transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hi everybody, I'm Joe Lamp'l, the joe behind joegardener, and welcome to the joegardener show. Today's guest is someone who's helping us see our gardens in a whole new way, not just as places we design for beauty and productivity, but as living, breathing ecosystems that can support far more life than we might realize. Shaun McCoshum is the author of Natural Habitats in Wildlife Gardening. It's a book that challenges the conventional idea of what a well-kept garden should look like, and instead invites us to work with nature, not against it, to create spaces that are vibrant, resilient and full of life. In this conversation, we're digging into what it really means to garden with wildlife in mind, from creating layered habitats and supporting biodiversity, to rethinking some of the habits and expectations that may actually be working against the very nature we're trying to attract. And if you've ever wondered how to make your garden not just a place you enjoy, but a place that truly gives back to pollinators, birds, beneficial insects and the broader ecosystem, this episode is going to open your eyes to what's possible right outside your door. So let's get started and as we do, thanks to our sponsors for today's episode, Soil Cubed and the Ultimate Gardening Chief. You probably know by now, having access to high quality compost is my not-so-secret weapon for the success of everything I grow in my garden. That's why I'm so proud to be partnering with Soil Cubed. If you live in their delivery zones within Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, most of Alabama, and for some of my Texas listeners, Soil Cubed is now in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, so this message is for you. Soil Cubed compost is OMRI listed for Organic Gardening. It's made from simple ingredients from their own farm and trusted partners. Soil Cubed products are rich in natural nutrients, so there is no need to add chemical fertilizers. They also help improve soil structure and regulate water retention. The best part is the results. Healthier roots, stronger plants, better harvest. Take advantage of the best Soil Cubed compost products and save $5 on each big yellow bag. Stack those savings on top of any sales. Just use the code joegardener26 at checkout. Order online at soilcubed.com, that's soil plus the number 3.com, and see the difference Soil Cubed makes. When I co-created the Ultimate Gardening Sheet, it wasn't a marketing idea or a product brainstorm. It was simply me, a gardener, trying to solve my own problem. For years, I needed a simple way to comfortably and securely carry my three essential tools, pruners, soil knife, and micro snips, and nothing out there worked. Nothing was even available. So, I created the solution myself. And what a difference it makes. Now those tools are always by my side, safe and secure, no fumbling around, no trips back to the shed. It's streamlined the way I work, and honestly, it's made my gardening more enjoyable. Handcrafted by a skilled North Carolina leather artisan, this sheet is built to last season after season. It's practical, it's beautiful, and it's a product born from real gardening experience. You can find it exclusively at joegardener.com/ugs. That's joegardener.com/ugs. Hi, Shaun, I love your book. We're gonna talk a lot about that today, but I'm so thankful that we're together to talk about it. And I wanna welcome you to the podcast.

Speaker 2:
[03:31] Thank you so much for inviting me on. It's great to be here.

Speaker 1:
[03:34] All right, Shaun, so I like to ask this question because I think it's interesting to learn about our guests as we learn about their expertise through some of the questions and dialogue. Tell us about your background, especially relevant to how you arrived at writing this book, because I feel like you're our people. And reading your book and what you wrote about, I just can't wait to hear more about you. So share with us what you'd like as we get into some of the other questions.

Speaker 2:
[04:00] Yeah, so a lot of my background is in restoration and building habitats. I've been accidentally doing it since I was a kid. My grandma got me into gardening when I was early on. We actually became poor when I was in about second grade. So gardening became a mainstay for us to eat. And in California, there were still a lot of laws preventing front yard food gardens. We had to tuck it in and make it look pretty while also being able to harvest things off it. So that was always a fun little puzzle to play. And then I ended up getting an undergrad in biology. Got a master's in botany. Went on and did conservation work on Catalina Island. Went to Mount Charleston outside of Las Vegas. Then I did my master's in Ohio. So I volunteered with a bunch of different groups out there in Ohio. I've worked in Wisconsin. After doing conservation restoration work, I went and earned a PhD in landscape ecology looking at pollinators, specifically how our agricultural systems were affecting native bee communities. And then because I am a ridiculous person, I will admit that now, anyone who's ever met me just knows that I'm above and beyond a lot of times. I did a full on side project on monarchs and their ecology, which would have worked as its PhD in its own sense. And then also did things on like reef ecotoxicology to see how sunscreen was affecting reef biota and the way that tourism is affecting these habitats. After that, I did a post-doc at Cornell doing more native bee stuff and looking at solar facilities. Then I started managing preserves in New York. I've been volunteering throughout all that time helping land trusts and parks and land owners kind of figure out ways that they can do stuff to help pollinators and amphibians and just, you know, be more connected with nature in our own backyard.

Speaker 1:
[05:45] As you can see, but people not watching can't tell that I've had this huge grin on my face the whole time you were telling me about your background because I want to be your new best friend. I love what you've said and all you've done and I want to hang out with you after this podcast and in person because we could riff on that forever because everything you said is fascinating to me. So thank you for that. But let's focus on one spot in your beautiful background and that is this book. And I was telling you before we hit record and your book is called Natural Habitats and Wildlife Gardening. I love it so much. I love it for the content, the practicality of it, the timeliness of it, the approachability of it. The look and feel of the book too, by the way, Shaun.

Speaker 2:
[06:30] The editors did a great job. It is gorgeous. I am super impressed.

Speaker 1:
[06:35] Yeah, it is super gorgeous. The photography and your writing and the layout and the way you take us through it and the way that you address people at all levels and wherever they are in the country. But there's another thing that I like that you're not old enough to relate to. And that is the size of this book and the way it's laminated reminds me of something in my childhood and maybe it was from my older brothers, too. I'll give myself a little credit there. But the Boy Scout Handbook is this size, maybe a little bit thicker, but it has this feel and this laminated-ish cover, the way it's designed to be used as a handbook. It's not designed to stay in your library, I don't think, just because it looks like it's designed to take out, it's kind of like a field guide to take out with you.

