Plan for Pollinators with Dorte Windmuller

Most pollinators are asleep in the winter garden- now is your chance to planfor a healthy ecosystem with the right plants. Remember it’s not just about pretty flowers.

Hi, this is The Garden Shift, a podcast for gardeners who want to do their part for nature.

I'm your host, Tina Cesaroni, and I thank you for listening in.

Today I'm joined by Dorte Windmuller.

0:18

Hi, Dorte.

Hi Tina, so nice to be here.

I began to hear about you and all your stewardship in in my circles about five years ago.

Cliffcrest Butterfly Way is an Environmental Conservation community group operating in Scarborough, ON.

0:36

If you have a quick peek at Dorte's Linktree on Instagram, you will see this group means business.

A call to action to grow native plants and bring back wildlife.

I met Dorte for the first time in early November at a conference and within 10 minutes I knew I had to get her on the garden shift.

1:01

So Dorte, let's start with your early years in Germany.

I feel like ecological gardening and sustainability may have always been best practices there.

What did you experience that influenced you and maybe stayed with you when you came to Canada?

Yeah, Tina, this is a typical not right perception of Europe.

1:21

We always think the grass is greener on the other side of the ocean.

You know, Europe is actually a in in worse shape than we are here, much, much worse.

And that started all the way back in 2000 years ago with the Romans who cut down all the trees for their, you know, empire building and war making.

1:43

So when I I did garden in Germany, but we had no idea about ecological gardening over there at all.

And I came here in ‘95 and, you know, then you as a new immigrant, you need to get some, you know, working and do all those kind of things to get established.

2:06

So I didn't garden for a very long time.

And that was very, very hard, I would say in retrospective.

But you don't notice when you're in the treadmill, right?

And so then in 2000 and we moved out to the Bluffs and I chose the house because it at the largest garden I've ever seen.

2:29

My husband chose it for the kitchen.

My son sources for the basement.

So we were all happy.

Yeah.

Then I started gardening full time because I had also, I had a store and I had sold this.

And so I was a free person.

And you know, the interesting thing is sometimes it's the smallest things that change the whole trajectory of your life.

2:52

So I had listened to a talk from Lorraine Johnson at the North American Native Plant Society, the plant societies website, about edible native plants.

And so I was so fascinated about this that I decided to order some native plants for my new garden.

3:10

And so we moved there in March.

So I had to wait a little bit to get gardening and I ordered three different kids from your leaf, which unfortunately they do only do trees now and no more garden kids.

I had the bird kit, the butterfly kit and the B kit and it wasn't many native plants and as you can imagine, the whole garden was just long, absolutely nothing else in there.

3:38

There were a couple of older trees and I just put in these few native plants and in.

Do you, did you start with shrubs?

Did you start with trees?

Did you?

What did you start with in those kits?

OK.

So that's a very good question.

So we got Swamp Milkweed.

3:54

I can highly recommend this to everybody.

This is such a good beginner plant and just so gorgeous and beautiful.

Then there was some sunflowers in there.

There was some Foxglove beardtongue also such a wonderful, beautiful plant.

4:10

And then there was a couple of shops like Serviceberry, Snowberry, what else was there?

I think it was mainly Service berries.

Then there was some sunflowers, which are also keystone very important plans for fueling local ecology.

4:26

And so when I put them in end of May, I was very, very impatient and it was too long to wait.

But anyway, end of May it was.

And then in July already I have pictures and you can see this on the Cliff Crest Butterfly Way website or it's on the also on the Facebook.

4:45

I had on one plant 5 monarch butterflies, right?

Three months after putting those little baby plants, which were just little green sticks, there was nothing to them.

I put them in, they flowered, they became big and beautiful.

And it was the same with the bees.

5:00

So many different kinds of piece I've never seen before in my life.

And so that was really what ignited my unstoppable passion for those plants which are just so powerful in bringing back the wildlife into your garden and.

