Native Herbaceous Plants Provide Shelter and Nesting Sites for Wildlife
Lower-growing herbaceous plants, especially ground covers such as ferns and grasses, can provide seasonal cover and nesting materials for wildlife.
Wildlife
Native Woody Plants Provide Shelter and Nesting Sites for Wildlife
When we speak of our gardens sustaining local wildlife, we’re often thinking of the nectar and pollen that insects and hummingbirds collect from our flowering plants . . . Woody plants provide shelter and nesting spots for animals in our home landscapes with their evergreen foliage, holes and hollows, thorns and thickets.
Barriers: Practical Ways to Discourage Garden Pests
Learn how the Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG) Master Gardeners protect the vegetable garden from the deer, rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, insects, and birds that want to enjoy the garden’s bounty.
August – Controlling Garden Pests
Controlling pests in our gardens can be frustrating whether they be blatantly furry and adorable or seemingly impossible to find as you search the ruins of a plant. Pests can even be invasive plants that bully the non-invasive vegetation. If you are experiencing pest problems in your garden or yard, the following classes and resources will help you.
Lepidopteran Crossword Puzzle Answers & Coloring Pages
Answers to today's crossword puzzle and coloring pages wrap up our celebration of #PollinatorWeek. We hope the posts About Butterflies & Moths will inspire you to create more inviting habitats for lepidopterans and other pollinators. Happy Gardening!
Lepidopteran Crossword Puzzle
As we wind down our celebration of #PollinatorWeek, we invite you to solve a Lepidopteran Crossword Puzzle. Good luck! Answers will post tonight.
Creating a Monarch Waystation
We cannot approach the end of Pollinator Week without celebrating monarchs. Today’s post discusses their current status and recommends ways that you can help these iconic, but threatened, butterflies. #PollinatorWeek
Nectar and Host Plants for Selected Mid-Atlantic Butterflies and Moths
Today’s #PollinatorWeek post includes a list of nectar and host plants for fifty common Mid-Atlantic lepidopterans. Plants may vary from one lepidopteran to another although some attract multiple species and some feed both adults and caterpillars.
Survival Tactics of Butterflies & Moths
Continuing our #PollinatorWeek celebration, today’s post describes different tactics lepidopterans employ to survive and includes a new video of a gray hairstreak using his hindwing tails to imitate his antennae.
Morphology Fill-In-The-Blank & Word Search Puzzle Answers
Answers to today's lepidopteran morphology fill-in-the-blank and word search puzzles. #PollinatorWeeK
Morphology of Butterflies & Moths
Today’s post describes the form and structural features of lepidopterans. We invite you to test your knowledge with a fill-in-the-blank narrative and word search puzzle. The answers will post this evening. Good luck! #PollinatorWeek
The Life Cycle of Butterflies & Moths
Happy Pollinator Week! This year we are shining a spotlight on some of the most widely recognized insects in the world–butterflies and moths–with a series of posts, videos, and word puzzles throughout the week. Today’s post describes the Life Cycle of lepidopterans.
Deer in Northern Virginia—Too Much of a Good Thing?
What is the impact of the overpopulation of deer on our local environment? Learn about the history of deer in our area, the impact on the environment, and how this issue is being addressed in Northern Virginia.
Brood X Cicadas Mating & Making Egg Nests
Watch this video to see Brood X cicadas mating and two females laying eggs in the slits they created in the branches of a red maple tree and an abelia shrub.
Brood X Cicadas Mating and Creating their Egg Nests
After mating, a female cicada finds tender twigs or branches (usually the size of a pencil) in which to lay her eggs. As many cicadas flew to trees like oaks, maples, cherries, redbuds, and dogwoods to find suitable twigs, this female chose a branch on an Abelia bush about five feet off the ground.
Cicadas Stop to Smell the Roses
Stop to smell the roses–but look before you do!
Brood X Cicadas Attempting to Molt: Success and Failure
Not every cicada is successful . . .
Brood X Cicadas in the Morning
For some cicadas, the molting process can be long and arduous, taking up to an hour or more.
Great Backyard Bird Count February 12–15
Learn how you can participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count–all you have to do is watch birds for at least 15 minutes, at least once, from February 12 through February 15, 2021...Also, learn how to improve the habitat on your own property to make it more inviting for birds and butterflies.
Protecting Young Trees from Deer
Your young, newly planted trees are very attractive to our healthy white-tailed deer population. Not only are the leaves and tender young growth within easy height for feeding, deer will utilize young trees for rubbing their antlers and do serious damage to the bark and trunk of even newly planted trees.
Protection from wildlife is important for guarding the initial investment of planting. Overall, wildlife protection should be adaptive and based on need, cost, desired effectiveness, installation effort, and ease of maintenance.
Landscape for Wildlife: A New MGNV Facebook Series
In 2021, Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia will introduce Landscape for Wildlife, a new series of educational posts on Facebook which will run weekly on Thursday mornings starting Jan. 7. Landscape for Wildlife will focus on the services that native species can provide to endangered pollinators, birds, small mammals, and other wildlife when homeowners include them in residential landscapes.
What’s up with those Cicadas?
If you think it is too early to find the exoskeletons of annual cicadas scattered along the sidewalk, then you are correct. What you see are the exoskeletons of periodical cicadas. Some of the Brood X 17-year cicadas have started to surface–four years early–in Virginia, Maryland, DC, Delaware, Ohio and Tennessee.
Bee-havior: Gathering and Transporting Pollen
As bees feed on flower nectar, their electrostatically-charged and branched body hairs attract and trap pollen grains. They carry the grains from flower to flower making them very effective pollinators. (About one-third of agricultural crops world-wide depend directly or indirectly on bees for pollination.) Both male and female bees feed on flower nectar, which provides carbohydrates and energy. However, only the female bees gather and carry pollen back to the nest or hive. Pollen provides protein that is essential for developing larvae.