Environmental Stewardship: Procrastinate Now!

by John Berge

The words procrastination and environmental stewardship are seldom linked together, but at this time of year they should be.

Never do today what you can put off until next spring! That is true for at least one chore — the cleaning up of our garden beds. Many butterflies, moths, bees and other insects need that material to protect themselves over the winter.

Monarch butterflies are one of the few insects that seasonally migrate to get out of the cold. The great majority dig into the ground, which is kept relatively soft and at a more even temperature by the layers of leaves and other plant material, or they winter-over in the stems and other parts of dead or dormant plants. They can stay there as adults, eggs, larvae or pupae, depending on the species. If, in an effort to be neat, you pull up the dead annuals and cut down the stalks and leaves of perennials in the fall, you are depriving the beneficial insects of their winter homes and depriving the birds, bats and amphibians of next spring’s sustenance.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you get out of raking the lawn if you are blessed with a lot of trees as we are. If the leaves are not too numerous, chopping them up with the lawn mower and leaving them in place is a good idea. It adds organic matter to the soil and gives extra protection to those bees that burrow into the soil for the winter. Other bees burrow under the bark of trees or downed branches for the winter.

One type of bee does seasonally migrate. Many honey bees migrate in hives on the back of a truck, traveling from crop to crop, starting in Texas or Mexico and spending the summer in beautiful Wisconsin. They don’t fly south by themselves.

Remember, those leaves that are raked up should be composted to use as mulch or to dig into the garden which you put off until next spring. This is good environmental stewardship.