But the biggest step into joining the other homeowners of the world is...an actual backyard! Time to compete with out neighbors for the lushest, greenest, most weedless, most perfectly manicured lawn in the neighborhood association!
Just kidding. Do you think the heady fog of homeownership had made me forget the bugs?
Behold, the palette:
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| Vast tracts of land! |
This is fairly standard for a Chicago backyard, at least in many neighborhoods. A small fenced in space between garage (and alley) and house to fit some plants and a BBQ grill and give your dogs a little room to run around. Nothing fancy, but we love it! We've been apartment dwellers for years, and the closest thing to an outdoor space around our home was an old wooden fire escape (yup, wooden fire escape), and a sunny window packed with plants. The most ambitious of said plants is Napoleon Beanaparte, who went from a tiny dried bean cast distractedly into a pot of soil, to mounting an annexation of our Venetian blinds in a matter of weeks.
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| Our plants have dreams of empire |
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| Turns out beans are self pollinated! |
To put it bluntly, we needed a change.
Plans for our new backyard are still in development - John, always searching for edible things to cook, wants a raised bed for some greens and edible berry crops. Me, I just want to feed lots and lots of cool insects (and by association birds, toads, snakes, etc.) And the best way to do this is by planting native plants- flowers for the pollinators, host plants for the caterpillars, nesting and hiding spots for others. It is one of the most important things that homeowners can do to preserve biodiversity in a world of Kentucky blue grass.
A far more articulate and experienced proponent of this than I am is the entomologist Dr. Douglas Tallamy, author of the book Bringing Nature Home, which a friend loaned to me years ago and has played no small role in my return to entomology. I highly recommend the book for anyone who cares about the environment and has a backyard (or not!). He makes a fine argument against lawns of monoculture grass; chemically-mediated ecological deserts where no creature can thrive. Just half of all of the lawn space in this country is more land area than all of the National Parks combined! Really, a pretty good place to direct conservation efforts!
For anyone interested in learning more, he also has a new book called Nature's Best Hope, which I have not yet read but hope to soon, and I recently heard an interesting interview with him on the podcast In Defense of Plants http://www.indefenseofplants.com/podcast (I also highly recomment the podcast).
In our yard, instead of a trimmed, 2, 4-D'd monoculture, I envision a tiny lush wilderness of native Illinois plants, shrubs and forbs and sedges, flowers and fruits and vegetables and host plants for butterflies, bees, beetles, etc. In preparation for this, I collected prairie seeds from our Michigan farm last fall, chilled them over the winter, and planted them in containers in a sunny window with no great hope of green life emerging but really nothing much better to do. And to my pleased surprise, we now have a tiny apartment prairie! Being stuck at home in this slower-paced life has given me a new appreciation for plants, and one of my favorite quarantine activities has become tending them. Once these are big enough, they will graduate to our backyard. John's tiny lettuce starters accompany them.
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In our yard, for the purposes of grilling and lawn chair sitting, we do want an open area of some type. Fortunately, the previous landlord and a large walnut tree left us with very little actual turf to tear up. Instead, we are greeting with a riot of purple creeping charlie flowers and splashes of yellow dandelions. Many folks would sigh and bust out the Roundup and the Seed-n-feed, but the flowers are providing a fantastic food source for the early emerging pollinators (bees, flies, wasps, ants, etc.), which is hard to find in a city of asphalt and concrete. And as though to prove this point, as we sat in lawn chairs with beers at the far end of our estate, we were welcomed by a very large and fuzzy bumblebee queen, sampling the wares underfoot. Like all bumblebees at this time of year, she has just emerged from her burrow or other protected place, the lone survivor of her colony, and will sleepily buzz around, feeding and searching for a hole or animal burrow to begin the next generation's hive. That is why one should not catch or mess with an early season bumble bee for purposes of science or otherwise: she is the equivalent of an entire hive! Clearly, she found our landscape to her liking, because she spent quite a while buzzing through the flowers, to my distraction and delight!
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| An appreciator of flowery unkept lawns welcomes us to our new home |
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| The lawn of the ecological revolution. Or the beginning of it.... |
I plan to document the deconstruction of our standard lawn and reconstruction of our edible, natural, wilder, colorful urban oasis (the goal, anyways), so this will be the first of several posts to come provided that I can turn out a post more than every six months. Hopefully our successes and challenges will inspire and provide ideas, as well help others learn from our mistakes. No matter what comes out of it, it will certainly be unique. And as spring slowly begins to enliven the Upper Midwest, we can't wait to begin!
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| Cheers! |
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