5:17

Yeah, this is incredible how quickly the wildlife comes as well.

I know people say, oh, do I have to wait years for my butterflies and my insects?

They just come so fast.

Have I have made a garden, There was literally nothing and nothing around either.

5:34

And this summer and we put in one little flower, 1 little plant actually flowered already, which is not necessarily the, the, the, the way we put in the native plants.

And right away there was an interesting bee, a sweat bee on it.

5:51

So it's just like literally instantly with how they were, like we say when you plant it, they'll come because the relationships are just so strong between those native plants and our native bees and butterflies.

So OK, let's back up a little bit because you get this beautiful space now that you want to garden in.

6:14

You hear Lorraine Johnson talk and she inspires so many of us with her writings and her blog and her books.

And I interviewed Lorraine a few episodes ago.

So you can hear Lorraine on The Garden Shift.

So now you're dealing with a garden of turf and, and you and all of a sudden native plants come on your radar.

6:37

I know you're very knowledgeable about soils.

Did you do any sort of testing?

Did you know what kind of soil you had out there in Scarborough?

How did you approach that?

Yeah.

You know, soil is very important for what can grow on it.

6:53

And in the ecological gardening world, we do not change the soil whatsoever so that we can grow something what's usually cannot grow in this soil.

We just do it the opposite way.

We we look at the soil and then we plant whatever can grow nicely in this soil.

7:14

The good news is that it's actually not good news.

But so our city soil is pretty much dead, right?

So, but the good news about that is that those native plants are just troopers.

They actually can work with the soil.

7:31

They can make the soil.

You know when I say the soil is dead.

So the soil has many different components to it.

One is biology, one is chemistry, and one is structure.

And for being dead, then that means the biology is missing.

7:48

And the biology is actually the most important piece in the puzzle to make things grow.

And so those native plants are actually our best friends in planting into this city soils to increase the fertility again and to make the soil work well.

8:10

So for native plants, usually there is no concern about any kind of soil.

Obviously moisture is important.

You can't put a plant that likes it dry and hot into moist part shaded area.

The structure is important.

So because if you have sandy soil, which we have in some parts of the city, like the beach for example, then of course you will have less moisture holding capacity in your soil and so the soil drains fast.

8:39

So generally you wouldn't put plants in there that love swampy conditions.

You know, like for example iron weed or something like this.

Even Swamp Milkweed is good in these soils because it is a lot of those native plants can do a lot of different kinds of conditions.

8:59

They are not locked into just needing the swampy conditions.

They can even work with dry conditions because often even in our more moist conditions throughout the summer, we get very, very dry periods.

Yes, we do.

We do right in nature.

9:15

And you know, it's funny that you mentioned Swamp Milkweed, because I can't tell you how many people have come to that that have said to me, why can't grow that?

I've my gardens way too dry and you're like, well, you know what, it's actually quite incredible that you know, it's going to still perform in average soil.

9:31

It doesn't mean its feet wet.

Yes, maybe, maybe it's habitat is more swampy area, but it they're pretty resilient once they're established, right.

So I would say, yeah, I had a beautiful swamp milkweed growing under a Birch tree and it was like, you shouldn't be growing well here, but there it was looking gorgeous.

9:50

I'm going to take you back to something you said.

So if I'm a traditional gardener, I'm not on the shift yet, but I want to get on the shift to ecological gardening.

And I've been super fertilizing my garden because I have rhododendrons and azaleas and roses.

10:06

And now I need to plant native plants and they don't need any fertility.

Well, that's a problem because my soil is filled with, with a high nutrient, lots of, you know, fertility.

Are your, are these native plants going to be able to perform?

And how are they going to adapt in that kind of soil and not just die down?

10:26

Very multilayered question.

Big one.

Yes, I do want to very quickly go back to the swamp milkweed because when we hear milkweed, as people who haven't had milkweed in their gardens, we think, Oh my God, it takes over my whole garden.

