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The Deep Middle


Gardening & writing in the prairie echo

A Suburban Lot for Pollinators & Native Plants

6/18/2017

6 Comments

 
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.
And in case you forgot here's the 10 year old main garden, which is about 75% native plants:
6 Comments
Mike McNeil
6/21/2017 10:42:31 am

Missed Father's Day garden tour this year (if you participated) because we relocated to Omaha. How are bugs and critters in the renovated back yard? I know they will enjoy the absence of chemical warfare.

Reply
Benjamin Vogt
6/21/2017 11:01:13 am

Mike -- I missed the tour as well. Now that the flowers are starting to bloom in the new meadow out back I should start to see more insects getting to work. Of course, I'll also have to build up that bug bank over time, too.

Reply
Diane Forristall
7/14/2017 08:21:45 am

Looks lovely! Do you use a riding lawn mower, tractor w/mower deck or push brush mower? Do you rake up the debris or leave it lay?

Reply
Benjamin Vogt link
7/14/2017 08:32:34 am

Diane -- The back meadow I mow with a push mower right now and remove the clippings with its bag. As the density and height increase, I may have to use a weed whacker and removed clippings by hand. Ideally, I'd burn the space. As for the front beds (and the older main garden with the fountain) I use an electric hedge trimmer, break up the debris a little by hand, and leave in place to get nutrients back to the plants. When I trim I also leave 12-18" of stubble so native bees can use those stems as nest sites.

Reply
Tree Removal Perth link
2/25/2021 08:54:50 pm

Thanks for the great information! I'd love to have such a great pollinator for my backyard, I will have to look into planting this.

Thanks,


Jeff M. (from Tree Removal Perth)

Reply
CIM Pennsylvania link
3/8/2021 05:02:07 pm

I enjooyed reading your post

Reply



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    Benjamin Vogt's thoughts on prairie gardening in Nebraska. With a healthy dose of landscape ethics, ecophilosophy, climate change,  and social justice.

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prairie inspired  design

Lincoln & Omaha, Nebraska

Monarch Gardens is a prairie-inspired design firm. We specialize in lawn to meadow conversions as well as urban shade gardens.

Employing 95% native plants, our designs are climate resilient, adaptable, and provide numerous ecological benefits while artistically reflecting wilder landscapes.
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