Coonties: Florida's only native cycad & only Atala butterfly host plant

Coontie is a popular native for parking lots
like this hospital lot in Jacksonville, because it
doesn't need trimming to maintain this height.

Coontie (Zamia integrifolia), a beautiful & unique plant native to most of Florida & some Caribbean islands, has an interesting history of over exploitation & the near extinction of the Atala butterfly (Eumaeus atala) that depends on this plant as its larval food source. Today, coontie is widely planted in all of Florida because it's attractive, drought-tolerant, salt-spray tolerant, plus it grows in poor soil & does not need trimming. 

Coontie is a Cycad

Cycads are ancient plants that have a fossil record that shows that they have not changed much in the last 68 million years. They are gymnosperms, which means naked seed. (Pines are also gymnosperms.) Angiosperms, the flowering plants with their enclosed ovaries and their pollinators such as bees & butterflies developed much later. 

Cycads bear pollen and ovaries in fleshy cone-like structures at ground level on separate male and female plants. They are pollinated by beetles and the coonties use heat in the cones at different times to attract the beetles to the male cones and then to travel to the heat in the female cones. This is called thermogenesis.

Soil: We Need to Stop Treating it Like Dirt

Gardeners can improve their soil.

Why is soil important for gardeners?

We’ve all heard about growing the right plants in the right places so they’ll survive, but without healthy soil, your plants (even the right plants) will suffer or even die. So let’s look at what’s under our feet.

 (This article is an updated version of one I wrote for a garden blog several years ago, which is no longer available online.)

Healthy soil ecosystems are a complex interaction
 between bacteria, fungi, insects, & more.

Soil: the ecosystem beneath our feet

Soil found in native habitats is a complex ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, nematodes, earthworms, ants, salamanders, toads, insect larvae, moles, and more, all living in a substrate of minerals and humus. The minerals are a mixture of rocks, sand, silt, and/or clay. The humus or organic matter consists of fully or partially digested plant and animal parts. As humus is broken down into simple compounds, it provides a living for the decomposers, and eventually yields nutrients for plants. 

One gram (about 1/5 teaspoon) of healthy, non-poisoned soil could contain one hundred million bacteria, one million actinomycetes (a filamentous bacteria), and one hundred thousand fungi; if strung together, their filaments or hyphae would measure about 16 feet (5 meters) in length. This same gram of soil could also contain hundreds of nematodes living on the damp surfaces of the soil particles and maybe a few insect eggs or larvae and some earthworm cocoons. The exact proportions of each of these organisms will depend on soil conditions such as moisture, acidity, aeration, amount of humus, and the local plant community growing in the soil. 

A Quest for a Perfect Lawn: a Case Study

This graphic makes the point about how
out-of-step people are for trying to
maintain unnatural&unsustainable lawns.

To celebrate Earth Day, this post is about rethinking the "perfect" lawns, which are maintained with applications of fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, and never allowed to go into seasonal dormancy. In Florida winter-dormant grasses are over-seeded with cool-weather grasses, irrigated through the dry season, & fertilized. 

Today's lawn expectations go way back to how European formal gardens & lawns around castles and manor houses were kept to show others how wealthy the owners were.

Today, lawn-"care" organizations can make lots of money by encouraging homeowners to have "perfect" lawns, but does it make sense or cents? As a botanist, naturalist, and a sustainable gardener, I would say, "NO!" 

There are so many reasons for replacing most of your lawn acreage with unpoisoned native habitat & pollinator gardens and then freeing the remainder of your lawn from all pesticides & synthetic fertilizers, mowing it less often at the highest setting, letting it go dormant in the winter & allow a variety of plants that tolerate mowing to grow there.

Measuring Climate Change

Figure 1: Weather balloon with
parachute and radiosonde.

Q: Do you believe in global warming?
A: We are Measuring it.

Guest blog post by Dr. Charlie Paxton, meterologist

We meteorologists have surface temperature measurements all over the world and with continued automation more measurements are being taken as time goes on. We must also consider what is happening above the ground. Weather balloons carry instruments called radiosondes that report temperature, moisture, wind, and pressure as they ascend into the stratosphere. Satellites, both geostationary and polar orbiting, provide a wealth of atmospheric information including global sea level measurements.

The Birds are NOT OK

What is the birds-eye view of your yard
your community?

Birds Aren’t Just Declining.
They’re Declining Faster!

Scientists studying data collected for more than three decades found accelerating losses. The steepest losses in the study, from 1987 to 2021, were seen in Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Arizona. This research offers clues about the causes. Here are links to a gift article in the NY Times that looks at this research and to a WashingtonPost gift article, which both cite the same study.

This research showed a correlation with increased use of pesticides in agricultural regions, but it also linked back to an older study showing that cats cause huge harm to our birds. I wrote about that as well and how controversial this is in this article.

This Red-shouldered Hawk provided its
opinion on how humans treat birds.

BUT...

