A habitat is a plot of land that provides food, water and shelter to sustain a diversity of wildlife. As gardeners, we can turn our yards into habitats. In doing so, we not only nurture the relationship of plants and wildlife but we strengthen our connection with nature as well. Nurturing creates a caring relationship that soon bonds the gardener to every living organism in the garden from the lively earthworms to the playful butterflies. A nurtured garden is full of movement.

In the front or back yard we experience the joy of watching birds splash around in a bird bath, of bees drawing nectar from a bed of blue salvia blossoms, of dragon flies skimming the surface of the pond, and fish in brilliant orange tones swimming among the water lilies.  In the new Millennium, we welcome the return to the natural garden. We may choose to or have to live and work in the city but we can still create an urban habitat that brings us back to nature.

Imitate Nature - Think Biodiversity

Biological diversity is what makes natural ecosystems thrive and stay in balance. Rows and mass plantings are man-made and not part of nature's order. Use a great variety of native or well adapted ground covers, vines, perennials, and annuals. These attract beneficials - insects, frogs, toads, lizards, garden snakes, birds, earthworms, and microorganisms - and allow them to repopulate and flourish. By using a basic organic program, you will witness your garden's diversity blossom before your eyes, as if by magic.

Attracting Beneficials

8 Ways To Attract Beneficials

1. Kick the chemical habit. Don't ever use pesticides, even botanical ones.
2. Leave some grass unmowed to shelter insects and small critters.
3. Put that rake away. Leaf litter under trees enriches the soil and shelters small insects and microbes.
4. Keep down the dust, especially from leaf blowers. Dust pollution kills beneficial insects.
5. Get rid of electric zap lights. More flying beneficials are killed than mosquitoes.
6. Plant lots of native plants and plan for a full season of bloom to sustain wildlife during the year.
7. Provide food - leaves, berries, nuts, flowers, and organic matter; water - ponds, wetlands, bogs, bird baths; and shelter – rock piles woodpiles, twig and brush piles, for beleaguered animals whose native environment is shrinking.
8. Go wild! Let corners or spots of the yard grow naturally. Native beneficials love native vegetation.

Bats
Bats are nocturnal and one bat can eat 3,000 or more insects a night.  Bats love mosquitoes! There are 34 species of bats in Texas and 7 just in the greater Houston area. Bats live in crevices, in hollow trees, under eaves on buildings, behind loose bark, and in palm thatch. Bats need to be near water, like  ponds and bird baths, and need sources of food, so leave some insects for them to eat! Bats are among nature's most misunderstood animals. Intentional killings by humans and habitat destruction are the greatest dangers to their survival.

Birds
Approximately 400 species of birds live in the Houston area. Attracting birds is high on the list for a habitat garden. Birds eat cutworms, cabbage loopers, hornworms, spiders, grass-hoppers, tent caterpillars, stinkbugs, moths, corn earworms, crickets, borers, weevils, mosquitoes, cucumber beetles, snails, and slugs. Screech owls eat rodents. To encourage these avian allies:

• Provide fresh, open water for drinking and bathing. This can be as simple as shallow saucers, particularly for the chickadees, or birdbaths, from functional to ornamental. Place your bath and feeders in a more open area, protected from cats and other predators.
• Provide flowering and berry-producing shrubs for a tasty part of a bird's diet.
• Plant native flowers to attract birds and butterflies for their nectar.
• Do not use poisons. Birds can drink the run off in standing water in a street gutter and die.

Butterflies
Besides providing visual delight in the landscape, butterflies are important pollinators, second only to bees. There are at least 64 different species in the Houston area. Butterflies are cold blooded and like to bask in the sun. A sunny, flowering garden with a flat stone for basking will help attract them.

• Butterflies need water and drink by sucking water from moist ground, even muddy water. To provide a drinking station, sink a saucer in the ground, fill with sand and soak. Then, put a flat pebble at the edge for a perch.
• Butterflies are attracted to color so plant flowering plants with nectar-filled blooms, like native lantana and pentas, the Mexican butterfly weed, button bush and butterfly bush, which provide food and shelter for butterflies and their larvae.

