The spring gardening season is upon us with even more speed than it usually arrives, because regardless of what winter does, that’s the way time works: every year accelerates. So it is time that the Ville’s annual “embellissement” campaign (“embellishment,” or rather “beautification”) is coming again to many boroughs in just a few weekends.
A pepper plant I received from the garden giveaway as a seedling, once it matured and produced two peppers!
This annual event gives residents of Montreal a number of floral, vegetable, and herb seedlings for their gardens and balconies. Past entrants have been impatiens and begonias, echinacea (cone flowers), sage, rosemary, basil, and mint, and peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Always included: as much compost and wood chips as you want to take. Bring your own bags, baskets, buckets, and a wagon to cart it all away! Oh, and don’t forget your ID. You have to prove residency in the borough in which the plants are being given.
When? Well, you’ll have to check the Montreal.ca website and consult the calendar or the page for your borough, or other community listings, to find out when the “distribution” of plants is (that’s the search word to look for), but it typically happens on the long weekend in May, and for some, the weekend after that, and lastly, the first weekend in June.
I know it seems late for gettting them in the ground (last-frost date seems to be happening in April, if you’re in the city), but frankly, it takes time for the seedlings to grow up and “harden off” (acclimate to the outdoors) before they can be distributed for public planting. Though outdoor plants that are well-established are now as lush as can be, the seedlings I’ve planted are hardly ready for planting; the ones the Ville distributes have been started in greenhouses.
Read on to find out more about Montreal’s giveaways and garden resources:
Well, here we are, late February/early March! Are you ready to design the layout of your garden and get your seeds started?
For those who have space and haven’t planted a garden before, or for those who planning it anew this year, you always start with a rough plan: what to place where, and how much space and sun it will get. This will give you an idea how many seedlings you should have of each kind of plant.
I don’t always start seeds every year, and when I do, I’m almost always late at it (much later than this). It’s easy to get a little overzealous and end up tending tonnes of seedlings we have give away. Of course, you start by planting many seeds, because some never germinate, or else germinate and start, but then fail. If you have the space to add a few more good planters, extra seedlings can come in quite handy.
Pollinating flowers is a serious job. In fact, in places where pollinators have been killed off by environmental toxins, people are employed to do it. (That means a government might see it as an advantage to take a service nature does for free, and turn it into something people have to be paid to do.)
For this reason, the third week of June every year we have Pollinator Week. Its aim is promote and support pollinator abundance and diversity, in the interest of serving them better than we have (see environmental toxin above, but also, habitat loss!) – because Lord knows they serve us!
Never mind an existential necessity for us humans; that’s a lot of economic value.
How you can help
What can we balcony or yard-owners and gardeners do to help bees and other insect pollinators? Things being as they are now, even if the spring proceeds as expected (not too cool and damp, not too warm and dry), and the blooms have been on time, if there are fewer flowers to choose from, pollinators won’t be seen around all that much.
So get planting! Plant a garden, even a balcony garden, of plants that flower in succession throughout the season. Include native plants amongst your more showy flowers! It takes a matter of years (don’t let this dissuade you, it’s rather an encouragement) to get the successive blooming underway, but it’s so satisfying when you do. By mid-summer, my anise hyssop is blooming, and between that and the Joe-Pye weed and asclepia, the butterflies are well fed until mid-September.
You can also provide a shallow water source such as a dish filled with sand and pebbles and water. This lets them mud-puddle:
Nature herself also motivated this post: On a recent trip to the Adirondacks, I found a bunch of Eastern Swallowtail butterflies mud-puddling on the beach.
While I was watching these Eastern Swallowtails (27 of them!) mud-puddle at the beach, I saw a Red Admiral butterfly also doing the same, and, nearby, a Mourning Cloak butterfly:
Why do butterflies mud-puddle? Well, it’s an easy way to absorb minerals, sodium in particular, from the solution it makes in water-logged soil. For this reason, other insects also congregate around mud puddles. Just watch and see who shows up.
Male butterflies tend to mud-puddle more than females. Read more.
How can you tell the difference between a butterfly and a moth? The butterfly’s antennae look like little golf clubs. If they don’t have a terminal bulb, but are more like a whisker (or even have whiskers themselves!), it’s a moth.