Speaker 2:
[07:27] Yeah, we want it to be a little bit resilient, so you can put it into the garden when you're doing things. I should highlight that the photographers that I worked with are also fantastic. Lauren Merrill and Leslie Miller, both fantastic, both sell their photography, but they did the majority of the photos in that book, and they were able to take the stories that we were telling from the ecology of systems, and trying to explain from examples that meadows are supposed to follow fires through forest, so let's take photos of a landscape with flowers that we have in our garden, but against the backdrop of a burned forest, because that's the habitat that we're trying to recreate. They did a great job about finding or going out and taking those photos and making sure we could illustrate it so people could see what we were talking about.

Speaker 1:
[08:12] That sounds like somebody that's authentic. People could be talented and pull that off, but I think when you really pull it off, you're talented and you're authentic with it. You really know your subject and you care about it, and it comes through in their work, is what I think.

Speaker 2:
[08:27] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[08:27] Yeah, well thank you. Okay, so let me pepper you with a few of my curious questions that I think will benefit everyone listening today because we've talked so much, thankfully, in the recent years about ecological gardening and native plants, and I want that conversation to continue to happen. But what I love in how you add yourself into this equation and conversation is that you make the case that our gardens can function as real habitat and not just decorative space, but you also differentiate between natural habitat gardening versus wildlife-friendly gardening, and there's a difference there. And we've talked so much, we always just hear wildlife-friendly gardening almost ad nauseam, but I wanted to keep going. But I love that you add a really important differentiation and layer to that. So, can I have you tell us more about the differences in what natural habitat gardening is and how it is different?

Speaker 2:
[09:29] Sure. So, the natural habitats, when we are trying to recreate spaces in our gardens, we want to typically mimic what's happening in nature. And the best way to do that is to understand what should be happening, what regulated these spaces. So, quite often in the wildlife gardening, pollinator gardening conversations, we want to hear things that actually go against what we understand would be happening in nature to begin with. One thing that I constantly hear is, let your yard be, let nature take its course. So, I try and buffer that conversation with, what do you mean let nature take its course? Because if you go out to an intact or healthier ecosystem that still has a lot of the big animals still present, if you show up in two months of growing season, there's not a lot of dead standing vegetation from last year. But if you go into an urban lot that hasn't been managed in any way, shape or form, there's a lot of dead vegetation still standing. So the breakdown that happens between these two systems is that there's a lot of missing components for nature to take its course. So then we have to step in for managing these spaces and start mimicking the bison, the bears, the elk, the moose, the groundhogs, whatever animals existed in our areas that were in fact managing these ecosystems. And then if we can replicate those, then we can actually create much better habitat for the wildlife inside of our gardens. And even better than what we would see necessarily naturally is we can make those gardens gorgeous for ourselves, still support us with food, still support us with native plants, but we can really construct something that is both useful, helpful, and still promote nature inside of our gardens that make us want to be outside.

Speaker 1:
[11:13] Nice. All right. So in making the case that our gardens can be functional, is real habitat, and decorative spaces too, not mutually exclusive, but what's the biggest mindset shift, I guess, that gardeners need to make to get there?

Speaker 2:
[11:30] One of the first, so it depends on where people are starting off in a gardening conversation with this, right? If I was having this conversation with somebody who started gardening because they loved roses and had a collection of roses, the first thing I would tell them is if you want to start supporting pollinators and wildlife, we have to be comfortable with our plants being damaged. So that means leafcutter bees cutting holes out of the rose leaves, cucumber beetles eating some of the petals. That's okay because those insects are important for the overall ecosystem.

Speaker 1:
[11:58] It's what you want.

Speaker 2:
[12:00] Yes. But if you're further down the road and you're like, I've converted my non into all native plants, fantastic. Okay, let's start there. What have we done to help the pollinators, especially our moths and our beetles, get through the winter? So quite often if we're planting native plants, are we considering where these animals would go naturally or in the urban ecosystem to avoid freezing to death or avoid drying out? So typically they need a rich organic matter which is going to replicate the breakdown of stumps or forest trees or fallen logs. So we want to make sure that we're adding those. We want to make sure we're diversifying the soils inside of our gardens, because typically we're focused on soils for plants. But many of our wildlife also need specific soils. Snapping turtles, for example, common snapping turtles, some people really like to support them. They need piles of loose organic mulch. Typically, in the wild, they would find big fallen trees that were decaying, and they would be able to excavate it once it was soft, and they would lay their eggs there and it would be safe. Now we find them typically in mulch piles, and people have taken down a sick tree, mulched it into wood chips, and then all of a sudden that's where the turtles are deciding to nest. Inside of our local gardens we can add just small pockets like one-gallon size soil diversity, and we can add small pockets of organic rich material to support crickets, lightning bugs, all sorts of moths, that just need to burrow down in that loose material, because they're not built for digging, but they need to be able to get out of the elements and into something that has some thermal insulation and moisture gradient to keep them safe.

Speaker 1:
[13:34] You've already said a lot of things I want to talk to you about in greater detail, in the course of this conversation, we're going to get there and unpack each of those items. But the start of this part of the conversation, you were already going where I wanted to go next anyway, and that is that we are spending so much time, and rightfully so, talking about the importance of putting in native plants to replace non-native invasives and the reasons for that. But where you come back into the picture with the extra layers of information, is that it's more than just native plants, we're trying to create a natural habitat in Garden for Wildlife, for the reasons you just mentioned. Is there more that you'd like to unpack there? Because I think that's a really important point that I don't want to have people gloss over that while it is super important to do the native plant route and aspire, if you will, to get 70% or beyond, if you want, native plants, and why that's important, I think we've done a good job across the board establishing why that is. They have a very important role. But as you talked about the habitat, so I don't want to sell this one short because it's deeper than just the native plants.

