Portsmouth Caterpillar Club

This was to be the year that I slowed down on germinating seeds .  Since 2017, I have built 2 rain gardens, converted bark mulched, depleted, depleted home-depot areas with living landscapes and biologically active soils, done and re-done the edges along my driveway, planted a shade garden from shrubs and seeds in a former chicken pen, planted fruit trees, created a perennial border along Woodbury Avenue in front of the historic stone wall, and added a few pocket gardens here and there.  Time for break right?  Well, that's what I thought.... But collecting wild seeds is a passion.  It can make you feel that the habitat losses due to development and invasive species can be mitigated, offset, or  even reversed if others follow your lead.  But how will they if all people can find are home-depot clones sold as natives when they are not.  People do not have access to wild, genetically diverse plants, from the region in which we live.  So as a seed collector and wildflower enthusiast, I

This summer I have tried to help organize residents advocating for sound barriers for Portsmouth, New Hampshire.   Because of the limitations that Facebook has linking files, I have created this post to link a couple of important documents.   This is the NHDOT's 2016 Noise Abatement Policy .  Note that it is up for review in 2021 which means that the formula for how schools like the New Franklin School are counted as receptors is also up for review.  This is probably the most important document for the New Franklin School community to consider.   A related document with the US DOT regulations governing state highway noise abatements is HERE .   This is the NHDOT's November 15, 2021 Presentation to the Portsmouth City Council which shows the areas that qualify and do not qualify for noise abatement (noise barriers).  While many areas qualified for noise barriers, the New Franklin School did not because, according to the NHDOT policy, its frontage on I-95 considers it to be only

2021 is drawing to a close, faster, perhaps, than I would have wanted.  So feeling nostalgic, I looked back at photos I took in 2019 and I was surprised by the number of caterpillars I saw compared to this year.  This year was not a good one for a gardener trying to host insects.  Maybe my first and best wildlife siting in the spring of 2021, a brown water snake, was an ill omen.   Let's not pretend.  2021 was a year of poverty in the garden:  voles destroyed perennials; painted ladies did not show up at all; there were no caterpillars at all on the viburnums; ferocious winds assaulted perennials; wasps ferociously devoured the caterpillars on pearly everlastings faster than they could hatch.  It is hard to recall anything positive about nature.   Is there any positive?  I suppose that I should be thankful that the drought of 2020 ended; I built a rain garden that infiltrated the worst that hurricane Elsa could throw at me; my lawn hosted a nest cottontails  (devoured by crows); an

A New Mask!   The end of 2020 could not come soon enough!  I bought a new mask for the end of the year holidays;  I survived the year; my gardens survived the drought.  But before 2020, survival was never the measure of success or happiness.  Let's hope that 2021 brings us back closer to the lives we once knew.    Here are some of my gardening goals for the new year:   Goal 1 : Continue to Re-wild , reduce lawns and expand natural areas!   Goal 2 : Create solutions and opportunities by building a rain garden to capture storm-water and create new habitats for water-tolerant plants and insects!   Goal 3 :  Learn to adapt by putting drought-tolerant species in full-sun areas and moving others that required excessive watering during last year's drought to a part-sun garden that I expanded in the fall!  These are not my only goals for the year, but they match the theme of recovery for the new year.  So with  these goals in mind, here are a few of the plants I am growing from seeds: 

Summit of Borestone Mountain Audubon Sanctuary, Maine.   I love native plants.   If you don't know that already, just get a really nice frying pan and bang it against your head a few times and see if that helps get the message though.  Oh my, did I just write that?  Sorry.  It is just really tough to watch the natural world get erased by the force of human disregard for nature:  big box stores and the finest retailers alike sell foreign plants to decorate lawns that are no better in ecological terms than your average parking lot; armies of landscape contractors use machines blow away leaves in the fall that would otherwise feed the soil and harbor eggs and larvae and bury the hew survivors with bark mulch made from the chipped and dyed remains of our forests. Biddeford Pool, Maine.  Nature is being systematically destroyed and your local garden center claiming to sell native plants is an accomplice.  Nursery plants are cloned from single individuals grown in some other

I post the plants I start from seeds every year and, if I am lucky, only 1 or 2 people take me up on my offer for free plants.  I think people do not feel comfortable taking something offered for free.  I am not really sure.  But from my perspective, I offer plants for free because I want to help slow the decline of nature and the more the yards around our neighborhoods can feed caterpillars, the more butterflies there will be for me.  I am really being selfish, right?  Well not really, but it would be a great reward not only to see my seedlings grow and feed butterflies, but also to know that somewhere out in our suburban jungle, they might be doing the same.  So don't hesitate to contact me if any of these plants may interest you.  I have some good ones this year and hopefully a few that I have started from wild seeds. From the Wild Seed Project, which uses seeds collected in Maine: Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) .  This is a striking native plant that is valued