Bees that pollinate: oh, all of them. But those we notice most are honeybees and bumblebees. There are also many solitary types such as leaf-cutter bees and Mason, or orchard, bees. (There are even bee mimics called hoverflies who do the same job.) Honeybees and bumblebees pollinate cultivated crops; native bees pollinate native plants. To learn more, check out the videos on the Pollinator Partnership website, put together by Burt’s Bees, Wild for Bees, and Isabella Rosselini.
Even more fascinating is CBC Ideas radio/podcast "Dancing in the Dark." If you want to learn a lot about bees' variety, language, complexity and sheer sophistication in a short time, listen to this!
It’s very important to give honeybees as much habitat (well, hives) and food (fields of crops!) as we possibly can, because of Colony Collapse Disorder. When I first heard about this mystery illness (mites and viruses are involved)—and I’m a biologist by training—I knew the basic tool we had of doing something was throw numbers at it. Sometimes, an illness or an epidemic can only be overcome by developing a natural population resistance. One requires large populations where many are lost but some survive. Natural resistance is where survivors (survivor queens and surviving males that serve them) go on to create new hives, so that the next generation’s immunity increases and fewer are lost. Natural resistance would improve the survival rates of beehives until scientists came up with good answers.
So it was with a good deal of gratitude that we saw a huge uptake in people’s interest beekeeping, because only if more of us do it, will there be more of them, for evolutionary forces to have the fastest rate of success. There is no human intervention or cure for it yet.
Urban beekeeping is also getting to be more common. In 2011, UQAM allowed hives on its roof (translation here), and a few years ago, another apiary installed some hives downtown. The Ville is not planning on regulating the practice, so count on seeing more of this, everywhere.
Those of us who can’t keep bees can still help by buying honey from local beekeepers. Look for this kind of honey at the grocery store, farmer’s markets, and word-of-mouth.
Nonetheless, there’s a reason I’m not keeping bees myself: honey bees are very competitive with native pollinator species. If we’re going to increase the number of kept hives, we also need to make sure that the native bees and other insect pollinators get as much food as possible — specifically native flowering plants, which honey bees are less adept at pollinating. And also: and sources of habitat (e.g. gardens with long grass, bare dirt, trees, and insect hotels). So while other people keep honeybees and grow fruits, flowers, and vegetables that need their pollination, I’m keeping a garden for everything else.
Let’s build a Mason bee house:
A few years ago, I created aMason bee house out of a log and bit of hardware. I got the idea because of an interesting rant on the Montana Wildlife Gardener blog against honey bees (it’s interesting — here’s a link to all of Montana Gardener’s posts on the topic of bees.) A friend’s comment also spurred me to do it.
Here’s the process, in pictures:
Start with a split log – this one has 3 sides Choose a drill bit the size of the bee—¼” or 5/16″ and 3″ long is goodDrill holes into the long-side of each face of the log. Don’t drill all the way through the wood!Space them accordingly – I chose 2″ but they may be closerA close-up – I hung it to the fence post with a wrap-around chainA rather non-descript result —but it was used within a week!
The house typically needs a “roof,” but I skipped over that part.
The Mason bee house was quickly occupied. I’ve also seen paper wasps using it as a source of fibre, gathering material for their hives. They chew up the wood and build paper for nesting cells. They’re again succeeding in occupying the upper corner of my garage door. Wasps have a place in our ecosystem, too – so I’ll leave them alone.
You can even buy bricks made to house bees, and install them in a brick wall!
Want to help bumblebees?
Bumblebees are important pollinators of native and fruiting crops. In fact, for some crops, the flowers need the particular buzz of the bumblebee to shake the pollen loose – they aren’t going to give it up for just any old insect! But there’s one bumblebee that’s landed on the Critically Endangered list, and it could use your help.
For example, leaving your yard an attended-to kind of messy will help. Let stands of grass grow tall, and leave nooks and crannies of bare soil. These are places where ground-dwelling bees can live.