Speaker 2:
[14:48] I appreciate that because it is, you are right, the building blocks of everything that we're doing. So one of the ways that I explain it in the presentations that I gave is I'll typically show the model that most people learn succession from, where you start with annual plants that will establish and then perennial grasslands will show up and that will give way to shrublands. And then if there's no major disturbances, you'll get into a forest if you're living in forested regions. For this book, I also made sure to cover this for desert regions so that people can get an idea of what's happening in both situations. And if we're thinking about Plantlist, that system, that model is fantastic. But instead of some major disturbance resetting the living plant vegetation community, which it does, the next vegetation community is also dependent on the resources left over from the previous ecosystem. And when something is disturbed, be it from floods, fire, drought, major insect breakouts, whatever it was, there would still be all of these resources that are left over. So the model then expands to the right. And other ecologists have built these models as well to illustrate that if you're talking about meadow plants in our forested ecoregions, we should be talking about standing snags and fallen logs as well. Because those two resources are incredibly important for the majority of the wildlife that live in those areas. One of the best examples to illustrate how badly we're managing that kind of idea, or were managing that kind of idea, is bluebirds were declining across North America. Right. And in the 90s, it was a huge push because bluebirds shouldn't be declining. But we realized we had removed all of their nesting resources. And the very few ones that were still intact were being outcompeted by starlings, which are an invasive bird. And what they're nesting in are the hollow snags of old branches and old trees. So simply by having farmers and landowners put up bluebird boxes, which are now in every major box store, every good gardening center has, with other than plants section, typically has bluebird boxes. And that's because we need to have that hollow cavity. And for a lot of ecologists, if you ask them, what is a bluebird box replicating in nature? If they aren't ready on that answer, it's going to take a moment to be like, oh, it's a hollow log, right? Because it's square, it's boxy, it's architecturally very different than a hollow log. But because we've been able to replicate the entrance, that's all that the bird really needed for that major protection and the cavity size, we can put them up. And it makes a very different ecosystem and look, but functionally still works to protect the bluebirds. And that's one of the topics I bring up over and over and over again in the book is, it might look a little bit different, but we can still make it manage or manage it in a way that makes it still very functional for our wildlife.

Speaker 1:
[17:33] Thank you for that example, because I was writing a note down to myself, Bluebird Houses exclamation points, just to make sure that I add some more of those to my property here. I love them and I remember a time, I've been here 15 years and it doesn't go back as far as you said when we were really losing them. But I remember a period of time where it was years between when I first saw them and I then saw them again with a number of year gap in between for whatever reason that was. But yeah, so thank you for that and thank you for adding some additional information there. Now, back to our audience who is all level gardeners, people that care about the environment and habitat at different levels and just different, where they are in the process. But when prioritizing which plants to include, we now have a great roadmap to help us get there. And with the wisdom of using keystone species or plant groups to deliver the biggest economical return, would you say that that's, you know, for that person like looking for that direction guidance on where to start? The keystone plants really seems to have made a nice impact. It resonates with us and it gives us an easy place to go to get started, I think.

Speaker 2:
[18:43] It does. And the start is always helpful because if, in some of the presentations I gave early on, when I was first just focusing on my research more than I was on trying to engage landowners, anytime I gave a little plant list, people were like, Oh, can you leave that up? Let me write it down, please. Because I wasn't expecting it. And then I really had to lean on some of the education techniques that I learned. Like, yes, people do need a to-do list. They need simple packaged things that they can do. So even in the book, all of the things that I try and explain to add to our gardens, I tried to make sure they could be done in less than two days. But even better, they could be done in less than two hours. So, stack some rocks up with some space. You know, add an excavated area to a raised bed that has an entrance for anything that needs to get out of the sun or out of the cold. And add pockets of organic material just as fast as planting a plant. You can excavate some soil, put in some untreated wood chips and little bits of soft sand. And you've started to diversify that soil to really help the arthropods inside of our landscapes find new places to shelter and lay their eggs.

Speaker 1:
[19:50] I love that. And as you said that, you reminded me, I heard you said in your raised beds, you know, just create an entrance to have wildlife get in there and find some shelter. I'm going to just tell a quick story here because I think it's very relevant. And I'm geeky like this. So this past fall in November, I was rebuilding. First of all, I was demolishing my raised bed garden because it had been 15 years of untreated red cedar and it was rotting. It was to the point where it couldn't go another year. So I was having to take it all out to replace it with new raised beds. But in the course of, and they were six by six timbers. They were beautiful, big chunky rotting timbers. So as we were taking them apart, numerous times through that weekend process, we would lift one off and there would be cavities that had been eaten out through it and everything. But there were lots of blue tail skinks that were overwintering in there. They were hunkered down for the winter and we would lift the logs up. They would wake up and groggily try to escape. Is that a word? But anyway, you know what I'm saying. Some toads and every time we came across them, I would catch them and let them know that they could stay. We just would move the wood and get them back to where they were. Hopefully, they can go back to sleep there. But we had other plans for that wood. Had I not seen that and known that that was their habitat, I wouldn't have been mindful at all of the need to kind of leave that behind and just rather get rid of it or whatever I was going to do with it. There's no end to that. That's the end of the story and I don't know what now the relevance really is. But you know, you-

Speaker 2:
[21:27] It actually does connect to a few things. Unfortunately, this is not in the book. So if you're listening to this podcast, you're getting a really great tip. Yay. The 50 degree Fahrenheit rule or 10 degree Celsius rule. When I first heard that, it was from herpetologists. It wasn't from insect people. I think somewhere along the lines, it's just gotten misconstrued that 50 degrees Fahrenheit is when insects emerge, and that's not the case at all. The reason we should be waiting for 50 degrees Fahrenheit is so that skinks are actually in a capacity, a regulatory metabolism, that they can move and find a new shelter. So doing any of these disturbances is important, especially to rebuild stuff. But we should be cognizant of what might be hunkering down and what stage of their life they might be in. So yes, there will be some mortality with the disturbances that we make, especially for anything that's laid eggs or is in a pupa and is stuck there. But for the organisms that are mobile, if it's more than 50 degrees, we will encompass the majority of our reptiles, our amphibians, and our adult arthropods, that they will at least be able to find new shelter and continue to succeed in their life cycle versus if it's too cold, where they're depending on us moving them to a safe place and making sure that it reaches those thermal limits, which is not necessarily as successful as them finding a new place to hunker down for the remainder of the cold season.

Speaker 1:
[22:49] I'm glad I told that story because I just learned something new that's really important. I can apply that forever more. And just to follow up to that, while I have your attention, I have a arborist wood chip pile out in my front area that I need to kind of relocate. And I was relocating all of it until I noticed that some snakes from last fall were overwintering in it and I wanted to leave them there. I guess now my question is, is it the 50 degree rule for them too? Because I don't want to disturb them until it's safe to move them.

