Cultivate a Bat-Friendly garden

Guest Article by BC Community Bat Programs

How can you support the bats?

Spring is at our doorstep! This is the most exciting season for gardeners and nature lovers. This year, we encourage everyone to try something new– gardening for BATS!

The Okanagan is home to at least 14 different species of insect-eating bats – the highest diversity of bats in the province. Supporting pollinators in your garden helps to support bats as they prey on insects at night. Since bats are active from dusk to dawn, having night-blooming flowers in your garden attracts nighttime moths which are a great source of protein for bats. This practice is called moonlight gardening!

Join us in cultivating bat-friendly gardens and nurturing the rich biodiversity of the North Okanagan:

• Start planning early. Opt for native perennial plants – contact local plant nurseries to get your seeds.
• Choose plants with long flowering season or those that flower at different times of the year.
• Variety is key! Pick plants with different flower colour, shape, and fragrance.
• Don’t spring into garden clean up too soon. Wait until temperatures stay consistently above 10°C to start to start raking and pruning. Many pollinators like bees and butterflies are wintering in dead leaves and hollow stems of last-year plants. Bats and snakes sometimes also sleep under leaves and in wood piles.
• Invasive species like burdock can entangle bats and birds. Regularly remove weeds from your garden. If you plan on harvesting burdock, please be responsible and prune out the flowers before they go to seed and become traps for bats.

Invasive species like burdock can entangle bats

If you plan on harvesting burdock, please be responsible and prune out the flowers before they go to seed and become traps for bats.
Photo by: Ken Dzinbal

• Pesticides and chemical fertilizers kill insects and poison wildlife. Practice organic gardening by avoiding chemical products. Try composting to provide organic nutrients in your garden.
• Fact: Bats fertilize gardens with their nitrogen-rich guano (bat poop). Attract bats to have a natural source of guano fertilizer in your garden.
• Switch outdoor light bulbs to “warm” toned or filtered LEDs (under 3,000K) to reduce light pollution that harms bats and other animals. Dimmers, motion sensors, and timers can help to reduce illumination and save energy.
• Keep pets indoors or supervised outdoors to avoid predation on bats and birds.
• Keep dead-standing trees (if it is safe to do so) and mature trees on your property to provide roosting areas for hard-working bats. Peeling tree bark and bark crevices are great homes for bats.
• If you have a lake, creek or wetland by your house – great! Protect natural water-side vegetation; it provides vital food, shelter and water to wildlife.
• Consider adding a garden pond to create a biodiversity oasis in your backyard. Ponds need to be at least 3m wide to serve as drinking sources for bats.

Download the Bat-Friendly Gardening in the Okanagan PDF 

On inspiration and irrigation

Article by Judie Steeves, Past-President OXA

Take inspiration and caution from Mother Nature

Consider taking inspiration for your own landscape from Mother Nature, as well as learning about cautions to be aware of.

For instance, I recently spent a few days hiking in Manning Park, where we visited wildflower meadows in the alpine and hiked all along the string of lakes about the same elevation as Highway 3, where the campgrounds are. That’s about 1,200 metres or 4,000 feet in elevation.

I’ve hiked there in the past, and never have I seen such dry conditions in the alpine and subalpine meadows (except where there are creeks or seeps). If it’s that dry at such a high elevation, far less water than normal is coming down into the Okanagan Valley or being stored in the hills around it.

With that in mind, it would be irresponsible for us to water our home landscapes this year as much as we might in a normal summer. And, that means the plants which prefer a coastal climate or higher natural precipitation, are not going to be happy and may even die back. The plants that will thrive are the ones that naturally do well in a more-arid climate such as the Okanagan’s near-desert conditions. Check our plant database for drought-tolerant plants.

Despite drought conditions in the park, the wildflowers were diverse and beautiful and inspired me to consider replicating some of the colour combinations in my own garden.

