No Lawns

I posted awhile back after making a home for solitary bees, sharing that it had gotten some use. Its important to replace the sticks annually to prevent parasites from being passed from bee to bee as holes are reused.

Thanks to some winter storms, we had lots of downed branches to clear, so I had no shortage of sticks available for use as future bee housing:

(One pile of many)

The holes need to be between 5" and 6" deep, so I started cutting the sticks into 6.5"-ish lengths.

This doesn't look like much but it took a lot of eight-foot branches to make these piles.

The next step was drilling holes. Different size bees need different diameter holes, so I read a few guides and picked out a range of drill bits between a metric #2 and a full half-inch (I don't think solitary bees care about unit standardization) to make sure any potential tenants can find a cozy caliber to call home.

I used the drill press to start the holes then used a set of extra long metric bits in a screwgun to get the full length the bees need

This didn't always go perfectly. I didn't break any bits, but sometimes the holes were crooked enough to punch through the side of the stick and I'd set them aside.

Then I just had to bag up what I'd made and replace the sticks in the bee house:

(Background omitted because it's easier than tidying the shop.)

I'd thought I'd made enough sticks for two years, but it took almost all of them to fill the bee house. Glad I prepared as many as I did.

I think I'd call that move-in ready.

Monarch on rose milkweed, Asclepias incarnata.

I dug this out myself, roughly 6 feet in diameter and 4 inches deep. Given how fast everything is growing and self-seeding, I'll be able to expand closer to the street next year.

Southeastern USA Plains. This is the last stop for rainwater before the storm drain leading to the Chesapeake Bay.

This is in the Southeastern USA Plains.

The mature plants (seen on the left side) went to seed in the fall. I broke apart the seed heads over the right side in February.

Firefly populations are declining. These tips can help you turn your yard into an inviting habitat for the bioluminescent stars of summer.

So many flower buds!

This is full sun between a brick wall and concrete pathway. Sandy clay, soil is wet in the winter and turns into pottery during the summer. What was four pads four years ago now covers 6 sq feet! Doesn't get much higher than a foot tall and edible.

Here's some flowers from last June:

Eastern Prickly Pear, Opuntia humifusa, is native to Eastern North America. Best for people who enjoy playing the game operation!

Just found out about this law that went into effect in 2021 in MD. HOAs or communities cannot require turf-only landscapes.

In this patch, I'm working towards a mix of violets (Viola sororia), nimblewill (Muhlenbergia schreberi), white avens (Geum canadense), and yellow woodsorrel (Oxalis stricta). There's also clover, chickweed, mock strawberry and others I'm weeding out. The shrub is an elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) which should get 10 feet wide. The top right corner is a mix of Philadelphia fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus) and orange coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida).

This is an urban area in the North American Eastern Temperate Forests. My yard is the lowest point of the street next to the storm drain, a "rain garden" for the block. Here, the violets thrive from deep shade to full sun. They are the host plant for fritillary butterflies.

Another good reason for killing your lawn is that once you've done so, you can turn your yard into a literal classroom in order to study things like plant identification and the ecology of the native habitat that once stood where your house is.

In some ways, planting native plant gardens (which can sometimes include non-native, non-invasive species of plants) are small acts habitat restoration in miniature, sure.

Equally (if not more) rewarding however is the ability to learn about the plants that together compose your native ecosystem by growing them right in front of you. Grow them throughout their entire life cycle - observe what pollinates them, what disperses the fruits and seeds, what eats them. The rewards from this kind of sh*t can't be overstated.

I hope these type of requests are allowed here. Otherwise just let me know and I'll remove my post.

I'm soon moving to a new house and it has a little garden area of 5.5 m wide and 4.4m long. And surrounded by a tall hedge (that I don't want to remove)

At the moment, as you can see on the pictures below, it's all tiled. I initially intended to remove about a third of the tiles and make a mos, clover and wild flowers lawn that my cat and dog can use now and then. Then maybe make some tall planteres for wild herbs from stacking the removed bricks up in a square and adding some wood planks.

But now i got the idea of asking you guys if you have any better ideas for how to use this space for a little sanctuary for me and my pets. I'd love to see some inspiration, sketches or ideas from you on how i get more use out of this space. Maybe removing the tiles is not the best idea?

I live in Denmark so the climate is a bit mixed. I'm not a big gardener type of person so something simple that mostly takes care of itself is ideal. Lavenders, sage, oniongrass types of herbs and Viola tricolor and wild flowers for easy and pretty colors.

Gardeners often don’t realize gardens make for great firefly habitat, helping to replace lost natural habitat. The common firefly — the Big Dipper firefly (Photinus pyralis) — readily takes to an organic habitat. The trick is to make your garden as inviting as possible for fireflies to take up residence.

Fireflies spend up to 95% of their lives in larval stages. They live in soil/mud/leaf litter and spend from 1-2 years growing until finally pupating to become adults. This entire time they eat anything they can find. As adults, they only live 2-4 weeks. Females that have mated successfully need a place to lay eggs. They will lay eggs in many spots, but gardens offer an oasis with a source of soil moisture good for larval development.

This is a Texas based organization, but many of the plants (or their close cousins) are found across the continent.

I've been at war with Privet. No matter what I do, the little bugger comes back in full force. How do I get rid of this relentless plant for good?

I came home from bringing my daughter to an extracurricular to find a big pile of grass in the backyard. My wife said that she was trying to pull out some of the Ground Ivy that has been plaguing our yard and garden over the last few years and found that the sod just started coming up like a carpet, so she went with it. We spent the rest of the daylight hours as a family ripping up the whole damn backyard.

We still aren’t quite sure what we are going to put back there but at least this part is out of the way. I’m excited to see what we are going to do with it now.

Hoping we can knock out the rest of the Ground Ivy from the garden so it stops trying to choke everything else out.

A garden that’s planted purely by aesthetic decisions is like a car with no engine. It may look beautiful, the stereo works great, but you’re going to have to push it up the hill.

This is a really informative article by Popular Mechanics describing how to effectively landscape with native plants, as well as the long term benefits you will see as a result.