Earthworms
Earthworms are extremely valuable in creating a healthy topsoil and maintaining soil fertility. They burrow as deep as 6 feet into the ground, aerating the soil, making holes for the rain to penetrate, and breaking up hardpan and other compacted soil. They remove litter from the soil surface and leave behind their castings, a natural fertilizer which provides rich nutrients for the plants. It is said the average earthworm will produce its weight in castings every 24 hours. Earthworms seek out and live among decaying, organic waste. They love compost piles! To speed up the process, buy and add more wiggly worms to eat your garbage. The brown nose worm is an excellent composting worm here in Texas. They are available by mail order.

Insects
Squeamishness aside, 98% of the world's insects are beneficial. If the beneficial insect population is supported in your landscape, the destructive insect population will be minimized. Be patient. They will come! To encourage them, make a safe home for them in your garden:

• Stop using poisons - fertilizers,  herbicides and pesticides.
• Stop polluting the air with dust, especially from noisy leaf blowers.
• Provide a variety of native and flowering plants for shelter and food, especially in the parsley and daisy-sunflower families.
• Leave some "bad bugs" for them to eat.
• Provide moisture - closely space plants, use  drip irrigation, consider building a pond.

Note: Some of them, such as lady bugs, lacewings, trichogramma wasps, etc, may be purchased locally.

Lizards
The beautiful green anole lizards love perennial flower beds where they can eat bugs close to the ground, but they will also go after flying insects if you help them out. Virtually any bushes or plants or sticks they can climb on will be enough of a perch to let them do some aerial hunting. Gecko lizards tend to sit on window sills at night, catching insects attracted to the house lights. They love small cockroaches, too, so discourage your cats from catching and playing with them. Lizards live close to the earth. Protect them from all pesticides and chemical lawn fertilizers. These little creatures play an important role in your garden.

Snakes
Small 10 inch brown garden snakes are common in lawns under the turf. They are totally harmless to us but an enemy of slugs and snails and cutworms. They love to hide next to rock piles or under mulch where temperatures are moderated from heat or cold.  So provide some rocks for garden snakes to curl up under. Don't disturb them and don't let anyone kill them! Snakes crawl on the ground. Protect them from all pesticides and chemical lawn fertilizers. These little creatures play an important role in your garden.

Toads And Frogs
Toads and frogs eat an enormous number of insects per day. Their diet includes cabbage loopers, corn earworms, cucumber beetles, cutworms, flea beetles, bean beetles, slugs and snails. To invite them to your garden and get them to stay:

• Heavily mulch vegetable and perennial plant beds.
• Add rocks and stone walkways to your landscape and leave some garden debris for shelter.
• Make toad houses out of broken, clay flower pots, turned upside down. Make sure they can enter through an opening on one side.
• Install a pond, even a very small one. Amphibians need water to drink and lay their eggs in. You will attract families of frogs and toads and improve the beauty of your yard if you have a water garden.
• Respect their fragility as they develop from tadpoles to adults. They have porous skins. They live close to the ground and hop around your lawn. Don't kill them off with pesticides and herbicides.

Creating Healthy Soil

Composting
It's called black gold. You don't have to pan for it, you can just scoop it up with your hands from the bottom of your compost pile. It's your reward for recycling all those banana peels, egg shells, and table scraps and not throwing them down the disposal. Not to mention those bags of grass clippings and leaves that could have ended up in a dump trunk instead of a corner of your back yard. And the kids probably enjoyed the outing to the stable for some horse manure or to the zoo for some elephant zoo-do. In less than a year, you have a gold mine. Rich black humus soil, the texture of a moist chocolate cake, is ready for your spring planting or anytime a stressed plant or lawn needs some extra nutrition. Some gardeners treat brown patch on their St. Augustine lawns with homemade compost. It serves as a fertilizer, providing nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur. It is nature's greatest gift and all you have to do is keep piling things up in one big heap!

