frogboys Archives - A Way To Garden

the frog garden: amphibian-friendly practices, with jim sirch

margaret — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 11:54:10 +0000

WE’VE ALL HEARD about what plants and other features figure into making a garden for the birds, or a pollinator garden. But what about a frog garden? I’m crazy about frogs and would like to think my place is one such habitat. So I was delighted to get an email recently from today’s guest, Jim Sirch, with the subject line “gardening for frogs.” Yes, please, I thought, and got to talking with Jim about how to be more amphibian-friendly in the way we create and care for our home landscapes. Jim is a trained naturalist and vice president of the Connecticut Horticultural Society, who recently retired as education coordinator from the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven. Jim has a deep understanding of geology, plants and wildlife and how they interact within a particular ecosystem, and writes about some of that on his blog BeyondYourBackDoor dot com. He co-founded a native plant seed library at his local public library and also founded a local chapter of Frog Watch USA, a national community science project to identify and track frog populations. He’s passionate about helping others decrease lawn and rewild their yards to welcome a diversity of creatures, including frogs. (That’s […]

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‘instant’ water garden: try seasonal troughs

margaret — Wed, 20 May 2020 18:28:09 +0000

NOTHING ADDS MORE TO A GARDEN THAN WATER. Just ask the birds, frogs, and insects—oh, and human visitors, too. It’s a magical element, providing sustenance and visual fascination (auditory, too, if you can make it move). I just hauled my simplest, seasonal water gardens—two big, glazed troughs I fill spring through fall, then stash—out of winter storage, and ordered the plants I need to get the look above. The details (and no, nothing to worry about re: mosquitoes, really): Yes, mosquitoes: That’s the most common question I’m asked when I lecture, when people see these photos, above and below, among my slides. “What about mosquitoes?” After that: “How often do you have to change the water?” Making an “instant” seasonal water garden—meaning no plumbing required—merely requires a watertight vessel, water, and some floating plants to shade the water surface. I top up the liquid as needed during the season, but do not swap it out completely. Containers can be anything that holds water, including galvanized cattle tanks; earthenware pots with glazing at least on their interior surface (like my big troughs) and no drainage hole; or some other found object. Level the pot or pots first (use a carpenter’s level), […]

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the (mostly froggy, sometimes variegated) news from here

margaret — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 10:35:40 +0000

THE LIGHT-HEARTED news from Nowheresville as June begins: I am short on garden help these days and long on frogs. Too bad the latter just lie around having a hot stone massage for hours and hours (above) in between brief bouts of chasing each other frantically for you-know-what. (In frogspeak they call it amplexus. Sounds sophisticated but it’s just you-know-what.) Um, yes, that’s one of the many around here: a gentleman caller, flocked in some tiny floating plants. The individuals who color up yellow during mating season are the gentlemen, at least among the species greenfrogs, like this guy, and their cousins the bullfrogs. (How to sex a frog.) These two (the same individuals from the top-of-page photo) are still at it. A week before, she hadn’t yet discovered that his thigh was a dandy pillow, but now she knows. See her nictitating membrane (aka third eyelid)? Like built-in goggles for underwater vision, the membrane then keeps eyes moist when on land. And yes, it’s true; I could just watch frogs all day. #beatsmowing When I am not crawling around communing with frogs, I like foliage a lot, too (more than flowers, even). This copper-leaf plant or Acalypha called Giant […]

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