Bringing Life Into Your Garden

Bringing Life Into Your Garden

Once your garden is built, and your plants start growing and filling in, you’ll begin to see life start moving in. When you incorporate a few simple things into your garden, you’ll start attracting butterflies, skippers, (non-stinging) bees, beetles, dragonflies, frogs, lizards, birds, moths, and beneficial insects.

If your garden is at a school, it will give kids one more reason to be excited to come to school, helping boost attendance. There’s nothing like a school garden to motivate kids to want to learn on their own, helping them get ready for test days and making your school stand out in the community. In this article we’ll explore all of the life that your DFW garden will help support, to give you a glimpse at what you can expect from your garden in the years to come. Photo Credit: Ty Smith (CC BY-NC). The Green Anole.

The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. Photo Credit: David Alan Rogers (CC BY-NC)

Wildlife Gardening Tips

To maximize the amount of wildlife and diversity in your garden, here's a few tips:

DFW summers get hot and dry, and all forms of life need water and shade. Keeping 2-3” of mulch in the garden will keep the soil cooler and retain moisture. Insects will burrow in this mulch, creating more food for insect-eating birds.
If you can find a few logs, or even a few pieces of natural firewood, place these in the garden directly touching the soil. Beetles like to burrow into rotting wood, so this will offer them more habitat.
Insects are quite sensitive to environmental pollution, so you’ll want to reduce the use of harsh chemicals within 100 feet of your garden. That way you avoid any chemical wind drift that could harm insect eggs, caterpillars, adult insects, and the birds and lizards that feed on them.
Life doesn’t stop in the winter; it just pauses. After the fall frost (around November 20th), your plants will die back. Remember that many insects use dead stems to overwinter. So if you need to tidy up the garden for the fall, you can make a pile of stems and leave them over winter. Or keep the plants as they are for a wilder look, and prune them back around the first week of January.

The Ebony Jewelwing. Photo Credit: David Martin (CC BY-NC)

Life Needs Water

A dry garden is fine for drought-tolerant plants. But if you want critters, you need water. To offer water to your lizards, birds, butterflies, and other insects you can create a very small water feature for $40. Take a 3’x5’ rubber liner ($35) and cut it in half, so you have two pieces 3’x2.5’. With these two pieces, you can create two water features in the garden. Dig out an area 6” deep in the center, gently sloping up to 4” deep along the edges, place the liner in the area, and then top it with 2” of sand ($5). The water level will be 4” in the middle, and 2” or less along the rim, as the water evaporates. Deep enough to hold water in between rains, but quite shallow so safe for children. As the water recedes, the sand along the edges will stay moist for insects to drink from and lizards and birds can come to the edge, too.

Plant a few tall plants on the West side, to shade the water from afternoon sun. Place other plants on the north side, for more shade, and keep the south side open so wildlife can walk up to the water. Wait for rain to fill it up with non-chlorinated water. To avoid mosquitos, you can use an all-natural mosquito dunk ($8). Cut these into small pieces and toss a small piece in the water, replacing them each month, from March 1 to December 1. One pack will last you 4 years and its organic and safe for wildlife.

The Southern Leopard Frog. Photo Credit: Joshua Liverman (CC BY)

Recharging Soil Life

If your garden site is heavy clay, you can recharge the soil life with biostimulants. Molasses, seaweed extracts, earthworm castings, humates….these all rejuvenate and replenish the healthy microbes that belong in the soil, which serve as the basic building blocks of the higher food chains that feed on this soil life (like earthworms). Healthy soil = more earthworms and bugs in your garden = more birds that will come and visit. It all starts with the invisible, microscopic life in the soil. Liquid Compost can be one way to get all of these biostimulants applied a few times a year to kickstart the soil rejuvenation process.

