It's National Pollinator Week starting June 19 and I wanted to show you more from home base. Here on my 1/4 acre lot I experiment with different plants, plant combinations, and various ways to establish gardens. If you follow me on my social media channels like Instagram and Milk the Weed (Facebook), you'll have seen some of these images. I want to focus on the back lawn, which was a space I never watered, that burned bad each summer, and was simply a wasted space. As the years went by I felt ridiculous for having lawn. Just a few feet away was a 1,500' garden full of pollinators, spiders, frogs, birds, etc. I began to see the unused lawn as lazy and selfish, a place no one could call home, a place that did not amend the soil or sequester carbon or cool the air around my home. Besides, I'm a gardener. Give me more plants!
Instead of a needy fescue lawn, one that suprisingly got patchier if I let it go to seed, let me tell you what I did. In the fall of 2015 I scalped the lawn, raked up as much thatch as I could (about 3-4 passes with a manual rake), exposed soil, and sowed flower seeds I'd saved from the previous year. I then put in about 150 seedlings I'd grown, as well as some 3" pots and plugs, and let it sit. In the spring of 2016 I kept it mowed at the highest setting until about mid June. Ideally, I would have mowed it the entire year because boy oh boy did the foxtail get bad, and I ended up manually deadheading seed on hundreds of plants just so I could have some prairie flowers blooming.
This spring, 2017, I mowed until about early to Mid may and have since let it do its thing. Little bluestem and sideoats grama are now by far the prominent grass, which is all the bright green in the above images. I sowed some pioneer forbs that I thought I'd need to shade out the fescue -- mexican hat coneflower and black-eyed susan mostly -- but the short prairie grasses are doing the job for me. Yes, the fescue lawn has bloomed and gone to seed, but I don't believe it will be able to procreate.
Over time I will:
1) Mow a path through the space (I'd like some things to set seed this year)
2) Remove / thin more aggressive species like wild senna
3) Deadhead indian grass and big bluestem so they don't take over (I only have a few of each for winter structure)
4) Thin seedlings of some more architectural and seasonal-blooming plants to preserve a slight sense of order and rhythm that even in a wilder space our eyes look for. Clumps and drifts. Think about a prairie, and how the plants guide you, how we look for patterns to connect to and navigate the landscape. It doesn't take much editing, and in the end, the plants are still allowed to move and do their thing -- to show me what they want and need.
5) Mow it all down each March (I'd love to burn).
Stay tuned to see this space for progress week by week. The asters will be especially spectacular this year. Come on, fall!
And below are a few more shots from out front, where some 400' of unused lawn that burned even worse was taken out in favor of two more designed beds. The landscape had a blueprint and allows for some plants to self sow to fill in the gaps over time. Not that the hellstrip was left to blend into the neighborhood, and a 6' wide lawn path bisects the two beds, showing purpose and human use while tying into the rest of the neighborhood. Both the front and back areas are never watered. Both provide winter habitat. Both represent a wildlife refuge and an island that connects to a tallgrass prairie one mile south.
This spring, 2017, I mowed until about early to Mid may and have since let it do its thing. Little bluestem and sideoats grama are now by far the prominent grass, which is all the bright green in the above images. I sowed some pioneer forbs that I thought I'd need to shade out the fescue -- mexican hat coneflower and black-eyed susan mostly -- but the short prairie grasses are doing the job for me. Yes, the fescue lawn has bloomed and gone to seed, but I don't believe it will be able to procreate.
Over time I will:
1) Mow a path through the space (I'd like some things to set seed this year)
2) Remove / thin more aggressive species like wild senna
3) Deadhead indian grass and big bluestem so they don't take over (I only have a few of each for winter structure)
4) Thin seedlings of some more architectural and seasonal-blooming plants to preserve a slight sense of order and rhythm that even in a wilder space our eyes look for. Clumps and drifts. Think about a prairie, and how the plants guide you, how we look for patterns to connect to and navigate the landscape. It doesn't take much editing, and in the end, the plants are still allowed to move and do their thing -- to show me what they want and need.
5) Mow it all down each March (I'd love to burn).
Stay tuned to see this space for progress week by week. The asters will be especially spectacular this year. Come on, fall!
And below are a few more shots from out front, where some 400' of unused lawn that burned even worse was taken out in favor of two more designed beds. The landscape had a blueprint and allows for some plants to self sow to fill in the gaps over time. Not that the hellstrip was left to blend into the neighborhood, and a 6' wide lawn path bisects the two beds, showing purpose and human use while tying into the rest of the neighborhood. Both the front and back areas are never watered. Both provide winter habitat. Both represent a wildlife refuge and an island that connects to a tallgrass prairie one mile south.
And in case you forgot here's the 10 year old main garden, which is about 75% native plants:
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