Where to Listen:
You never know when a life-changing moment is going to come. For Sarah Savage, owner of Tend Native Plants, it came when she picked up a book about pollinators. Amy meets Sarah at her small plant nursery in Blue Mounds, Wis., to talk about the hidden pesticides that could be lurking in our gardens and how to make sure the flowers we buy are truly pollinator-friendly.
Host:
Amy Barrilleaux
Guest:
Sarah Savage, Tend Native Plants
Resources for You:
Episode 33: Wisconsin’s bees are acting weird. Here’s why.
Neonicotinoids and their Impact
Episode 23 Neurotixins on Our Plates
Neonicotinoids and Human Health
Transcript:
Amy Hello and welcome. This is the Defender, Wisconsin’s environmental podcast where we talk about pressing environmental news and issues facing our state and we meet people working every day to protect our water, land, air, wildlife and climate. I’m Amy Barrilleaux. The Defender is powered by Clean Wisconsin, your environmental voice since 1970. If you’re like me, chances are you have a little garden or area somewhere in your yard where you’ve planted pollinator-friendly flowers. I have two, one in the front, one in the back. And when I see bees on the salvia or the cone flowers, I feel happy, like I’m doing my part to protect these insects that are so important. So what if I told you that your pollinator-friendly flowers could be hurting those insects? It turns out many of the plants we buy in stores have been grown from seeds treated with neonicotinoid pesticides. Neonics, for short, are neurotoxins that attack the nervous systems of insects, and when seeds are coated, they persist in every part of the plant. And in the soil. But there are ways to make sure your garden is safe. We’ll meet a woman who’s on a mission to raise awareness about neonics in home gardens and protect our pollinators. That’s right now on The Defender. You never know when a life-changing moment is going to come. For Sarah Savage, owner of Tend Native Plants, it came when she picked up a book about pollinators. I recently met Sarah at her small plant nursery in Blue Mounds to talk about the hidden pesticides that could be lurking in our gardens and how to make sure the flowers we buy are truly pollinator-friendly. I guess first, before we dive into pollinaters and pesticides, what got you interested in plants?
Sarah Yeah, so I actually had a totally different career for 19 years. I was a technical writer for a software company. And in 2020, I felt like I needed a change. So I was having, I’d been having migraines for about a decade and they were slowly getting worse. And, you know, in 2020 like many people, I was just reaching a point of, it wasn’t working for me anymore working at the computer. So I left my job. And I didn’t really know what I was going to do at the time and it kind of took a year to figure that out. But I was already being drawn to doing something with plants because I loved gardening and I never had enough time to garden in my previous job. So as I was exploring things, I came across a book by Doug Tallamy called Bringing Nature Home and that really clicked into place for me that I wanted to grow native plants. It’s something that we can do in our backyard to actually help with the crisis that the environment is in and I just wanted to help get more native plants out into the world.
Amy So that’s a, I mean, I think, yes, you’re talking about that, I guess, pandemic career shift that a lot of folks went through. Did you have an interest in plants before that time? Were you like a hobbyist or anything like that?
Sarah I had a garden and I was gardening with native plants. I think I went to my first native plant sale at the Arboretum in like 2011. So throughout having our house in West Madison, I was definitely gardening with the native plants and I understood that they were beneficial, but I didn’t really know the details of how important they are to our insects and therefore the whole rest of the food web. I just knew they were well adapted to our climate and I thought they were pretty and they helped pollinators, but now I really understand after learning more about Doug Talamey’s research and many others, why it’s so important that we get them back into the landscape.
Amy If you could give us a brief summary of what you learned that kind of made that switch for you.
Sarah Yeah, I think it’s really about habitat and our native insects evolved with these plants, so they depend on them for food. And if we lose insects, that affects birds and fish and the whole food web. So we could look at a couple of examples of insects that are in big decline right now, like the monarch butterfly. Most people are aware its population has gone down by I think 80% in the last 30 or so years. And it’s because its host plant, the milkweed, is dramatically less than it used to be. That’s one big reason. There are many reasons for its decline, but the habitat is one really big reason, so monarchs can only reproduce on milkweed and if we don’t provide them milkweed there’s not gonna be any monarchs.
Amy I think some people might say, well, you know, it would be too bad if we didn’t have monarchs, but you know things come and go. What’s your response to kind of that way of thinking?
Sarah Yeah, I kind of understand that you think, well, bugs. I don’t really love bugs. I mean, me myself, I don’t love mosquitoes. I’m not like a huge bug lover, but what we don’t understand there is that bugs are a critical part of the whole ecosystem. And if you like birds, most of our songbirds feed their young caterpillars and insects. They don’t eat seeds when they’re nestlings. And so they need a ton of insects, I think. Was a study that showed that a nest of chickadees needs like over 10,000 insects to raise their young, just one nest. And so even if you don’t love the insects being around you, we need them in our system.