Speaker 2:
[23:18] Yes, your snakes and your lizards are going to be the ones that are in the higher level of that thermal extreme for the 50. A lot of our amphibians will come out earlier than that. If I'm not sure exactly where you are located.

Speaker 1:
[23:28] Atlanta, Atlanta, Atlanta.

Speaker 2:
[23:31] Oh, Atlanta. Okay. So it gets a lot hotter there. You might want to bump that up to 60, 65. When you would typically see your null starting to show up, it would be a good time to know that the lizards and the snakes will be able to move if they get disturbed. They might be cold because you've unearthed them from a cold spot, but they'll be able to get back into a safe place. In areas like New Mexico, I actually recommend to go a little bit higher, like 75 or 80 because those lizards are used to being active at much higher temperatures. Some of them are still very lethargic in the 60s and 50s.

Speaker 1:
[24:02] Fascinating. Now, I want to talk about some challenges with conventional gardening norms. One of the topics that has surfaced in the last few years, and I'm very thankful for this, is the reminder that we don't need to be so tidy in our garden. And I very clearly remember in my horticultural training days and then up through the Master Gardener program that I enjoyed sitting in on, it was always about putting the garden to bed in the fall, cleaning up and getting the duff layer out and all of that. But thankfully, these days, we have come a long way and I think people have really embraced it. And whether it's selfishly for the fact that now they don't have to be as work so hard to clean everything up and they can just chill with it, there's a method of the madness there and a reason for that. Can I get you to just comment on that for a few minutes?

Speaker 2:
[24:53] Yeah. So tidying up, cleaning and messiness, those are words that I really dislike, but unfortunately the ones we have in our toolbox at the moment. But to replicate the big animals that existed in our landscapes and are no longer present inside of our urban landscapes, we do in fact need to clean up and tidy up. But I use those words as we need to be managing those spaces appropriately and all that material should still be staying on our properties, like none of it should be bagged up and shipped away. Similarly with our landscape designs, quite often people will put up maples or oak trees, and then they'll have things like frog fruit in their beds for their pollinators. If you put leaves from your oaks and your maples on top of these low growing full-sum plants, they're going to die eventually. So they need to be managed in a way that clears those leaves off. So we will be tidying up in a way, but then we can move those leaves to an area that would allow them to pile up. Because naturally the wind would be blowing through, animals would be collecting these leaves. The only time you see a thick leaf layer is in a deciduous forest with a pretty tight canopy. If you're in an open savanna, like the majority of the southern US, those leaves don't make solid layers, they can get moved. And I talk about ways that we can move them too. Rakes are going to be preferred, but if you only have a leaf blower, use a leaf blower, preferably something that is not going to be running a two-stroke engine, a battery-operated one is going to be better than that. But we've got to look at this as a scale of things, of there's really bad, and there's really good, and there's a lot of in-between. And that's what comes into the tidying up and the cleaning up. The other thing I focused on is sight lines. So if you have neighbors that are looking at your yard, you should step out and look at how your yard appears to them. If it is overgrown and lots of dead things are standing up, that doesn't sound like a good habitat. You wouldn't go into a healthy ecosystem and be like, this looks good. But if we did go into a healthy ecosystem, we would see that a lot of those plants are being broken down, they're getting laid down on the ground, they're creating other layers and resources. So if we can take that tidiness, that landscape level approach when we're looking at the habitat of what we think is attractive, and then try and mimic that attractive landscape, natural landscape in our gardens, we can tidy up to match that, but not grab everything up in a box and put it in a trash bag and send it off to the landfill. That's never a good option.

Speaker 1:
[27:23] Yeah, and I think that's a big part of this conversation because when people are really into the tidying up part, they don't want to have anything to do with it anymore, and they are sending it off the property to the landfill. And I see that a lot around here with the leaf collection time in the fall, where many of the HOAs require that not only are the leaves cleaned up, but they're removed from the property. They can't even like rake them into the beds. And so they sit in these brown bags that you get at the box store or Costco or whatever, and you fill them with your leaves, and you set them on the curb, and then the trash company comes, and they don't even, here in Atlanta, they don't even take them to a composting facility. They go straight to the landfill. And another story we don't have time to talk about, but I would, there were years where I would take weekends in November and drive the neighborhoods with my pickup truck and rescue those bags and bring them home and just dump them out into my native plant beds, just to try to counteract some of that.

Speaker 2:
[28:28] Yeah, and we definitely have a lot of work we need to do with laws and regulations. And another thing I did not, there was, the book is 342 pages, it's long, but it's packed filled with easily digestible pieces of information, lots of photos. There were a lot of things that didn't make it in there. And one of the things I do in a lot of my presentations is talk about being active outside of our yards, because if you can get the local laws to change, it's way more impactful than doing the work in your own yard. So if we can get HOAs to be aware that shipping all of this off is not a good practice, if we can utilize it instead as part of our landscape material, things that are going to return the nutrients is going to reduce the amount of fertilizer or pesticides we have to use. Why not make less steps for us that also make our neighborhoods more alive and filled with bird songs and crickets? Like a lot of people are on board. We just have to educate them.

Speaker 1:
[29:23] Yeah. And by the way, you mentioned the length of your book and you said it's big. It doesn't feel big to me at all. And you're right, it is that number of pages, but I never had an intimidation factor with this book. Back to my questions though on the tidiness part. As far as not being so sterile with your cleanup, what role does leaving the organic matter have, like the leaf litter or the dead stems, in supporting the food web?

