife-friendly squirrel deterrent methods for next year.

Wildlife pond update: I spotted the Northern Flicker hopping around the prostrate knotweed in my yard, digging around for bugs. Then it hopped onto the tarp I’m using to clear the ground for new beds, took a drink from a puddle that had formed, then bathed in it.

So I still haven’t seen a bird use the actual dish I set up, but this just goes to show that any water source helps.

Happy growing!

Tanith

In case you missed it:

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

Northwest’s Earliest Garden Discovered In British Columbia by Jason Daley(via Smithsonian Mag)

Researchers have discovered what is the earliest known garden in the Northwest. And can you guess what it grows? Wapato!

Ancestors of the Katzie First Nations built a 450 sq ft stone platform to prevent the tubers from rooting too deep and thus make them easier to harvest.

Tools found at the site were dated to 1,800 BC! That’s the earliest evidence of cultivation in North America (so far).

Sedimentary analysis showed that their cultivation methods improved the health of the wetland ecosystem. When it was abandoned, the site acidified and dried up.

(Remember the ghost ponds from last week’s extra credit reading! There have been reports that arrowhead will bounce back just like that.)

Perennial Water Vegetable: Arrowhead by Theresa (via Our Tiny Homestead)

Theresa gives personal insight into growing Arrowheads in their garden pond — with lots of photos.

Water Lily and Lotus -- Incomparable Beauties (via NYBG LuEsther T Mertz Library)

I think lots of times people get confused by the difference between water lilies and lotus, especially when attributing the religious significance. But they are two different plants, with water lilies having pointed flower petals sitting close to the water, and lotus having thicker, rounder petals held up above the water that also leave behind a large seed pod behind. Lotuses are definitely tropical-only plants, while water lilies have both tropical and cold-hardy species.

Fossils suggest an aquatic plant that bloomed underwater was among first flowering plants by David Dilcher (via The Conversation)

The first flowering plant may have actually been an aquatic plant. It wouldn’t be like the flowers we see today. It was, in fact, water-pollinated. The current would carry pollen between flowers, so it didn’t need to be showy to attract pollinators. Hornwort (Ceratophyllum submersum) is one of its descendants, and its one that aquarium plant enthusiasts use to help oxygenate the water and use up nutrients. It’s also native in many parts of the northern world.

Labrador tea: the flavor of the wild by Susan Pike (via Seacoastonline)

I was going to include Labrador Tea (Rhododendrum groenlandicum), as like with cranberry, I was surprised to find it grew here up north. Probably because “Labrador” makes me think it’s more a Maritimes/Eastern Canada thing. But like many plants on this list, it’s a circumpolar plant — growing in places near the Arctic. Susan Pike learned about Labrador Tea on a visit to Greenland, and explains how this very cold-hardy plant works and how it tastes.

Subscribe now

Hi Gardenerds,

Aquatic plants are a mystery. To me, at least.

When I first started learning about the easy ways to add a wildlife pond to your garden, I was stupefied. What plants could I even add to a mini-pond? I could have named lotus and cattails as water plants, and maybe could have made my way to a sedge or reed, but I knew nothing else.

So of course I had to dive in to this mysterious topic. I devoured books from the library on ponds. I learned about waterlilies, blue flag iris, marsh marigold, sweet flag, and pickerel. (Plants either native or adaptable to Canadian weather.)

Then, just a few days before I sat down to write this, the last book I’d ordered arrived: “Water and Wetland Plants of the Prairie Provinces” by Heinjo Lahring. A twenty-year-old field identification guide.

The Internet is great. Online plant listings like the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Plant Finder are really handy. Pond-building books are helpful.

But I’d forgotten how amazing it is to just flip through a field identification guide. To see all the different plants and serendipitously discover some really cool and fascinating water plants — plants I had no idea existed in my little old province of Saskatchewan.

(I continually underestimate what plants I can find in my home region. All the best plants seem to be out there, elsewhere. Is that just me?)

This book is primarily a field identification guide rather than a gardening guide that helps you select plants for your garden, but the author hopes that people will use this book for prairie restoration projects to see the sheer scope of different plants available. (And notes that this collection is only the beginning — there’s so many more species waiting to be found and recognized.)

So, let’s nerd out about unusual aquatic plants.

3 Unusual Aquatic and Wetland Plants

Water plants are divided up into 4 categories:

1. Wetland plants: the water table is above or near the soil surface, either throughout the year or through a season (so the soil is soggy and/or occasionally flooded)

2. Marginal plants: a weird category that includes:

   1. Marginal plants: grow on the shoreline where the soil stays moist to soggy but above the waterline (like sedges and marsh marigold)

   2. Emergent plants: grow in the water along the shoreline but stick out above the water (like cattails)

3. Floating-leaved plants: plants with leaves floating on the surface, either rooted (like waterlilies) or free-floating (like duckweed)

4. Submerged plants: grows entirely underwater, although they may push flowers up above the surface (like seaweed and kelp)

Common Bladderwort (Utricularia vulgaris)

The name doesn’t immediately pique interest. I probably flipped past it a dozen times before I started reading through the hefty “Special Features” sections Heinjo Lahring so thoughtfully added to each plant profile.

Common Bladderwort is a submerged plant that floats freely in the water with delicate fronds. Pretty much something you’d think lived in the water, except for the little “bladders” dotting the stem that give it its name.

It produces above the water bright yellow flowers that look like snapdragons, which makes it somewhat unusual among submerged plants. The flowers only last a day, and the seeds tend not to reach maturity. Instead, it relies on growing overwintering buds that will detach as the plant dies back in fall to float to a new location before being buried in mud and silt for next year’s growth.

But that’s still not what caught my eye.

This plant has a dark secret.

It’s a carnivorous plant, and those bladders are its traps.

Each bladder has trigger-hairs, that when a small crustacean touches them, the flap opens, the bladder expands and sucks its prey inside.

The translucent green bladder turns dark when there’s a creature inside.

I don’t much associate the semi-arid prairies or the northern boreal forests with carnivorous plants, but we also have sundews and pitcher plants up north. Who knew? (Well, besides Heinjo Lahring.)

Red Samphire (Salicornia rubra)

We might be a thousand miles away from the nearest coastline, but that doesn’t mean there’s no salt water to be found. Millions of years ago, most of Saskatchewan was a sea, and that sea left a lot of marine deposits underground.

As groundwater moves through these marine deposits, it picks up salt. It’s not much of a problem when the sloughs are full, but as the water evaporates through the heat of the summer, that salt gets concentrated. Alkali precipitates become a white crust. These alkali sloughs are a challenging place to grow, needing to deal with both the flood-and-dry conditions and the extra salty alkaline soil.

Most plants that grow in these conditions rely on quickly going to seed while water levels are high and salt concentrations are low before dying off for the year. But a few plants excel in these conditions and take over. (Nature abhors bare soil, even if it’s extra salty.)

Red Samphire is the most salt-hardy of all the halophytes (plants adapted to growing in saline conditions) found here on the prairies, and it’s pretty easy to spot. It grows up erect with succulent stems that turn bright red when mature. You can easily spot them in summer even from a distance because they look like a red carpet. And they also make it easy to find the center of sloughs with the highest concentrations of salt, as they’re the ones right around them.

This bright red plant is actually edible, and cattle love it as a source of salt. You can use it on salads or add it to stews. And because of its high salt content, its great for pickling. People even used to use its ashes to make soap.

(Another alkali slough plant, Red Goosefoot (Chenopodium rubrum), is actually related to a previous plant I shared, Good King Henry (Chenopodium Bonus-henricus). When young, it’s also edible, either raw or cooked.)

Small Bog (Vaccinium oxycoccos) and Bog Cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea)

Cranberries existing is not a surprise to me. But what is surprising is that there’s at least two cranberry species found up north. (I’m not sure where I thought cranberries came from — now, I know BC, Quebec, and some places in the Eastern US.)

Cranberries are low-growing, matting vines that excel in bogs where they can keep their roots wet but stay relatively dry. In cultivation, farmers will flood the fields to protect the berries during early frosts and over the winter to protect the vines from the cold.

Small Bog Cranberry is, well, smaller than Bog Cranberry. But there’s not much difference.

Bog Cranberry is “said to be slightly less flavorful than Dwarf Bog Cranberry in early autumn but superior to it after the first frost,” according to Heinjo Lahring.

Also, Bog Cranberry has been found as far north as the high arctic region in southern Baffin Island (that’s the dog-shaped island at the top of Canada). Bog Cranberries can be easily stored under the snow without losing their flavor, making it a really useful berry for Indigenous people and wildlife.

But here’s where it gets wild. The cranberry grown for cultivation in North America is Vaccinium macrocarpon, another native cranberry. Small Bog Cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus) is the cranberry cultivated in the UK, where it’s also native. And Bog Cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) is also known as Lingonberry in Europe. So if you’ve watched The Great and wondered what that Swedish wonder Lingonberry is, now you know. A cranberry.

And these are just three of the plants that caught my eye. Stay tuned for my next essay as we explore even more.

✍Join The Conversation

What unusual aquatic and wetland plants are found where you live?

If you don’t know any plants, give it a search or pick up your own identification guide from the library. Then report back here! We’d all love to know.

Leave a comment

Happy growing!

Tanith

Did you miss it?

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

5 techniques to ID aquatic plants (via Ausable River Association)

Ready to identify some of your local aquatic plants? This guide goes over the quick steps you need to know for correctly identifying plants.

1. Which water level is it growing? (Is it marginal, emergent, floating, or submerged?)

2. How are the leaves arranged along the stem?

3. What is the leaf blade architecture?

4. How is the leaf edge shaped?

5. How are the leaf veins arranged?

Why I’m bringing centuries-old ‘ghost ponds’ back to life by Emily Alderton (via The Conversation)

Have you got a filled-in pond that you want to restore? It may be as easy as digging it out. Insect eggs and aquatic plant seeds can remain dormant for centuries. Once they’ve returned to pond conditions (ie, the old soil is exposed and it’s filled with water), they can come back — even bringing back plants thought extinct. That’s what Emily Alderton and her research team found when they resurrected 3 ghost ponds in Norfolk that had been buried between 45 and 150 years.

Insects helping to curb invasive aquatic plants

Aquatic plants have been taking over waterways. Herbicides are more likely to kill of native aquatic plants than the invasive ones (plus all the other concerns of using herbicides in waterways), so instead, people are turning to a new solution — insects that only prey on the invasive plant. When the invasive plant dies back, so will the introduced insects (instead of the introduced insects becoming the next big problem).

A few such projects include:

• Tiny weevils are waging war on the invasive water lettuce plant choking South Africa’s Vaal River by Julie Coetzee (via The Conversation)

• Ethiopia’s Lake Tana is losing the fight to water hyacinth, by Solomon Kibret (Different weevils are being used to fight back against water hyacinth)

• Ontario scientists are using caterpillars to combat an invasive aquatic plant by Justin Chandler (via CBC)

It takes longer (at least a couple years), but they are making headway.

Cranberry Capers: Wild Harvesting in Nova Scotia, 1880s and 1950s by Sara Spike (via NiCHE Network in Canadian History & Environment)

After the 1880s, cranberry harvesting for both fun and profit became very popular in Nova Scotia among white settlers (the Mi’kmaw having harvested cranberries for use for a long time before that). Cranberries were heralded as a great crop to make those peaty, boggy areas of a farm profitable.

Soon after, legislation began to be introduced to control wild picking by limiting the picking season among unenclosed lands. Cranberries can ripen after they’re harvested, so people could quickly strip cranberry patches of fruit (damaging the vines) before cultivated cranberries could hit the market. Early harvesting would depress cranberry prices.

The legislation also “served to extend non-indigenous authority over the wild spaces of Canada,” as Sara Spike puts it.

[Small] Bog Cranberry by Heidi Bohan (via Gatherer to Gardener)

Heidi Bohan shares her knowledge and experience of Small Bog Cranberries in BC, and how wild patches are slowly disappearing.

Make Your Own (Cranberry) Bog In A Cup [PDF] (via Massachusetts Cranberries Association)

If you want to try your hand at growing cranberries, but don’t have your own bog, then the Massachusetts Cranberries Association has a cool kid-friendly activity guide to making your own bog in a cup (or a larger container). The guide shows the different layers of clay, gravel, peat, and sand you need to make an ideal-ish bog and includes some growing tips.

