Mt. City Montage
by PAULINE TOM
Mark the date: Saturday, May 1, celebrate Mountain City’s 160th Birthday! Tentatively, the day starts at 9:30 a.m. with a Farmer’s Market – limited to produce and flowers grown in Mountain City. Tentatively, it will end at noon – after presentations by long-time mayor, Judge Beth Smith, and long-time-living near here, Bob Barton.
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Is it safe to say that all of us have weeds this spring? I’m pulling weeds and leaving horse herb as groundcover.
A bluebirding friend, Keith Kridler, recently posted on “Bluebird-L” (an electronic conversation) an explanation of how chemicals used for grass and weeds reach wildlife.
Most of the chemicals we end up using in our yards end up getting into the “blood stream” of our plants. These chemicals end up getting into the nectar and then into the insects that sip or drink the nectar.
When you treat around your house foundation for termites, ants or roaches, the landscape plants pull up these chemicals. Most of these translocate within the plants and your trees from the roots, to the stems to the leaves and end up in the fruit or berries.
When you use a “broad leafed” weedkiller on your lawn you kill only the “weeds” but the grass, nutsedges and other related families of plants still absorb and pull up these chemicals that end up getting into the blood streams of the insects and animals that eat the treated grasses.
There are other selective “grass” killers that only kill certain families of grass, but then these chemicals are absorbed and pulled up by the “broad leafed” weeds and will end up in the nectar of the “weeds and/or wildflowers” or the creatures that eat these.
When they tested the honey bee hives, they found 121 different pesticides in just 800 different hives or bee or pollen samples. (For more, Google “disappearing bees pesticides”.)
What percentage of the human diet is from plants that require pollination from honeybees? One-third!
Major honeybee die-offs in the past four years are under investigation. Honeybee die-off casts much more affect on Mountain Cityians than Monarch butterfly die-off.
The morning after I tidbitted about Monarchs, I found a dead Monarch. She was at least seven months old and, she had traveled back and forth to the mountains of Mexico. I wondered if she found milkweed for her eggs when she came back to Texas.
Texas Parks & Wildlife removed electronic text that downplayed the value of butterfly weed for Monarchs, after Montage spotlighted the paragraph.
Now, TPWD says, “Butterfly weed is used by Monarch butterflies as a caterpillar food plant. Butterfly weed really lives up to its name. It attracts a wide range of butterflies to the abundant nectar that it produces.”
Mark Klym, Information Specialist for TPWD Wildlife Diversity said, “Most of the butterfly weed found in the nurseries is Asclepias cursavica - a non-native from Mexico.” He suggests Asclepias tuberosa which is native but is harder to transplant because of the tuber.
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Most “Montage” tidbits are produced by me. I prefer tidbits from you; but, they are harder to come by. It’s easy to transplant a tidbit – just send to [email protected] or phone 512-268-5678.
Thanks! Love, Pauline