Speaker 2:
[29:50] So much. So part of the ways that I wanted to let people understand how to incorporate these materials was to create profiles of different species and different guilds of animals inside of this book, and then really walk through the annual life cycle that each one has and the resources they would be reliant on. So the lunamoth is a great example, the profiles in there where they are dependent on loose leafs to sow around their cocoons when they're trying to protect themselves. In areas where they are two generations, there is a generation that's going to do this in a more exposed area, so that they aren't going to get soaked with rain, there's a little bit more airflow. But the ones that need to spend the winter, they're going to go into the areas like underneath logs or into hollow logs and the leaf piles that are there. So when we're cleaning up the fallen leaves and putting them into our beds, we're creating spaces for animals like luna moths as well as many other pupating organisms to go and create their own little nests. Similarly, things like possums will collect those leaves and then drag them into their own areas. So we are kind of recreating that movement of leaves if we do have to clean them up. And then just by letting them live in the ecosystem and landscape, that feeds nutrient cycles, that's going to feed some of the fungal growth that we actually want, because fungus is important for a number of invertebrates, including worms and beetles, that then feed our birds as well. So it's not just lepidopter that we want to worry about. We want to worry about all of the arthropods that are going to feed our city birds, but are also going to feed our toads, our amphibians, our lizards, everything that's in that ecosystem that we should be excited to see when they decide to live at our house.

Speaker 1:
[31:34] I love stories like that because every time I'm out in the yard and I'm walking through the woodland garden of mine and elsewhere around my property, I replay the tape on what we're talking about right here and just it reinforces feeling, not that I need any reason to feel good about the fact of having a looser approach or more hands-off approach to it, but just knowing what the benefit is to the wildlife and natural habitats that are there because I'm not really invading their space.

Speaker 2:
[32:04] Yeah. With the idea of using leaves is a good example, there is a maximum depth.

Speaker 1:
[32:11] Yes, thank you.

Speaker 2:
[32:12] You can over mulch areas with your leaves, so we need to be careful, especially if we're planting full sun, meadow plants in some areas, we'll need to move the leaves off of those areas and only have an inch or two of maximum of leaf cover in that because as the rain and the snow compacts it, it works like cardboard and it's going to prevent things from growing, especially our annual plants. But many of our perennial plants that have underground stems that need to grow through that won't always be strong enough to make it through that leaf layer. So those leaves do need to strategically be placed back underneath the tree itself or underneath shrubs that are going to be tall enough to already be exposed to the lights to continue to photosynthesize.

Speaker 1:
[32:52] Thank you. That one almost got away from me because it was a question I wanted to ask you as far as proper depth or how deep is too deep and I think you just answered it. So thanks for that from a guy who likes to keep the leaves around.

Speaker 2:
[33:05] Yes. And then if you're also trying to support birds, if we want to mimic some of the actions that wolves, elk, deer, any of the active summer mammals, they clear snow and they also clear the leaf litter. So they're trying to get down to the shoots and the roots of the plants. And in doing so, they're exposing the soil for birds to come in and actually access that seed bank. So when we think about cleaning up snow, one of the things that we should be thinking about is in our meadow spaces, where we have those full sun plants. It is useful to go out and clean up some of that snow and expose some of that soil, simply to help feed the native birds that are in the area that need to be able to access the seeds, but also the invertebrates that would be in that layer, and they can still get the protein that they're looking for.

Speaker 1:
[33:50] You mentioned soil. So let's talk about that for a second. How does soil health factor in to habitat gardening? Like how important is it for our efforts to create healthy soil for those habitats, literally from the ground up? Or is it better to work with just the native soil because if we're so focused on putting in native plants, they're not used to somebody coming in ahead of them and adding compost and amending the soil and make it nice and cushy and sweet? So what's our role in that?

Speaker 2:
[34:22] So if you somehow are lucky enough to live in natural, healthy soil, you don't have to do anything, except for maybe add some of those burrows and underground shelters if all the burrowing animals have been removed. But the majority of us live in places that have been heavily impacted. One of the photos that are in the book is from Westchester County, New York, and the forests on the East Coast are roughly about 100 years old now. The area was smoothed out, it was tilled, it was completely re-terrain so that we could have farms and sheep and agriculture. Then as we developed those cities, land got a little bit too expensive and farmers got pushed out to the Midwest. But that soil is interrupted, that soil is not intact. Similarly, a lot of houses that have been built in the last 30 years, they've come in with huge machines and made just, I don't want to use monoculture, but they've homogenized the soil in a way that it's not natural, it's not healthy. So we can't really think of our soil as healthy or intact and that we do need to be diversifying it. So then you have to ask the question, well, what does that even mean? How do I articulate or even start to comprehend what the soil is supposed to look like if we don't really have a good reference? There is a forester who's on lots of socials, his name is Ethan Tapper, and he talks about ways to make an old growth forest without having an old growth forest, this is one of his episodes, and it really helps explain we need to be looking at resources, that there should be this rough bumpy terrain inside of these older forests that we see because trees fall over, their roots come up, they've now created a mound and a divot. That then decays, it's going to leave some topography, but it's also sorted that soil out, and we cover that in the book. So inside of our gardens, we want to make sure that we're having pockets of rich organic material, which if you read any gardening book for plants, they say, don't do that, that's going to steal nitrogen from your soil because the fungus are going to use it up, and that's true. But so many of our wildlife depend on it, so then we have to incorporate it into the overall design, which is why I like to recommend putting that underneath larger structures or in between plants like ferns and vines so it would typically be near those rich organic materials anyways. We can also look at what is the density of mature trees in a healthy forest in the region that we're in, and then kind of realize that's how dense on square footage we should be putting in these larger organic materials or pockets, and then smaller ones are just going to mimic the transverse roots that go out and branches that would fall on the ground anyways. So, we can kind of start to articulate the density that we should be doing, but understanding the diversity of soil really takes a better understanding of the geology and the systems that are around. We don't really have time to dive into all of that, but I do talk a lot about it in the book, about whether or not sandy soils are going to be there, or clay soils, and how we want to look at the wildlife and the soils that they would be using to then put that in our yard, specifically when it comes to nesting bees and ground nesting bees, and the packed clay or the packed sand, and how that can be integrated into our landscape.

Speaker 1:
[37:36] As I listen to that, I have a new question that I hadn't even thought to ask you yet, but in this conversation in the title of your book, Natural Habitats and Wildlife Gardening, and we're trying to emulate that or create that, is it accurate to say that humans can even take our subdivision backyard that's been scraped clean of topsoil and native soil, and then restore or create a natural habitat, or is that not possible just because of the term natural habitat?

Speaker 2:
[38:07] Yeah, so the title of the book is more referring to understanding natural habitats and then creating wildlife gardens to emulate them.