So this is only the common milkweed.

10:43

It's the only one which will take over your garden.

All the other ones are completely safe to put in the garden and nothing will get out of hand.

So I think that's important point to know with the soils when you fertilize your soil, actually I fertilizing you kill your biology in the soil.

11:00

So I am not too sure on how fertile the soil really is because when you stop fertilizing then you don't even have biology in there.

Because with this fertilizers because there are salts you dry up all the life in the soil.

11:16

If it was more fertile the soil then your plants will just get a bit higher until this whole thing gets back into a balance.

If some of the plants and you can Google this.

Thanks for Google for all of those things.

11:31

A lot of those native plants, if you don't want them to grow too high, you can Chelsea Chop them.

So that means you add them about to cut off a third of the growth in beginning of July and then what happens?

11:47

Instead of them shooting up tall, they will just become bushier and shorter.

So that is definitely a thing you can do.

We've talked about it a few times and Chelsea Chop comes from the English Flower Show, LLC Flower Show.

12:04

And of course, their season is a little earlier than ours.

So they would be doing a Chelsea Chop probably in June, whereas we're doing our Chelsea Chop of herbaceous perennials starting in July.

And now because we have an extended season, unfortunately, with climate changing and a really warm October, you can extend your season of flowering native plants, right, right in like they'll flower longer.

12:28

And what I like to do I, I experimented with my iron weed.

I chopped, did chop 1/3 down and then I chopped 1/3 of the stems.

So I extended the period of blooming as well.

If you have many, many specimens of the same species, which you always should have just for ecological reasons, because bees and butterflies, they see in a very different way than we do.

12:52

And so it's much easier for them to find those resources when there is more in a cluster.

And it's also more pleasing for our eye from a design perspective.

But what you can do, you can also chop at different times.

13:08

So that way you can also extend the bloom time of those, right?

When the ones go in and fade out, the other ones come in.

And yeah, and I find that this year I tried it out some of my asters and I was really successful too.

13:24

Asters are the ones which are definitely the most common ones to to Chelsea Chop, yes.

OK, Now let's get back to some of your community work that you're doing.

I think the last time I did hear about you was with your native tree giveaway.

13:42

I'm talking about 3 trees and you register and you come and pick them up and you had a collaboration last year I think with Feed Scarborough, is that correct?

Yes.

So we do 3 giveaways.

This is the program that the city offers the City of Toronto for the reason that we do need a 40% tree canopy by 2050.

14:07

That's what their goal is in order to avoid a city that is just way too hot to live.

So and the science says that a 40% the canopy is necessary in order to get any effect on cooling the whole city.

14:25

So it's very smart of the city of Toronto to have that goal.

And they realize that they do not have as much land in order to make sure we have the 40% tree coverage.

So they said we need to get into the private land as well to make sure we have more trees.

14:46

And the best thing about this is they offer native trees only, which are harder to find in regular stores.

But here we know these are native trees and they are straight native trees, no cultivars.

And they're amazing, amazing assortment of trees.

15:03

You can go on the Cliffcrest Butterfly Way website and you can go to the tree giveaway tab there and you can see what we gave away this fall.

So I think it might be already five years for sure that we do those 3 giveaways and we do them twice a year, months in spring and once in fall.

15:23

Spring is when everybody knows to plant.

That's when everybody gets into the mood and the mood of planting.

And fall is actually the best time to plant shrubs and trees, which is not as well known, but they don't trees don't need to produce leaves and flowers.

15:42

They we have still warm soil versus in the spring the soil is rather cool and warms up here.

We still have fairly warm soil.

And so the the tree roots can still anchor for quite a long time also, and this is definitely true this fall, fall is a very, usually a very moist season.

16:04

So they get enough moisture.

And so that's why fall is also easier on the gardener to plant because we don't have to water as much.

So you do list some powerhouse trees, you call them, and I'm wondering about what size they come in when they're in the giveaway.