In the alpine, at 5-6,000 feet, red paintbrush were bright against the background of silvery pussytoes and white star-flowered sandworts. A great combination! Add in the occasional deep blue of lupines or self-heal and bright yellow buttercups it was different again. Western anemone had finished flowering but their mop top seedheads were graceful and fun and reminded me of the Pulsatilla vulgaris or Prairie Crocus from my own garden, which also have seedheads that look like bedheads.

The wildflowers were entirely different on our hike along the chain of lakes at about 4,000 feet: Lightning, Flash, Strike and Thunder. It’s a more-shaded hike, with lots of creeks and seeps, wetlands and streams, so it features plants which require more moisture than we typically find naturally in the Okanagan.

However, we can substitute drought-tolerant, xeriscape plants for some of those dramatic combinations I found on the lakes trail.

For instance, there was one meadow of deep blue Upland Larkspur, nearly as tall as me, along with creamy Cowparsnip, Fireweed and thistles and I thought of alternatives such as the tall hollyhocks, Beebalm, asters and yarrow, with Fallugia paradoxa or Apache Plume. It’s a shrub of about four feet that has fluffy, pinkish seed heads in summer. All of those are tolerant of both heat and dry conditions and make a glorious show of colour and height and texture.

Paintbrush was a feature everywhere you looked, whether short or tall, and in all shades of red, orange and pink or white. However, it’s one wildflower that’s best left in the wild as it is semi-parasitic on the roots of particular grasses and won’t survive on its own.

Never dig up wildflowers in the wild. Instead, look for cousins in nurseries or explore the native plant section.

Hiking around the Okanagan is a wonderful opportunity to bring home inspiration for your own landscapes, as well as a reminder that it is very dry out there.

If we try to garden as if that natural condition did not exist, we’ll use far more water than we can afford to waste on our landscapes. If we want to live in the Okanagan, we must reform our bad habit of growing plants which require lots of water to thrive.

Gardening with Nature

Article by Sigrie Kendrick

Use native plants to help stabilize slopes

It’s just common sense to look to Mother Nature for advice about solving natural concerns on your landscape, like water, steep slopes and sun exposure or shade.

If recent rain sent a torrent of water sluicing down a steep slope on your property, leaving behind a small creek bed full of rocks and gravel and a pile of soil at the bottom, consider planting native and xeric trees, shrubs, grasses and ground covers which will naturally help to stabilize the slope.

Many residential properties throughout the Okanagan have to deal with steep slopes. Our silty soils are notorious for losing stability when exposed to higher-than-normal volumes of water such as intense rainfalls or a sudden rush of water from water line breaks or leaks.

Josh Smith, a director of the Okanagan Xeriscape Association and manager of XEN Xeriscape Endemic Nursery in West Kelowna explains that a cost-effective, low-maintenance and eco-friendly solution is to take advantage of Mother Nature’s suggestions: plant strong-rooted native and xeriscape plants that are adapted to survive and thrive on our slopes—and in our dry environment—to retain the soil and beautify the space.

Plants just after planting to help stabilize a slope on a residential property in Kelowna last year

Developing a naturalized slope-retention system on your property can take several seasons of monitoring but once it is established, it should require zero maintenance, irrigation, or upkeep.

Some key points for getting started include:

• Control the weeds until the trees, shrubs, grasses or ground covers get established. Some invasive species in the Okanagan are virulent enough to take over a slope and hinder the growth of shrubs and trees you have planted or which seed themselves.
• Grass blends or ground-cover are necessary to occlude weeds and provide surface erosion protection. These species help retain the top 10 to 20 cm of the soil.
• Tree and shrub species are what will provide deep, long-lasting, structural support to help stabilize the slope over the long term.

Smith recommends that if you are choosing plant species for slope retention or naturalized areas, go for a walk in your neighbourhood and look carefully at what is growing on natural slopes in your area. This is a surefire way to ensure you select species suited to your soil and moisture conditions.

