Going Native In Your Garden

Gardening with native plants - that is, with species that grew here before the first settlers arrived from Europe - has always had its supporters, Landscaping Services but it’s a trend that’s getting stronger as part of the eco-friendly movement. Advocates argue that because native species have adapted to local conditions, they’re easier to grow, less likely to invade other parts of the garden, and require less water, pesticides and fertilizers. They also maintain that native plants are the best choice to attract birds, butterflies and other wildlife.

Does this mean we should dig up our non-native perennials and shrubs and replace them with ferns, trilliums, and maples? Not according to two Ottawa garden experts. They say that while native plants do offer advantages, the most practical approach — and sometimes the most eco-friendly — is to integrate them with non-native species, finding the best location for each plant.

“There are a lot of generalizations about native plants, but these aren’t always true,” says Eva Schmitz, owner of Artistic Landscape Design. Take the statement that native plants are hardier. “A species from a country like Russia may be just as hardy as a Canadian native, perhaps hardier,” she says. Nor are native plants necessarily less invasive.

“Some natives spread very quickly,” says Adele Courville, design centre manager at Rockcliffe Landscaping. “An aggressive, self-seeding native may be fine for a woodland area, but not for an urban garden. You can try to stop a plant from spreading by creating a barrier below the soil surface, but in time, it will over-root and won’t survive.” While she believes that native plants are the best for wildlife,

Ms. Schmitz considers this to be a generalization, too. “Birds and bees are attracted by colour and shape. They don’t avoid a plant because it’s originally from Europe or Asia.”

Rather than focusing on whether it’s native or not, both women stress the importance of picking plants that will suit their location in the garden. How well any plant does, they say, depends on whether you have the light, moisture, soil and other conditions it needs. Native white spruce, for example, flourishes

in the forest, but can’t take city pollution; red lobelia thrives in water, but will die in a dry location. “Many native Ontario plants grow in woodlands with rich,

organic soil and plenty of water and shade,” Ms. Courville notes. “They won’t succeed in dry, full sun environment.You must provide similar conditions or a native species can wind up being high maintenance.”

In the wrong space, natives may be as susceptible to disease as other plants. “If you have a native, upright phlox in an area with poor circulation, it will get mildew,” Eva Schmitz says. “Again, it’s about putting the right plant in the right location and keeping it healthy. That’s also the best way to eliminate the use of toxins such as pesticides. I don’t spray any plant.”

Besides being a practical solution for many gardens, integrating native plants with other species boosts can boost variety and visual appeal. Natives can be straggly and inconspicous-looking, and depending on the plant, may take as long as five years to bloom. “Natives that have been hybridized often provide bigger blooms,” Ms. Schmitz observes. “They may also be taller, more compact, and have stronger stems and healthier leaves. In fact, native plants can be made richer with hybridized versions.”

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Friday, May 9th, 2008

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Outdoorswomen enjoy getting out but they do it differently than outdoorsmen

Mandy Claypoole spends her downtime bird watching with a group of female friends on her mother’s grain farm in Fennelton.

For Claypoole, a 27-year-old physician’s assistant who lives in Butler, one of America’s fastest-growing pastimes is as much about sisterhood as songbirds.

“I think women bond in the outdoors as much as men,” she said. “It just may not be as obvious.”

Claypoole was introduced to birding at a National Wild Turkey Federation Women in the Outdoors event three years ago. She plans to try her hand at spinning wool, birdhouse building, and beekeeping at this year’s program, April 19, at the Bullcreek Sportsmen’s Club in Tarentum. It is one of dozens of Women in the Outdoors events the federation is offering across the state in coming months, in an effort to attract future hunters and conservation stewards.

Shooting sports still top the agenda, but with just 6 percent of Pennsylvania women now hunting, the federation has broadened its appeal beyond bullets and bows.

“Although archery and shotguns are popular, not every woman is interested, so we offer a lot of other things like backpacking, kayaking and backyard habitat,” said national Women in the Outdoors coordinator Tammy Mowry of Butler. “Women come to learn, and they come for the camaraderie.”

Recruiting women to the outdoors, and ultimately to a conservation ethic, means recognizing their interests often differ from men’s, said Ted Lee Eubanks, whose Austin-based company Fermata Inc. has been helping the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources develop ways to market state parks and other amenities.

“In some ways, there’s a real schism between what men and women enjoy,” he said. “The activities men rated highest were the least favored by women.”

Big game hunting was No. 1 with Pennsylvania men, followed in order by small game hunting, football, migratory bird hunting, fishing for migratory species, surfing, wind surfing, golf, and primitive camping.

