Welcome to my garden
Why I want a sustainable yard:
There are many things going on in this word that I worry about and feel I have no power to change. I worry about pollution of our air, water, global warming, and chemicals in our food. I worry about human rights, food equity, slave labor, capitalism, and the fragmentation of communities. I worry about wildlife suffering from decreasing populations, extinctions, and habitat fragmentation. I worry about my children and how they will suffer because of all these problems becoming worse over time.
There are a few things that I can control. I have this patch of fertile earth. I can have a chemical free yard. I can control my stormwater runoff. I can grow my own food and support my local community. I can plant a habitat garden and link it with my neighbors to make safe corridors for wildlife. I can be an example to my children and my neighbors with this oasis I have created. I can protect this piece of earth and all who depend upon it.
“We are losing the plants and animals we share this planet with. Biodiversity losses are a clear signal that humanity's life support systems are failing. We need biodiversity because biodiversity runs the ecosystem on which we depend. The more diverse an ecosystem is, the more services (air, water, food, benign weather systems, carbon dioxide sequestration, garbage recycling etc.) it will provide for us. With ever growing human populations, we need more ecosystem services. But as we kill off our biodiversity, we are getting fewer and fewer services from our ecosystems.”
~Doug Tallamy
My Garden history:
This garden is a sustainable native garden. The plants in it are mostly native to this area and planted to support wildlife, protect the soil, and absorb stormwater.
I started working on this yard in 2011. At the time it was all grass with two blue spruce and two magnolias. Lawn is not a sustainable landscape. Lawn takes fertilizer, water, and mowing to keep it looking nice while it does nothing to support wildlife or land. I used cardboard and wood chips to smother the lawn without chemicals and create a nice garden bed. Each year I killed a new patch of lawn and slowly expanded my garden until the lawn finally disappeared in 2017.
As part of landscaping the yard many precautions had to be taken to prevent erosion when the grass was killed and the perennials were not yet established. The whole yard is a slope and a lot of water runs off the street down the yard. I have created many berms, swales, rain gardens, and ditches all over the yard to stop water runoff. Alowing the rainwater to flow into my soil instead of running away keeps my ground moist longer and also keeps my soil from running downhill.
In the earlier days of the garden, I grew more annual vegetables in the new beds. As the beds mature, they turn into perennial flower gardens. Now there is not much space for the vegetables between the perennials but I still try to sneak them in to any empty gap. I have added many trees and shrubs to my landscape to create more layers for plants and animals to live. In the distant future this will become a forest garden. As the plants grow and more compost is added, my soil becomes richer and can support more types of plants.
"This is not someone else's problem. We—you and I and everyone who has a yard of any size—own a big chunk of this country. Suburban development has wrought habitat destruction on a grand scale. As these tracts expand, they increasingly squeeze the remaining natural ecosystems, fragment them, sever corridors by which plants and animals might refill the voids we have created. To reverse this process—to reconnect as many plant and animal species as we can to rebuild intelligent suburban ecosystems—requires a new kind of garden, new techniques of gardening, and, I emphasize, a new kind of gardener."
~ Sara Stein
Sustainability
A sustainable yard can have many definitions depending on who you talk to. To some gardeners, a sustainable yard is one that needs a minimal amount of maintenance from year-to-year so that the effort of the gardener is sustainable. Some may calculate inputs versus outputs to become sustainable. A sustainable yard may be one that does not need fertilizer or leaf removal, all rainwater is captured, and no tap water is used in the garden. A sustainable garden may be one where the vegetables are harvested in an equal amount to the compost being created. Sustainability could also mean that every need of the gardener is met by products produced on the land, however this usually involves more than an urban yard’s worth of space.
To many native plant gardeners, a sustainable yard is more about the big picture: to use our yard to sustain the local ecosystems and provide habitat for wildlife. A sustainable yard is a combination of all these definitions of sustainability. Pick which sustainable practices are the most useful to you and make sense in your garden. A sustainable practice will cease to be sustainable if it is not motivating to the gardener to keep it up. All gardeners must find rewards in the sustainable practices we implement, from composting, to growing garlic, to raingardens. A wide variety of practices will gradually create the whole sustainable yard. Sustainability will always look different from one garden to the next to meet the needs of that piece of land and that gardener. Sustainability is reciprocating the gifts of the land.
Native Gardening
Our best chance for saving nature as we know it is to begin in our own yards. We are often discouraged when we hear reports about the declining monarch and bee populations and when we read that all insects are vanishing at an alarming rate. We need to think global and act local because each of us influence a piece of this earth. If all private landowners would take care of their own property by removing invasive species and planting native plants, we could make large parcels of ground friendly to biodiversity. Even if we all planted just one native tree in our quarter acre properties it would make a huge difference to habitat availability for migrating birds.
Native plant landscapes often are presented as low maintenance or even sometimes, as maintenance free. This is not the case! While native plants do require less water and do not need chemical fertilizers, they still need all the rest of the care that traditional gardens require. The native plant garden also tends to appeal to gardeners who want less lawn, fewer chemicals, and more diversity. These all require more maintenance than traditional landscaping. The common garden center plant has been selected to require less maintenance while wild native plants have not. A wild plant has evolved to fill its ecological role - and that is not the same as being a well-behaved garden plant.
To keep the native plant garden lower maintenance start with a weed free garden bed. Most common garden weeds are not native plants. If the soil stays covered with living plant layers and dense root systems, then competition will not allow new seedlings to become established. Place plants in the conditions that are right for them, pay attention to soil moisture, texture, and sunlight. Don’t force a plant to grow where it doesn’t want to be. Select plants that will serve multiple functions in the garden beyond beauty, like erosion control, seeds for birds, nectar for pollinators, leaves for caterpillars, nesting material for birds, and berries for winter residents. Also, select some plants with sweet smells or that display gentle movement in the wind. Keep your plant pallet simple while you learn your plants, big masses of one species are easier to care for as they fill in a space. Diligent maintenance early on will pay off in the long run while the native plants get established.
Native gardening is a learning experience. There will be many lessons learned early that can be applied to more successful gardening in coming years. Establish a new garden in phases, each year expanding a little more. Since native gardens require the most work in the first years, start off small. A benefit to starting small is that once plants get established, they can be divided to be planted in larger beds, saving costs. Native plants establish slowly, usually coming to maturity on their third year, working on establishing their root systems the previous years. Gardens will change over time, as trees grow and the canopy layer fills in, and as soil improves from all the organic content that plants add. Plants will migrate on their own over time or will need to be moved to areas where they are adapted and can be healthy. To be a native gardener is to work with nature in a never-ending ecological project.