Christmas Crafts at Holiday Lights

Holiday Lights is in full swing at the Garden, and it really is a fun event-- for guests as well as staff. I enjoy walking through the Garden and overhearing the appreciative comments and exclamations from visitors as they enjoy a lovely evening with family and friends. Beautiful lights, great music and entertainment, tasty hot chocolate, and jolly old Saint Nick himself... and much more-- it's all here!

There is one little corner of the Garden where I spend a lot of time, and that is the Christmas Crafts table in the Visitor Pavilion. We provide a nature-based holiday craft each night, which changes from week to week. So far, we have made Christmas Mice from pinecones, Nature Baskets that can be displayed on a table or hung on the tree as an ornament, and Nature Bags (sachets) that will fragrance a room. Still to come-- Pomanders and Glittered Pinecones.

The Nature Baskets and Nature Bags, in particular, would be easy to do at home as well. Take a few minutes to go outside with your kids and look around. Collect small treasures that you find-- a few small pinecones, sweetgum balls, a bit of moss, an interesting pod... all of these can become unique treasures in the eyes of a child. Back inside, take a small basket (app. 2-4 inches wide) and work together to arrange the treasures in the basket. Add a dash of color and sparkle, if you wish, by tucking in a small ornament or a bit of ribbon, and you're done! Set the basket on a table, or hang it on the tree. A larger basket can become a centerpiece or mantel decor.

Nature Bags (an updated and kid-friendly name for a sachet) are also easy. You can search outside for nature treasures, as described above, and tuck them in a small muslin bag or wrap them up hobo-style in a scrap of fabric and tie closed with a ribbon. At the Garden we use muslin tea bags, which are perfectly sized for a small sachet, and add fragrance with a few drops of essential oils that can be purchased at any craft store. We make use of cones, pods, and bits of greenery collected from around the Garden, and add ingredients like lavendar, cinnamon chips, allspice berries, cloves, and rose petals. The bowls filled with all the different ingredients are beautiful, and showcase the diversity of textures, colors, and fragrances from nature.

Though sachets are an old-fashioned craft, kids love making them and enjoy sorting through all the different ingredients to create just the right mix for their very own creation. Adults love making them, too. The craft corner is open to anyone who wants to participate. From the youngest toddler working with help from their parents to the most experienced senior, everyone has a small memento of their evening at the Garden to take with them that they made themselves. What a treat!

All in all, nature crafts are perfect for the holidays. Take a few minutes with your family to go outside and gather some treasures from your yard. Or, if you're in the area, come visit the Garden and enjoy making a nature-based Christmas Craft together and have a lovely evening of Holiday Lights with your family and friends. See you here!

Family Gardening: Garden Maintenance

I hope you’re having fun in the garden with your family! Now that the planting is done, the focus shifts more to maintenance. This is sometimes regarded as a chore, but I have to admit that I really enjoy it. It’s one of the few excuses to just putter around in your garden observing the fruits of your labor. It never ceases to amaze me how much plants can grow and change in a short time—it’s a miracle in every plant!
While there is a lot to do in the garden, endless weeding doesn’t come across as appealing to anyone—least of all your kids. In order to prevent garden maintenance from seeming onerous, try the following tips to keep it fun and engaging for the whole family:

• Mulch magic. Mulch is one of your best friends in the garden—it cuts way down on weeds, and helps conserve water in the soil as well. There is no single best material for mulch—I recommend an organic material that will break down over time and improve the soil, as well as a material that is locally available. This could be pine straw here in the southeast, or bark mulch, or even a thick layer of newspaper covered with leaves or straw. At my own home I have a lot of trees, so we create our own mulch by shredding the autumn leaves with the lawnmower. The result is a great mulch, and I feel good that I am not adding bags of leaves to the local landfill. I add a thick layer of leaves 2-4 inches deep to all my garden beds in the fall. As the leaves break down they enhance the soil by adding wonderful organic matter. When I plant new flowers and veggies in the spring I dig through the leafy mulch, turning some of it into the soil in the process, and then add more after planting to prevent weeds from taking hold.
• Weeding wizards. Yes, weeding is a part of gardening, but it doesn’t have to be a burdensome chore. Keep it light and fun. First off, don’t let the weeds get to be taller than your children before you pull them; instead, make a tour of the garden once or twice a week to scout for new little encroaching weeds and pull them while they’re small. If your child has a difficult time distinguishing between weeds and sprouts of plants that you want, then focus in on just one type of weed at a time. Proclaim a ‘weed of the day’ and show them a sample, then have a contest to see who can find the greatest number of that specific weed. (It goes without saying that you should choose whatever weed is most prolific in the garden for your weed of the day.) The winner becomes the Weeding Wizard for the day. It can become a kind of a scavenger hunt, providing a lot of fun and some great quality time in the garden for you and your kids.
• Dig in! Kids simply love to dig. They can expend endless energy and will generate great enthusiasm digging around and playing in the soil. There are a lot of discoveries to make in digging: small leaves, twigs, and rocks that make up the soil… different types and textures of soil… the joys of mud pies when water is added… engineering feats to be achieved in creating holes, tunnels, and caves for small imaginary villages… insects that make their home in the soil… and best of all, earthworms! If you have young kids—toddlers to middle elementary—leave a little patch of your garden open as a digging zone. They will want to continue their digging adventures long after the planting is done!
• Wonders of water. Kids like watering even more than they like digging. Try to make it as easy as you can for them to water their plants. It’s a wonderful natural lesson in taking responsibility, and helps them learn to think beyond themselves in caring for living things. Plus, it’s just fun! I worked with a daycare center a few years back to create a small garden for their kids, and watering was their absolute favorite activity. To make it easy for them to be independent in their watering, we placed a large storage bin under the faucet and used it as a sort of watering trough. When it was garden maintenance time, we simply turned on the faucet and let the bin fill with water. We kept a bunch of small child-sized watering cans by the bin, so that the kids could help themselves to water. Several of them at a time could fill their watering cans in the watering trough. They could handle the diminutive watering cans with ease, and the small volume that the containers held ensured that they would not overwater and ‘drown’ the plants. They were wonderful caretakers, and loved that they could be independent and do it themselves.

What tips and tricks do you have up your sleeves to help keep garden maintenance fun for kids and the entire family? I’d love to hear them!

Happy Gardening!
Dr. Cindy

Family Gardening: What to Plant?

There are so many plants to choose from these days, it can be hard to know where to start. For those of you planning and planting a family garden with your kids (or with a group of kids such as a summer day camp, scout group or church group), here are a few ideas to help frame some interesting options that kids will enjoy:

• Giants, Minis, and Oddballs. When planting vegetables, think about oddities or extremes. They can be used to create a vegetable garden that is fun and interesting for kids. Also, most kids are more willing to try eating something that they have grown themselves, especially if it’s something different from the norm. Try planting giant varieties planted next to miniature ones to create a contrast, or strange-looking varieties. For a nice miniature tomato, try growing cherry tomatoes (my personal favorite is Sungold) right next to a giant variety like Park’s Whopper. Yard-long beans—an Asian type of string bean that truly does grow very long—are a fun bean to plant on a trellis or bamboo teepee. A nice colorful vegetable is the beautiful Swiss Chard called Bright Lights—the multi-hued stems look like old-fashioned ribbon candy, and create a lovely little rainbow right in your garden! You’ll be looking for recipes to try with your new-found crop. Don’t forget squash—it’s a great plant that is extremely easy to grow, so you can almost guarantee success. A few squash will produce enough to feed your entire family and all your friends, and there are some fun ‘different’ varieties, too, such as a small round squash called Eight Ball.
• Floral Bounty. There are endless flowers that would be ideal for a children’s garden area. Zinnias would top my list (any kind), along with Sunflowers (Helianthus) and Tithonias, also called Mexican Sunflowers—they have bright orange daisy-like flowers, and the leaves are fuzzy and shaped like a dinosaur’s foot/paw. (No, I’ve never seen a dinosaur’s foot/paw-- which is it, anyway? However, this is what the kids I’ve worked with say, and it really does look like a three-toed foot. They make great dinosaur leaf prints…) There are so many options it’s hard to limit—it really just depends on the space you have available and the amount of sun or shade you have. Take your child and let them pick out a few flowers to try. It's a great outing. Plus, experimenting with something new fosters a wonderful aptitude for exploration and discovery—key components to critical thinking that are essential for developing young scientists as well as creative artists!
• Herbal Delights. Create a fragrant sensory experience by making sure to plant a few herbs in your garden. Many have fragrant foliage, and it is simply delightful to brush against them and release their scent as you are working in the garden or just strolling through. Plus, you have the added benefit of having fresh herbs just outside your door that you can add to your meals. Basil is extremely easy to grow, as is mint, rosemary, and lemon balm. All of these—and many more—are very kid-friendly, and very commonly available at your local nursery. I especially like lemon balm and mint, as you can steep them and make your own herbal tea, or use them to flavor your iced tea. Some folks say that they will ‘invade,’ but I have never found them to be truly invasive—they just like to spread out. Makes me feel like a really successful gardener! They are easy to keep in check—you just pull up the surface runners, and then you have some to share with a friend.
• Heirloom Heritage. Try planting some heirloom varieties. These are plants that have been grown for generations, with seed collected and passed down from one person to another. With heirloom plants you can collect and save your own seed to plant again next year, which is a fun and interesting activity in and of itself at the end of the season—a wonderful scavenger hunt in your own backyard! Heirloom vegetables, in particular, are some of the best-tasting varieties of vegetables you can grow. Many companies carry heirloom varieties along with hybridized ones—heirloom tomatoes like Brandywine and Mortgage Lifter are popular, and there are many more available. Plant several different types and conduct your own taste test—they will be the best-tasting tomatoes you ever put in your mouth!
• Gourd-geous. Last but not least, grow some gourds. These are just plain fun—they grow very rapidly, and it’s amazing to see just how fast the gourds grow and take shape. Harvest some for bird houses or other crafts. You and your kids will all be enchanted to have a bird house you grew yourself! There are an endless variety of vegetables, herbs, and flowers to plant—I could go on and on. The point is to have fun experimenting and try some new things.

Obviously, this list of plants could go on and on. I would love to hear what the favorite plants are in your family garden. What do your kids enjoy? What do you have the most success with? How do you use the harvest from your garden? Please write and let me know!

Happy Gardening!

Dr. Cindy

What's New on the DSBG Bluebird Trail

May has been a busy month for the bluebirds at the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden.  The first brood of chicks from the nest boxes have fledged their nests and we are now seeing the second brood of the year.  We noted that 8 of the nest boxes have a second brood and we counted a total of 28 eggs in those boxes.  We also have one box with an active house wren nest.

If you are monitoring a bluebird box in your own back yard, do not be alarmed to see that the number of eggs in the second brood is smaller than the first.  This is what we are seeing as well. We do have some smaller broods of just one, two or three eggs.

This year on the bluebird trail we had a slightly rare occurence in one of the nest boxes that we did not observe last year.  During our monitoring of the boxes on April 30th we discovered that one nest box contained white eggs!  The photograph above was taken on that day.  After checking the box we drove a short distance away and waited.  Sure enough a female bluebird flew right into the box. The eggs were also consistent with the size of the blue bluebird eggs that we are noting in the other boxes and the nest was consistent with the other bluebird nests.

According to www.sialis.org, up to 4 to 5 percent of bluebirds lay white eggs.  The Sialis website also indicates that white eggs can occur in all three species of bluebirds and that the white eggs are just as fertile as the blue eggs.  From what I read on this website, a female that lays white eggs will always lay white eggs.  So, if we have blue eggs in the same nest box for the second brood, then another female has now inhabited the box.  It will be interesting in the coming weeks to see if we have white or blue eggs in that same box.

As always, one other good thing about being outside monitoring the bluebird boxes is that it affords us the opportunity to see what new visitors we have flying around the garden.  In addition to the usual suspects we saw a few new species of birds during May that we did not see in April.  We observed the Indigo Bunting, American Goldfinch, Barn Swallow, Red-winged Blackbird, Orchard Oriole, Red-eyed Vireo and the Chimney Swift.