Subscribe now

Dear Gardenerds,

Last time, we discussed the different ways that we can add a wildlife pond to our gardens, no matter how small, and whether they actually make a difference (spoiler: they do). And how I may have saved my tomatoes from squirrels by just adding a dish of water. (And the squirrel still hasn’t touched them!)

But how do ponds actually work?

How do they maintain themselves?

What is the difference between a healthy pond that supports wildlife and one that’s essentially dead?

Let’s nerd out.

How the nitrogen cycle works

If you have an aquarium, then you probably already know about the nitrogen cycle. As I was trying to get pond fish out of my system, I delved deep into the art of fish keeping. Every beginner source said the same thing — your best chance at keeping fish alive is by knowing how the nitrogen cycle works.

You may also know the nitrogen cycle from gardening or biology class. It’s very similar, but with a few key differences in an aquatic ecosystem.

When you have fish and decaying organic matter, you’re going to have ammonia (NH3) and ammonium (NH4). Plants (and fish food) become ammonia and ammonium as they decay through a process called ammonification. Whether you get more ammonia or more ammonium depends on the pH level of the water. The more acidic, the more likely it is to take on that extra hydrogen molecule.

While we tend to think that the ammonia comes through fish waste, fish actually excrete most of their ammonia from their gills. When ammonia levels rise, their gills get chemical burns. And when their gills are burned, fish struggle to breathe and die. Ammonia is very toxic to fish because of this. (It’s also toxic to other aquatic wildlife) Ammonium is also toxic, but causes less harm, and is safer in slightly higher concentrations.

When ammonia levels appear in a fish tank, you need to do a water change (removing half the water and refilling it with fresh water) to get rid of the extra ammonia. But a natural pond can’t organize a water change. Instead, it has a secret weapon — it has beneficial microbes.

Nitrosomonas bacteria turn ammonia into nitrite (NO2), and then Nitrobacter bacteria turn nitrite into nitrate (NO3). Plants can absorb nitrate, removing it from the water. (This is why aquarium water is so good for plants, or how you can combine fish keeping and hydroponics to grow food without additional fertilizer.)

Now, all three are toxic to fish, but at different levels. No level of ammonia is safe for fish, while fish can live with a bit of nitrite and a bit more nitrate. There’s test kits that you can get that measure each. And if you’re planning to keep fish in your newly developed pond, wait a few weeks to introduce the fish to build up beneficial microbes and get this process going.

The best way to keep all of this in check is by having enough aquatic plants in a pond to soak up the extra nitrates. When planting, you can actually shake off any soil from the plant roots and just weigh the roots down in the water. The extra soil just adds nutrients to the water, and the plants can still take hold.

Alternatively, nitrogen can be stored in sediment as nitrous oxide. While this makes it an interesting solution for nitrogen runoff (see the extra credit reading), it’s not ideal for maintaining a garden pond.

But what happens if nitrogen builds up? After all, an enormous problem in water conservation is all the nitrogen (and phosphorus) runoff from over-fertilizing lawns and from conventional agriculture.

Then, like with weeds covering bare soil, nature takes over.

Algae (phytoplankton) will grow, gorging on the extra nitrogen. If there’s enough nitrogen, not enough competition, and hot temperatures, algae will rapidly reproduce and take over a waterway. When a huge bloom dies, microbes will decompose it — and they’ll need all the lingering oxygen in the water to do so. No oxygen, no life.

(The toxic blue-green algae, while also causing harmful blooms, is not actually algae. It’s a nitrogen fixing bacteria (Cyanobacteria), converting atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia/ammonium. While algae blooms because of excess nitrogen, blue-green algae is caused by phosphorus pollution.)

It’s not just algae, either. Any quickly reproducing plant that floats on the surface and shades out other aquatic plants will do. Michigan has found that storm ponds covered with duckweed have less oxygen and produce more methane.

Which brings us to the other important and arguably more critical cycle in a pond:

How the oxygen cycle works

They might be underwater, but aquatic creatures still need oxygen to live. Even plants need oxygen around their roots. When there’s no dissolved oxygen in the water, that’s it. Everything dies. So how do ponds get more oxygen?

Water surfaces exchange gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide with the air. When oxygen is low in the water, then oxygen moves from the air to water. If oxygen is high in the water, then it moves to the air.

Colder water holds more oxygen than warmer water. Deeper spots (3 to 4 feet deep) help regulate the temperature, so that water can stay cooler even as temperatures rise.

But it’s not just depth that helps. The more surface area to the water, the more access to oxygen the pond has.

And the more movement on the surface of the water (like by wind, waterfalls, or fountains), the more quickly these gases exchange. This is how a waterfall feature adds oxygen to a pond.

But when the water is covered, whether by plant life or ice, then the process stalls. (Overwintering creatures will slow their heartrate so they need less oxygen. Some pond owners may even add a bubbler during the winter to help them survive.)

Plants can add oxygen to the water too. During the day, when plants are photosynthesizing, they take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. If the leaves are above the water, then they release oxygen into the atmosphere. If they’re fully submerged, then they release the oxygen back into the water.

But when it gets dark, plants stop photosynthesizing, which means they stop producing oxygen. (They even absorb a little oxygen during the night.) Plant roots are always in need of oxygen, so they continue to pull oxygen from the water.

Meanwhile, everything else in the water (like fish and beneficial microbes) is also absorbing oxygen and replacing it with carbon dioxide all night long. Oxygen levels drop. If they drop too low, then everything suffocates. However, once plants start photosynthesizing again, they start producing oxygen again, and oxygen levels rise.

Except if the next day (or days) is cloudy (plants don’t photosynthesize) and it’s hot (raising the water temperature). That’s when a pond runs into trouble.

Pond fish are pretty good indicators of oxygen levels, as they’re more sensitive and visible than other creatures. An oxygenated pond will have a max of 10 ppm of dissolved oxygen. Fish suffer when they drop to 3ppm and die when they drop to 2ppm. As oxygen levels drop, fish will stay close to the surface where there’s more oxygen (because of the gas exchange).

But fish also make a huge impact on oxygen levels. If there’s too many fish to a pond, then there won’t be enough oxygen for everything (including the fish). Always underestimate how many fish a pond can support, and start off small.

That being said, if a pond has a good amount of open surface area, the water keeps cool, and there are enough plants, there shouldn’t be many problems.

The two processes can seem really intimidating to manage. But nature manages them just fine. It’s just that we humans need to adjust the controls sometimes.

✍ Join the Conversation

What do you think? Did I miss anything?

Do you have a pond? Have you noticed the effects that the nitrogen and oxygen cycles can have on one?

Is there anything that surprised you about these two cycles or maintaining a pond ecosystem?

Share with us in the comments! We want your insight!

Leave a comment

Happy growing!

Tanith

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

Building Natural Ponds: Create A Clean, Algae-Free Pond Without Pumps, Filters, Or Chemicals by Robert Pavlis (via New Society Publishers)

If you want to learn more about natural pond design, and the above seems really freaking intimidating, then grab a copy of his book. He’s a Master Gardener that runs GardenMyths.com and a Facebook group on natural ponds, so he really knows his stuff. And he shares how he’s learned to design a natural pond so it just works with little maintenance.

Beaver Ponds With More Sediment Store More Nitrogen, Simple Mapping Reveals (via Advancing Earth and Space Sciences)

As I mentioned above, there’s another way that ponds can deal with nitrogen — bury it in sediment. Beaver ponds can be very good at it, since they can create areas with slow-moving water and lower oxygen that are ideal for this process. The researchers found that just by mapping the zones of beaver ponds by water flow, pond depth, sediment thickness, and sediment size, land managers can get a pretty accurate idea of how much nitrogen is being stored and how much is being passed on down the river without expensive testing.

How beavers are changing Arctic pond and stream microbiology (via National Park Services)

Likewise, researchers have found that the rebound of the beaver population in Alaska have had a profound effect on waterways. Beaver ponds favor aerobic conditions. Tundra lakes and rivers without beavers favored anaerobic conditions, which are more likely to release methane and contain pathogens.

Farm ponds can act as greenhouse gas sinks in the Canadian Prairies by Kerri Finlay and Jackie Webb (via The Conversation)

Conventional farming isn’t that great for the environment, and the Canadian Prairies is pretty much fields of wheat and canola. You’d think that farm ponds here would be pretty polluted. But these two researchers found that 2/3 of the farm ponds they studied actually had low levels of nitrous oxide, particularly when ponds were deeper (at least 3 feet deep). The lower oxygen levels in the deeper regions provides the ideal conditions for aerobic bacteria to consume nitrous oxide. Algae soaks up the rest of the nitrogen.

They also found a weird quirk of the prairies also lowers the carbon dioxide found in lakes and ponds. Our water is alkaline. The pH causes carbon dioxide to be converted into bicarbonate and carbonate.

Deeper ponds also help farmers store more water for our famously dry summers.

Natural ponds remove nitrogen more effectively than stormwater ponds by Brad Buck (via University of Florida IFAS)

Research by PhD student Audrey Goeckner has confirmed that it’s better to have an ecosystem than just water storage when dealing with nitrogen runoff. She confirmed that natural ponds are more likely to remove excess nitrogen from the water while stormwater ponds had the same chance of either removing or storing nitrogen.

Earliest life may have arisen in ponds, not oceans by Jennifer Chu (via MIT News)

We may also have ponds to thank for all life on earth. An MIT study from 2019 believes that ponds are more likely than oceans to be the source of the first life forms, since it was more likely to contain enough nitrogenous oxides to react with other compounds. In deeper bodies of water, like the ocean, nitrogenous oxides would have been too diluted.

Surface Waters: Ammonium is Not Ammonia – Part 1 by John Sawyer (via Iowa State University Extension and Outreach)

While this is an older article from 2008, it also highlights something important — it’s very important to get chemical names right. This article was written about a newspaper article that caused a lot of uproar about high “ammonia” levels in Iowa water systems. As I mentioned above, ammonia is lethal to aquatic life, and ammonium is less so. Ammonium (NH4+) is ionized. Ammonia (NH3) is not. The pH level affects the balance of ammonia and ammonium, and that can fluctuate based on temperature.

It’s actually really hard to test for just ammonia, so laboratories test for ammonium-N plus ammonia-N, and monitor the pH level.

In this case, there was no jump in ammonia. Details matter!

Subscribe now

Hello Gardenerds,

I may have inadvertently saved my ripening tomatoes.

Despite having a red squirrel digging beneath the straw in my potted plants and scampering along my gutters, it has not yet touched my tomato plants.

This, according to many Reddit posts when I started looking up red squirrels, is a miracle. They apparently love to take a single bit out of ripening tomatoes, then abandon it. Sometimes even having the gall to line them up on your patio.

Now, there could be a few reasons for this.

I planted marigolds (Tagete spp.) around my tomato plants, and apparently squirrels don’t like their smell. (Something has devoured my one and only pepper, and that’s planted in a container away from the marigolds.)

Or maybe they just haven’t hit my tomatoes yet, although hopefully that’s not the case. ***knock on wood***

But as I learned about the perils of red squirrels and vegetable gardens, I found one particular anecdote. Squirrels don’t just take out a single bite out of malice.

They take a single bite because it’s scorching and they’re desperate for water. And tomatoes are full of water.

(My pepper, not so much. But whatever got at it actually ate most of it.)

So what did I do? Well, when the unseasonably cold and wet month of June turned into the blazing heat of July, I set out a 12 inch diameter pot saucer under the shade and filled it with water.

I’d done it for the pollinators, adding some small stones and wood for perches. And for the birds, although I haven’t seen them use it yet.

But possibly, just possibly, I saved my tomatoes.

So let’s nerd out about wildlife ponds.

4 difficulty levels of wildlife ponds

You don’t need to go full blown pond to help wildlife. But I see people talking about one specific type of wildlife pond, when I’ve been happy to discover there’s a whole range, going from something as easy as a tray of water to something as challenging as an inground pond. You can scale up.

Level 1: Tray of water

You don’t need to get fancy or buy anything to help wildlife. So long as you have some kind of shallow receptacle (like a pot saucer or a shallow bowl) and some rocks, then you’ve got a wildlife pond.