The Eastern Giant Swallowtail. Photo Credit: David Alan Rogers (CC BY-NC)

Butterflies

With those few tips out of the way, let’s look at the 100+ species of butterflies that you can find here in DFW. If your garden provides the right host plants (for caterpillars to feed on), you will attract a wide variety of butterflies (Order Lepidoptera) including the American Lady, Cabbage Whites (small, large, Indian), Checkered White, Cloudless Sulphur, Dainty Sulphur, Eastern Black Swallowtail, Gorgone Checkerspot, Eastern Giant Swallowtail, Gulf Fritillary, the Monarch, Painted Lady, Pearl Crescent, Phaon Crescent, Pipevine Swallowtail, the Queen, Silvery Checkerspot, Sleepy Orange, Texan Crescent, Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, Variegated Fritillary, and the Viceroy, among others.

Most of your garden will provide blooming flowers that provide nectar and pollen. But you’ll also want some of your garden to grow host plants, for butterfly caterpillars to feed on. No need to have all of these host plants your first year. Just start out with a few. Parsley, Dill, Fennel, and Rue will help attract the Eastern Giant and Eastern Black Swallowtails. Milkweeds will support the Monarch butterfly. In the spring, you may be able to get free milkweed plants (Green and Antelope Horn do well in DFW as well as Butterflyweed).

As your garden grows, there are a few other host plants you can incorporate. These include plants in the Artemisia family (including Powis Castle artemisia), the Mustard family, Partridge Pea, the Sennas, the Sunflower family, the Rudbeckia family, the Echinacea family, Passionflower, the large Aster family (and subfamily Asteroideae, particularly tribe Astereae), the Frogfruits (especially Turkey Tangle), the Pipevines (especially Wooly Dutchman’s Pipe and Pipevine), and Frostweed.

Where to buy host plants? We offer the Purple Coneflower (Echinacea), Frogfruit, and Flame Acanthus. Keep an eye out for a Native Plant Society plant sale to get a few milkweeds, frostweed, Maximillian Sunflower, and a Passionflower. From a Big Box store, you can probably find Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’, a few leafy mustards to replant each year and your parsley, dill, fennel, and rue.

The Fiery Skipper. Photo Credit: Ken-ichi Ueda (CC BY)

Skippers

Related to other types of butterflies, what makes Skippers unique is that they’re often not as brightly colored and they behave differently with their fast, erratic flight. There are over 30 species in DFW, including the Fiery Skipper, Clouded Skipper, Delaware Skipper, and Common Checkered Skipper.

Skippers require different plants than other butterflies for their caterpillars to feed on. They like native grasses. Texas native grasses that support skippers include Big Bluestem, Little Bluestem, and Side-oats Grama, which serve as host plants for various skipper caterpillars. You can buy seed for these grasses for the garden. Little Bluestem grows about 5 feet tall and makes an excellent border around the perimeter of a garden for a sense of enclosure.

The American Bumble Bee. Photo Credit: Tex Anne (CC BY-NC)

Native Bees

In addition to the European honeybee, Texas is home to over 1000 native bee species (Order Hymenoptera), most of which are solitary and pose very little risk for stings. Having a large variety of native wildflowers will help to attract the over 100 species found in DFW, including the American Bumble Bee, Eastern Carpenter Bee, Blueberry Mason Bee, and the stunning Pure Green Sweat Bee.

Bumble bees build their nests in the ground, or in grass or trees. Leaf-cutter bees rely on leaves to build their nests. Large carpenter bees burrow into wood for their nests. Mason bees don’t make nests, but rather use small crevices like plant stems. Digger bees nest in the soil. Long-horned bees are named because of the large antennae on males. Sunflower bees rely on the pollen of the sunflower/aster family of plants (Asteraceae). This family of plants includes Yarrow, Damianita, Gregg’s Mistflower, Purple Coneflower, and many others. Sweat bees are often bright, metallic colors like blue and green and are attracted to the salts of human sweat. Polyester bees nest in the ground and are able to waterproof their nests.