When you pay your next visit to the garden I hope you'll take some time and observe the birds as well as the beautiful plants and flowers.  Please drop us a line if you see a species of bird that you do not normally see so that we can be on the lookout for them as well.  Enjoy the garden and happy birding!

Out, Out Dastardly Beast

In addition to having House Wren predators in the bluebird nestboxes at Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden, there is a serious problem with paper wasps. Last year only one box was taken over by them, and we learned not to go near that particular box. Our thoughts were to let the wasps have that one, and we designated it the "bad wasp box." This year it's a very different story. Wasps have moved into four of the boxes and that represents twelve percent of the boxes along the bluebird trail.

Early in the monitoring season and before the birds started placing nesting material in the boxes, we lined the inside of the tops with aluminum foil. We pre-cut the foil and secured it with double-sided tape. It was our understanding that the wasps prefer the top sides of the boxes, but now we know that isn't always the case. The vertical sides are also enticing. When the weather was still cool in the mornings, we made an attempt to remove the wasps and the stem/core of the beginning nests. We thought we were quite brave, both the one using the "weapon", in this case an umbrella, as well as the one taking the picture. However, the following week the beast was in the box again, building a new nest in the same spot.

Since then it has been an on-going battle and we are in a dilemma as to what to do. We don't want to spray the boxes with insecticide as that would contaminate them for future use by the birds. We have read that rubbing a bar of soap on the insides will keep the wasps from building, but that seemed too labor-intensive. After all, the two of us are volunteers here at the garden. We have other lives, too. We've considered removing the affected boxes from their poles but, again, who is brave enough for this job?

So don't let this little soliloquy discourage you from establishing your own bluebird trail. Just know that the Eastern Bluebird has a few challenges of its own. Checking boxes each week gives us great pleasure, but we do give the ones with wasps in them wide berths.

What We Don't Want To See On The Bluebird Trail

There have been a lot of things going on during the past few weeks on the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden Bluebird Trail.  Just in the past week alone we discovered that 19 bluebirds fledged their nests.  We have at least 6 active nests and we have 4 nest boxes that are active with wasps.  We are definitely having more problems with wasps this year than we did last year.

The picture at the right is a picture of what we don't like to see on our bluebird trail.  This is a House Wren nest.  The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 protects these little native birds that build these big, clunky nests.  The Act makes it illegal to remove active nests or eggs of the House Wren.  It is acceptable to remove House Wren nests without a nest cup or eggs.  You can see from this picture that it would be very difficult to determine whether or not there is a nest cup or eggs in this box.  So, to be on the safe (and legal) side, it is best to let nature take its course at this stage.  This is what makes regular monitoring so important.  Early detection makes it possible to remove the sticks before a nest cup is established and eggs are laid.

We also discovered one nest box being inhabited by a Tufted Titmouse.  This bird is also protected by the same act so she'll be raising her brood without any interference from us.  The Tufted Titmouse makes downy nests of moss, fur, soft plant fibers and occasionally crumpled leaves.  It is easily distinguishable from the pine needle nests that bluebirds build.  It looks extremely soft and comfortable.  If I were a baby bird I think I'd like this nest quite a lot!

We also had one more visitor to a nest box this week that is also protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.  I noticed two tree swallows flying around one of the nest boxes.  One of the birds landed on the front of the box and held on and sang away at the entry hole.  So, next week the monitoring could be very interesting.  We may just get the opportunity to see what the Tree Swallow's nest looks like as well.

So, do pay a visit to the garden soon.  Sit a spell and see what else is flying around in the air besides wasps, bees and pollen.

Family Gardening: Planning a Garden with Your Kids

It’s late April, and the spring gardening season is in full swing! The average last frost date (April 18th here in the Charlotte area) has passed. While this doesn’t guarantee that we won’t have another frost, it’s a pretty good bet. So, consider the ribbon cut and get out there and dig!