16:19

Yes, that's also very interesting question.

So they are in one gallon pots.

So they are very small.

They are not like the full calibre trees which you get when you get a street tree or from the city in the front yard planted.

So you can easily take them home.

16:36

Interestingly is that we like the instant gratification always right.

Those small trees are actually ecologically stole much more advanced than so much better than bigger trees because trees, most of the trees get into a partnership with underground fungal networks and those underground fungal networks, they can extend the reach of the root system by 1000 times.

17:06

So the funding, they cannot produce their own sugars and energy.

They need it from the trees.

So they say to the tree, tree, I need your sugar.

And the tree actually over chemical signals will tell the fungi exactly, I need boron, I need nitrogen, I need water, I need this.

17:26

So that very specifically the tree will tell the fungi to get something for them and then they will deliver the sugar.

And the fungi can do this because they are the most advanced chemical Wizards on Earth.

17:43

They can, you know, take down radioactive substances, oil spills, whatever you think of right, they can do it.

They they spit out the chemicals and digest outside of their bodies and then grow into it and take it in.

18:00

So it's very, very fascinating creatures and they are actually more related to us than clients are, which is interesting.

That's a whole other episode, isn't it?

Yeah.

You just made me think of this book that I just pulled off myself, my yeah, Entangled Life copy by Merlin Sheldrake.

18:21

And I think that's fantastic way to put it about fungi is the Chemical Wizards, because no one's ever thinking about them, right?

Because they're under foot, right?

I've just started this book and I'll put it in the episode notes.

Entangled Life, crazy pictures of all these association of ants with fungus.

18:39

Anyways, we'll do another episode on that later stage.

But you know, I do want to just on a basic level talk about how people want that instant gratification.

They go to buy a tree and it's like, no, I want an 8 or 10 foot tree.

And I'm like, no, you want a really young tree.

18:57

And I promise you in five years it'll have a better establishment record than that big tree you're trying to put in like in the middle of a drought or something.

I think that that's really important information for ecological gardeners to know.

19:12

And what I, I didn't finish my train of thought, why it's important to why it's better to have those small trees planted is because they still can get into a relationship with those fungi.

Those big trees sometimes cannot.

19:30

So it's the same as we cannot learn a language without an accent after a certain age.

So that's the same idea with the trees.

They just can't understand their languages anymore, right?

And so the younger you plant, the better it is.

19:45

And I can also, I see this in my garden.

I have, I'm very blessed that I have a role of 300 year old oak trees on my South side of the garden and there is also a black cherry, many sugar maples and ironwood and so Tulip tree.

20:04

So I get all those seedlings and some of them are let grow and you know what they grow so fast when they grow from seed.

So I'm now even a really big proponent of just growing.

20:20

In place your plans from Cedars who are like your tree.

Plant your trees and try this out.

Oaks are very, very easy to plant like this.

They will sprout.

You need a handful of oaks which you can collect in the fall.

Put them in right away.

Make sure the squirrels can get to them and put a mesh on top or so watch them grow.

20:39

It is fascinating how and when they grow in place.

They would have never been disturbed.

They, you know, it's amazing what what happens, how fast they can grow.

That is amazing.

And so for someone who is interested in these spring or fall native tree giveaways as the City of Toronto advertise that OK.

21:00

Yeah, they stopped on their website.

There's many different locations.

So there is in the West End, there's all over the place.

We are one of them.

You can find hours on our website and you you do need to pre register your trees because we are kind of need to know how many of which kind we need to get.

21:19

OK.

And is there a limit to how many you can get?

Yeah, usually it's 2, but it comes back every half a year, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And I see that there's also shrubs on offer like service berries and not only trees is that.

True Woods.

21:37

Beautiful.

Roses 9 Bark which he saw anything.

Yeah.

And that's my segueway into Douglas Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park, because we all know his biggest piece of advice, his first piece of advice for ecological gardeners is to plant an oak tree, right.