The rocks provide places for pollinators to reach the water safely, so the waterline shouldn’t go above them.

My husband empties and refills the tray every day or two (giving some thirsty plant a drink) to keep mosquitos from hatching in the still water. When I gardened in a sunny patio, the sun evaporated the water every few days so all I did was refill it. (Incidentally, I’ve also found that there’s always 2 or 3 dragonflies hunting in my yard.)

If you don’t have any water sources in your garden (whether it’s in your yard or even on a balcony), go do this now. I’ll wait.

Got it? Great.

If you already have a water source, that’s fantastic. ⭐⭐⭐

Level 2: Birdbath

I separated this one from level 1, because while a bird bath is essentially just a pretty tray of water on a pedestal, buying a bird bath is more expensive (although you can DIY one for much less money).

You can also upgrade your bird bath with accessories that move the water to make it easier for birds to find your bird bath. They can hear the water as they’re passing by. (Moving water also helps with mosquito control.)

Drippers add fresh water to your birdbath one drip at a time. You can set one up to add fresh water from a hose, or recirculate the current bath water. While there are some aesthetic options, you can also easily DIY one by using an old milk jug (cleaned, obviously) hanging over the bath with a pinprick hole in the bottom.

Solar fountain pumps and bubblers add a spray of water by recycling the water. You can either buy a birdbath with the pump incorporated, or get a kit to add one to an existing birdbath.

You could also get a birdbath heater, but this is highly controversial in the birding community. The idea behind a birdbath heater is that it keeps a bit of water accessible to birds throughout the winter. But if the bird takes a bath, the water will freeze their feathers and keep them from being able to move.

Proponents for heaters say that birds are smart enough to know not to bathe when it’s cold.

Proponents against heaters say that birds don’t know about technology. If they find warm water, then they’ll think it must be warm enough to bathe. There have been reports that birds have done exactly this. Even if you don’t see them, they may have been able to fly just out of view before the cold set in.

Chilling.

Personally, I would not use a heater. I live in an area where ice and snow routinely bury water sources for weeks at a time. If the birds that overwinter here haven’t adapted, then they really shouldn’t overwinter here.

If you’re in an area where there’s usually water available but is undergoing an unexpected severe cold snap, then the decision gets more complicated.

If you decide to get one, cover up the birdbath so that there’s only enough room for birds to drink but not to bathe. Laying boards across the fountain with a small gap is an easy way to do this. And get one from a reputable source. Some cheap heaters found on Amazon practically boil the water.

Level 3: Container pond or mini-pond

Now we get to a gardener’s challenge — aquatic plants! A container pond is exactly what it sounds like: a pond that’s in a container. I’ve seen so many cool videos on YouTube with these. All you need is a bucket (you could also use an old sink or a half barrel), some bricks, and some aquatic plants.

Bricks inside the container provide shallow regions and steps so that if any creature should fall in, they can climb back out again. They can also make shelves for keeping plants at their preferred depths. Depending how high your container is off the ground, you may also want to add steps outside the container so little critters can easily get up there.

You also have enough room to add emerged and semi-emerged aquatic plants. The plants will really help amphibians and insects by providing places to land on, places to lay their eggs, and places to hide. The plants use up excess nutrients to keep algae in check. (I dive deeper into aquatic plants in an upcoming essay.)

Also, at this level, you have the option to keep outdoor fish. Lots of people think that fish are strictly necessary to keep mosquitos under control, but that’s not absolutely true. Other wildlife (like tadpoles and dragonfly nymphs) love the taste the mosquito larvae, while fish also will happily eat those other wildlife.

I got really excited about keeping fish in the mini-pond I’m planning. But my husband put the breaks on that. He worried that losing fish would break my heart. And he’s right.

Fish in a wildlife pond will have a short life. You can’t provide a drinking water source for birds without opening up your fish to predation.

Which I think I would be okay with so long as they’re outdoor “wild” fish. But there’s no way that I can overwinter fish outside. It gets much too cold. And I’d feel terrible if a fish that lives for several years (or, like goldfishes, up to 15 years!!!) lived such a short life. So I’d try to bring them indoors during the winter, and get attached them to them. (I get the same way about potted perennials and it hasn’t worked out yet.)

So no fish for me. If I need more control, I’ll use mosquito dunks.

If you do use fish, check that the fish you’re getting aren’t invasive. Even though they’re cut off from local waterways, birds could accidentally get fish eggs on them when bathing in your pond, or grab a fish to eat, then accidentally bring them over to the local waterway.

And always start with a few fish. Too many fish can wreak havoc on the balance you’re establishing. (More on that in the next essay.)

Level 4: Inground wildlife pond

Now, if you have enough space to dedicate to a pond, then you can build yourself your very own inground wildlife pond. This is the most time, labor, and cost intensive project on this list, which is why it’s level 4. But it’s actually a lot easier than you’d think.

The same considerations of the container pond apply here, just on a bigger scale. You want shallow areas and plants. You also want to add plants around one side of the pond for safety and to hold moisture to ensure that amphibians don’t dry out as they come and go.

You will also need to get on board with algae. There’s a lot of advice out there (one book I’m reading being one of them) that implies that any algae at all will absolutely kill your pond. Algae will deoxygenate the water, so anything living in the pond will suffocate. Which is true, at high enough concentrations.

But algae is a food source for the wildlife you’re attracting. It’s part of the ecosystem. You just need to keep it in check, like by:

• Keeping enough plants to use up excess nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus in particular) in the water.

• Using rainwater to fill your pond, as nitrogen and phosphorus sadly end up in tap water.

• Not using high nitrogen fertilizers or any fertilizer containing phosphorus where it can run off into your pond (few people ever need to add phosphorus to their soil anyway).

• Shade the water, either with floating plants or with trees, shrubs, or grass, as algae loves the sun.

As well, you’ll want to have plenty of dead wood in the pond to provide habitat.

If you want a pristine pond with fish, I suggest getting into aquarium aquascaping. You can see the submerged plants and fish better, and you don’t have to fight or endanger herons to keep your fish from being eaten.

But do these tiny wildlife ponds actually make a difference?

Yes!

We get obsessed with doing big things, saving big wildlife habitats while letting smaller ones get “developed”. Or we think that nothing we do could possibly make a difference, so why try at all.

But tiny ponds make a difference.

A 2023 study in Urban Ecosystems employed conservation-minded residents in Hertfordshire, UK, to observe and record what species were visiting their garden water sources (including everything I just talked about here). The researchers did the same for local urban lakes. And while they found that there were some differences in species (large aquatic birds like ducks preferring lakes for obvious reasons), there wasn’t a significant difference in visitation rates. The researchers concluded that these wildlife ponds are an effective conservation action.

It may even be better to have a few smaller ponds than it is to have one big pond. You can use a combination of these different levels to provide water sources that appeal to more wildlife, like having a water saucer for pollinators and a birdbath for birds and squirrels.

Wildlife ponds are possibly the one time where “if you build it, they will come” is actually true. After all, most landscapes used to be dotted with small ponds, both temporary and permanent. Wildlife is used to searching out water sources.

✍ Join the Conversation

Do you have a wildlife pond in your garden? Have you ever considered it? Are you interested in aquatic plants?

Come nerd out with us in the comments!

Leave a comment

Happy growing,

Tanith

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

📽 So Simple To Help Birds and Bees - Mini Pond or Pond In A Pot For Your Small Balcony or Garden by Amy Kelly

This is the video that got me excited about this idea. While I knew about setting out a dish of water for insects, I didn’t realize it would be so easy to make it into a “pond” with aquatic plants.

Water in the city: visitation of animal wildlife to garden water sources and urban lakes by Esther K. Gibbons, Paul G. Close, Bronte E. Van Helden, and Nicola J. Rooney (via Urban Ecosystems)

The research study I cited above. A few highlights include:

• They adjusted the data based on water volume (a large urban lake is going to serve more wildlife than a water tray)

• While there wasn’t much of a difference between water sources in the broader categories (all wildlife, small wildlife, small birds, and insects), they did find differences in species

• Damselflies and dragonflies were more likely to visit urban lakes than garden water sources

• Bees, wasps, moths, and butterflies preferred bird baths to urban lakes

• 50% of respondents had more than one water source in their garden.

How does wildlife find garden ponds? by Chris Baraniuk (via BBC)

If you build a wildlife pond, they will find it. But how? Flying animals and insects look for the light bouncing off the water, and listen for the sound of moving water. Dragonflies look for the differences in polarised reflected light to find the right dark or light pond to lay their eggs in. Salamanders can smell water.

Pond life: facts about pond habitats, plants, and animals by Sylvia Myers and Lisa Hendry (via Natural History Museum)

These two writers share the diverse life found in UK ponds, from the water scorpion (which breathes through its tail) to horse leeches (which eat slugs, not blood). Yes, a bit alarming at times, but very interesting tidbits.

📽Building a Wildlife Pond by Stefano Ianiro

Wildlife photographer Stefano Ianiro recently bought a tract of land in Quebec that he’s been transforming into the ideal wildlife habitat. He has many great videos, including a documentary-length video that shares his first year living and observing there, that are well worth watching. You will learn a lot!

In this video, he builds a vernal (or seasonal) pond. In the spring, runoff from the original trout pond fills the vernal pond to allow amphibians to breed free from the threat of fish.

DIY: A solar drip for the birds by Vic MacBournie (via Ferns & Feathers)

Vic MacBournie explains how she converted a birdbath with a dripper into a solar-powered recirculating drip that won’t keep overflowing her birdbath.

Pristine Ponds Be Gone! by Nancy Lawson (via The Humane Gardener)

If you want to provide a wildlife pond for amphibians like frogs and toads to breed, then you need to let go of the aesthetic fish pond. Fish eat tadpoles. You also need to allow fallen leaves and wood to stay for habitat and some algae to build up for food sources.

Subscribe now

Dear Gardenerds,

Do you know who we don’t really talk about?

Leafcutter bees.

When you hear “Save the Bees,” most people think about the honeybee.

Then mason bees got their time in the spotlight, and you can even find mason bee houses in all the big box stores.

But this little powerhouse of pollination? No so much.

Before my latest rabbit hole, I’d only really heard of leafcutter bees once. My local museum’s native prairie garden had a large solitary bee house in the middle of the garden and an explanatory sign. And then I promptly forgot, only really thinking about mason bees (and to a lesser extent, bumblebees).

That deficiency, I’m happy to report, has been thoroughly rectified.

So let’s nerd out about leafcutter bees.

6 Things You Didn’t Know About Leafcutter Bees (Megachile spp.)

🐝 #1 Leafcutter bees get their name from their practice of “cutting” round circular pieces from leaves.

If you see that a plant’s leaves have large half-circles neatly cut from them, then you can be sure that you’ve been visited by a leafcutter bee. Don’t worry — the cut doesn’t harm the plant. And it’s not even particularly bad looking.

Leafcutters don’t eat the leaves. They use the semi-circles to make nest cells to breed the next generation of bees. They prefer soft, flexible leaves such as roses, buckwheat, clover, and alfalfa.

Once the circle has been cut out, the bee flies back with it between her legs. She needs at least 15 pieces for the initial cell. She’ll then pack the cell with pollen and nectar before laying an egg on the provisions before closing up the cell with more leaf pieces.

Some leafcutters, like the alfalfa leafcutter bee, only use leaves. Others use multiple materials, including mud and petals.

While there are ways to dissuade leafcutter bees from using your plants if aesthetics is your primary goal, you could also just take it as a happy sign that leafcutter bees love your garden and you’re helping these pollinators survive.

🐝 #2 Leafcutter bees are more efficient pollinators than honeybees

Don’t get me wrong — honeybees are great at pollination, and you get honey (if they’re your hives). But if pollination is your concern, then you really want leafcutters instead.

The difference comes down to biology. Honeybees store their harvested pollen in sacs on their hind legs. Leafcutter bees carry pollen on a hair-like structure called a pollen brush on their abdomen. Just look at how much pollen is on that leafcutter in the photo! Because it’s on their body and not just in sacs, more pollen ends up being distributed between flowers.

According to Crown Bees, leafcutter bees pollinate 95% of flowers they visit, while honeybees only pollinate 5%.

The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education’s guide Managing Alternative Pollinators says that in good conditions, a single leafcutter bee can visit 25 flowers a minute.