Planting a garden is one of the best—and most economic—family activities I know. If you want to have a great adventure with your kids this summer, consider planting a garden together. You’d be surprised how many special moments you and your children will have checking on and maintaining your garden together.

Although there are endless ways to enjoy gardening with your children, I’ve accumulated some tips and advice as I’ve worked with kids and families over the years. I’ve listed a few below that relate to garden planning. I’ll post a few more each week for the next couple of weeks on what to grow, and garden maintenance. (It could grow to more... we'll see!)

Shared ownership. We all like a say in what goes on around us, and kids are no exception. The garden is the perfect arena to include them in decision-making; besides, they will wander out to the garden much more often if they feel like they have some ownership in it. Let them in on the decisions about what to grow. Provide a few choices for them to select from, or peruse the garden catalogs or local garden center together. Ask everyone in the family to choose one crop, or perhaps everyone gets to choose one type of tomato and then have a contest to see whose tomato produces the most fruit.

Start small. If you are planning your first garden, start small. You don’t need a half-acre in order to produce a lot of food. In fact, you will be surprised how much produce you can harvest in a small plot. I recommend starting with a 4’ x 4’ plot, or a few containers on the patio or balcony. Better to smart small and have fun with it than to create a large garden that becomes a chore to maintain.

Don’t worry about perfect. Perfect gardens really only exist in books—don’t worry about it! Your rows do not have to be perfectly straight, nor your garden weed-free. Instead, focus on enjoying your garden together. Family gardening time is some of the best family time you’ll get—no TV, and just each other for company. You’ll have actual conversations! The important part in planting is that you do it together and keep it fun—a few minutes at a time a few times a week may be all the time you and your kids have to spend in the garden, and that’s okay. The entire garden doesn’t have to be planted at one time. Let it fit your schedule—you’ll all be happier in the end. You can always add more later or next year.

Be adventurous. Don’t be afraid to try new things together—one of the best lessons you can give your kids is to model being an enthusiastic and curious learner yourself. Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking you have to know all the answers; instead, teach your kids the joy of trying something new and waiting to see how it will turn out. Remember, all great gardeners have killed a lot of plants as they learn and discover what works in their gardens. If you see a plant that looks interesting, but that you don’t know how to grow, that’s okay—investigate it with your child and then try it if it seems appropriate for your conditions. Gardening is an ongoing investigation, and you never stop learning.


The most important thing to keep in mind is to keep your garden project interesting and engaging for you and your kids. Have fun with your kids in your garden this summer, and turn them into lifelong gardeners. It’s one of the best things you will ever do as a parent!

Have some feedback, or some additional tips based on your own experience? I would love to hear them—please post a response and help foster family gardening.

Thanks for reading-- now get out there and garden!

Cindy

Dogwoods in bloom

We were really lucky this morning-it only got down to 32 degrees for a low here, and it didn't stay there long. There was some patches of frost, but no hard freeze like we were afraid of. There shouldn't be much plant damage. It's amazing how just a few degree difference in temperature can make such a huge difference in a plant.

Spring always makes me really excited-so many things coming in to bloom. The dogwoods are lighting up the woods. It is neat how they always come into bloom at Easter, regardless of when it is. They somehow seem to know the right time to bloom.

Dogwood (Cornus florida) is a small tree native to the eastern U. S. and the upper part of Mexico, most often seen in the understory of larger trees like pines and oaks, but I also see them pop up in abandoned fields and other sunny places. The pretty red berries they have in the Winter are good food for birds, which is what spreads them around.

One thing that makes the dogwood interesting is that what most people think is the flower is actually a bract-a leaf-like part of the plant that covers the flower bud until it opens. On most plants, the bracts are small and green, but on dogwoods they are creamy white and the showiest part of the plant. The true flowers are the little yellow parts in the center of the white bracts.

Another neat thing about dogwoods is that the bracts get larger and more white the longer they have been open. And if you take a close look, each bract has a notch at the end, giving them a heart-shaped appearance. They also have a brownish-red blotch at each indention.

Next time you see a dogwood, take a close look at the "flowers" and see how each plant comes with a story.