Remember! It’s still tree-planting time in the Valley – November through February. The first criteria for planting anything in my gardens is, “what can it do for me?” Selfish, but payload is important. I want wildlife in my yard but not be a slave to it. Planting what nature wants gives me endless hours of…

I welcome January — Ordinary Time. The hustle and bustle of Hallowe’en-to-New-Year run now behind us. Now it’s time to plan new ideas, and refresh old ones – get out a new note pad, select new pen colors for 2016 and jot down ideas. Some of my ideas are: 1. What to write about next…

As the year wraps up, our 2015 new members end their first year, here’s a recap of what they may have learned: January – Not all debris should be cleared. Many now know to leave rotting logs and fallen branches no matter how tempting it is to make a nature preserve look as neat as…

November through February is tree-planting time in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The perfect umbrella-shaped canopy of the potato tree, Solanum erianthum, caught my eye. All the Valley nature park butterfly gardens have one, so it must be important. I bought a small, shapely tree. Not one to accurately judge future spatial relationships, I planted…

For those interested in a small, colorful butterfly and hummingbird garden, I’ve listed what’s planted around my potato tree in a 10- by 30-foot plot (listed mostly by height, definitely not by girth of adult plants): Caesalpinia, Caesalpinia Mexicana – attracts hummingbirds and butterflies Potato tree, Solanum erianthum, — all sorts of fun. See “Consider…

The ever-changing disguises of dicliptera, Dicliptera sexangularis, make it a great candidate for the dodge and evade of spy work. The Thursday Ramsey volunteer team has displaced cart-loads of dicliptera since March. At first, there were a lot of questions, mostly, “Is this dicliptera?” “Yes,” we’d say. Cloaked in different attire throughout the year, it’s…