See Materials for Compost - Recipe.

Be Organic

A healthy yard is one that will naturally reduce the number of invasive weeds.  To be truly natural is to be organic.  Try using an organic fertilizer and soil amendment.  This will feed the microbes in the soil.  In turn the microbes feed the plant.  Good organic fertilizer may have as its source poultry litter from birds raised for human consumption. Gathering the waste then takes a pollutant and turns it into a fertilizer rich in micronutrients as well as the required insoluble nitrogen, potash and phosphorous.

Mulch
Just like leaf and twig litter on the forest floor, mulch protects the soil in your urban garden. Mulch is a layer of organic material covering the ground that conserves moisture by blocking the sun and insulating the soil.  When sunlight hits unmulched soil, it quickly dries out. Bare ground, without mulch or plants, is an invitation to weeds, so mulch will control weed growth in your garden. It also improves soil structure and fertility as it decomposes. Replenish when this happens.

• Mulch plants, shrubs, trees and ground covers with at least 1 inch of compost and 3 inches of a mulch mix of shredded native wood chips or shredded hardwood bark.
• Mulch vegetable gardens with compost and as much as 8 inches of hay (alfalfa is best). Pine needles can be used if soil is alkaline ; if not, they should be aged.
• Mulch is also a habitat for lizards, earthworms and microorganisms. Decomposing mulch is the preferred food of many insects and organisms so this keeps them off your plants.

Creating Biodiversity

To find out about creating diverstity in the Houston region go to

Watersmart Landscapes for the Upper Gulf Coast

Herbs
A garden should appeal to all of our senses, not just visual, so herbs in a garden greet us with their subtle fragrance. Is it rosemary, lemon verbena, or perhaps peppermint-scented geranium that takes our breath away? Herbs are a good choice for a Houston garden because once established they are generally drought tolerant and are not bothered by bugs. Herbs grow in almost any well-drained soil. They provide color, texture, and variety to your garden. Try scattering them among your other plants. Want to bring bees around to help pollinate your plants? Bees like lemon balm, borage, marjoram, thyme, lavender hyssop, and many more. Most importantly, herbs attract beneficial insects to your garden that will eat the bad bugs. Cilantro is number one for this purpose. Others include dill, fennel, yarrow, coneflower, dandelion, mints, parsley, and bee balm.

Native Plants
A hundred years ago, before St. Augustine grass covered our land, your yard was probably covered with lush natural vegetation.  Imagine what kinds of trees, plants, and wildlife lived there. Imagine trying to create a natural setting to invite butterflies and hummingbirds back to your garden. To attract butterflies, look at passion flowers, golden rods, prairie verbenas, purple coneflowers, Texas wisterias, butterfly weeds, buttonbushes, desert trumpet vine, and brown-eyed Susans. Ornamental grasses like Big Bluestem or Switch-grass to act as wind breaks in your garden. For hummingbirds, plant pentas, coral beans, prairie phloxes, scarlet sage, and coral honeysuckle. Native trees such as the female yaupon holly, with its bright red berries, are a welcome sight to all birds. Other native trees that attract wildlife are scarlet buckeye, Mexican plum, flameleaf sumac, eastern persimmon, and possum haw holly.

The Water Garden
A water garden is a place to reclaim a small piece of the natural world in your own backyard. No landscaping decision you make will give you as dramatic or satisfying a change as adding a pond. This one element turns a common yard into a sanctuary not only for you and your family but for all forms of wildlife. A water garden habitat provides birds with a place to drink and bathe. Blue jays, American robins, and chickadees enjoy a good bath, and get soaked from head to tail. Smaller birds, like hummingbirds, bathe in the water that collects on water lily pads. A pond full of goldfish or koi will keep your mosquito problem in check by feeding on the larvae. Toads and frogs will tuck themselves around the natural rocks and stones at the ponds edge and feed on the garden pests. A pond is a quiet corner to stop, sit and reflect on the beauty of your garden and this earth.