Whatever the causes for their decline, we are NOT helpless and, as Joan Baez stated, "Action is the antidote to despair."

There are many actions we can take to make our yards and our communities more bird friendly. I've covered this topic from several different angles over the years, so I've gathered some of the most relevant articles here to make it easier for people to up their game at this critical time. The birds need us to act now more than ever.

Alders Fix Nitrogen

Smooth alder or hazel alder (Alnus serrulata)
Photos by Georgia Native Plant Society

Hazel alder or smooth alder (Alnus serrulata) is blooming now with its showy yellow catkins. The woody female flower heads look like little pine cones. It's a tall multi-stemmed shrub to small tree in the birch family (Betulaceae).

This alder is native to freshwater and brackish water wetlands from Texas to Maine and into North Florida. It plays an important role in these wetlands because it fixes nitrogen in its root nodules using Frankia, a genus of anaerobic, filamentous bacteria in the Actinomycetes order. 

When soil is wet all or most of the time it is anaerobic (without air) and in these conditions, the normal soil microbes cannot survive and most plants cannot obtain enough nutrients from this soil. The alders' symbiotic relationship with this weird bacteria provides the nutrients they need to survive and they do so without much competition from other plants.

Florida Betony

Florida betony develops ridged tubers that
look sorta like a rattlesnake tail and are edible.

Florida betony (Stachys floridana) is an aggressive perennial wildflower. Most botanists think that it was originally endemic to Florida, but now has spread to most of the Southeastern states from Virginia to Texas. It's a member of the mint family (Lamiaceae) and has the typical square stems and opposite leaves along the stems. The beautiful bilateral flowers range from whitish to purple arranged on a spike. It does best in damp soils.

The tubers are edible

It's also known rattlesnake weed because of its rattle-like tuber. Florida betony tubers are edible when harvested in the spring when they are firm and white, but only if the area has not been poisoned with lawn-care chemicals. They have the crispness of a water chestnut with a taste reminiscent of a very mild radish. Most people don't eat them later in the season when they turn tan or yellow and are not as crisp.

Sticks as Mulch

Using sticks as mulch reduces weed growth.

Mulches & mulching

Over the years, I've written about mulching and mulches in my seven books and in various articles: 
- Pine needle mulch (the most read post on this blog)
- Wood chip mulch 
- Too much mulch
- Rock-scaping & more.

But for the past several years, I've also been using sticks as mulch near buildings to reduce weed infestations. Unlike other mulching materials, there's a lot of air or space between the sticks, so there's nothing there for seedlings. Eventually, some weeds that spread via rhizomes or stolons, such as fog fruit (Phyla nodiflora) or Florida betony (Stachys floridana) work their way into the space, but very few seed-spread weeds. 

This type of mulching works well for our yard because have lots of trees. A good time to create a stick-mulch area is after a high-wind event. Yes, we also have several stick piles to create habitat for small birds and various insects, so I don't usually raid those piles for sticks for mulching. 

This year's roselle crop was amazing!

The roselle was almost as tall as the house.

This year's roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa) crop was amazing even though we were out-of-town for almost 2 months starting at the end of March and again for a month in midsummer. I planned for survival of the roselle shrubs during these trips in a couple of ways. 

- I'd planted them on the back (house-side) of a 10'-long swale and surrounded the area with several wire tomato cages to keep them upright and also to protect them from the deer. 
- The bottom of the swale had been enriched with several loads of kitchen scraps when the roselle shrubs still were small. (Read this article for details on composting in place.) 
- I'd planted tomatoes mostly to one side of the roselle bed, but then strung the sprawling tomato plants onto the front tomato cages. This was also to keep the deer away, because they do not favor tomatoes.
- Before we left on our trip in March, I placed the end of the rain barrel hose into the swale and left the rain barrel on a very slow drip. This way all the water from that downspout was used to irrigate the roselle. 
- Before we left on the second trip, I propped up the plants and tied them together to two 12' poles and to the house. 

Food-from-scraps

I prepare a whole row for come-again crops.
So far this year I have two starts: celery &
romaine lettuce.

Instead of throwing away or composting the bases of store-bought celery, cabbages, leaf lettuces, and other cool-weather crops, you can grow new food. The base must include a root-bearing zone. This is a fun project for kids, because you see results in just a few days.

As, I prepare wide rows for my fall and winter crops, I also prepare a food-from-scraps row. It's usually a fairly narrow row about a foot wide. First, I bury kitchen scraps and compost down the middle of the row and leave a shallow swale on the surface so that water stays in place and soaks into the soil. Then I mulch the row with pine needles. Here's link to my wide-row article for more detail & photos.

So far this year, I have two starts in this row, celery and romaine lettuce. Over the years, I have had the best success with celery, so much so, that I never plant it as a crop from seeds or plants. Cabbage has also been quite reliable and I end up harvesting the come-again cabbage leaves well before my regular cabbage crops mature.