🐝 #3 Leafcutter bees emerge in the warmer summer months

Mason bees prefer the cooler weather of spring, and by early summer, they’ve disappeared, leaving behind the next generation tucked away in their cells.

That leaves a gap that leafcutters are happy to fill. They prefer the hotter summer months, so they’re especially good at pollinating summer fruits and vegetables like tomatoes and squash.

Leafcutters need temperatures to stay above 15C (60F) for fifteen days to even hatch. The warmer it gets (to a point), the faster the eggs hatch and for larvae to reach the prepupal stage.

In fact, alfalfa seed growers recommend using both honeybee hives and alfalfa leafcutter bees. If it’s hot, then leafcutters can efficiently pollinate more alfalfa. But if temperatures are unexpectedly cooler, then honeybees can pick up the slack.

🐝 #4 Leafcutter bees are used as commercial pollinators for alfalfa, blueberries, and more.

Honeybees aren’t the only commercial livestock in the bee world. Alfalfa leafcutter bees (Megachile rotundata) are raised and their cocoons harvested to send around the world to pollinate many crops that honeybees just aren’t as good at like their namesake, alfalfa.

Alfalfa has a weird petal shape, with two fused bottom petals called the keel that cover the stamen. Once the keel gets slightly separated by a probing insect, the stamen column ends up slamming into the large standard petal. Unfortunately, this “tripping” can end up hitting the bee with some force. Honeybees learn to avoid alfalfa when they can. Alfalfa leafcutter bees (often shortened to ALB), and some other wild bees, have learned how to trip them safely.

Honeybees will also abandon their intended crop when something more appealing becomes available. They don’t want to pollinate onions when they could be collecting from sweet clover.

The alfalfa leafcutter bee originated in Eurasia, and was accidentally brought to North America in the late 1930s. By the 1950s, these bees had naturalized in the northwest US, and alfalfa seed farmers had noticed that their seed production had tripled.

But why not use leafcutters native to the region? Because alfalfa leafcutters are gregarious — they’re happy to live close to other alfalfa leafcutters in man-made bee houses, which makes managing them simple. Other leafcutters tend to drift off and make their nests elsewhere. As alfalfa field got bigger and margins that allow for native bee nests became smaller, farmers needed a bee they could raise.

Alfalfa leafcutters also form their cocoons loosely, making it easy for farmers to remove the cocoons for storage. The sunflower leafcutter (Megachile pugnata) was investigated in the 1980s for commercial use, as it also nests gregariously, but it uses a closed-cell system with mud and leaves, so it needs to be managed like a mason bee.

The majority of leafcutter bee producers are also alfalfa seed growers (not alfalfa growers, who harvest alfalfa before it starts to flower for the highest protein content). They raise the bees for their own seed and sell off extra cocoons to other farmers, providing them with another income source.

But alfalfa leafcutter bees aren’t just used for alfalfa. They’re used for blueberries, canola, clover, and more — all the plants that honeybees just don’t like to do.

🐝 #5 Most commercially used alfalfa leafcutter bees are bred in Saskatchewan, Canada

While the US used to have a thriving alfalfa leafcutter bee industry, it collapsed in the 1980s due to new parasites and diseases, particularly chalkbrood (Ascosphaer aggregata). Canadian producers were able to manage these new threats better, and so most ALBs sent throughout North America come from Canada, and in particular my home province of Saskatchewan.

Raising alfalfa leafcutters is easier in places with a short hot period. In places with longer summers, alfalfa leafcutters may hatch a second generation that same summer, instead of waiting to hatch next year. There’s less forage available, and the larvae may still be in cells when temperatures dip too low for them to survive. But if the bees do get to emerge, then they may chew through bee cadavers contaminated by chalkbrood, thus infecting them. This doesn’t happen as much when you only have one generation a year.

Many American producers continued to use solid wood with drilled holes, which could not be cleaned, and so chalkbrood spores took hold. Some producers adapted by redrilling the holes to remove dead bees or retiring the boards on an annual basis, but this takes a lot of effort.

Meanwhile, Canadian producers had started using wooden boards with grooves as early as 1962. When closed, the grooves would form tunnels. When open, they could easily be inspected and cleaned.

These days, Styrofoam nests are standard on the commercial scale, but they make it too easy for parasites and predators to get in (woodpeckers can make quick work of Styrofoam), not to mention that they’re not very sustainable. Canadian producers also use a lot of fumigants, pesticides, and disinfectants, which is also not ideal.

🐝 #6 Most commercially-available solitary bee houses aren’t good for raising solitary bees.

Okay, okay, this isn’t just a leafcutter bee fact, but I thought it was very important to include. While you can find solitary bee houses at big box stores, they’re terrible to raise bees in.

If you’re going to raise leafcutter bees, then you need a house that:

• you can take apart to harvest cocoons and remove parasites (instead of using bamboo straws or solid wood with holes),

• has an overhang over the tunnel entrances to allow bees to take off or land while protected from the rain,

• has tubes 6 inches or longer (short tubes encourage solitary bees to lay only male eggs, since they lay females deeper into the tube where they’re more protected), and

• has tubes at ideal sizes (leafcutters prefer 6 or 7mm while mason bees prefer 8mm).

Solitary bee houses also tend to have the same problem that people who live in subdivisions do — all the houses look the same, so it’s really easy to walk into another house. Some people have taken to painting their bee houses to add some visual differences.

So yes, you know me — this is why I went deep into the rabbit hole. I wanted to find a good bee house at an affordable price so I could help conserve solitary bees too. Then I saw one comment that made me reconsider.

They said that there’s no evidence that solitary bees are having problems finding their own nesting sites (except in large commercial fields, like in alfalfa seed production).

They’re having trouble with pesticides and a lack of food.

So if you can provide a lack of the former and an abundance of the latter, then you’re golden.

This is true even if you’re trying to get them to pollinate your vegetables. You need to give them an abundance of food to get them to stick around, especially when your vegetables aren’t flowering.

However, I don’t think this is entirely right. After the weirdly cold weather this spring (here in Saskatchewan and in the UK), many people are worried about the lack of pollinator sightings. As weather patterns heave, I think solitary bees could use help keeping their cocoons at the right temperature so they can hatch at the right time.

✍ Join the Discussion:

Let us know:

Have you heard of leafcutter bees before?

Have you seen leafcutter bees around your garden? Have you spotted circles cut out of your leaves and wondered why?

Do you “raise” solitary bees? Do you have a solitary bee house in your garden?

I’d love to know. Either join the discussion in the comments to share with all of us Gardenerds, or you can share just with me by replying to this email.

Leave a comment

Happy growing!

Tanith

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

Where are the bees? It's quiet out there, but there's still hope... by (via )

UK wildlife gardening expert Kate Bradbury reminds us how important small actions are (as I said above, no pesticides/herbicides and lots of flowers) and that we need to press our elected officials to protect our pollinators. (If you’re in Canada, the David Suzuki Foundation started this campaign to tell local policymakers to get rid of bylaws limiting habitat gardens.)

Before You Release Leafcutter Bees (via Crown Bees)

If you’re thinking of releasing leafcutter bees in your backyard, check out this guide by Crown Bees on everything you need to think about before you order your first cocoons. (You don’t need to order leafcutter bees — the same advice can be used for housing native bees.)

To Grow a Right-Sized Bee, Give It a Right-Sized Nest by Andrew Porterfield (via Entomology Today)

Each solitary bee group has their own preferences when it comes to tube sizes, but there’s often conflicting studies about leafcutter bees. This study found that while leafcutter bees would nest in a variety of different tubes, the size affected the size of the resulting bee and how many emerged. In the biggest 9mm, leafcutters laid their cocoons side-by-side.

Alfalfa Leafcutting Bees Like Nests That Face North, Study Shows by Edward Ricciuti (via Entomology Today)

While honeybees like their hives facing the warmth of the sun, surprisingly, alfalfa leafcutter bees do not. This is especially helpful since summers have been blazing, and while leafcutter bees like warmth, nest temperatures above 26.7C (80F) can cause mortality. So put your leafcutter bee houses shaded to the north.

The Quest to Find the World’s Largest Bee by Oliver Milman (via Smithsonian Magazine)

The largest bee in the world is actually a type of leafcutter. It uses termite mounds for its nest. But the rediscovery of this bee thought to be extinct has had negative consequences. It’s a good reminder that we need to be protecting habitats, and also not buying/collecting rare insects.

Business downturn forced producers to think small by Sean Pratt (via The Producer)

When alfalfa seed prices tanked, these leafcutter producers sought a whole new market for their cocoons.

Subscribe now

Dear Gardenerds,

Moving to a new house is always full of surprises, no matter how much you pour over the details (and boy, did I ever).

The bathroom door opens to the wrong side so you have to squeeze against the toilet to get out.

The sconces in the living room (that you didn’t know existed) throw the exact right level of warm light for a cozy evening.

The neighbors’ tree covers your backyard in so much white fluff that it looks like a blizzard blew through.

That last one sounds a lot more romantic than it actually is.

The fluff clung to my tomato plants and clogged up the marigolds. It coated the volunteer lettuce in my raised planter. When I harvested the bolting lettuce, I picked off a lot of the fluff, and so did my husband, and we still ended up needing to ditch the lettuce because there were still so many sticky strands left on the leaves.

It’ll be over soon, my husband would tell me after the fluff had been raining down on us for a week already. I arched my eyebrows in disbelief — I could still see big balls of fluff dangling from the branches.

It would be another week before the storm ended.

This has to be a boom-and-bust kind of tree, I thought, like a rowan tree. I don’t know if I could handle it if it was yearly.

Then, I finally did my homework. I googled “what tree has fluff seeds?” I thought I’d have to dig through to find the answer.

Nope. The first thing that came up was eerily accurate, from the description of the cotton-like seeds to the near-constant scattering of gnarled twigs and triangular leaves all over my garden.

The neighbors had a cottonwood tree.

And this tree is widely regarded as a nightmare.

And no, it’s definitely not a boom-and-bust kind of tree. It goes to seed. Every. Single. Year.

What are cottonwood trees?

If you’ve ever lived close to a cottonwood, you probably already have at least a vague idea of what I’m talking about. Perhaps a traumatic flashback or two. Before moving, I’d seen the fluff around, mostly in the gutters. I’d probably seen the tree a lot. I just never thought to identify it.

Cottonwoods are a type of poplar tree. They share many of the same qualities, like its triangular leaves that “talk” as the wind blows through them. While there are cottonwoods native to Europe and western Asia, the three you’re most likely to encounter in North America are all native. These are the:

1. Eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides), found throughout most of North America and is one of the most common trees. Plains cottonwood (Populus deltoides ssp. monilifera), which is probably what my neighbors have, is a subspecies of Eastern cottonwood.

2. Black or Balsam cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa), found west of the Rocky Mountains from Alaska to Baja, California. Their leaves have fine teeth, unlike other cottonwoods.

3. Fremont cottonwood (Populus fremontii), found in California and through the southwest USA and northwest Mexico. Their leaves have fewer and larger serrations.

Why is the cottonwood tree the stuff of nightmares?

When I first started searching for these cotton fluff seeds, I’d wondered why anyone in their right mind would plant this tree at all — it can’t do anything right.

Well, to be fair, it is an excellent shade tree, and that’s mostly why it has found its way into urban yards. It grows super big and super fast, so in just a handful of years, your whole yard is under pleasant dappled shade.

But trees that grow fast don’t grow strong. The wood is especially brittle, which is why it graces my yard with a sprinkling of twigs every time the wind blows. While it grows thick, meaty branches, those branches are much weaker than you think they would be. A good storm can bring them down onto whatever structure is underneath.

Cottonwoods love moisture and send their roots spreading far and wide to find any scope of water, even if its in your foundation. The roots are so thick at the base of the tree that you can’t grow anything else.

Its budding leaves are coated in resin. If you have a dog or small child playing outside during the winter and early spring, the resin will coat anything that steps on or grabs them. I hear it’s murder trying to get the resin off paws, and can be brutal on a dog’s soft pads.

Then, after the budding leaves unfurl, female trees burst into voluminous puffs of fluff. In Beijing, where they planted hundreds of thousands of native poplars, the resulting storm becomes a dangerous blizzard that obscures vision. Even the single majestic female next door puts off enough fluff to cover my yard in just one day (never mind the rest of the two week period, although that varies). Allergy sufferers cringe in fear.

