Providing Water Year-round

As the cold weather approaches, I thought I'd do a blog on providing water year-round to wildlife.  For my water elements, such as the pond and a hanging birdbath, YardMap asks whether you provide water year-round or seasonally.


Water is important for animals year-round for drinking and for grooming.  I keep my pond running except during the very coldest weather when it would damage the pump.  As long as there is enough liquid water to keep circulating, I keep it on.


The hanging birdbath freezes at night during the winter, so just this morning, I brought out the heated birdbath and a long orange extension cord.  I filled the heated birdbath and tonight will plug it in, since we are expecting freezing weather.  I'll take the hanging birdbath down and store it indoors during the winter.


Below is a photo of both the green hanging birdbath on the left and the heated grey birdbath sitting in a circular frame attached to the railing of the deck.  You should see the birds on a snowy day when everything else is frozen.  They flock to the heated birdbath like humans do to a hot spring!  It's great entertainment on a snowy day.

Screenshot of my yard with YardMap

It's hard to convey to someone what you're doing with YardMap without them actually being able to see your map.  So, today, I took a screenshot of my map and have inserted it below.  As you can see, the yard is diamond-shaped. One third of the acre lot consists of the house, the lawn areas (shown in light green) and all the garden bed areas with shrubs and perennials(shown in purple).  The other two-thirds of the acre consist of the forested area, which is seen in dark green on the right side of the map below.  You can also see my pond as the blue circle to the left of the wooded area.

I can zoom in on the map and have added the elements mentioned in a previous post, such as a bird bath, a compost bin, a rain barrel and a large silver maple in the front yard.  But, the screenshot above is too small a scale for you to see these elements.


There is also a horseshoe-shaped trail that circles through the woods, so that we can easily access most of the property. Another short, dead-end trail enters from the center of the lawn area and goes to a hammock suspended between two sturdy tulip trees.  Along this trail, I have planted some native spring ephemerals such as Bloodroot, May Apple, Celandine Poppy, Jack-in-the-Pulpit and Wild Ginger.  I also have Partridge Berry growing alongside the trail.


My activity this past weekend with YardMap was to list some of the species of plants in the garden beds by common and scientific name.  There is no specific area where you can do this, so I included it in the Comments section of each garden bed. 


At this time of year, there are no longer any plants in bloom.  But, only two weeks ago, in late November, I had a few Obedient Plants (Physostegia virginiana) in bloom.  Why so late?  Because they were on the south-facing side of the house and close to the shelter of the house. Just as the real estate agents always say, "Location, location, location." 

Learning about my Eco-Region in YardMap


The next activity that I did on YardMap was to learn about my Eco-Region.  You type in your zip code and it tells you what Eco-Region you live in.  I live in Vienna, VA and my eco-region is the Southeastern Mixed Forest Province.  That was not really news to me, but for a lot of people, this gives them a sense of what the natural eco-system in their area is.


What is really useful in discovering your eco-region is that then they give you several links to help you make your yard a better habitat for local wildlife.  There is a link to a pdf published by the Pollinator Partnership which gives a wealth of information on pollinators in general and also information about native plants that can attract pollinators.  I already have a lot of pollinator-friendly plants in my yard, but I am always on the lookout for new ones!


A second link to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Texas gives a list of all the plants that are native to Virginia.  I found this list to be too cumbersome, since plants that are native to the coastal plain, would not be native to the piedmont, where I live.


A third link gave a list of local native plant nurseries.  Although I usually purchase my natives from my local chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society, I think this link is very, very useful to most people.  Even if people want to plant natives, they can't do so, unless they can find the plants to plant.


Another link took you to local e-Bird reports.  I haven't explored this link yet, but I intend to do so, since it will open up new horizons for me.  I have a bird feeder, but I am not that knowledgeable about birds.


The last link was supposed to take you to local community gardens, but this link was broken.  :-(


Since I usually include a photo with my posts, I am including a beautiful native shrub today called Fothergilla (Fothergilla gardenia).  It is also called Witch Alder.  The leaves are brilliant in the fall and they only fell off a few days ago.  This photo was taken last week.

Frustration with YardMap and Photos


So, this was a rather frustrating week with YardMap, because I have repeatedly try to upload photos of the various elements in my yard and YardMap is unable to do so.  I finally just sent an email to their Help section.  Uploading Photos is Activity 5 of the various activities that they send as suggestions in emails to me. 


The first photo I was hoping to upload was of my wildlife pond, complete with two waterfalls and a sloping "beach" on one side, which allows frogs or any other animals to "escape" and not drown.  The pond is surrounded by native plants, which afford either seeds for birds (coneflowers) or nectar or pollen for pollinators.  Below is a photo of the pond.

This photo also shows that my yard is a Certified Wildlife Habitat, certified by the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.  I am very proud of this pond, because it is home to at least two frogs, one of whom loudly proclaims his presence every spring and through the mid-summer.