Speaker 1:
[38:16] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[38:17] So we can try and restore those habitats, but we have to understand that our urban systems, our neighborhoods are not natural. So fences, roofs, driveways, roads, all of these things are brand new to the environment and that the wildlife have to deal with. So if we understand that we're already starting from an augmented ecosystem and that we have removed a lot of the pieces of the food web, of the overall, you know, feedback systems, then we can start to look at what we can as stewards of that land replicate to make the habitat more successful and more suitable for the wildlife that are able to retain and persist inside of our neighborhoods. When I was living in West Texas, I was out there for seven years and there's a lot of toads in people's yards because the Texas toad is out there, there's the Fowler's, Spadefoot toad, there's a lot of ones that show up. But interestingly, there's not a lot of juveniles. And the populations that are holding on inside of these neighborhoods are dying off. They're not able to reproduce. And the more that I was living there, the more that I was noticing this, that those toads were getting run over by cars every time it would rain. They would go and find places to breed and then it would be polluted. So simply by getting some of my neighbors and myself to add in deep enough ponds, we went from never seen juveniles to always seen juveniles. So it's really just understanding that we're not going to recreate whatever the pristine environment was because we've moved too much. We also have huge extinctions gone on. And the North or the East Coast is a good example. Chestnut trees were about 25% of the tree population. Yeah. They're gone.

Speaker 1:
[40:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:01] So we can't rebuild that system. Right. We can try, but we've, there's so much we've tried, but we can try and emulate it by making sure that the organisms that fed on those chestnuts can maybe feed on the acorns or the hickory bark, shagbark hickories. Those plants can then be added in abundance so that the food sources are still there.

Speaker 1:
[40:25] Shaun, you brought up water and that was, I feel like you're looking at my notes because I'm a big proponent of making sure we don't miss an opportunity to talk about the importance of water and any garden design or landscape setting or whatever because of its importance that sometimes I don't think we give enough credence to. And we assume that the wildlife is just going to know where to find the water. But in my experience on my own landscape and garden area, you know, we have those many days in a row without water and, you know, stuff evaporates and then where do they get it? You know, because sometimes they're not traveling very far. That's just not in them to do that, to find it. So, with that, let me, I'll set that up like that and let me let you take off on that because I know you have a lot more to say about it than I do.

Speaker 2:
[41:23] And it's actually really, you know, important that we pay attention to this as the US is now entering, about 75% of us entering this year in a drought, unprecedented drought nonetheless. And in the book, I do talk about this specific scenario because we are going to see it more and more with climate change, that we are going to have incredible periods of drought that are going to push populations into extreme stress, decrease their survival rates. And there is no reason that we should be letting that quote unquote natural process continue because we've exacerbated it with climate change. So when possible, we should be providing some supplemental water during drought periods. It should be provided at ground level so that more organisms can access it. However, it should be spread out so that birds and things that need open areas to feel safe can access that water and sheltered areas can be accessed by the animals that don't want to be exposed. So that's going to play an important part. I've put in designs on how to utilize your downspouts from a house and channel that water away from the house foundation through impervious pathways that will then feed into ponds depending on where you're at. But typically, more than nine inches deep need to be. If you want to hold that water for two months or longer, you're going to feed some ephemeral pools. People immediately go, what about mosquitoes? We start talking about mosquitoes. Dr. Talame is in great work getting people to understand that we now have what's called a mosquito dunk. All that's using is the bacteria from Bacillus therminiensis, Variety Israelensis, it's pretty much Botox, and those cells sit at the bottom of the water and the filter feeding flies, typically, specifically mosquitoes, but there's a few other genera and families in there, will eat that toxin and they will die. But our tadpoles, our dragonflies, the majority of things that live in that aquatic system are still able to persist and not be harmed by that. There are a lot of ways that we can bring water back into our systems. The other thing I talk about is, if you've ever gone to Carlsbad Cavering, right outside of Carlsbad is a little town where the Pecos River is fed by a huge spring. There is a stone that says this used to flow at a million gallons per hour, but it now trickles at just a few hundred. It's because all of these landowners in the area didn't know what they were doing, or didn't realize the impact they were having, and they were drilling into the aquifer and they were dropping the water levels. So every single one of those landowners had an action, and it affected the overall landscape, and it drained all of these springs. So we also just have a reduction of water availability inside of the landscape in general. But from that story, what I like to take is that a bunch of people did actions, they didn't understand how it was affecting the landscape, but we can do the same thing that we can positively, personally impact the landscape and bring these things back by building that momentum in the same way that we accidentally removed it from the system.

Speaker 1:
[44:26] Let's talk about some of the tangible things that gardeners at any level or people that want to do something, whether it's an apartment balcony or one-tenth of an acre, whatever it is. Let's call them small gardens, really create meaningful habitat or does this only work with a larger scale? I understand that everything matters, but I do want to hear how you respond to that.

Speaker 2:
[44:54] It ties perfectly into that example with the wells draining the aquifers. Every little bit is going to help the overall natural systems rebound. A 10-foot by 10-foot balcony with just a few potted plants, if we're using native sunflowers, native plants are going to refuel some of our insects that are migrating through or our birds, that's going to help. Allowing the populations to find their spaces inside of our suburban and our urban ecosystems. Every little food plant helps. It also accidentally introduces seeds sometimes. So again, back when I was in West Texas, the house that I moved into had a Bermuda grass lawn and a calorie pair in the front. Horrible design, right? A lot of people had just rocks put in because it's hot, it's almost the desert, and then they had back alleyways for the trash trucks to go through. First thing that I introduced to the yard were some spiny golden weeds. They're very common weed out there and tohocadazes. They weren't in our landscape, but I knew where some were growing. I was working as a consulting biologist for some of the developers, and I would go through before and the machines would show up. So I was just taking seeds and plants and saving them. The second year that I was in that house, golden weed and tohocadazes were all in the alleys around our house. The third year that I was there, they were like further and further away. So I was accidentally introducing these native plants that were simply finally establishing. And then people were saying, like, I've never seen this many butterflies around. And the properties were only 10 years old. And just by that destruction, we lost everything. But simply by adding in one small yard, it did trickle out. And there, of course, were neighbors that saw the activity and saw the overall design. And they were like, this is really pretty. And I would be like, do you want a flower? Do you want this, you know, Greg's Mist flower? Would you like some of this Mexican sagewort? And people were like, oh, you wouldn't mind? I'd literally just pull out a piece and be rooted. I'd like to just put this in water, put it in some soil. Or if you want, I'll get it to a solid point and I'll hand it off to you. But I was able to get other landowners simply to adopt one or two native plants without doing the massive redesign that I had done.