For women, it was in-line skating, soccer, outdoors volleyball, caving, boat tours, watching and photographing birds, sailing, horseback riding, and wildflower photography, Eubanks said.

Some of those activities have a strong social component, which is a big draw with women, Eubanks said.

“I hate to make generalizations, but women are far more likely to enjoy the outdoors in a social group. Men do also — that’s one of the appeals of golf — although hunting is an activity a lot of men do alone.”

For women, safety is also a concern, said Eubanks. “Facilitated activities are appealing.”

Pennsylvania state parks officials have only recently begun to explore ways of attracting new users, including minorities and women. DCNR is about to release an outdoors recruitment study that first took shape at the Governor’s Outdoors Conference in State College a year ago.

“Historically, how you managed state parks is by serving whoever knocked on the door and it hasn’t been women,” said Eubanks. “But that doesn’t mean the need, the demand, isn’t there.”

Venture Outdoors, one of the region’s biggest recreation boosters, seems to already have figured that out.

Participation is overwhelmingly female in most of the 230 different activities Venture Outdoors offers and they quickly sell out, said program director Rob Walters.

“Some of the most popular are specialty hikes. They’re a nice couple of hours in the woods, followed by a treat, like wine and cheese or hot chocolate,” he said. “It’s an easy way to get outdoors, and a lot of people graduate to day treks or rock climbing.”

Aside from the social appeal, women are often more adventurous than men, Walters said. “It’s not like we’re taking them sky diving. But I think women are more willing to try new things, and they like the idea of making new friends.”

And while the bulk of Venture Outdoors participants are in their late 20s to early 40s, the region’s older population is also represented, shattering misperceptions about age.

“An 84-year-old woman came snow-shoeing with us this winter,” Walters said.

Although women are making strides in outdoors recreation, the gender divide remains stubbornly intact when it comes to Pennsylvania’s more traditional activities: hunting and fishing. Despite a modest increase in female hunter numbers in recent years, fewer than 10 percent of women fish or hunt in Pennsylvania, although they are an avid minority.

Lisa Diehl, 35, of Overbrook, became the first woman to compete with the Holiday Park Bassbusters and now is fishing the Women’s Bassmaster Tour. That means juggling a full-time job as an adult education counselor with the demands of a Southern tournament circuit.

“I wanted to take my fishing to a whole new level,” said Diehl. “I wanted to meet like-minded people and see and fish new places. The competitiveness was part of it.”

Diehl has tried to interest her female friends in fishing, but none has taken the bait. They don’t know what they’re missing, she said.

“Women are natural anglers. They have the patience and sensitivity for it. I do think it helps if kids are introduced to fishing at an early age. I learned to fish from my mother and an aunt.”

Heather Seitz of Allison Park would like to see more women on streams, too. As captain of the Pennsylvania U.S. Youth Fly Fishing Team, which competed against international youth anglers last summer in State College, Seitz, 19, wants to make fishing a career.

“I’d like to teach women and youths,” she said, “maybe get into guiding, maybe even putting together camps.

“Other women need to know this isn’t just a male sport and they can enjoy it very much,” said Seitz, a freshman at Pitt. “In fact, women are better casters, they’re more graceful.”

Ron Anderson of Butler taught his daughters to hunt when they were old enough to hold a rifle.

“The objective was to hit a paper plate from 50 yards with a .22,” said Anderson, who owns a tackle shop near Lake Arthur. “They’d get points for hitting targets and would compete with one another.”

Now in their 20s, both Jess and Jen hunt today.

“They’re not obsessed, but it’s a fun thing to do with dad a couple of days a year,” said Anderson.

“It’s a manly thing, hunting,” he said, tongue in cheek. “Nobody remembers Annie Oakley anymore.”

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Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

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Boeing won’t commit on new Dreamliner delivery dates

On a day when Boeing should have been celebrating that it beat rival Airbus in booking jet orders last year, the U.S. planemaker instead faced urgent questions about a new delay to its vital 787 Dreamliner program.

The answers in a morning teleconference were not very reassuring.

Boeing executives showed a good grasp of what needs to be done to get the first Dreamliner into the air. But they acknowledged they are still reviewing how the latest three-month delay will affect production and delivery of subsequent airplanes.

They aren’t ready yet to commit to a new schedule for deliveries, said Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief executive Scott Carson, because “We don’t want to be in a position where we do this with you all again.”

Carson and Dreamliner program chief Pat Shanahan said they are confident the first flight of the new airplane will be pushed out only three more months until June, which is ten months behind the original schedule.