Details about elements in the garden

Last week, I spent a good bit of time on YardMap entering specific details about the various elements in my yard.  I believe Cornell uses this info to see how much land participants dedicate to wildlife management, how sustainable their gardening practices are, what percentage native they plant, etc.


For instance, for my forested area, the online form asked the type of forest (I chose deciduous) and if it was managed for wildlife (yes).  All my trees are native, but unfortunately, I have a lot of Japanese bush honeysuckle, multi-flora rose and other invasive shrubs that it would take forever to get rid of in the 2/3 acre that they cover.


For my lawn areas, they wanted to know what kind of mower I use (gas-powered push mower), if I leave the clippings (yes), if the grasses are native (no) and how much I irrigate it (never, and it shows!).


For the pond, the questions included is it seasonal (no, I keep it going except in the very coldest weather, when the whole thing would freeze), if it was running or still (running) and if the shoreline was managed for wildlife (yes, I purposely had a sloping shoreline at one end so that frogs or turtles could get out).


And lastly, for the garden beds, they wanted to know the percentage native (100%), irrigation (I put never, because the only water I use is from a rain barrel), if they were managed for wildlife (yes) and if they are pollinator gardens (almost all are).


This past Sunday, I decided to improve my pollinator garden a bit.  There's not much you can do in mid-November, but I had obtained a passionfruit from a neighbor of my sister's down in Williamsburg.  She said if you just plant the whole fruit, you'll get a vine.  Passiflora incarnata  is a host plant to various butterflies and also a nectar plant.  Below, you can see the fruit (somewhat dried up, but I really only need the seeds) and an unflattering photo of me planting it along my fence line in a sunny spot.

I figured I would know by next spring whether this was a success or not, but I found out early.  Two days later, there was an empty hole spot in that very spot.  Some animal (squirrel, probably) had already dug it up and eaten it.  Ah, the perils of having a backyard habitat!

Sustainable Elements in my Garden


So, one of the things that YardMap asks you to put on the map are elements you might have in your garden that add to the sustainability of your yard.  I am proud to say that I have had a compost bin and a rain barrel in my yard for years now.

First, I'll talk a bit about my compost bin.  I keep a plastic container with a tight-fitting lid under my sink and whenever I have peelings or other leavings from fruit or vegetables, I put them in the container, instead of my trash. Every week or so, I mix it in with the other compost in the bin.  I also put in dead leaves in the compost bin.  The vegetable leavings count as "green" and the leaves count as "brown" in the compost bin, and to get good compost, you should have some of both.  Whenever I plant a new plant in my yard, I dig some of the beautiful brown, loamy soil from the bottom of the compost bin and put it in the hole for the new plant, instead of purchasing a chemical fertilizer.  This whole process keeps the vegetable leavings out of landfills and saves energy that would have been required for the manufacture of chemical fertilizers.

I also have a rain barrel in my yard that is made of 30% recycled plastic.  The great thing about this rain barrel is that it collects water from my roof and I can use it to water plants in my garden.  It was really helpful this summer with some of the dry weeks in August and early September.  I never had to use the hose to water plants.  You shouldn't use this water to fill a bird bath, though, because it often has some oil in it from the roof shingles.  But, it is perfectly fine for plants.

Starting out with YardMap

So, this is my initial blog to tell about my experience with using YardMap to document my habitat garden.  Honestly, it's a project for my graduate-level Conservation Biology class at Virginia Tech.  We were supposed to engage in some kind of Citizen Science project and it being the fall with freezing temperatures fast upon us, I didn't think it was the right time to start with Frogwatch or Project Budburst. 


So, I chose YardMap, sponsored by Cornell University (my alma mater) 's Lab of Ornithology.  For more than a decade now, I have been managing my yard as a wildlife habitat, so I thought it would be nice to document it all in YardMap, with the thought of adding other features in the future as well, or engaging in other Citizen Science projects in the spring.


It was a little tricky mapping my yard with YardMap.  Once you submit your address, they send you a satellite photo of your yard.  Then, you are supposed to choose the kind of yard (in my case, Home) and outline it.  But, it was difficult to find the boundaries and I ended up including part of my neighbor's yard as well.  I had to email the Help folks at YardMap to ask how to edit my yard.


It works out better, it turns out, if you select Map, rather than Satellite photo.  Map shows the boundaries of your yard, which makes it much easier.


I have a rather unique property.  I live in northern Virginia, outside Washington, DC and I am very fortunate to live walking distance to a Metro Station  and yet have a mostly wooded, over 1 acre lot.

So, this is a photo of the entranceway to my house.  I am a board member of the Virginia Native Plant Society and nearly everything I plant in my yard is native to northern Virginia.  Although it is now Fall, I have a lot in bloom in my front yard:  Goldenrod, Chocolate Eupatorium, Lyre-leaf Sage and New York Asters.  All of these are very beneficial to pollinators.  On a warm day, my entranceway is abuzz with bees!  Not just honeybees, but little native bees as well.  This gives me a warm feeling when I walk to my front door.