Mason Bees, Chickadees and Eco-roofs, Oh My!

It's the little things that matter the most sometimes. I was up on the eco-roof the other day noticing that within a few square feet amazing things were happening. The roof itself is a microcosm of life with all manner of seedlings sprouting, bees were buzzing around from the mason bee nests a few feet away, and right above my head a pair of chickadees, the garden's namesake birds, were dee-dee-ing right at me. Each of these three elements I have either encouraged or actually physically placed in the garden to increase biodiversity. It is a pleasure then to see them thriving, mostly on their own with little help from me.

Sedums and mosses on the eco-roof are just getting started for the season. Let's take a look at new life this spring at Chickadee Gardens:

First up, the mason bees. I addressed cleaning the cocoons last fall in a blog post that can be revisited here. I have since put in fresh new liners for the tubes and waited for the mason bee cocoons to hatch. They started to do so in March, males first then the females who promptly began filling the tubes with eggs.

See how the tubes are irregular in depth? That helps each female to identify her particular tube. Something I learned from Crown Bees recently. Good info!

Here are two gals capping off the ends with some mud. Mason bees need a good mud source nearby for this purpose, make sure you provide it for them if you want them around. Mud equals happy gals.

Metallic blue on blue. How wonderful.

They are really very cool to watch, and so gentle.

The yellow stuff is pollen. Although they do not produce any honey, here are some benefits of hosting our native, pollinating mason bees:

• They travel up to 100 yards from their nest site to collect pollen.
• As far as pollinating, they are some 80x more efficient than honey bees.
• They forage on overcast days.
• They will fly and collect pollen at 54 degrees F. whereas honey bees rarely collect pollen below 60 degrees F.
• Since they fly at lower temperatures and when cloudy, this means that your early blooming fruit trees (and anything else blooming) are adequately pollinated. They are busiest when pollination peaks between May and June.

Now for the eco-roof. Here's a stitched together shot of it from last summer, just to get a sense of scale. To revisit our how-to, I blogged about it here.

Here it is again from the same time period. We did it ourselves with minimal materials and help from the Portland Ecoroof Handbook and Portland Ecoroof Program.

Sedum laxum, a native sedum that really likes it up here.

Sedum laxum again with Sedum spathulifolium in the background and Sisyrichium californicum or yellow-eyed grass in the foreground. All natives and quite happy up here, all putting on fresh growth for the season.

Pretty soon, little yellow flowers will be blooming on these, and the pollinators will be going crazy.

Another native sedum, Sedum divergens also sports yellow blooms that pollinators adore. The fleshy green parts turn red when under stress so it can look like red and green jelly bean sometimes. Kind of fun for kids.

One of my go-to ground covers seen here on the eco-roof, Sedum oreganum. This also has yellow blooms, is evergreen and tough. I highly recommend any of these sedums for ground covers in small sections or for eco-roofs in certain situations.

Sepmpervivum 'Ruby Hearts'.

Jelly beans!

Mystery seedling, maybe fireweed. Sedum 'Angelina' in the background.

Nasturtium seedling I stuck in there some month or so ago. We'll see how long it goes without supplemental water.

Hens and chicks, spreading like a little family should. Sempervivum tectorum.

Tiny seedlings of Escholzia californica or California poppies coming up.

The larger seedling up top looks to me like a Penstemon 'Husker Red' gone astray. We shall see. 

More hens and chicks, too bad we can't enjoy these more often - I have to get on a ladder to see them.
Sempervivum 'Lotus'.

But I know the birds and the pollinators do enjoy them - especially when in bloom.

Sempervivum tectorum.

Next up on the list of small things that are flourishing at Chickadee Gardens: Our namesake bird, the chickadee. This birdhouse has sat empty since I moved in some 6 years ago. It was built by David's father for bluebirds on his Lapwai, Idaho, property. While visiting Idaho and noticing it hadn't been put to use in years, we decided to bring it to Oregon and clean it up. It's been empty ever since, and we'd kind of forgotten about it, actually. Until I was up on the eco-roof last week and Hello?

I was getting chirped at by none other than this little guy. Or gal. Yay! We finally have residents! A pair has taken ownership of the little nest box and she/he let us know. We couldn't be happier.

We've been watching this couple for the past week with great delight. They fly back and forth all day long, taking turns bringing necessary items to the nest.

Ha! I love this. As my friend Amy Campion of The World's Best Garden Blog pointed out, it would just be embarrassing to be Chickadee Gardens and have no chickadees. We no longer have to hang our heads in shame. Hang. Heads. Shame! No more! Hooray!

Also, the very well-written (in my opinion) magazine Garden Design has an online article about my garden out this week, you can read about it here. It touches on biodiversity and wildlife in the garden, certainly major goals of mine in gardening.

Some great reading that brings it all home is this wonderful book written by Douglas Tallamy and published by Timber Press. I highly recommend this. You can buy one here. I bought my copy at Powell's in Portland. The premise is that nature has changed by our doing, and that it can be brought back to some kind of balance, also by our doing. Nature is now in our backyards and gardens, our urban centers and parking strips and by doing one small simple thing like planting just one native plant we can help shift the balance towards sustainability.

 By planting native plants they support a whole host of native insect life which thus supports a host of bird life and so on. This, I believe, is why I see such diversity in my own garden since I have introduced biodiversity in the form of a multitude of native plants, water features, bird boxes, mason bee nests, eco-roofs, no pesticides or herbicides, etc. Even if I just planted one native plant vs. an invasive plant, that would make a huge difference. If you plant it they will come, as I wrote in a post about our miraculous little monarch caterpillar that found our milkweed last summer. It really did find it all the way up north here in Portland. You can see the photos and read about it here.

The future of biodiversity has a grim outlook unless we all take small steps. Plant some milkweed, start a mason-bee box, pledge to cut back on pesticides as there are plenty of alternative ways to get rid of pests. If you have aphids, spray them off with a hose and attract beneficial insects such as ladybeetles and lacewings, for example.Your garden and the chickadees will thank you for it.

That's it for this week at Chickadee Gardens, as always thank you for reading! Until next time happy gardening!