Bringing back balance to the environment

by Barbara Allen
 

“When we tug at a single thing in Nature we find it attached to the rest of the world.”
John Muir – Scottish Naturalist

There are a great many things we can each do to help bring balance back to our environment. The following is a list of actions you can take on your property that will go a long way toward replacing lost habitat.

Twenty-four things you can do in your own backyard

• Build healthy, humus-filled, moisture-retentive, biologically active soil with the addition of compost, cover crops, leaves, aged manure and other organic matter.

• Don’t use toxic chemicals of any kind on your property.

• Emulate nature with meadows, woodlands, hedgerows, ponds and plants native to our area.

• Keep lawn areas to a minimum (a new California law limits lawn area to 800 square feet in some areas).  Use drought tolerant, native grasses when you do plant some lawn.

• Leave grass clipping on lawns to feed soil bacteria, worms and add nitrogen back to the grass. A mulching mower or reel mower does a wonderful job.

• Don’t plant lawn on slopes or in hard to water areas. Use groundcovers instead.

• Plant a well rounded mix of plants; evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs, fruits, herbs, vegetables and flowers (native and non-native) Diversity is a key component in ecological balance.

• Choose and Place plants carefully;

  • Use native varieties when possible as they are best adapted to our climate and soil and need the least human attention to thrive.

  • Naturally drought-tolerant and insect and disease resistant plants require little care and water.

  • Place plants carefully with attention to their sun and moisture needs and their ultimate size and shape, they will then need less care and little, if any, pruning.

  • Choose food bearing plants for hedges, privacy screens, shade, bird and small animal shelter and food, beauty, fragrance, windbreaks, erosion control, cover crops, medicine, compost material, nitrogen fixing, firewood, and noise barrier.

  • Choose plants that need little or no annual pruning in order to bear fruit and flowers well or to be healthy.

• Cover bare soil with groundcovers, self-seeding annuals (those that reappear on their own after we seed them the first year), mulch or cover crops. Black-eyed Susan, impatiens, California poppy, and old-fashioned petunia are common self-seeders.

• Use drip and ooze watering systems whenever possible to conserve water and use it more efficiently.

• Group heavy water using plants together whenever possible.

• Don’t rake leaves where it isn’t necessary. They act as a natural mulch and feed the plants they fell from necessary nutrients. This is the natural process. If you must rake them up ―compost them and return them to the area in the form of finished compost.

• Leave weeds where you can. Many, like Queen Anne’s lace, milkweed and Black Eyed Susan are food plants for predator insects and butterflies. Many others ―chickweed, lamb’s quarters, pigweed, purslane and dandelions are important food for humans, too (we have just forgotten this).

• Welcome and encourage bats, owls, shrews, wasps, bees, spiders, snakes, frogs, toads, dragonflies, etc. Honor the role they play in keeping the insect, and rodent populations under control.

• Put up bird, bat and screech owl houses to replace lost habitat in the wild.

• Add a pond and a birdbath―most creatures need water to drink.

• Place a rock pile somewhere for critter habitat, hiding and sunning.

• Leave a small pile of brush in some secluded corner for the same reason. Grow a vine over it if you don’t like the way it looks.

• Don’t prune ground level branches from evergreen shrubs and trees if possible ―they provide good cover for small creatures.