Speaker 1:
[47:08] Very stealth. I love it. Thank you. That's great. So that goes to my next question then. How long, and for example, when you talked about earlier in this conversation, I think it was under the conversation of density and you talked about putting stones underneath and just piling them up loosely so the habitat could be accessed for the frogs and so forth. If somebody's wanting to make some simple changes to see some results from their efforts, and I know it's a depend kind of answer, but how quickly can they get results from some of their efforts, and maybe the shortest time period is more realistically drawn out?

Speaker 2:
[47:49] With the majority of projects that I've done, I see pretty instant results. Typically, that's because I'm assuming that because these species are already present and I'm finally making more purposeful and intentional habitat that meets their needs instead of it accidentally being inside the landscape, they quickly move in. One of the best examples is I put in some simple one-gallon holes in the ground, filled them with unchemically non-treated wood chips, a little bit of sand, because I wanted to create some hibernacula or some safe spaces for crickets and beetles and toads to go into, because they kept showing up in the plants that I was putting in. Within two days, I had crickets singing from those little pockets. And the next time I dug into them, there were already toads in there. I didn't dig in right away, because I didn't want to disturb it. But just knowing that crickets were singing within 48 hours shows that you can really get this change pretty quickly.

Speaker 1:
[48:45] Amazing. And I'll say, when I add a water source around here, it blows my mind how quickly the birds or the bees or other insects find that source and they are all over it. And just for example, the other day, I added a new little water saucer outside my office window, filled it with water. A few minutes later, I looked out at it, literally a few minutes later, and there was a bluebird just preening and taking a beautiful path. And it just made me so happy. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[49:20] And that's one thing I recommend quite often, is to simply look at some of the rocks or the hardscapes that we do have. And if you can reorient them so they'll hold water after a rain event or after an irrigation event for just a few more hours. That will help hydrate so many animals. If you live in an area where you have American toads, you can do that. The other thing I personally like to do is when I'm at Goodwill or any of the antique shops, I look for old ash trays. And the really shallow ones that are at least six inches wide that they set for the parties, we don't need those anymore. Put them underneath your shrubs so that when you do have a rain event or anything, it will hold water for long enough. But make sure it has a crack in it or it's terracotta or porous so that after about 24 hours it'll dry out, and that way you won't be breeding mosquitoes.

Speaker 1:
[50:11] Who knew? So I'll have to explain to my family when we're in the next Goodwill and I'm buying ash trays. I haven't taken up smoking. Oh my goodness, that's interesting. All right, let's do some inspiration and take away here, and then we'll do a quick rapid fire. I've come to love these real quick either or kind of questions. But before we do that, let's talk about just maybe a universal simple change that anybody can make no matter the size of their garden into listening today, that would have an immediate ecological impact. Maybe you just answered that question, but I had it queued up that I wanted to ask you that.

Speaker 2:
[50:49] A second backup to that would be add large pieces of wood. So if it's firewood from the local gas station, or you know somebody who's taken down a tree recently, utilize wood inside of the landscape, either as pedestals, garden borders, simply is something to look at that plants can grow around. That wood itself is going to feed a lot of the insects like our metallic bupresseds. The common names are metallic woodboring bees or longhorn beetles. Those beetles create burrows at a lot of our native stem nesting bees or cavity nesting bees more specifically, will go in and utilize. So by adding that dead wood to our landscape or replacing the fallen trees or creating that habitat, but you can do it in ways that are attractive and you will have a very quick return on the number of organisms that will utilize it.

Speaker 1:
[51:41] Easy. For somebody that maybe has even a smaller space where that may not be a practical option, do you have one other idea for uber small?

Speaker 2:
[51:50] For much smaller spaces, I would say start with sunflowers. Get a native sunflower or get a native asteraceae. Fire wheels are a good option. Tohocadase is going to be a good option. But the large open flowers that we see in the asteraceae are going to support a number of pollinators, including our moths, our butterflies and our bees. But they also provide seeds that a lot of birds can utilize, and especially our migratory ones.

Speaker 1:
[52:17] Great answer. Okay, rapid fire. And maybe you're allowed to reuse some of your answers. Those may come into play for these next few questions. And starting with this one. One plant every garden should include for wildlife no matter where you live?

Speaker 2:
[52:35] There isn't one because our ecosystems are too different. You can look at families, though. Asteraceae is going to be a good one. Any of those major tree groups inside of North America, Quercus, the oak genus, is pretty much in all habitats. Yep. And then Cherries prunus is going to be another good option, as well as Salix, which is your willow group.

Speaker 1:
[52:53] Yeah, nice. Biggest mistake gardeners make when trying to help wildlife?

Speaker 2:
[53:00] Letting plants grow wild. It's not the same thing as letting plants rewild an area because plants are supposed to be browsed, they're supposed to be eaten, they're supposed to be damaged. And if we don't do any of that, we don't allow them to be browsed, we don't cut them back a little bit, they grow leggy, they grow tall, they actually impede flight space for a lot of these animals and prevent the movement of things. So we really do need to go in and make sure that we're trimming up our plants at least once during the growing season to mimic some of that behavior. Inside of the book, I do talk about plants that can tolerate a lot of trimming, that you can sculpt into something like a topiary, and then plants that will take a cut here, a cut there, but that's going to allow those plants to grow back stronger, and it's going to allow flight space for animals that need to fly through that area to still have windbreaks, but still access those plants in a more natural way.

Speaker 1:
[53:49] OK, I get that, but it did lead me to ask you this question based on what you just said, and that is in a natural habitat, if we're trying to emulate what's been out there without the impact of man, nobody's willing to cut in those plants back.