These seeds are not just fluff. They’re sticky fluff, designed to fly on the wind, then settle on a patch of soil (and plants, screen doors, and air conditioners) and cling to it with dear life. I shudder to think how many pollinated seeds are in all of that fluff that settled in my yard.

And possibly the worst part of all, that blizzard of fluff is highly flammable. I came across so many news stories of fire departments warning people not to set the fluff on fire. It’s worse than trying to burn your lawn (PSA: don’t do either. You don’t want to be standing there in front of a smoldering ruin that was your or your neighbors’ house, telling the firefights, “It just went out of control so fast.”) The best way to remove the fluff is by raking or letting the rain soak it in.

Oh, and also it’s a pest and disease magnet. I haven’t dived deep into that yet, but I know they attract aphids. Now I know why there’s been so many ladybugs hanging out on my tomato cages.

That’s all to say, that this one tree has added several nightmare scenarios to my list of homeowner worries. At least I have good fire insurance.

How I came to love the cottonwood

Given all that in just my initial research dip, you might expect me to march up to my neighbors and demand that they cut down the tree.

Fortunately for my social anxiety, I’m a Gardenerd. Of course I didn’t stop researching there.

Cottonwood fluff doesn’t cause allergies — it relieves them

So let’s start with one of the biggest myths about them — that the fluff inflames pollen allergies. I have to say, even just looking out my window at the fluff-fall, my delicate sinuses twanged.

But let’s remember basic botany. They’re seeds, not pollen. They’re the part that gets pollinated by the pollen. The real culprits, tree and grass pollen, have been blowing through for weeks before you get cottonwood fluff. You just can’t see it.

The fluff seeds are probably not great to breathe in (being big, sticky fluff balls), but they’re not the cause of your suffering. Like how goldenrod takes the fall for ragweed, it’s just visible when the real culprits strike.

In fact, the fluff actually cleans the air of pollen. Cottonwoods don’t just hope that the wind happens to blow in the right direction. Its seeds have a negative electrical charge. Pollen on the wind has a positive charge. Thus, the fluff seeds suck up pollen as it flies through the air.

And not just poplar pollen (which routinely interbreeds). All pollen. Despite the snowstorm, the backyard air was probably the cleanest its been since winter.

Thank you, cottonwood fluff.

(I also came across suggestions to plant male cottonwoods instead of female to lower allergens… But the male trees produce the pollen, so... 🤔)

Cottonwood resin is anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving, just like willow bark

Cottonwood is actually related to willow, and that sticky resin that people loathe having to remove from dog paws actually contains Salicin, a precursor to Salicylic acid. Salicin relieves pain, even at doses lower than aspirin and with fewer gastrointestinal problems than aspirin or NSAIDs. It’s also anti-inflammatory. Even today, people collect the buds to brew a pain-relieving balm.

Here, the brittleness of the twigs are actually a boon. You don’t have to climb up into one of these giant trees to harvest the buds. You just wait for a wind storm, then collect all the broken twigs from the ground. As a bonus, you’re not taking the strongest twigs and branches that the tree needs to survive, only the weakest.

Also like willow, you can stick the twigs into water to enhance rooting for cuttings, which I’m particularly looking forward to.

Cottonwood is a floodplain forest foundation species

Cottonwoods love riverbanks and floodplains, and honestly, that’s where they thrive best (not in my neighbors’ yard, although it seems to have done really well for itself). And that’s where they’re most useful.

In fact, those roots that are such an obstacle in an urban setting are great on riverbanks. They hold the soil against erosion. The stabilized soil provides places for other plant life (and more cottonwoods) to colonize. According to the National Park Service, cottonwood trees even pioneer new shorelines.

The roots also shelter aquatic invertebrates and fish. All the branches falling off help to improve water clarity, filtering soil and dirt sediment from the water.

In fact, whole ecosystems rely on cottonwoods.

Bees love cottonwood resin

You know my fascination with bees, so probably this (along with the pollen-clearing) tickled my fancy the most.

Honeybees love cottonwood resin. You can’t keep them away from cottonwood trees. Cottonwood resin (that sticky stuff on budding leaves) is the best ingredient for them to make propolis.

Propolis is made from resin and beeswax, so it has a malleable but waxy texture that bees can use to seal up any gaps in the hive. When beekeepers struggle to open up a hive, and there’s a creamy orange unguent that was gluing it shut, that’s propolis.

Propolis is antimicrobial, so it helps the hive fight off infections, disease, and even mites. If a mouse crawls into the hive and dies, and the bees can’t get it out, then they entomb the mouse in propolis so that its decomposition won’t hurt the hive.

Some solitary bees make their nests using resin too.

And do you know who appreciates the cottonwoods’ early pollen? Bees! It can be a critical source of food early in the season.

Birds love cottonwoods too

I spotted my first Northern Flicker last month.

I’ve seen plenty of Downy Woodpeckers, and possibly even one of the larger Hairy Woodpeckers, just hopping up elm trees here in the city. But I’d never seen a Northern Flicker outside of my bird book.

But it was unmistakable, with his black crest, black dotted tawny feathers, and red patch on the back of his head. He surveyed the yard from the safety of the fence, then flew up and disappeared into the branches of the cottonwood.

Northern Flickers (among other woodpeckers) make their nests by excavating dead or diseased cottonwoods and pines. This cottonwood tree isn’t particularly dead or diseased, but it does have a large nook. The Northern Flicker might be nesting there, or it may have been just checking it out for a potential nesting site.

Northern Flickers are far from the only birds who love to nest in cottonwoods. Eagles and Osprey nest at the top of older, larger cottonwoods, while great horned owls will take over other nests. Grouse will winter between its roots during the winter to eat the buds exposed throughout the winter. Wild turkeys like them for night roosts.

As the tree decays and insects feed on the exposed cambium, woodpeckers rush in to feed on the insects and further excavate nesting cavities. Abandoned nesting cavities become nests for other birds and mammals. Larger hollows have even been used by black bears. Saplings provide food for deer.

The much maligned fluff seeds also provide a source of food for hungry ducklings.

As someone who loves spotting birds, but can’t go birdwatching, a tree that especially attracts birds is lovely indeed.

Cottonwood is culturally important to people, too

Cottonwoods are important to many Indigenous peoples. As I mentioned above, the resin makes a pain-relieving, anti-inflammatory balm, and its bark and leaves are used to treat wounds and swelling. The buds also make a bright yellow dye and can be made into glue.

The Hopi, Navajo, and Pueblo tribes use the roots for kachina dolls, masks, and ceremonial objects. Likewise, Plains tribes carve sacred poles and sun dance artifacts from trunks and branches.

Cottonwood trunks are also used for dugout canoes and the cambium can be fed to horses in winter when other forage can’t be found.

Immigrants travelling across the plains and prairies also treasured the cottonwood trees, even if their descendants would go on to call it a garbage tree. It would be the only tree that you could see for miles. I know that when I did endurance walking, spotting this one lone tree amidst the prairie (that I now recognize as a cottonwood) always brightened my soul.

I’m still hesitant about all the fluff gluing themselves to my lettuce. I’ve found no evidence that it’s toxic (the only suggestion is that it may be mildly toxic in large proportions, but no research to back it up), and people eat the cooked catkins.

(If you have any advice on how to easily remove the fluff from my plants, please reply to this email or leave a comment to let me know! I can’t find anyone talking about this.)

But the fluff cleans the air of pollen, and it brings Northern Flickers to the yard. It provides for bees. When the wind brings down branches with buds, I now know to collect some to make my own pain relieving balm (and leave others for wildlife).

They’re not the best tree to plant in the middle of a city. But if you’ve got the space, or an existing stand, they’re well-worth protecting.

Overall, this so-called “trash” tree is a win.

The morning I started writing this, I heard the buzz of chainsaws. At first, I thought it must be a weedwhacker. But as I checked out the back window, I spotted a ladder against the cottonwood tree.

Were my neighbors really going to chop down the cottonwood tree just as I started to appreciate it? Did they read read the articles condemning this tree due to its fluff, and miss all its positive qualities I had just learned about?

(Admittedly, the writer in me marveled at what a poignant end for this essay.)

But don’t worry. They were just trimming a branch. That seems like a good sign that they will take good care of this tree.

💬 Join the Conversation:

Do you live near a cottonwood tree?

Is there any so-called “trash” tree that you think is actually a treasure?

Do you know how to easily remove cotton fluff from plants?

We’d love to know! You can either reply to this email to share directly with me, or join the conversation by leaving a comment on the public post.

Leave a comment

Happy growing!

Tanith

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

Misunderstood & Maligned: Rethinking the Cottonwood by Cameron Turner (via Mortise & Tenon Magazine)

Since cottonwood just doesn’t play nice with power saws, cottonwood has been relegated to plywood. But Cameron Turner reminds carpenters that with hand tools, you can still create something wonderful.

It All Falls Down: A plummeting cougar population alters the ecosystem at Zion National Park by Eric Jaffe (via Smithsonian Magazine)

Cottonwoods might be foundational, but they can be affected by other parts of the ecosystem. Environmental scientists found that the lack of cougars in Zion National Park resulted in a decline of cottonwood trees.

Cottonwood: Winter’s Balm, First Medicine, Water Keeper by Elise Krohn (via Wild Food and Medicines)

If you’re interested in making cottonwood bud balm for yourself, Elise Krohn provides an excellent guide. She’s the one who clued me in on what a boon all that twig-scattering is.

Cottonwood Survey & Restoration Fund (via Elk River Watershed Alliance)

Wild cottonwoods are declining. The Elk River Watershed Alliance is working to restore cottonwoods in 4 locations.

Volunteers Grow Cottonwoods For Restoration Projects by Kim Chmura (via Boise River Enhancement Network)

Kim Chmura shares the lessons they’ve been learning as they struggled to grow black cottonwood saplings for restoration projects.

Flickas Gotta Dance by (via )

Bill Davison recounts one particular encounter with a Northern Flicker and a hawk (much more dramatic than mine), and shares many more fascinating facts about these birds.

Subscribe now

Hi Gardenerds,

As I’ve shared before, my main goal with my new garden is to make it easier each year to grow food.

While I would love to be able to come up with complicated annual planting plans to maximize yield — and be able to deliver on it — my chronic illness just doesn’t allow it. One spring, I felt so bad that I didn’t even get any seedlings started. My husband and I picked some up from the local grocery stores, but even then, we had definitely cut back on my already low expectations for that year.

So like any good Gardenerd, I picked up Eric Toensmeier’s Perennial Vegetables: From Artichoke to ‘Zuiki’ Taro, a Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious, Easy-to-Grow Edibles.

Over 100 perennials! Surely, I’d find lots to fill my garden plots.

Except… I live in Canada Zone 3 (approximately Zone 2 to Americans). I have an average 111 frost-free days a year. Winters routinely drop below -30C (that’s -22F).

When I flipped to the book’s list of perennial vegetables by climate type… Well, you can probably guess. While most other North American regions have at least a page-and-a-half of suggestions, my region had about 3/4 of a page. Most of them were perennials that need protection to survive.

But what I did find surprised me. I could even be a bit more selective. I focused on:

• Cold-hardy plants that can overwinter even when it gets to -30C (although they may need some help),

• Unusual/uncommon plants that are unusual or unheard of, unlike asparagus and rhubarb (both plants I want to have anyway),

• Plants that are easily swapped with annual vegetables, so you don’t have to learn new recipes, and

• Plants I’m genuinely excited to try out for myself.

(Incidentally, all three will work great in the one dappled shady spot I have in the backyard. Win-win-win.)

So let’s nerd out!

3 cold-hardy perennial vegetables you (probably) haven’t heard of

🌿 Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus)

While no one’s quite sure who Good King Henry is named after (there not being many King Henrys that were ‘good’), we do know that it’s been grown as a vegetable in Europe for centuries. Pretty much all parts are edible: the leaves make a good substitute for spinach, the flowers are eaten like broccoli, and their shoots are eaten like asparagus. (And they’re cooked the same way.)

Three swaps in one perennial — and to boot, Good King Henry produces for longer than all three.

