This way, bee predators, parasites and diseases won’t be able
to attack all of your native bees in one convenient place.
Create caterpillar pupation sites
under your trees
Over 90 percent of the caterpillars that are so important to
food webs do not pupate on their host plant. Instead, they
drop to the ground and pupate within the duff on the ground
or within chambers they form underground. When we
replace soil rich in organic matter with lawn compacted by
frequent mowing it is difficult for caterpillars to burrow into
the soil or find leaf litter for their cocoons. Replace the lawn
under trees with well-planted beds replete with ground covers
appropriate to your area. Large decorative rocks also provide
pupation sites but better yet, add a fallen log or old tree stump
to the bed. Many caterpillar species bore into decaying wood
to pupate, a resource not available in most yards. Finally,
treasure your leaf litter. Many leaves that fall each autumn
have small caterpillars within curled leaf margins, and there
68
are dozens of caterpillar species that eat fallen leaves rather
than green leaves. Replace store-bought mulch with natural
leaf litter wherever you can, and if you have more leaves each
fall than your beds can accommodate, that’s a good sign that
your beds aren’t large enough!
9 Do not spray or fertilize
It is self-evident that using insecticides and herbicides,
particularly in the name a perfect lawn, is antithetical to the
goal of living with nature. It is far less evident that fertilizers
are also unnecessary. After all, if the commercials tell us to
use fertilizers, we should use them, shouldn’t we? But keep
in mind that most North American plants are adapted to the
low nitrogen soils they encountered after the last glaciation
and do not require high doses of synthetic fertilizers. This is
particularly true in the sandy soils of Kiawah. In fact, highly
fertilized soils favor many nitrogen-loving invasive plants
species from outside of North America. Creating soils rich in
organic matter is entirely sufficient for healthy plants. What’s
Naturally Kiawah