The Xerces Society has a few programs for supporting bumblebee science and conservation. You can read about the threats they’re facing, but more importantly, you can help by reporting every bumblebee you see to:
Knowing the lifecycles, ranges, and habitats of the animals and insects you want to protect is critical if you’re going to be effective at preserving their populations. So another thing you can do, if you have suitable habitat or enjoy going for walks in nature, is participate in this study out of York University: https://xerces.org/2019/03/26/quest-for-bumble-bee-nests/
The study’s investigators say we currently don’t know exactly what constitutes high quality bumble bee habitat—especially when it comes to nesting. But they can give you tips on what to look for, and knowing what it looks like afield, you can report back at https://www.savethebumblebees.ca/citizen-science/.
There’s even information on The Missing Link about training your dog to help sniff out bumblebee nests, which will augment their discovery when you take your dog further afield. That’s a novel approach! If you or your dog are the type to take on this kind of challenge, do it do it do it!
My house is distinctive for the vines I have growing on it. The only other neighbours who have vines are a house on the end of a row, with a big wall to cover.
Summer 2017: Virginia Creeper on the house and garage wall
The Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) adorning my home has been here for 6 years. It’s ropey all the way to the top of the eavestrough. I trimmed it a lot the past year to stop its spread across the house and into the soffits, but spread is what Virginia Creeper does. Though to be fair, it falls back on its own, so it’s not unreasonable, and the configuration changes every once in a while. This makes it great to green-up a wall, especially if you are willing to “tutor” it across a large expanse of wall. If you don’t tutor it, it will detach and hang when it gets heavy.
For two years, I also let one climb the back wall, on the shady eastern side of the house. At the same time, I nabbed a “real” ivy plant and planted it in the same place, to have both. Parthenocissus tricuspidata “Veitchii” – Boston ivy – is not a native plant, and it’s not from Boston! Its leaves spread out row upon row – nicely, and less rambly. There’s ample room – like 10m2 – for it to spread. But it stayed stunted, so I suspected that Virginia creeper inhibits other plants. The creeper had to go.
The creeper easily climbed to my 2nd story bathroom window, but this was not the effect I wanted
In its place, I wanted to have a climber that thrived in the shade. So I bought Hydrangea anom. petiolaris – Climbing hydrangea (unfortunately, not native). This flowering vine grows upward more so than outward, and it looks like it will create boughs that support birds as well as its own flowers. It’s a slower grower than Virginia creeper and Boston ivy (giving the ivy a chance to get started), and it clings well. It should nicely fill in the rough brickwork without any overgrowth effects.
The climbing hydrangea, rooted in place on the right, with Boston ivy on the left (more pronounced). Later I transplanted the Boston ivy elsewhere, and the hydrangea really took off!
I left the Boston ivy there for now, so both are against the wall. It’s doing much better than when it was with the creeper. Next year, where I could remove the creeper from the front of the house and transplant this ivy there. I wouldn’t do that now, because I’d have to tear down the Virginia creeper just when it’s getting to the best part: the brilliant crimson it turns in fall.
Virginia creeper in the autumn, berries and all
And then again, I’m not even sure I want to replace the Virginia creeper out front, which is a native plant, after all. Maybe I’ll put the Boston ivy along the back fence, where it would cling better and be easier to control than Virginia creeper! (And that’s what I did.)
Finally I must say: It is not true that climbing vines damage your bricks. They attach to the surface by sending out little sucker pads that do not penetrate into the brickwork, and they also wind around each other. If you cut a section so that it dies, the suckers dehydrate and break off. You may have to scrape or scrub the remaining the plant matter off the surface, which is maintenance work, but it’s not damaging the pointing or whatever. Moreover, the vines help shade your home so that it’s cooler. They also give wild birds a welcome place to hang out, and berries and insects to eat. Finally, they just look nice. Stately, even.
This is a long-running “lifestyle” blog about the pleasures of living like a farm kid in an urban context. You’ll find a wide range of topics that pertain to food, crafts, energy efficiency, and DIY. There’s a big focus on ecology and wildlife because this has brought me a lot joy – but this is also the greatest potential we have of restoring some balance to nature where we live.
Given that, I’ve turned my attention to providing more content for people to switch traditional lawns over to native landscaping and green driveways and things that will support climate readiness, drought and flood-prevention, and increased habitat for biodiversity. Comments and questions are welcome!
If you’re in the Montreal region, you can also use my “Rewilding” service to landscape your property using native plants, convert to a green driveway, and prevent your windows from killing birds.
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