The shoots start coming up before asparagus and continue a few weeks after asparagus ends. Unlike spinach (and other bolting greens), the leaves don’t change flavor with flowering, so you can continue harvesting.

Good King Henry also has few, if any, pest problems.

To grow Good King Henry, plant in full sun to partial shade. It’s not picky about soil, but it does prefer rich soil. It’s not drought tolerant, so you’ll need to keep watering it through dry times. If you get hot summers, plant it where it’ll get some shade, especially during droughts.

Harvesting and cooking is pretty easy. Since Good King Henry is related to spinach and chard, it’s high in oxalic acid, so always cook before eating.

Harvest shoots when they’re 8 inches tall and cook like asparagus.

Cook greens like spinach and mix with other greens, as they have a bold, even overpowering flavor.

You can even cook the seed like quinoa, although soak them overnight (like quinoa) to remove the saponins.

(Yep, after years of not soaking quinoa, I just discovered that they have saponin in them — which is only mildly toxic, but still good to know.)

🌿 Caucasian Spinach (Hablitzia tamnoides)

This leafy perennial is from the Caucuses, thus its (unfortunate) name. This seems to be a more unknown plant, as it’s not even in Toensmeier’s book, but the few gardeners who grow it absolutely love it.

Like Good King Henry, Caucasian Spinach gets an early start and makes a great hunger gap plant. It grows tall — climbing up any structure its planted against up to 10 feet (3m) tall.

And it prefers the SHADE! In fact, the more sun it gets, the more it seems to struggle. If you have a shady spot where anything else struggles to grow, then you’ve got a great spot for Caucasian Spinach.

It prefers alkaline to neutral soil, and it struggles in acidic.

Sadly, they are also susceptible to leaf miners. 😥 Even though I had a rough time battling them for the fate of my spinach and chard in Ontario, I haven’t seen them in Saskatchewan. (Yet.)

Unlike Good King Henry and many other greens, “Caucasian Spinach tastes wonderfully inoffensive,” as Jessi from Not A Horticulturist describes it. That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, but it means you can fill your plate with it and not be biting back on sharp flavor.

Use the leaves just like you would spinach, either raw or cooked. The spring shoots can be harvested as well.

🌿 Wood Nettle (Laportea canadensis)

While Stinging Nettle is mostly regarded as a weed (and a noxious one at that), we are starting to recognizing it’s value, both in the garden and for our health. Their deep roots bring up nutrients, making them highly nutritious as compost or as salad greens.

But Stinging Nettle has earned is noxious weed title by being very invasive and causing allergic reactions to anyone who accidentally brushes up against it. (Its sharp hairs inject painful chemicals into bare skin, but the chemicals and hairs are neutralized by cooking for a few minutes).

Did you know that there’s a nettle native to North America? It’s even a bit gentler, with fewer stinging hairs. (Some people have said that it’s actually more stinging, since they can handle stinging nettle without gloves but get stung by wood nettle, so your mileage may vary.) You still should handle it with gloves until its been cooked, and plant it out of the way especially if you have kids and pets running around.

Wood Nettle prefers shade and spreads more slowly than its cousin stinging nettle, so it’s easier to keep contained in the garden. It grows shorter, maturing at 2 to 4 feet instead of 3 to 6 feet. It has a milder taste than its cousin, more like spinach. And it starts to come into its own when Stinging Nettle is starting to wane, so if you already have a Stinging Nettle patch, Wood Nettle can extend your nettle season.

Extra Credit

Perennial Vegetables Are a Solution in the Fight Against Hunger and Climate Change by Virginia Gewin (Civil Eats)

Not only can perennial vegetable store CO2 in the soil and reduce tillage, but they also can be more nutritious than annual vegetables. I also like that they mention trying to pick perennial vegetables that are similar to grow and can easily swap in for things they’re already eating (like I am). Food is such a personal, intimate part of our lives — a comfort, even. It’s not easy to switch up your diet just because some expert tells you that you should.

Caucasian spinach by Jessi (Not A Horticulturist)

There’s not much out there about this perennial oddity, but this article by the Caucasian Spinach enthusiast behind Not A Horticulturist provides a lot of useful information.

The renaissance of Good King Henry by Alys Fowler (The Guardian)

Guardian garden columnist Alys Fowler gives advice on how she grows and enjoys Good King Henry.

Ye Olde Kitchen Garden by Michael Tortorello (New York Times)

Another older article (apparently 2011 marked a resurgence in Good King Henry), Michael Tortorello interviewed historical house museum gardeners on the best (and worse) historically important edible perennials.

Wood Nettles by Alan Bergo (The Forager Chef)

The Forager Chef offers tips on the best ways to cook wood nettles and preserve them for later use along with 2 recipes.

The English Farmers Who Harvest Rhubarb by Candlelight by Corey Buhay (Smithsonian Magazine)

Okay, so I wasn’t going to talk about rhubarb (but maybe I should have, as I’m really intrigued that it was more expensive and valued than opium and saffron in the 1500s), but then I found this article, and knew I had to share. This is how British farmers have been growing the sweetest rhubarb since the 1800s.

✍ Share with us:

What perennial vegetable do you think everyone should know about? Have you grown it?

What perennial vegetables are on your wishlist?

Leave a comment

Happy growing!

Tanith

In case you missed it…

• Let’s Nerd Out About… Cultivated Mushrooms

• Let’s Nerd Out About… Microgreens

• Let’s Nerd Out About… Saving Water

P.S. If you’re looking to put those fresh garden herbs to work this summer, check out ’s collection of tasty herbal drink recipes.

Subscribe now

Hi Gardenerds,

When I was a child, I hated mushrooms.

It wasn’t because I didn’t like the taste. Like most kids, I decided that I didn’t like it because I didn’t like the look of it. It had gills. Anything could be in there.

It didn’t help that people would tell me that I should eat mushrooms because you are what you eat. They meant something about how mushrooms eat sunshine (they don’t; plants do), but if you are what you eat, then I’d become gills. Ew.

I’ve only recently learned that there’s an actual word for this: trypophobia. Trypophobia is the disgust of repetitive patterns or clustered holes, like those in honeycomb or mushrooms.

As an adult, I still don’t like the gills or the rubbery texture. I know mushrooms are good for me, not because they eat sunshine (which they still don’t), but they’re packed with nutrients, including Vitamin D. They have a distinctive unami taste that I’m not use to, so my husband hides dried shitake mushrooms in sauces. With my permission, of course.

I even once enjoyed oyster mushrooms, when a vegetable delivery bin accidentally gave us some. (I still don’t like button mushrooms.)

Yet, somehow, I’ve managed to fall into the world of mushroom cultivation thanks to YouTube (once again). It showed me a video on how to easily grow oyster mushrooms in a 5 gallon bucket. Great! Growing mushrooms may just be a low cost alternative to buying expensive factory-raised meat, especially if I can just reuse the same oyster grow kit to continually raise more mushrooms.

Let me tell you. If you love to fall down research rabbit holes, then you’ll love mushroom cultivation. I’ve spent weeks in research mode, looking at everything from mushroom kits to hobbyist level cultivation to farm-scale. Even getting a handle on all the terminology takes quite some time.

Luckily, researching and being exposed to so many photos of mushroom gills has helped with my trypophobia, as these other mushroom cultivators have found (there are photos of mushroom gills and pores).

If you too have tryphophobia, there are photos in this newsletter with gills. And pretty much every link.

Something to learn…

Mushroom cultivation is pretty unique in that it’s mainly exploded in the past twenty years, as technology has allowed for people to start experimenting with growing mushrooms at home. For the past century, we used to only get button mushrooms in grocery stores because that’s pretty much all that we could reliably grow on a safe, commercial scale. Now, anyone can grow oyster mushrooms on their kitchen countertop.

And incredibly, most of what’s used today has been developed by people growing mushrooms in their own home. Most gourmet mushroom farms seem to use the same technology, just on a larger scale.

Some basic terms that will help you understand include:

1. Contamination — the bane of mushroom cultivators. The same conditions that encourage mycelium to grow also grow a bunch of other unwanted things, like mold and rival mycelium. Contamination is when you get something you don’t want growing in your substrate.

2. Inoculate — to introduce mycelium to a substrate. This could include introducing a liquid culture to grain, or introducing grain spawn to a fruiting block.

3. Substrate — what the mycelium grows on and eats.

4. Pasteurized Substrate — bulk substrates like wood chips and straw that are brought up to a temperature that will kill many contamination factors (mold, fungal spores, etc) but not all. They’re easy for newbies to do without specialized equipment (like with the 5 gallon bucket example above), but since these substrates are less nutritious, they produce smaller yields.

5. Sterilized Substrate — bulk substrates that include highly nutritious food for mushrooms that are brought up to a temperature that kills all contamination factors. Sterilizing substrates means using a pressure cooker since only a pressure cooker can raise the temperature above boiling.

6. Liquid Culture (LC) — a nutrient-rich solution used to grow mycelium that reduces contamination. You can make your own or buy liquid culture in syringes to inoculate your own grain spawn.

7. Grain Spawn — nutritious grain used to grow mycelium from the liquid culture stage so that it’s ready to be introduced to a fruiting block.

8. Fruiting Block — a pasteurized or sterilized substrate that will get the mycelium ready to fruit into mushrooms. This is essentially what a mushroom grow kit is

!!! Always cook mushrooms when eating! Some mushrooms can be eaten raw (like button mushrooms), but many (like morels) are toxic while raw. Better safe than in the ER.

Here’s a couple easy mushrooms to start with:

Oyster (Pleurotus ostreatus)

• Difficulty level: Easy

• Cultivation Methods: Versatile

• Taste: Depends on the variety, with Kings meaty, yellows sweet, and pinks seafood-like. Cook before eating.

Oyster mushrooms are most home growers’ first gourmet mushroom. They’re just so easy and prolific to grow even without ideal treatment. They grow vigorously, outcompeting other possible contaminations in pasteurized substrates, so new growers don’t need to invest in pressure cookers and laminar hoods. You can easily break up an oyster mushroom kit to add to new substrate to keep it going.

Once my grow kit starting pinning, it seemed to change every time I looked at it. Every few hours, it seemed to have already grown. That’s how fast they grow.

But that vigorous growth comes with a downside: high spore load.

When I first researched and bought my first oyster kit, I hadn’t seen any mention about the dangers of spores. I only found out this tidbit after I’d started growing my kit.

Most people immediately think about your house — are oysters going to worm their way through every wood joint? Well, probably not. Oysters only grow in wet, rotting wood, so if they do take hold, they’re only exposing existing problems.

I’m more concerned with the potential harm to human health. Now, one oyster grow kit harvested at the right time isn’t a problem. If you’re growing a few kits at one time or you’re sensitive to fungal spores (or have a body like mine that gets easily overwhelmed — you want me to also deal with what now? *sigh*), then you need to take precautions. These precautions are doable, but also make it harder to get started. You can also grow them outside if the weather cooperates.

Fortunately, someone has bred a sporeless grey oyster that’s actually sporeless, and it grows just as well as regular oyster mushrooms. It’s available in a ready-to-grow kit in some places, but not in Canada (as far as I’ve found — if you know of a source, please let me know!). I found a few places that offer it as a liquid culture, so I’m going to buy some sterilized grain spawn and try it out myself.

Oysters are being explored for mycoremediation, as they’re capable of adapting to and breaking down many toxic chemicals (like motor oil) and even plastic. If you do experiment with mycroremediation, don’t eat the mushrooms as the toxins might end up in the caps.

Wine Cap/King Stropharia (Stropharia rugoso-annulata)

• Difficulty level: Easy

• Cultivation Methods: Outdoors

• Taste: Spring and fall mushroom with a meaty texture and potato flavor. Cook thoroughly and eat in moderation (not more than two days in a row) as too many can cause indigestion.

Wine Caps are the easiest mushroom to cultivate outdoors and a great companion in a vegetable garden. Unlike most other gourmet mushrooms, they can take a bit of direct sun, so long as they have some leaf cover from your other plants.

Having grown up being told never touch or eat wild mushrooms because they’ll probably kill you, growing mushrooms outdoors is something that I’ll need to work up to.

But Wine Caps can be great for your garden, even if you don’t harvest them. They speed up the composting process of wood shavings and straw. While you can create a separate garden bed for them, they also grow as easily in wood shaving covered walkways between garden beds or under berry bushes.