21:56

So can we just talk a little bit about how the David Suzuki Butterfly Way project, you know, that citizen LED movement came on your radar?

And could you just explain a little bit about these connecting corridors of habitat gardens that we're trying to we should all be trying to do?

22:14

Sure.

So actually, I have to admit I had no idea about this program.

I was just gardening happily in my garden.

After I have put those initial plants in and I saw what happened, I was literally unstoppable.

There's practically no more lawn left in the garden now.

22:33

Front yard, completely nothing, Right.

And so one of my neighbors across the street, she's a birder and she noticed that, you know, I do, in her opinion, the right thing for the birds, right?

Because then with all the berries coming and the seeds and all this keeping the stems up in the winter.

22:49

So she then we were good friends.

And she then said, one day, you know what?

We should we should make a butterfly way here because you love this stuff.

I love this stuff.

And I think you're done with your garden.

23:05

You now you need something else.

And I said, what is this?

And then she said, yeah, I go every fall, I go to Allison at the Guildwood butterfly away and she gives out we seeds and I just got my seeds.

And then she explained me what it is.

23:21

So what it is is the David Suzuki Foundation has initiated a program here in Canada, which was kind of coined by Duck Tallamy.

If you have not seen a YouTube from that Tallamy, I highly, highly recommend it.

23:39

Anyone is good.

It doesn't matter which one.

It's just a very entertaining and very eye opening.

And so the idea is that even the smallest amount of changing over non helpful vegetation, like for example lawns, into something which helps our local wildlife, starting with the insects, then the birds and everything else follows, including us, will have an impact if more people do it.

24:10

So the idea is get some people to change over, let's say a little bit off their front lawn and make connected habitat because the bigger the area is, the better.

Of course it is for wildlife.

24:26

The so the idea was Mike by it's called Butterfly way is because if I do it, my neighbor does it, the other neighbor and so on.

Or even if it's not direct neighbors, because sometimes neighbors just don't want to be a part of this, but then it still will help because a lot of those insects can fly and the birds anyway.

24:47

And so if we create more of this habitat and then we can create better, you know, bigger areas in the city for this wildlife.

And that's why it's called Butterfly Way way.

Right.

And it's the yeah.

25:03

And they say it's 1 butterfly friendly garden at a time.

It's about just putting some plant native plants in and then trying to get your neighbor to do the same thing.

And hopefully it'll it'll have a knock on effect down the road, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

25:18

And it does because people see it.

People can see the butterflies coming to the plants in the neighborhoods, right?

So it is, it's, it's, it's really amazing.

What I want to point out is that every spring, the David Suzuki Foundation makes a call out where anybody who's interested and just needs a little bit of help to get into gardening with the native plants for the wildlife can actually become a butterfly way Ranger, we call them.

25:49

And so then if you sign up, you get access to a lot of tools.

We have whole toolbox where you can find out which plants would be maybe suitable for this high hot, dry sidewalk where you want to put it in salt tolerant or then we have about 10 webinars which you can attend for free where we we teach everything from growing native plants from seed over, you know, the the the bees and the butterflies which get attracted by which plans to then them the garden care in the fall that you don't don't destroy everything what you created because you still need the habitat going all year round.

26:36

You don't want to just clean up your garden and then it's, you know, then you have destroyed everything what you worked so hard for, right?

And on your on your website, which I'll know you, you do have actually a second website that is has some fantastic information on you offer some garden hacks that I thought were super interesting for the beginner gardener.

26:59

Should we review a couple of them that are your favorites?

Yeah, sure.

So what I learned when I studied the the soil, the biological soil part for the regenerative agriculture is that tilling is really the most, it's destructive, the most destructive, but also the least helpful for our goals.

27:19

Because when we garden, we actually do not really want to invite weeds.

And we also want to create a soil that can support the plants we like.

And so when you tell what you actually do, you create disturbance.

27:36

And in nature, there is a successional path that nature always takes.

