May Photo Winner!

Congratulations to Kate, with a beautiful picture of a lovely peony!

Remember, if you submit by the end of the month you can win $25 off your next Birch Meadow visit! Just email your photo to shannon@birchmeadowgc.com. 

For more information on the contest, see our January newsletter.

Rain Gardens

Rain gardens are becoming more and more popular in the world of gardening. A beautiful feature for many landscapes, they can create dimension, bring in color, and are highly versatile in style. They are also incredibly useful for storm-water management!

Have you ever had bad runoff from Carolina storms wash away your topsoil or mulch? Have you had soggy areas in your lawn, or spots where the grass just never takes the way you’d like? Do you have awkward or empty areas around your hardscape where you want some interest, but aren’t sure what to do with the space? Maybe you live near a new development – and the deforestation has completely changed your garden environment for the worse. Rain gardens can reduce these and many more issues for a garden or lawn. They support birds, pollinator insects, and even filter harmful compounds out of rainwater like excess fertilizers and sediment (the #1 water pollutant worldwide) and reduce the herbicides and pesticides entering our stream waters. These small buffers can have big “downstream” benefits – pun intended – for ourselves, the water ecosystem, and its wildlife. Finally, a properly planned and built rain garden holds water for three days or less, which isn’t enough time for mosquitoes to make it from egg to adulthood so there is no need to worry about inviting these pests into your yard.

- Ray

Get Ready for Hot Weather

Every year the heat gets a little more intense and there are more days with high intensity air pollution.  Our employees struggle to work safely on the hottest and/or most polluted days.  In order to keep them safe, we have created a heat and air quality policy which will go into effect on April 15.

Here is what you need to know:  

• We will shift our available hours for physical labor to 7:30 AM until 3:30 PM during the first week of heat indexes greater than 90.

• If the heat index is predicted to be above 99, we will cancel work for the hours that it is expected to be that high.  

• If air quality is a code red, employees will work at their own discretion.  If it is code purple or above, work will be canceled. 

• We will do our best to send employees in pairs so that they can keep an eye on each other when the heat index is 90-99.

If you are at home on a hot day, please be aware that we may ask for ice, or permission to sit in a cool space if an employee is showing distress from the heat.  Hopefully this won’t be necessary with the new policies in place, but heat distress can get dangerous quickly if not treated properly so we would like to have all the resources available that we can in the event of an emergency.  Thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation!

• Mary Beth

Appalachians Against Pipelines

The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) was proposed in 2014 to run from northwest, West Virginia to southern Virginia, with a short extension running into NC, quickly drawing opposition from environmentalists as well as farmers in West Virginia to Indigenous tribes here in North Carolina. Aside from the fact that the fracking corporation would run the pipeline through predominantly Black communities and the lands (and burial grounds) of Indigenous people, further concerns include the destruction of trees and forests, disturbed landscapes, water running brown from the tap, and a high risk of leaks and explosions. Earlier this month, a segment of the pipeline ruptured during a test—something activists have been warning about as the companies involved have been using segments of corroding pipes that have been sitting in water during years of long delay. Despite the corporations insisting that the tests are working as intended, activists’ concerns are not without warrant as accidental pipeline leaks happen routinely and leak quantities of methane into the atmosphere. The multi-billion dollar pipeline has been in construction since 2018, but is having trouble wrapping up due to activists working to disrupt the pipeline’s progress and hope to kill the project altogether. 

“Even as pipeline crews continue steadily boring under rivers and felling trees, activists say each day they can delay construction is another day humanity delays the worst impacts of climate change.”

Communities continue to show up for the activists on the front-line by attending permit hearings, bringing them home cooked meals, blankets, and supplies.

Among the activists are Coles and Red Terry, a couple in West Virginia. You can read their account of what it is like to live next to the MVP at this link. You can follow the actions of Appalachians Against Pipelines, and their calls to action, at @appalachiansagainstpipelines on Instagram and Facebook. You can also directly support people on the ground by donating to the Appalachian Legal Defense Fund, which supports community members being targeted for protecting their communities and land. Appalachian artists also participated in a compilation of 40 music tracks standing against the MVP, and all proceeds go to the Appalachian Legal Defense Fund. 