Amy So you read this book, you kind of started to understand the research, and you thought, okay, I’m going to make a big career change. How did that go, or how did it get started?
Sarah Yeah, I think I started by doing a lot of volunteering, volunteering for Dane County, collecting seed and processing seed, volunteering at the native plant garden at the Arboretum just to learn as much as I could. And there’s so many resources out there now too about native plants and podcasts and all this stuff. So I was just absorbing everything and I started on a trial basis, just sort of trying to grow a few species. And after that first year, I-I- I successfully grew things. And I said, okay, I think I’m going to take this bigger. We actually already had the greenhouse in our backyard. That was a pandemic project that we ended up, we built that glass greenhouse. We had it built during the pandemic. So I already had that in place, which was really fortunate. And so I could use that to kind of extend the season.
Amy Part of why we’re talking about these plants today is Clean Wisconsin is beginning to do a lot of work around a certain class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics for short. And it makes it, this particular kind of pesticide, makes it really hard to know what plants are safe to grow if you want to help pollinators. So when did you first hear of these neonic pesticides?
Sarah I think I probably heard about it through one of the native plant podcast that I was listening to at the time. I don’t exactly remember, but what I, what I remember sinking in is that these pesticides are extremely toxic to bees and they’re absorbed into the plants. And so any insect that eats a part of the plant, whether it’s a caterpillar eating a leaf or a bee. Taking pollen or a butterfly taking nectar, they’re getting exposed to this toxic insecticide. And it’s also not tracked very well, the usage of it, like it’s often used as a seed coating. And so because of, I guess, our particular regulatory system doesn’t track how often those seed coatings are applied in the same way that other pesticides are tracked. And so it’s difficult to know. As a consumer, was this plant grown from a seed that was treated or coated with a neonicotinoid? If it was, it’s still present in the plant. And you could be buying a plant for pollinators that is actually harmful.
Amy Not too long ago on the podcast, I talked with a researcher from UW-Madison who talked about the non-lethal impacts of Neonics on bumblebees. And even very, very, low amounts of this type of pesticide can interfere with the way a bumblebee takes care of its young or lives its life. And so, do you ever talk to people who are… confused about, well, how can I find, if there’s no labeling requirement, for instance, how can I found a plant that is going to be safe?
Sarah Yes, for sure. Um, and luckily most native plant nurseries are very aware of this issue and don’t use neonics in their plants. Um but if you’re going to a garden center that has both native and non-native plants, you’ll have to ask and the person might not know the answer to that question.
Amy I’m just picturing myself asking at a big box store, hey, does this have neonics in it? And getting a totally blank stare.
Sarah Yeah and I think for me if they didn’t know I wouldn’t buy it because the chance of providing a plant that you are trying to help wildlife with and then having it harm wildlife to me it’s just a no-go.
Amy I think, you know, as much as we like to plant native plants in our gardens, a lot of people rely on annuals to kind of fill out, bring some color early in the spring. And those annuals, we don’t really know necessarily how they’re grown or what kind of pesticides are used.
Sarah Yeah, it’s true. And I know that some of the big box stores have made pledges in recent years that they’re going to reduce neonic use, but there’s not really any solid proof that that’s happening or we still can’t be sure when we’re buying a plant from those stores that it is actually neonic free. There was a study also a few years ago. Maybe you’ve heard about this, the milkweed study. Samples from 33 different nurseries across the country of milkweeds and they all contained some pesticides. Not all neonics, but some did have neonics. And that was that study reading about that was a big wake-up call to me. I just think that there’s so many risks for our pollinators out there and so that’s why I made the decision not to use any pesticides in my growing.
Amy So the reason why I reached out to you for this podcast was I noticed that on your website and in your brochures you make a point of talking about neonicotinoids. Do you have people coming up to you saying yeah I’m worried about this issue and I saw that you are too?
Sarah Yeah a few. It’s less common. It’s because it’s kind of a complicated topic. I mean you just, neonicotinoid is hard to say and it’s not a thing you’re going to see on the label of a product at the garden center because there’s it’s really a class of insecticides. So you know you might see the name of one like imidacloprid I think is one but they’re all tongue twisters. They’re hard it’s hard to know it’s just a hard issue to be aware of. So I think more people should be aware of, that these are very commonly used insecticides and ask your nursery if they’re using them.
Amy And if they can’t answer, maybe say, hey, why don’t you make this a priority?
