Fall garden checklist

Looking for reasons to enjoy more time in your yard or garden before the snow falls? Want to help local wildlife weather winter’s challenges and set yourself up to create even more habitat next year? Work your way through this fall checklist:

• Don’t bag and dispose of leaves. Instead, layer them over your garden bed or containers of perennials to insulate plants, nourish soil and provide shelter for wildlife.
  
  
• You can also leave some leaves on the lawn — keep the layer under 15 centimetres thick if you want to avoid killing the grass.
  
  
• Place large sticks on top of thick, exposed leaf layers to keep leaves from blowing away or contain those areas with snow fencing.
  
  
• Leave dead flower stems standing so pollinators can find protection inside them over winter. If you prefer a tidier look, trim off and bundle the stems, leaving at least 30 centimetres sticking out of the ground, and place the bundles somewhere inconspicuous.
  
  
• Harvest seeds from your native plants so that you can grow more plants or share the seeds with others living nearby.
  
  
• Leave some seeds behind on the seed heads for birds and small mammals to eat.
  
  
• To start a new patch of plants, sow seeds on some bare soil and cover them up with leaves.
  
  
• To package seeds for gifting or to store them until spring planting, clean them, let them dry, and stash them in labelled paper envelopes.

Completing these tasks provides winter habitat for species like bumble bee queens, small carpenter bees, yellow-faced bees, snails, beetles, mourning cloak butterflies and woolly bear caterpillars (featured below), as well as food for finches, sparrows, chickadees and more. Plus, saving seeds to create new habitat next year benefits all species that rely on native plants.

Remember to record your fall garden actions on re:grow (login required) as part of the impact you’re making for wildlife throughout the year.

Prize draw: Tell us what native plant seeds you’re harvesting

re:grow plant tag © Kate Landry

We loved hearing your native plant garden stories and seeing your photos during our garden sign giveaway, and look forward to sharing them to help inspire more people to garden for wildlife. Check out Peck’s story below for a great example of the responses we received.

Now that fall is here, we’d like to know if you’re harvesting seeds from any native plants that you grow, and how you plan to share them. Your information will help us expand and improve the gardening resources we offer, so we can provide more helpful native plant guidance to gardeners in all parts of Canada.

If you harvest native plant seeds, please email Kate at takeaction@wwfcanada.org by December 15 to let her know which species you’re harvesting from and who, if anyone, you plan to share your seeds with. To say thanks, we’ll mail you some re:grow plant tags that you can give away with your seeds, and enter you in a draw for a $100 discount on a purchase from our WWF-Canada e-store! Please include your mailing address if you’d like to receive plant tags.

Who’s home in the garden: Banded woolly-bear

Banded woolly-bear caterpillar, larval form of the Isabella tiger moth © Braden J. Judson / iNaturalist

This Isabella tiger moth (Pyrrharctia isabella) is most recognizable in the larval stage, when it’s known as the banded woolly-bear. These adorable orange and black caterpillars are a common and familiar sight in their native range across southern Canada. They eat a variety of plants and trees including asters, goldenrods, birches and maples. In fall, they are often spotted scooting across pathways on sunny days as they search for a sheltered place, like some leaf litter or a tree bark crevice, to spend winter. When disturbed, they curl up into cute fuzzy balls.

You can tell the relative age of these caterpillars by looking at their orange bands. Each time they molt and grow larger, the orange band gets wider, so the caterpillars with the widest orange bands are the most mature ones.

In early spring, the caterpillars wake up and eat, then form pupae and transform into adult moths. They go through two generations — including egg, larval, pupal and adult stages — over the course of the spring, summer and fall. The nectar-sipping adult moths are yellow-orange with brown and black markings and a wingspan of about five centimetres.

Want to look after the fuzzy friends in our midst? The caterpillars are generalists in terms of diet, so chances are that you already have a plant in your yard for them to eat. Leave some leaf litter or logs on the ground where they can stay cozy in winter and avoid the use of pesticides year-round.

Peck’s garden story

Purple coneflowers and black-eyed Susans © Peck Ki Laou

In last month’s re:grow newsletter, we shared facts about the black-capped chickadee. Afterwards, Peck in Montreal wrote in to share the big impact one small bird can have:

It started with a beautiful fall afternoon twenty years ago. A black-capped chickadee appeared on my outdoor railing. I knew it wasn’t a house sparrow, but I could not identify it. This chickadee piqued my interest and I decided to learn its identity.

I put up bird feeders and bird baths. I participate in Project FeederWatch and eBird. My visitors include chickadees, cardinals, downy and hairy woodpeckers, American robins, mourning doves, white-breasted nuthatches, sparrows, juncos and American goldfinches. These observations bring me a lot of joy.

Next, I realised that my feathered friends need a welcoming environment. I planted shrubs, perennials and annuals. I have experienced failures along the way, but the experience has been very gratifying.

My perennials like echinacea, rudbeckia and asters are very healthy and growing well. There are also butterflies and bees feeding from my flowers. Not to mention my salvia and goldenrod, much appreciated by the pollinators. My hydrangeas take up an area almost half the size of my lawn. There is also a lot of butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) because I participate in the Mission Monarch project.

Thanks to this little chickadee, I’ve become knowledgeable about gardening and observing birds, butterflies and bees. She taught me to appreciate the beauty of nature.