- Kel 

Side note:

  While I did not ask Kel to write about the subject of MVP, this article is particularly personal and poignant for me.  Our family farm of over 200 years had a section of land seized by eminent domain in 2019 as part of the MVP project.  In the small print we were informed, after the land was taken,  that the family homestead, built by my great grandfather will be considered condemned if  the pipeline ever begins to function because of its proximity to the pipeline, so even though we received no compensation for the house or the land it sits on, technically we lose both once the pipeline starts functioning.  To build the section of pipeline on what was formerly our property, one of the prettiest sections of woods in the area was completely clear cut.  

  If I believed that natural gas was actually clean and that it would help everyone to have this pipeline, I would not object to my family’s losses.  However, as the climate warms and because we know that methane gas is 28 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, I am absolutely certain that all of the time and effort spent both building and fighting over the building of the MVP could be better spent figuring out how to coexist with our environment in ways that won’t hasten the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

- Mary Beth

Book Review

“To explore what might be inside the mind of a bee, it is helpful to take a first-person bee perspective, and consider which aspects of the world would matter to you, and how. I invite you to picture what it’s like to be a bee. To start, imagine you have an exoskeleton—like a knight’s armor. However, there isn’t any skin underneath: your muscles are directly attached to the armor. You’re all hard shell, soft core. You also have an inbuilt chemical weapon, designed as an injection needle that can kill any animal your size and be extremely painful to animals a thousand times your size—but using it may be the last thing you do, since it can kill you, too. Now imagine what the world looks like from inside the cockpit of a bee.

You have 300° vision, and your eyes process information faster than any human’s. All your nutrition comes from flowers, each of which provides only a tiny meal, so you often have to travel many miles to and between flowers—and you’re up against thousands of competitors to harvest the goodies. The range of colors you can see is broader than a human’s and includes ultraviolet light, as well as sensitivity for the direction in which light waves oscillate. You have sensory superpowers, such as a magnetic compass. You have protrusions on your head, as long as an arm, which can taste, smell, hear, and sense electric fields. And you can fly. Given all this, what’s in your mind?”

Bees are a welcome sight in our gardens, but have you ever considered what it is like to be one? The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka explores the alien sensory experiences of bees from informative samples of the 20,000+ species of bees worldwide—not only popular social species of bees like honey bees (Apis mellifera). Chittka draws from both recent scientific research as well as historic literature that is often overlooked by modern scientists despite the fact that these historical sources expressed contemporary ideas about the minds of bees some centuries ago.

• Kel

May To-Do’s

• Click here for Planting Calendar for Annual Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs by city. This link provides dates both based on estimated last frost and the lunar calendar.

• Click here for April’s list if you are still catching up.

• Weed! Pay special attention to weeds that have gone to seed so you will have less work to do in the seasons to come.

• Leave your spring bulb foliage (like daffodils and tulips) foliage until it has completely died back! It looks especially unappealing at this time of year, but the bulbs need as much time as possible to store energy for next spring’s blooms.

• Refresh mulch, pine straw, and composted leaf mulch in your garden beds before the heat of summer. Remember the mulch should not exceed a depth of 2-3 inches! 

• Move your houseplants outside.

• Prune spring blooming shrubs (like azaleas) after they finish flowering.

• Plant warm weather vegetables, herbs, and summer annuals.

• Fertilize summer flowering trees and shrubs, like crepe myrtle. 

• Water! While the rain should still be plentiful this month, pay close attention to the moisture of the soil—especially if you have recently planted things. As daily temperatures increase your plants will likely need to be watered more frequently. The best times to water are in the early morning or in the evening.

-Kel

From the Council of All Beings

We hear you, fellow creatures.
We know we are wrecking the world and we are afraid.

What we have unleashed has such momentum now,
we don’t know how to turn it around.

Don’t leave us alone, we need your help.

You need us too for your own survival.

Are there powers there you can share with us?

“I, lichen, work slowly, very slowly.
Time is my friend.
This is what I give you: patience for the long haul and perseverance.”

“It is a dark time. As deep-diving trout I offer you my fearlessness of the dark.”

“I, lion, give you my roar, the voice to speak out and be heard.”

“I am caterpillar. The leaves I eat taste bitter now. But dimly I sense a great change coming. What I offer you, humans, is my willingness to dissolve and transform. I do that without knowing what the end-result will be, so I share with you my courage too.”

–Joanna Macy

Happy Gardening!