2025 Life Logs, Day 102: Take a Look at Your Garden (Lawn)
Date: Saturday, April 12, 2025
Weather: Overcast, Rainy and Cold; High Temp 41, Low 38 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
It is April. It is cold and rainy which can easily turn me into grump. But Earth Day is coming up on the 22nd, so today I went with Heather to a Wampanoag ‘Honor the Earth’ fair in the hopes of brightening my cold, rainy day mood. I talked with a ranger from the Mashpee National Wildlife Refuge. I had a Wampanoag salmon hash for lunch. I talked to the women of ‘Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage’ (OLAUG) who literally dive down in Cape Cod ponds and remove the garbage they find to help restore the ponds. And I met an amazing Wampanoag woman, a Falmouth native, whose accomplishments are so impressive. She works at WHOI, teaches at MIT and Harvard, makes films, and more, all trying to help us keep our ties to the earth as the Wampanoag people have for thousands of years.
Then I came home and read a NYT article entitled, “The Four Ecologically Crucial Things You Should Do in Your Garden.” Unlike the British, most Americans do not refer to their yard as their garden. But for the purpose of this article, pretend you are British, and your garden is your yard. According to Douglas W. Tallamy, the entomologist and University of Delaware professor who is co-founder of Homegrown National Park, the four ecologically crucial things that need to happen in your garden are:
1) Every landscape (yard or garden) needs to manage the watershed in which it lies.
2) Every landscape (yard or garden) needs to support pollinators.
3) Every landscape (yard or garden) needs to support a viable food web.
4) And every landscape (yard or garden) needs to sequester carbon.
If you already have ornamentals in your yard, you have a head start. According to Tallamy, “You don’t have to think about redesigning the entire landscape. Just say, ‘Can I improve on any one of those four goals incrementally over time?’” But if you just have a yard with grass and no trees, bushes, or ornamentals, you have to start from scratch. A grass lawn doesn’t address any of the four ‘crucials’. Tallamy writes that if you have a ‘good’ lawn in terms of beautiful, green grass, it degrades or destroys the water shed. It doesn’t support any pollinators, nor the food web. And grass is the worst plant choice for sequestering carbon. What small step can you take?
• Do a one-to-one swap. Remove one invasive plant and add one native. The eventual goal is to get to at least 70 percent native, one step at a time. But start slowly by adding one oak tree or a little patch of goldenrod.
• Reduce artificial light at night by switching to yellow lightbulbs and motion detectors.
• Don’t give into mosquito-fogging treatments. Even natural solutions indiscriminately kill monarchs and other butterflies, pollinators, fireflies, and more.
• For Earth Day on April 22, plant a keystone plant in your garden (yard). To find out what these plants are for your area, go to https://homegrownnationalpark.org/. For Cape Cod, these are native container plants like Grass-Leaved Goldenrod, Autumnale Sneezeweed, Common Evening Primrose, Black-Eyed Susan, Cutleaf Coneflower, Old Field Goldenrod, or Blue Wood, Calico, or New England Aster. Keystone trees and plants for Cape Cod are American Aspen, American Plum, Black Cherry, Black Willow, Chokecherry, Red Maple, Red Oak, Sugar Maple, or White Oak.
When I went out into my ‘garden’ to play with Shadow late afternoon, I looked around to see what tiny step I could take this spring, but it was so cold I had to come back inside to get my winter coat. I had put it away near the end of March thinking I would not need it anymore this spring. But for most of our April days this year the high temp has been in the 40’s with the lows in the 30’s. For most of April last year, our days were in the 50’s with nights in the 40’s. There were a few exceptions, but nothing like this last week. After tomorrow, the rest of the upcoming week looks more like last year’s April. I hope!