It starts from bare rock and ends up at the old growth forest.

And if you do, if we wouldn't do anything and if there wasn't like an earthquake or a volcano or a flood or something like this, which is a disturbance or a herd of bisons running through or a gardener, then we would end up at the old growth forest.

28:05

And so in our gardens, what we have as a traditional means.

And my mom, she is in Germany and she has really, really well kept beautiful garden with her roses.

And over there they still bloom in February.

28:21

And so it's gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.

And between her rose gardens, she was always chilling all the time.

And she had so much wheat pressure.

And I learned that what happens when you till is.

28:37

And I, we talked about those underground fungal networks, which are really the neurological system of the whole natural world, from the soil to the treetops.

And if you till you actually cut them into pieces, so you destroy those fungal networks which are just so, so, so important.

28:59

That would be if you would cut your Internet cable and on the outside and you wonder.

Why analogy?

Don't have the Internet anymore, right And so tilling is really very counterproductive that's also the word I was struggling for getting earlier.

29:14

And so I just mentioned this to my mom, and I didn't expect her to change anything because she's done it since, I guess, 65 years.

And so she's 85 now.

And one of the years she tells me, you know what?

29:30

Yeah, you were right.

When I stopped telling, I had no more weeds.

The reason for that is because when you keep the soil and tilt the biology and the soil actually creates the beautiful fluffy structure.

So even sandy soil with more organic matter, which can fall on and stays there and gets then decomposed for by all this organic, by all this biology in the soil, um, this biology will change the soil chemistry in a way that weeds no longer are needed because weeds are the first responders of nature.

30:10

They come in to heal a place.

So if you have a lot of weeds, you need to just take it easy and you know, leave your leaves stop tilling and nature will over time, it will not take very long at all heal herself and you will have no more weeds.

30:28

So and once you have also a dense ground cover, you can just cut the weeds.

You don't even this annual weeds.

You don't even have to pull them out by the roots anymore because that is kind of tilling as well, right disturbing the soil when you cut them, there is no more light for the the and there is no more disturbance that the lower weeds is come back onto the surface.

30:52

Then you will actually really get control over your weeds.

Yeah, that's interesting.

You're making me think too that weeds are an indicator as well.

The type of weed you have is usually an indicator isn't it?

Of of something going on in your soil.

Yes, like the soil calls in the weeds, it needs to get onto the successional path.

31:12

And so that's a whole different story.

There is specialists who know exactly when you see this kind of weed, what kind of nutrients are missing in the soil or abundant or you know all these kind of things.

So on your pollinator garden.ca website, if anyone's interested, that's probably the best place to get a hold of you.

31:34

Dorte can speak on a number of topics.

You can book a workshop with her, a talk or presentation.

You know, I, I encourage you just to listen to some of her webinars and for learning purposes and listen to them again.

I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm picking up stuff that I, I knew, but I had forgotten.

31:52

So it's, it's so informative to listen to someone who's an experienced gardener and who has been through it because I say this all the time, but you have to grow these plants to know them.

And doesn't matter how you start, you just get started and you start getting to know native plants on any, any scale that you that is appropriate for you and where you are right in your gardening career or gardening journey is probably a better way to put it.

32:21

That's very true.

And you, you will fall in love with those plants because plants, like animals, are living beings and they are the ones who actually make our life even possible.

Because we are like fungi.

We are not autotrophs.

32:37

We cannot produce our own energy.

So we owe everything to plants.

So we need to treat them well.

George.

I hope you you can come back because I think we've opened a can of many worms based upon and I think we can go down a few different routes, but definitely the fungi 1 and what's happening in our soil is is worth a 30 minute talk for sure.

33:01

So hopefully you'll have some time in 2026.

But, um, thank you so much for being here, for joining me on the Garden shift.

Thank you so much Tina for having me.

It was so much fun to talk to you.

Thank you and I hope everybody can enjoy our conversation.