But timing of the next steps is less clear. Five further aircraft must be swiftly rolled out to conduct full flight tests and certify the plane before deliveries to customers can start.

Executives said Boeing needs to have detailed discussions with all its supplier partners, and an assessment based on those talks won’t be complete until “the end of the quarter.”

Only then will Boeing know precisely the impact on its flight test and delivery schedule. A delay of at least three months in deliveries seems certain but it could be longer.

“We have resisted the temptation this time to make a broad and sweeping generalization about where we are on all the rest of the aircraft until we have completed our assessment of the condition of assembly on airplanes 2 through 6, the ones that are critical to our flight test program,” said Carson.

Despite that uncertainty, Carson insisted that the 787 global manufacturing plan is going to produce the game-changing new aircraft that Boeing has promised and airlines have ordered in record numbers.

“We have tested the technology on the airplane, we’ve tested the build plan and we’ve tested the team,” Carson said. “Everything that we’re seeing in terms of the health of the technology and what it’s going to deliver continues to give us high confidence in this program.”

The teleconference with media and Wall Street analysts provided a detailed account of the assembly delays on the first Dreamliner, which has turned into a production fiasco.

Progress on plane #1

There was some good news here: Shanahan said parts shortage are no longer holding up this first airplane.

However, many of those parts are still sitting beside the assembly line. Mechanics unable to install them because the work is all out of sequence.

“About a month ago, we had on airplane #1 over 10,000 fastener shortages,” Shanahan said. “We’re down to 100s.”

Further, out of several thousand system component parts that go into activating the airplane including flap actuators, pumps, computers, and generators only 27 are missing today.

“By Monday, we’ll have all 27 of those parts,” Shanahan said. “So if the airplane were available on Monday, with the wiring, the tubing and the ducting, we would be able to install all of those system components.” The next step would be to turn on the power on the airplane and begin testing to ensure the systems work, which was scheduled to begin in late January.

Unfortunately, the airplane won’t be available Monday because the wiring, tubing and ducting aren’t fully installed. Shanahan said he expects the airplane’s power won’t be turned on until March.

Beyond that goal of “power on,” Shanahan said he’s missing only another 20 system component parts needed to get to the next milestone, when the airplane is taxied on the ground under its own power.

With parts shortages now manageable, the out-of-sequence work is the big issue.

Boeing underestimated how long it would take to complete work the major partners were intended to do on the first airplane.

Shanahan said the work that “traveled” down the supply chain has clogged the Everett production system, which was designed to be a lean operation tailored to efficiently perform only final-stage assembly work and system tests.

“We thought we could modify that production system and accommodate the traveled work from our suppliers,” Shanahan said. “We were wrong.”

It has been “very onerous and time consuming” to reconcile the engineering records from supplier partners with the reality of the assembled sections received, and then to adjust the Everett production process, Shanahan said.

He said planning the optimal sequence of aircraft assembly work typically takes a year, but Boeing had to organize the “traveled work” in months.

“That dramatic compression has produced inefficient assembly sequence,” he said.

“We thought late December we would really turn the corner so we could start installing the systems racks and the wiring,” Shanahan said. “We have not been able to finish that assembly work.”

The critical task now, he said, “is getting all the partner supplier factories doing the work they were supposed to be doing and so we’re doing the work we were supposed to be doing.”

That’s what will determine if the follow-on airplanes can be built much more quickly than Dreamliner #1 is coming together.

Asked why he is confident now that this latest plan will work, Shanahan narrowed his answer to airplane #1: He cited the progress with parts shortages, completing the primary structure of airplane number one, and testing of wire bundles still to be installed.

“I can see a path forward based on how much work we’ve completed” he said. “I’m confident that we’ve got the right plan and it’s really about focus and execution.”

Carson acknowledged that Boeing had offered similar assurances last fall.

“I know our credibility is also being tested on this program,” said Carson, “It is up to us to deliver on what we say we will do.”

A victory in 2007 orders

Meanwhile, in Europe, Airbus released its 2007 orders data. The result: for the second year in a row, Boeing came out on top.

Airbus had 1,341 jet orders for the year, 72 short of Boeing’s tally of 1,413 new jet orders.

Airbus said its orders are worth about $157 billion at list prices. Boeing’s orders were worth $171 billion at list prices.

Boeing stock plunged almost 5 percent yesterday when news broke of the 787 delay. In mid-day trading today, the share price was up about 4 percent.

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Thursday, January 17th, 2008

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