Sarah Exactly. Let them know that you’re looking for neonic free plants. And maybe they’ll be able to source them in the future because there are growers for sure that are not using them.
Amy So speaking of neonic free plants, I see you’ve got some plants out here, baby plants that you’re growing. So if you wanna, maybe we can walk over and you can describe some of the things that you are growing because I’m not, there’s so many native plants and I don’t know really what they all are or which could be, are the most desirable, I guess, for folks.
Sarah Yeah, sure. So there’s a huge range. I think I’m growing over 150 species this year. The ones that we have in front of us right here, one of them is a showy goldenrod. And goldenrods are actually one of the types of plants known as keystone plants. And that means they support a huge number of wildlife. So from insects to everything. But they’re a really important genus of plants. They bloom in the fall. People sometimes think of golden rods and they think of Canada golden rod, which is one very aggressive native golden rod. And they think, no, no no, I don’t want that. But there’s like dozens of kinds of golden rod some are short. Some are aggressive. So sometimes golden rods get a bad rap, but they shouldn’t cause they’re really important. Um, we also have some gentian, some bottle gentian which is a really cool purple flower that’s pollinated only by bumblebees cause they are the only insect that’s strong enough to kind of pry open the flowers and crawl in there. And I’m excited to be growing this one this year because I hope to see like a little bumblebee crawling around in there and you know, scooping up the pollen.
Amy Speaking of bumblebees, you know, when I went to my back garden early this spring, I saw a bumblebee that was kind of living in a nest, clearly, under my garden. I thought, because I do this podcast, I knew that that was a bumbebee queen out early in the spring and that she had a nest and I shouldn’t disturb it. So are you able to educate people about pollinators a little bit? Like if somebody comes up to you at the farmers market and asks about this particular plant, because we think honeybees maybe, but maybe we don’t realize the importance of all the pollinator.
Sarah Yeah, exactly. I’m still learning about our native pollinators because that was a new area, completely new area for me when I started the nursery, but I know that there’s over 400 species of native bees in Wisconsin. Honeybees are not one of them, like you said, and there’s so many different ways that they live. Some are solitary and they nest in the ground and and bumblebees are more social and they have colonies of multiples, so they all have… Unique flowers that they visit. Some specialize on only one type of flower that they collect pollen from. And that’s another reason why it’s really important to have a variety of plants in your garden.
Amy So I know when I was growing up, we didn’t talk about pollinators that much. I mean, we’d talk about butterflies and sometimes bees. Do you feel like people are starting to pay attention to this issue a little bit more?
Sarah Absolutely, I think that the native plant movement has been afoot for probably decades, but it feels like really in the last five to 10 years, it’s really gaining traction and people are taking notice and they’re deciding they do want to treat their yards differently and reconsider how much lawn they need because we need, and this is one of Doug Tallamy’s main points, with books like Bringing Nature Home, we need to be living alongside of nature and not just saving nature in preserves and parks, that’s not enough anymore. We need to bring it into our backyards and it’s amazing when we do that we get to see all these interactions between insects and plants and birds come in and it is really wonderful for us too.
Amy Do you feel that when you walk around here and you’ve got all your little plants out and you’re maybe getting ready for the farmer’s market? Do you like your living among nature?
Sarah Absolutely. I mean this living on this property out in Blue Mounds is a dream and this is a dream job for me.
Amy If you could tell anybody, you know, who may not, who may want to start a native garden, a native plant garden, but doesn’t really know where to start, feels a little overwhelmed because there’s a lot of different plants that you have to learn how to care for, how would you say to start?
Sarah Start small. Learn what kind of sun you have in your garden. Is it sunny all day long, half day, less than half a day? And from there, you can start to narrow down your list of plants. And even if you just start a small patch of what used to be lawn, 9 or 12 square feet, it’s providing food for insects that would otherwise not have that food to eat. Any little bit of habitat that we can provide is a win and you can always expand it.
Amy So we’re at five years since you made the decision to leave your office job staring at a computer every day. I know not every day is as beautiful as this one, but are you feeling pretty good about the decision?
Sarah I can’t believe it, sometimes I have to pinch myself. It’s definitely hard work, especially at this time of the year, but it’s a variety of different tasks that keep me interested every day and I believe in the mission of it and that’s the most important thing.
Amy Thank you so much for talking with me about this and for educating me about more native plants. I really appreciate it.
Sarah Thank you.
Amy And thank you for listening to The Defender. Next week on the podcast, we’re going to take a deep dive into the human health impacts of neonic pesticides, and we have all kinds of resources on the topic for you to explore. Check out the show notes or head to our website at CleanWisconsin.org and click on the Podcast page. I’m Amy Barrilleaux. Talk to you later.