A year later, the native plants used to stabilize the slope including a yellow-flowered sedum, grey rabbitbrush, nodding onion, a showy fleabane, kinnikinnick and native grass mix are filling in nicely

Resources

There are many wonderful resources available to help you identify native species and learn more about their growth characteristics. Phone apps like iNaturalist and Seek can help you identify plants. There are also several Okanagan-specific plant identification books, including Trees, Shrubs and Flowers to Know in B.C. by C.P. Lyons, and Plants of Southern Interior B.C. by Parish, Coupe and Lloyd, or you can take photos. They can help you look up the plant characteristics in books or on the Internet. You can also take your photos to a native plant nursery for an expert to help you identify the plant.

OXA has an extensive plant database of ornamental and native species. 

There are also specialized native plant nurseries like XEN in West Kelowna and Sagebrush Nursery in Oliver, and many other nurseries carry a selection of native and xeric species.

Sigrie Kendrick is a Master Gardener and Executive-Director of the Okanagan Xeriscape Association. She can be reached at 778-363-8360 or by email at exec_dir@okanaganxeriscape.org.

Gardening with Nature

Article by Sigrie Kendrick

Can we make better choices?

Next to our vital agricultural industry, outdoor landscapes in the Okanagan suck up the most
water.

And there’s no comparison when you consider which use is the most important: we can no
more do without food than we can do without water.

Unfortunately, the Okanagan is a near-desert and water is in short supply, a situation made
much worse by climate change and the resulting extremes in weather such as drought.

While attitudes are changing, wholesale buy-in from civic authorities, the development
community, landscape professionals and nurseries, as well as those of us who plant and water
our gardens and outdoor living spaces is absolutely essential.

No longer can we afford to be so irresponsible as to use plants that require large quantities of
water to stay alive.

With that in mind, the Okanagan Xeriscape Association has joined forces with the Okanagan
Basin Water Board, an entity on which every taxpayer in the region has representation, and its
Okanagan WaterWise program to help educate the whole community about the importance of
replacing water-thirsty landscapes with beautiful ones that require far less water.

When we obliterate natural landscapes to create buildings, and pave our grasslands and forests
over with concrete and asphalt, we simply must re-plant at least some of that with native-type
plants which don’t require large quantities of water to stay alive.

Rewilding

When we obliterate natural landscapes to create buildings and pave our grasslands and forests
over with concrete and asphalt, we simply must re-plant at least some of that with native-type
plants which don’t require large quantities of water to stay alive.

Re-wilding is the term for restoring healthy ecosystems in the landscape that have been
disturbed by humans. Think of the millions of acres of mono-culture that is turf grass currently
planted across this country.

Re-wilding aims to reverse biodiversity loss by using native plants and animal life to rebuild
ecosystems and mitigate climate change.

It is in the hope that we as humans can undo some of the destruction we have wreaked on our
home—earth.

Please consider allocating a portion of your garden to native plants.

Plants native to the Okanagan thrive in our semi-arid valley and support countless pollinators,
birds, and animals. Think of the ripple effect, much as that from a single stone thrown into a
pond.

It’s simplistic to believe that because the bottom of our Okanagan Valley features a sparkling
blue lake, water is not scarce. As soon as we begin to ‘mine’ the lake— use more water than is
replaced by natural precipitation each year— we are in big trouble.

The alternative is for all of us to wake up and give our heads a shake; to enact legislation
requiring that new developments install landscapes that use the principles of xeriscape; to insist
as creators of subdivisions, as home builders and homeowners that our landscapes use
drought-tolerant plants instead of lawn grasses, trees, shrubs and flowers that belong in a
coastal rainforest.

We have to move away from inappropriate landscape choices such as turf grass, cedar hedges
and inappropriate plant selections and instead move toward choices that better mimic our
stunning natural Okanagan environment and support our pollinators, birds, and small mammals.

We humans have to relinquish our control issues and let nature do what she does best— heal.

Sigrie Kendrick is a Master Gardener and Executive-Director of the Okanagan Xeriscape Association. She can be reached at 778-363-8360 or by email at exec_dir@okanaganxeriscape.org.