They’re also prolific for the amount of work you need to do setting them up. Unlike oysters, which have to be respawned into new pasteurized substrate after a few fruiting cycles, you just need to keep refreshing the wood shavings or straw. They fruit twice a year in spring and fall, or basically when you get cooler, wetter temperatures.

Something to read…

📔 DIY Mushroom Cultivation: Growing Mushrooms At Home For Food, Medicine, and Soil by Willoughby Arevalo

Blog and forum posts are very helpful, but it’s really useful to see all the steps laid out. I liked this book by Willoughby Arevalo as a really thorough overview, including the mushroom life cycle and many different cultivated mushrooms. The written instructions can be a bit hard to follow, and I found that watching videos for each part made it much more straight forward.

How to Grow Mushrooms — The Seven Basic Steps by FreshCap

A quick overview of the full process of growing mushroom. But you can technically jump in at any step. Grow kits allow beginners to start at step 6: pinning. Buying inoculated grain spawn can allow you to start at step 4: spawning in fruiting container. And liquid culture allows you to start at Step 2: inoculating grain spawn.

Seven Stages of Cultivation by Cornell Small Farms Program

If you want even more details and data than the above article, this article has you covered.

🔬Mushrooms seem to be able to regulate their own temperature by David Nield

One question I have about trying to grow my oysters outside is what happens when it inevitably gets up to 30C (86F)? Turns out that mushrooms can keep themselves 2.9C (5.2F) or even more cooler than their surroundings so long as they have water. (Researchers still don’t know why, though.)

🔬Fungi Physics: How Those Spores Launch Just Right by Kenneth Chang

Mushrooms don’t just drop their spores straight down and hope for an errant wind. Mycologists knew that spores launched themselves, but not until this study did they know how.

🔬Ecologists use mushrooms to detoxify soil and water after wildfires by foodtank

I’ve had trouble finding more rcent information on this, but in 2019 and 2020, local groups have been using mushrooms for toxin remediation after the wildfires in California.

🔬Plastic eating mushrooms: a viable solution to plastic decomposition by Kayla Vasarhelyi

Mushrooms could also be the answer to decomposing plastics in landfills and the ocean. While oysters can break down plastic, Pestalotiopsis fungi can break down polymer polyester polyurethane (PUR) in oxygen-free conditions (like in a landfill or underwater).

🤲What can fungi teach us about healing trauma? by Katarina Sabados

As Sabados grows oyster mushrooms for the first time, she makes connections between how mycelium grow with what we humans need to heal trauma.

🍳 Golden Oysters: A sunny shroom that morphs into different textures by J.B. Douglas

But what do you do with all the mushrooms? J.B. Douglas has a couple posts about different oyster mushrooms and how best to cook them, including this one featuring golden oysters. If you like foraging or expanding your culinary ingredients, join his weekly newsletter.

Something to watch…

🎥 Mushrooms For Years To Come!! by The Wilsons on Wilson

I really like this Youtube channel (their videos are stunning), and I think they should get more attention. They’re fixing up an abandoned farm in BC with a load of friends. Most farming videos just show the farmers, but they have a whole community of help. In this video, they’re inoculating shitake and wine cap mushrooms for outdoor cultivation.

🎥 How much does a low tech mushroom farm cost? by GroCycle

I’m always interested in seeing the costs of different farming/gardening methods, and this video by GroCycle shows the estimated costs of four different scales of mushroom farming, from hobby to large-scale commercial production.

🎥 Do Mushrooms Need Light To Grow? by GroCycle

Another video by GroCycle, showing the effects of light starvation on fruiting mushrooms. This is a thing I initially got wrong when setting up my mushroom kit.

🎥 Dance of the spores by Planet Fungi

Closeup slow-mo video of mushrooms releasing spores.

🎥 This is what a REAL functional mushroom farm looks like by FreshCap Mushrooms

This video shows the very different conditions used to farm medicinal mushrooms reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) and cordyceps (Cordyceps militaris). This is actually part of a regular mushroom news show by FreshCap Mushrooms, and they have a lot of interesting mushroom-related stories.

✍ Share with us in the comments:

Do you cultivate mushrooms? Have you ever thought about it? Do you hate mushroom gills too?

Leave a comment

Happy growing!

Tanith

In case you missed it…

• Let’s Nerd Out About… Microgreens

• Let’s Nerd Out About… Saving Water

• Let’s Nerd Out About… That Carbon Footprint Study

P.S. Here’s my own oyster mushroom growing journey. For a week or two, it did nothing. I started misting more. Once it started pinning, it seemed to have grown every time I looked at it!

They became a delicious mushroom risotto, thanks to my husband. I might harvest them earlier, though, as I think some of the mushrooms were tougher/chewier from age. The others were delicious. Smaller harvest, better texture (to me, anyway).

Subscribe now

Hi Gardenerds,

I HAVE DONE IT! I HAVE GROWN MICROGREENS!

Ok, ok, that may seem like an overreaction. Everyone always says how easy it is to grow microgreens at home, even if all you have is a window.

And it’s not that they’re wrong. I just couldn’t see the point of growing microgreens that could be grown faster and easier as sprouts.

Way before I ever got into gardening, I grew my own sprouts. At a local organic store, I found my first Mumm’s sprouting kit with seeds, a little mesh square, and an elastic band. (This was before microgreens was a big thing.) In just 5 days, I had a ball of delicious sprouts. So easy. So quick.

As I got into vegetable gardening, microgreens exploded in popularity. So many people swore by growing microgreens. It’s so easy. You get bountiful harvests. You can sell them and make so much money. They’re so healthy. They’re so much easier than sprouts.

So I tried it. I already had a microgreen seed blend that had been included as a free gift in a seed order, and bought some jute mats. (I also bought grow lights on sale, but that was more for growing seedlings for the garden.)

But honestly, what I got was pretty much the same size of sprouts, only without the roots (so actually less). And it took a week longer while also needing grow lights.

Why bother to grow microgreens when you can grow sprouts easier without having to buy and throw out potting mix???

Don’t get me wrong — sprouts can be harder to grow, especially if you’re in a humid area. Mold is a problem. Since I live in a dry area (and have learned to taper off watering as the sprouts get bigger), I have an advantage. I also use a sprouting cup from Mumm’s, instead of glass jars, since it has more airflow.

But back to microgreens. I had the wrong approach. Anything I could grow as a sprout, I should grow as a sprout. Instead, I should keep microgreens to much bigger species like peas and sunflowers. Something worth growing, and something that can help with the ever-increasing cost of nutritious food.

Then YouTube algorithm delivered me a solution: a video by On the Grow that showcased their hydroponic-ish grow method, using peas. And suddenly, I realized a bunch of things I’d done wrong. I needed to weigh down the peas for three or four days, then do blackout for another day. I needed to use much more seed than I used before. I had all the things I needed — a jute mat, pea microgreen seeds, and 10x10 flats.

So I tried again. This time, I got an okay first flush, and an even nicer second flush. My husband loves them, and so do I. I tried growing sunflower microgreens without a hemp mat, as I’d always been told that they can just grow their roots together. And it worked. So now I’m experimenting.

Something to learn…

You see a lot of articles about how to grow peas, and sunflowers, and radish, and broccoli microgreens. And all for good reason. They’re easy (or the easiest) and the most popular to grow. But we’re not here to learn about the usual suspects. So let’s jump into learning something fun — unusual microgreen varieties.

Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)

If you read the Rare Honey edition, you know I like my buckwheat honey. But this flowering plant also makes more a very delicious microgreen (or so they say). While most microgreens have a very sharp flavor and are best used as a topping, Mumm’s Sprouting Seeds say that they taste like lettuce.

The only thing is that you shouldn’t eat a ton of them. In high doses (like when juicing), they can make your skin more sensitive to light. So it’s not a great lettuce-alternative, if you eat a lot of salad.

Tricolored Chrysanthemum (Glebionis carinata)

I actually grew the cousin to this (Glebionis coronaria) one year, intrigued by the idea of having an edible plant and beautiful chrysanthemum all in one. The flowers didn’t really turn out that well, and the growth was a little weedy (probably my fault).

But the tricolored chrysanthemum has gorgeous bicolored petals. Not that you’d see them if you’re growing them as microgreens. As a microgreen, they apparently taste like carrots. They also have a bushy growth.

Shiso (Perilla spp.)

Shiso is another unusual plant in North America. It’s more commonly found in Japanese cuisine (although it originated in China). Different types of Shiso are used for different purposes, like using green Shiso as a garnish for somen, sashimi, and tofu dishes. And it is bitter.

As a microgreen, it’s said to have a mint-basil flavor with a bit of anise and cinnamon to it. As noted by reviewers at True Leaf Market, they need heat to germinate (80F), so they’re probably better suited to growing in the summer if you don’t have AC going.

Something to read…

Microgreens aren’t just a fad or a luxury. They hold the possibility of cost-effectively addressing food insecurity, especially in food deserts. No, they won’t fill your stomach, but they can close the gap on nutritional deficiencies from not having access to fresh, quality vegetables.

🤲Wind- and solar-powered greenhouse takes off in Gjoa Haven

Growing vegetables in space is a lot like growing vegetables in the northernmost Canadian territory of Nunavut. You have little light, you need to ship everything from great distances at high expense, and you have to wait a long time for extra parts. That’s probably why the Canadian Space Agency wanted to set up a test site in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut.

This project is in partnership with local community members, including hiring local people to manage the site, growing what the community wants, and giving the produce to local elders.

They also grow microgreens, although that’s not highlighted in this particular article. But I wanted to include this one instead of others because it focuses on the community-side of the project, not the space travel side.

🔬New Science Is Backing Your Windowsill Microgreen Endeavors

We know that the nutritional content of full-grown vegetables can vary widely based on environmental conditions. But unlike their full-grown counterparts, the American Chemical Society has found that there’s only a small difference in nutritional value between commercially produced microgreens and those you grow on your windowsill.

🔬 Biofortification of microgreens with zinc could mitigate global ‘hidden hunger’

A Penn State research team has been experimenting with microgreen kits as a source of food in case of emergency. During disasters, access to fresh, nutritious food is limited or non-existent. Microgreen kits can be easily deployed to residents to grow their own. The kits don’t replace meals, but make sure that people get more nutrients.

They also discovered that soaking seeds in a zinc sulphate solution before sowing resulted in higher amounts of zinc in the resulting microgreens. (Zinc deficiency is common worldwide, especially in areas with poor diets.) The solution also reduced phytic acid, which means people can absorb more of the nutrients already available in the microgreens.

🤲 Teens For Food Justice Tackles Food Insecurity Using At-Home Farming Kits for City Youth

This is just one example I found of students setting up clubs to both learn how to grow microgreens and hydroponics, while using the results to help with food insecurity in their communities.

Another non-profit funds school programs to teach Bronx students how to grow microgreens.

🌏 How They Grow Bean Sprouts In Vietnam

Mung bean sprouts have been grown and used in many Asian cuisines for centuries. When I was in Vietnam, I was lucky to get to tour a local farmer who showed us how they grow sprouts. Not short sprouts like you commonly see taught here in North America, but full on sprouts with sprouts and cotyledon.

(I’m currently trying to grow these (without sand) but haven’t quite gotten it yet.)

Something to watch…

🎥 Yellow Pea Microgreens - Kratky vs Bottom Watering!? by On The Grow

The video that got me back into trying to grow pea microgreens. I really enjoy the On the Grow channel as they set up actual experiments with controls to figure out the best growing methods.

I’m not sure I’d ever want to buy a silicon grow mat, though, as I’ve heard that there’s fiberglass in many of them. If you cut them or have an exposed edge, the fibers can get out. And just because a listing doesn’t say there’s fiberglass in it, doesn’t make it true. I’m going to stick with the jute mats for now.

✍ Share with us in the comments:

Do you grow microgreens or sprouts? What are your favorites? What tips would you give a newbie like me?

Leave a comment

Happy growing,

Tanith

Did you miss?

P.S. There’s another “new” entry into indoor growing that has some of the same hype as microgreens. To find out, stay tuned for the next email!

Subscribe now

Hi Gardenerds,

I’ve just been enjoying a week of on-and-off again rain here in my little prairie city.

