Reclaiming my yard.

When we moved into the house we are in now there was a lot of landscaping which had been done around the house. After having another child I realized I cannot keep up with the weed pulling and spraying, not to mention that it is just chemicals upon chemicals -some of which supports my least favorite company- so NO MORE.

I have seen several articles about people in CA letting their yards "go back to nature" by planting some indigenous plants and grasses which lower their carbon footprint, attract local birds and bees, and just look damn nice. For some reason "Western" thinking implies that anything in its natural state cannot be beneficial. You can see this all over the place: how we give birth, medications, and food are some obvious examples. I think though that our gardens are also affected. We do not know what indigenous plants are or even what they look like - assuming that if it is not at the grocery store you can't get it or it is too much trouble. Most grass actually flowers and even common plants like clover can look beautiful when allowed to grow to proper size and proportions.

I found a few links for local, for me local is NJ, plants and species in my area. I have listed them in case you are interested in looking at them at all. The gentleman who runs the Easyliving Wildflowers site only deals in indigenous species and has a wide selection. I am going to get the following from him:

New Jersey Tea or Ceanothus americanus which has nice white flowers when it blooms. It is a shrub so I am going to plant it around the fence areas.



I also intend to use Lonicera flava or Native Yellow Honeysuckle. These are really nice and are not the Japanese Honeysuckle you see all over the place. I intend to plant these along the chain link fence as crawlers so they use the fence as a trellis and block out the ugly thing.



There is another I want to find more about and it is Crimson Clover or Trifolium incarnatum. I do not know if this clover is indigenous or even regional if it is, but it is very pretty and would be nice for ground cover when it flowers, as opposed to the gravel we have in place now.



Another resource I found is native trees and shrubs at http://njaes.rutgers.edu/njriparianforestbuffers/projects/mtholly.htm, which is a Rutgers site promoting and supporting the restoration of forest areas in NJ. I will post photos in an ongoing thread on this as it happens.