Everything Is Suddenly Waking Up in the Garden
We try to hold off on tidying up the yard too early in the spring, giving our native bees and butterflies a chance to vacate their winter hideouts before we take a wrecking ball to them. Some solitary native bees hatch from eggs that were laid in hollow stems, others emerge from tiny tunnels in the ground. Some butterfly chrysalises look just like curled dry leaves clinging to sticks; and still other tiny critters are nestled in amongst the leaf litter laying on the ground.
The Xerces Society offers some phenology guidelines for when to do your garden cleanup; an easy one to follow is waiting until the apple blossoms have faded, especially if you know that crabapples bloom at the same time. Lately, I have been admiring the flowering crabapples all around the neighborhood, and now some of them are starting to shed their petals, so I’m checking that box this week.
Since everything in the garden needs to happen all at once in May, we did want to do what we could in April to get a head start on the season. Our compromise strategy has been to keep all the garden debris in our yard until the time is right. That includes the bundles of twigs stacked in the backyard that are otherwise ready to put out for collection, and the two bags filled with smaller sticks and last year’s tomato vines, which don’t compost easily at home (the bags are sitting open so any hatchlings can escape).
Over the last several days, we’ve been seeing little bees hovering about here and there in sunny spots in the yard. And then on May Day, as if on cue, our serviceberry exploded with white starry flowers (pictured at top, with an Andrena bee), which is a reliable indicator that the mining bees are up. That’s the informal term for a few different genera of native bees, including Andrena, Colletes, and others that nest in the ground—but don’t worry! They’re called solitary bees because they don’t form colonies and, consequently, have no hive or queen to protect and are not going to sting you.
A mining bee of the Colletes genus emerging from its tunnel under the leaves.
Mulching, but Not Too Much
The leaves that we raked from the lawn onto the garden beds last fall will either stay where they are or be added to the compost. We keep most of the mulch fairly sparse to avoid smothering the little bees that need to emerge from the pencil-sized tunnels their mothers made in the ground last summer. I learned several years ago that there is such a thing as too much mulch, which I wrote about here in my old blog, so we seek a balance. The goal is to suppress (some of) the weeds, but not the bees.
On Mowing in May
As for our little patches of lawn, I plan to overseed as much as we can with a bee lawn seed mix. It’s a blend of lawn grasses and short flowering plants that tolerate mowing—and, yes, we will mow in May, at about 3 to 4 inches high, the optimal height for both insects and lawns.
Though well-intentioned, letting lawns grow unchecked until June (“No Mow May”) does more harm than good—those grasses were selectively bred to grow best with regular mowing. Besides, in what world do the dandelions, clover, and creeping Charlie in a mowed lawn not bloom? Bees don’t care if the flowers have long or short stems.
Here’s a Little Zine that Boils It All Down for You