And while that’s not exactly newsworthy in most places (it is spring, renowned for being damp), we don’t get many days of gentle rain. Usually, we get intense, short, soil-pounding rainstorms and lightning. Not exactly a good day to curl up with a book and hot chocolate, or even to replenish water stores in the ground. Most of the water gets washed off.

Water is always a concern. I’ve been growing in containers for the past few years, which need to be watered a lot more. This year, I’m growing my first inground garden that’s actually mine.

Yes, through a confluence of fortunate circumstances and help, I was able to buy my first house with two small yards that get lots of sun. I’m going to be transforming these yards into edible gardens over the next five years. I want to grow it gradually while thinking about the long term. (I think I’m finally entering the gardener stage of not needing to do all the things all at once, which is a relief.)

(I’m thinking about doing standalone updates on my gardening efforts. Would you be interested in that? Let me know in the comments.)

So I’m thinking hard about conserving water. Despite the rain, the Farmer’s Almanac has predicted another scorching hot and dry summer here on the prairies. We didn’t get as much snow as we normally do either. So I’m researching and making plans. (And yes, we’re getting rain barrels.)

Something to learn…

The best way to improve water use in the garden is simply choosing drought tolerant plants. But sometimes you don’t have a choice. I want to focus on tomatoes, zucchini, and winter squash in my first year, and while there are varieties that are more drought resistant, I didn’t have time to start my own seeds this year. So I’m mainly relying on seedlings I can buy, which limits my choices. (Fortunately, I scored some locally grown tomato seedlings for CDN $3/seedling. Quite the steal! They look in amazing health as well.)

As I was researching different systems, I’ve found a few “new to me” tools that can be really handy but aren’t that widespread yet.

Olla (pronounced oya)

Sure, there’s tons of plastic tube automatic watering systems that you can buy and spend hours setting up. Or you can go with a technology that’s been working for thousands of years in arid regions around the world.

An olla is an urn made out of unglazed clay, much like a terracotta pot. You bury it in the soil with just the opening exposed so you can add water into it. As the soil dries out around the olla, it pulls water from the olla into the soil. The soil stays consistently moist.

The Olla Company says that olla can save 50 to 70% water over hand watering. Plus, you don’t have to deal with clogged drip lines or evaporation, and you don’t need to add more plastic to your garden.

The downside is that a proper olla vessel is pricey, but you can also DIY them, which is what I’m doing this summer. I found two DIY methods, one by gluing together 2 clay pots and the other just using a pot with a saucer for a lid.

That second version takes up more surface space, but the saucer can double as a water bath for birds and pollinator insects. They need water too.

Blumat Watering Spikes use the same principle, although they use a gravity feed instead of storing water inside the spikes. I’ve used these, and they work great. You can set them up on your indoor plants before going on vacation. They also have big outdoor irrigation sets.

Rain Barrel First Flush Diverter

Kevin at Epic Homestead was the first person I saw talking about first flush diverters (video is linked down below). Most people just hook up their rain barrel directly to the downspout. Which means that everything that was on the roof (like bird poo) ends up in the rain barrel. Which brings up some contamination issues.

It should be fine as long as the water doesn’t splash any edibles and/or you wash them before eating.

If you’re storing rainwater for days or weeks, you should treat it with 1 oz of chlorine bleach once a month and let stand for 24 hours before using. The University of Connecticut Extension Office also recommends getting the rain barrel tested for E. coli.

But Kevin used a manual first flush diverter in his setup. So whenever it rains, he waits for a few minutes, then runs out into the rain to switch the diverter. The first flush of rain carries most of the contaminants to be emptied in the ground. The rest of the rainwater can then be collected.

Having to run out to switch the diverter leaves much to be desired, though. Especially, again, if your rain is short and intense. And I’m energy-limited to boot. So I wondered if you could buy an automatic diverter. I thought it’d be something high tech and expensive (and probably hooks up to Alexa or Google Assistant).

But no.

There are automatic first flush diverters, and they use simple physics to work.

The diverter adds a ball in a long vertical tube with the bottom end blocked off between the downspout and the rain barrel. The initial rain follows gravity and fills up the tube. The ball rises with the water. Once the water fills the tube (the first flush), the ball blocks the tube. The rest of the water then flows to the rain barrel. (This website has a great diagram.)

Brilliant.

Edit: Since writing this, I found another article that suggests that most rain harvesting experts don’t recommend automatic first flush diverters. They say you only really benefit from a first flush diverter if it hasn’t rained in a while. Plants love the organic matter that gets flushed. And you have to empty the tube. (The model I saw allows the first flush to slowly drip away.) They’re also harder to clean.

I still think the principle is pretty cool, though.

Tree Ring Irrigation Contraption (TRIC)

Trees make cities cooler and hold onto moisture, but even the most drought-hardy trees still need a drink. Drought stresses out a tree, making them more prone to pests and disease (and vice versa).

But how do you most effectively and efficiently water a tree? It isn’t by the base. You can find small ring watering devices and diapers, but they only water near the tree’s base. The roots circle too closely, and that causes way more problems.

The best place to water is actually at the edge of the canopy. And you want to water 2 to 3 feet deep to discourage shallow roots. Deeper roots will always have more access to water. You can use watering spikes to help you, or you can use the Tree Ring Irrigation Contraption. This is a kit/plan designed in collaboration between the CA Center for Urban Horticulture at UC Davis, UCANR, and Ewing Irrigation. You just need to buy the parts and assemble.

Another take on this idea is the irricade. I had a bit of trouble researching this initially, as Google was having a meltdown, but basically about 9 years ago, a conservancy group in California adapted an Australian idea to use barricades to drip feed historic trees. Here’s a short news clip showing the system.

Something to read…

To Grow Sweeter Produce, California Farmers Turn Off The Water by Alastair Bland

Tomatoes seem to be a water hungry crop that needs to be watered consistently. But some farmers in California have been experimenting over the years with a dryland farming technique that results in sweeter tomatoes that chefs love.

Can Dryland Farming Help Growers Endure Increasing Heatwaves and Drought? by Lela Nargi

This Modern Farmer article goes more into the indigenous methodologies of dryland farming, particularly using native crops in Southwest US.

Farming Like the Incas by Cynthia Graber

At the height of the Incan empire, Incan terraces and irrigation systems covered a million hectares of land. They were lost in the Spanish invasion. But over the past few decades, researchers and farmers have been rebuilding the systems to improve water use, yields, and resilience in the face of climate change.

Mexico’s Floating Gardens Are an Ancient Wonder of Sustainable Farming by Peter Yeung

Likewise adapting to the environment and not the other way around, the Aztecs built chinampa (“floating islands”) to farm in the boggy, lake-filled valley around Tenochtitlán, which would become Mexico City. Chinampa have been in use for a thousand years, and provide local organic food grown in the suburbs of a capital city. Not only is it profitable for local farmers, but it’s incredibly efficient in water use and high in nutrients.

Are Flooded Fields and Orchards the Answer to California’s Groundwater Shortage? by Jennifer Cole

Between 40% to 60% of California’s water supply is groundwater. But with so many dry years, groundwater reserves are being depleted. Some almond farmers are flooding their fields during the dormant season to recharge groundwater stores.

Something to watch…

I tracked how much water I used in my 100 sq ft garden for an ENTIRE year…here’s what I learned by The Desert Garden Experiment

It’s always wonderful to come across actual data when it comes to home gardening techniques, and I learned so much from her video and experience in an arid region. She uses a few different watering methods, and is the first person to recommend using a water meter. They can be inaccurate (so I’m told, I haven’t used one yet), but I think that like her, I’ve always veered toward overwatering. She also has a video (with an affiliate link) on her experience using olla in particular.

5,700 Gallons of RAINWATER STORAGE at the Homestead! 💦💦💦 by Epic Homesteading

As I mentioned above, this is the video (I’m decently sure, as he has a few videos at different stages of his system) where I found out about the manual first flush diverter. Kevin also mentions that greywater systems have a better return on investment than rainwater — but that’s because he’s in San Diego. If you’re in a northern region like me, and your laundry is in the basement, rainwater capture is the better investment.

Grey Water Systems: Shower, Bathroom Sink, and Laundry Conversion! by Epic Homesteading

He also has videos on his grey water system, how he’s set it up, and how it performs.

How I designed my permaculture food forest: A step by step guide by Goldifarms

Okay, this is veering off the topic of irrigation, but she has the clearest explanation of how swales slow rain down that I’ve seen.

The Self Watering garden: How to Create a Passive Rainwater System with Dr Cally Brennan (via Canberra Environment Centre)

And if you’d like to learn more about physically adapting your garden in order to make the most of rainfall, Dr Cally Brennan breaks down different techniques and how-to’s, including how to figure out the slopes of your current garden.

Your turn: what water-saving techniques or tools do you use for your garden? What tools are you fascinated by?

Please share with us in the comments! I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

Happy growing,

Tanith

P.S. I have been using this section to include a topic-related joke, but I want to experiment a bit. Let me know what you like.

Recently, I’ve gotten into binge-watching new allotment garden videos. Allotments are absolutely amazing. You get so much room to garden, and you can even build (or inherit) structures like greenhouses, hoop houses, and chicken coops. I don’t know why we can’t do that here in Canada. (I googled this, and people say that we do have allotments, but I think they mean community gardens, which are usually much smaller small and you can’t do big structures.)

The main two I’ve been watching are:

• Seren’s Garden (South Wales): My New Allotment Plot. This is a new channel, but she does awesome vlogs. This is the video that got me started on allotment videos.

• The Tiny Garden (Ireland): First Three Days Allotmenting. She also does videos on her tiny house-side gardens, which I’m loving as well.

Just a quick update today instead of the full newsletter. Exciting things are happening in my life that I need to focus my limited energy on, so Let’s Nerd Out About Gardening will be taking a short hiatus over the next couple of months.

If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss the comeback newsletter.

In the meantime, here’s a study that you may have seen making headlines the past month. The Telegraph seems to have kicked it off with claiming that “Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than those grown conventionally.” (The rest is behind a paywall.)

I haven’t actually read the clickbait articles, since I know how sensationalized academic studies can get in the news. But after watching Gardening in Canada’s response video (she’s a soil scientist), I decided to read the actual study here: Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture.

(The University of Michigan Record also has a pretty thorough interpretation.)

Here’s a few things I noted:

• On average, yes, the urban farms, community gardens, and home gardens studied produced more CO2 per nutritional serving (their way of comparing tomatoes to lettuce) than conventional farms. But when looking at individual urban farms and gardens, some had much lower carbon footprints than conventional farming. (Only collective gardens, like community gardens, were statistically significantly higher than conventional gardens.)

• They didn’t study conventional farms themselves, but used other studies. In the U of M Record, one co-author noted that conventional farms are difficult to compete with in efficiency, since they can use monocropping with pesticides and fertilizers to get larger harvests. Even though we know that’s worse for the environment, it lowers their carbon impact. (Although I do wonder if this includes the release of CO2 from tilling up soil. If anyone knows, please share in the comments!)

• The biggest factor seems to be infrastructure. So a gardener putting in wood raised beds with a lifespan of 5 years would have a higher carbon footprint than someone putting in galvanized steel or using inground methods. Likewise, a tomato grown in a garden is always going to have a lower carbon footprint than one grown in a commercial greenhouse. But they also note that it’s not always the choice of gardeners — if their community gardens get displaced by land developers and city officials, then all that infrastructure is destroyed.

• The researchers support urban agriculture. They just want to point out the ways that gardeners and urban farmers can lower than carbon footprints, especially when that’s one of their stated goals. They also point out that urban agriculture has a lot of social benefits which can offset their larger carbon footprint. So they shouldn’t just focus on minimizing carbon footprints, but in increasing their social benefits. (Also again, carbon footprint is just one small aspect of the greater environmental impact picture.)

It’s your turn: do you consider your gardening carbon footprint? What decisions would you make to offset the impact? What insights did you glean from the study?

Share with us in the comments. We’d all love to get some more ideas.

Leave a comment

Happy growing,

Tanith

P.S. No joke this time, but here’s a hint to the next newsletter: this one growing method can help food insecurity and nutritional deficiencies.

If you haven’t already, subscribe so you don’t miss it!

Subscribe now