The Differential Grasshopper. Photo Credit: Ryan Philbrick (CC BY-NC)

Grasshoppers, Crickets, and Katydids

If you want to attract birds to your garden, one of the best ways to do that is to provide food for grasshoppers, which many birds rely on as a food source. A wildlife garden welcomes grasshoppers, because with these insects you’ll attract more birds to your garden who need these insects if they are to raise their young.

In a healthy ecosystem, the birds keep the insect population in balance, not eradicating the insects completely (harming the birds’ food supply) but also not allowing the insects to take over (harming the plants they feed on).

There are over 100 species of grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids in DFW, including the Differential Grasshopper, Fork-Tailed Bush Katydid, the Common True Katydid, and the Spotted Bird Grasshopper. A common problem for vegetable gardens is that there’s no wild plants for these insects to eat, because all the wild natural places for them have been removed. So long as you provide wild, native grasses for them to eat and there’s enough for them to eat, and you have a healthy bird population, you'll maintain a balanced, healthy ecosystem.

The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird. Photo Credit: Kent Ross (CC BY-NC)

Birds

DFW is home to over 200 species of birds. Many birds feed on insects (like grasshoppers) and plant berries (like the American Beautyberry) and seeds (including the Purple Coneflower). Birds that feed on insects include the Eastern Bluebird, American Robin, and Carolina Wren so its important that the garden have plants that grasshoppers and other insects can feed on, to attract more birds. Insects poisoned by insecticides that are then eaten can harm birds.

The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird migrates north from Mexico and Central America, arriving in DFW in March and staying for about 6 months until heading south to overwinter. Flame acanthus, Turks Cap, and other bright red flowers are great at bringing these birds to the garden.

The Widow Skimmer. Photo Credit: Gail Taylor (CC BY-NC)

Dragonflies and Damselflies

Dragonflies and damselflies lay their eggs in water, where their nymphs develop, but as adults they visit meadows to feed on mosquitos and other small flying insects and so you’ll likely attract them to your garden. We have over 80 species of dragonflies and damselflies (Order Odonata) here in DFW including the Widow Skimmer, Common Whitetail, Eastern Amberwing, Neon Skimmer, Familiar Bluet, American Rubyspot, Ebony Jewelwing, among so many other living works of art. If you have the space, a small wildlife pond (3 feet deep) will provide a space for these insects to lay their eggs in the water. Their nymphs overwinter and emerge in spring through summer.

The Common Eastern Firefly. Photo Credit: Katja Schulz (CC BY)

Beetles

Keeping your garden wild, and not too tidy, leaving plenty of mulch and decaying plant stems and logs will create more habitat for beetles (Order Coleoptera). In DFW over 800 species can be found including Stag Beetles, Dung Beetles, Leaf Beetles, Scarabs/June Bugs (green and brown), Ground Beetles, Blister Beetles, and Longhorn Beetles. 26 species of lady beetles are found in DFW, including the Cactus Lady Beetle and the Seven-spotted Lady Beetle. The Asian Lady Beetle is not native.

The Snowberry Clearwing. Photo Credit: Karalyn (CC BY-NC)

Last But Not Least

Let’s not forget our DFW lizards: the Texas Spiny Lizard, the Little Brown Skink, the Common Spotted Whiptail, and the Green Anole. And our 15+ species of frogs and toads. And our Fireflies, including the Common Eastern Firefly, in need of habitat restoration so we can continue to enjoy their summer lightshows. And our Lacewings, which are beneficial insects that eat aphids and other garden pests. Our praying mantis.....the Carolina Mantis and Arizona Mantis. And the friendly, yellow-as-the-sun and insect-eating Yellow Garden Spider.

And of course, once the sun goes down, you might find the Snowberry Clearwing, a Hummingbird Moth visiting night-blooming flowers (like the Evening Primrose), one of the 500 types of moths here in DFW, including the Luna Moth, the Nessus Sphinx, the Polyphemus Moth, the Io Moth, and the Zebra Conchylodes.

The American Robin. Photo Credit: John D Reynolds (CC BY-NC)