Speaker 2:
[54:04] But our bison are, our clare are, the larger animals, but we also can't remove the indigenous peoples that have been on this land for thousands of years. Ten to thirteen thousand years is where we're showing the cultures that existed here. And one of the arguments that recently has been coming up is like, well, we're looking at pits in Wisconsin from six thousand years ago, and we don't see bison. And it's like, well, six thousand years ago, that was a very different ecosystem that even has changed as the winters have gotten a little warmer for that space and different plants have shown up and new things have evolved. So we really do need to understand that people are a part of the natural ecosystem and our chemicals aren't, but we shouldn't be disrespecting any of the groups of people that settled and built their cultures here and were forcefully removed from it because they did, in fact, create part of those ecosystems that we're trying to support again.

Speaker 1:
[55:00] I'm glad I asked. Next question. Messy garden feature you wish more people would embrace?

Speaker 2:
[55:07] Ooh, stick piles. But I will say if you don't like the messy stick pile, you can still organize them by creating an outer box with stacked logs. It's more airy and then put your sticks inside of it. So it still looks nice, but it's going to create the same kind of snug bug hotel that will benefit your wildlife.

Speaker 1:
[55:27] Cool. Okay. One more for you. If you could eliminate one common gardening habit overnight, what would it be and why?

Speaker 2:
[55:38] Weed and feeds. Any pesticide application. Pesticides are so bad and they're synergistic. So it's not just insecticides are killing bees. Some of the research that I did when I was working in Cornell, was looking at why are we seeing bumblebee range contractions? There were four species that we looked at because they had the most severe range contractions. We went and found fungicides were one of the leading pollutants in those areas. Other research was showing that those same bees, when they were exposed to fungicides, these fungicides were refining the water. They weren't killing them directly, but they were lowering their ability to fly. They were lowering their ability to reproduce. They were lowering their ability to fight off infection. In short, we were lowering the amount of children they could produce and increasing how fast they would die. That's just, instead of allowing the population to grow or stay flat, we were causing it to decline over time. So we see this huge range contractions because of fungicide, as well as the use of insecticide and herbicides. So they all are affecting their poisons, and we need to utilize them intelligently, but we need to stop doing it as the initial knee-jerk reaction. I've got aphids, I've got beetles, let me put a pesticide down. It's like, no, maybe, maybe, let it sit for a second and let the natural pest management system kick in and take care of those things first.

Speaker 1:
[56:56] Shaun, thank you for all of this. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And before I let you go, I want to make sure that we don't miss anything that you wanted to share that I didn't ask you about.

Speaker 2:
[57:09] The one thing that I would like your audience to take away from this conversation is there are a lot of things that we can do for wildlife to support them inside of our urban ecosystems, but there's no one way to do it. So give yourself grace, let yourself make mistakes, and don't kick yourself for doing something wrong and then finding out that there's a better way to do it later. Just if you learn better, do better. You're allowed to make mistakes. You're allowed to have your roses and be like, oh, that's not the best thing for the environment. Okay, so you know better. Don't plant more roses, but it doesn't mean you have to rip out your entire rose garden if you have some that you truly love or mean something to you. So give yourself some grace. On that same line, if there's ever a space where you're like, I want to grow something that I can eat, that is going to be incredibly important for just the overall world that we can reduce our food impact and our carbon footprint when we are looking at our natural landscapes. And if we can get the nutrients to ourselves quickly and without shipping them across the ocean, that's going to be useful. So allow yourself to have design and flux and grace with the habitats that you've created.

Speaker 1:
[58:26] And that wraps up my conversation with Shaun McCoshum. I heard so many great take aways from this episode, and I hope you did too. I know I say this every week, but if you would like to go back and re-listen to this episode, and this is one where I really think you should, you can do that from our website joegardener.com. Just look for the podcast tab, and this is episode number 466, or you can watch my conversation with Shaun over on our YouTube channel, joegardenerTV. And there, you can leave a comment or drop me a question in the notes, and no matter where you review this show, we will have those notes and related pictures and links, including to Shaun's book and to other resources, so that you can dig deeper and start by applying what you learned today. I mentioned our YouTube channel joegardenerTV for watching our podcast, but that is also where we post my DIY and how-to videos. And this is the year where we are in a major rebuild here at the garden farm, including my raised bed vegetable garden, which we've already started. We tore out the garden and rebuilt new beds, but now a lot of work has to commence before they're ready to plant. And we'll be documenting all of that. We also have a major expansion of my nursery and propagation area, which you don't see much of, but you will be in the next few months. And I'm going after that. Plus a new design for my compost bins. So there will be lots of video covering all of this and more. And that will be on our YouTube channel at joegardener.tv. So more than one reason to go check out that channel. And our other YouTube channel is where we post all of my past television episodes of Growing a Greener World, our Emmy award winning national public television series. All episodes from all 12 seasons are there. And I have to say, I think you will be pleasantly surprised if you haven't discovered that channel yet. So please check that one out also. And again, the channel name is GGWTV for Growing a Greener World. And as we wrap up today, a special thanks to Milorganite. Milorganite has been a supporting partner of the Joe Gardener Podcast since its beginning. And this year, they're celebrating their 100th anniversary. That says a lot about their staying power in a very competitive market. Milorganite is my fertilizer of choice because it's a non-burning, slow release, organically derived source of nitrogen. I've been using it all around here on my garden farm for my lawn, landscape and beds for years. And I get consistently great results whenever and wherever I apply it. You can find it just about anywhere. And to learn more, head over to their website, milorganite.com. Thanks as always to Amy Prentice, Brendan O'Reilly and Christine LaFond. Names you hear every week because they are my all important podcast production team to help me get this episode ready to go and out the door every Thursday morning. And thank you for joining me today. My goal for every episode is to help you take the guesswork out of gardening by teaching you the why do behind the how to so that you can become a better, smarter, more confident gardener. I'll be back here again next Thursday for another episode of the Joe Gardener Show. And until then, have a great week. Take care and I will see you back here really soon.

Speaker 3:
[61:40] Thanks for listening to the Joe Gardener Show, the podcast where it's all about gardening and learning to grow like a pro, no experience required. For more information, podcasts, and how-to videos, visit us online at joegardener.com.