I find that, since i grow from seed, researching what seeds l plant is always a good idea. Knowing what kind of soil you have, your climate, and whether or not a plant will behave (ie ‘doesn’t spread aggressively’) is always an asset. My soil is aggressively clay/limestone/shale based, so anything that needs ‘sandy, well-draining soil’ is likely to slowly die here without amending, which I don’t do outside of mulch in some spots.
I love having my stream/pond combo (despite all the headaches involved with upkeep and maintenance) due to the birds, reptiles, frogs, and temporarily aquatic species it can attract, as well as providing a water source in dry weather and a shelter for moist rock-seeking species. It’s not something that can work for everyone, however, and there’s a lot of mistakes that can happen even when it’s installed correctly.
I don’t know too much about gardening. Is it a good idea to pull up weeds even if you don’t replace them with other plants?
There are some patches of dirt and weeds in my neighbourhood that are currently untended (adjacent to a parking lot by a long-abandoned church). I’d love to do some guerilla gardening and plant native Australian species there, but it could be a while before I have time to research what species to plant and how to do it properly. In the meantime, would it be beneficial to start getting rid of the mallow, madeira vines, dandelions, nightshades etc? Or would I be making things worse by leaving the soil bare?
I created a new club on my college campus that is about wildlife. I have been using iNaturalist at Tarrant County College since I joined up with iNaturalist back in 2015. I started using it on South, Southeast Campus and found all kinds of cool things and decided to make a club that would explore some of the wildlife on campus and the world around us. That is one way to get the word out on nature is to start a club or a little group that talks about nature. Our club has only been in the club roster for a year but in that time we have done a lot with iNaturalist and we have had presentations and even did some events with other clubs on campus. Having a small group or being part of a larger group say a Master Naturalist group like I am part of it one of the best ways to get out and educate people.
That is the best advice I can give. You can create a nature group in many ways. Also making sure you have a whole range of activities and topics will keep people interested. For me my group does hikes, presentations, we sometimes act like a bunch of couch potatoes and watch nature videos. Also making a social media group is great too. Posting nature videos and topics is pretty cool but you also want to add some humor in the mix. My club has a Facebook group and we post photos we have taken, nature art, memes, and nature videos, and nature facts all the time. It is important to keep people of all ages involved and interested. That is how I tend to foster nature in my community. That is just something I have been experimenting with. I am a Texas Master Naturalist with the Cross Timbers region and I was so inspired by that group that I wanted to get some kind of interest group on my campus. We are planning future events with other clubs in the new year.
Sometimes even if you are alone on the trail and you see a group of people that maybe looking at something and they don’t know what they are looking at you might want to enlighten them on what it is they are looking at. Sometimes just talking with complete strangers will strike up a better understanding of the world around them and you could make a friend in the process. There are so many ways you can foster nature. This is just my two cents worth if this helps.
One of the best things about native plants is that they aren’t insect resistant. Plants need insects and so do all the other things that eat them like frogs, lizards, and birds.
@grace_sibley, a lot of the time there will be native plant seeds in the soil as well as invasive plant seeds. If you keep removing the invaders, the native plants will start growing by themselves.
Oh I don’t know if that would be the case here…this is suburban Melbourne so there probably aren’t many natives around to seed the soil. The soil is pretty low-quality, sandy and ashy with bits of litter in it, so it seems possible the weeds are improving it, but I wouldn’t know.
Thanks for the reply though, maybe I’ll clear a small patch and see what happens!
Some of your ‘weeds’ will be wildflowers. I would start by only removing vigorous invasive weeds that know are a local problem. Paterson’s Curse has smothered our nearest greenbelt. But I have had some happy volunteers in my suburban garden. Just a few houses from the urban edge and Table Mountain National Park in Cape Town.
Unfortunatelly I can’t share anything but a little expericence. No formal knowledge. I’m working on a semidesertic plot (less than 200 ml/year rainfall) with sodic soil where the only spontaneous vegetation comprisses Fagonia cretica, Atriplex semibaccata, Patellifolia patellaris, Mesembryanthemum crystallinum L.,… Although most of them are not local, I decided to keep the creeping, perennials ones, because I decided that the worse option would be soil without any coverage. So I combine mulching with straw and with those plants to keep the soil covered, retaine some moisture and protect soil life. Looking under those plants, seeing Oniscidea and finding Lumbricus terrestris and smelling, touching the soil I would say it is effective to build up a living soil. I decided to do so after viewing several videos by Dr. Elaine Ingham
It is possible that some of the invasives will be poor competitors for space and may be opportunistic when there is no competition and when everything is cleared and their seeds are on the surface and possibly most abundant. That “see what happens” may need some constant nurturing. Also, you might want to find out what is the trigger for germination of desired species. Certain seeds like poppies can be viable for up to 70 years but need sunlight to trigger germination. That is why often you will see poppies growing in areas of soil disruption like construction sites and in the fields of Flanders. Some seeds germinate after fire, some eucalyptus depend on it to open seed pods. There may be plenty of viable wild seeds in the patch just waiting for the right stimuli.
if willing to accept a bit of a “natural” look, i would tend to leave “weeds” (plants growing in an undesired spot) unless you know that they compete aggressively. in my opinion, it’s better to have some plants to provide food and shelter for insects and other critters, and it’s better to have roots to prevent erosion and provide exudate to nourish the bacteria and fungi and other stuff in the soil, than to have bare soil.
if you want to clear a spot when you’re ready with new plants, that’s fine, but I would tend to clear no more than necessary, cut down plants if you can rather than pulling them out, and don’t compact your soil either.
i don’t know what’s invasive (non-native + aggressive) in your neck of the woods, except that i would get rid of the madeira vines since they can be really aggressive anywhere they grow. (one way to get rid of them would be to cook the leaves and eat them, assuming the soil isn’t contaminated with bad stuff and nobody’s used a bunch of biocides in the area.) you can eat the dandelions, too, but i would tend to leave them (because good roots and good flowers and seeds for wildlife) unless they are too aggressive. i wouldn’t eat the other two, and i would tend to leave (because good shelter and food sources for wildlife) unless too aggressive.
Thanks for the advice, everyone! I asked on a local native plant group on Facebook and they suggested that it may be too hot for new native plants to survive, so I’m going to start by adding some mulch to the area in hopes of improving the soil by autumn. There’s an old pile of dead leaves nearby that I should be able to use as mulch. I’ll also ask at a local native plant nursery to see if they can recommend anything that can survive being planted in summer.
I guess I’ll leave most of the weeds for now but I do want to get rid of the pellitory, which suppposedly is a major cause of allergies, and has several well-established clumps with spreading root systems. I’ll try and fight the madeira vine too - I didn’t know you could eat it! Don’t think I’ll risk it though, this spot is next to a parking lot so the soil may have absorbed exhaust fumes, and I think weed killer may have been used in the past.
Doing a test patch definitely sounds like a good idea! I don’t think there’s a catch-all answer. Effect on erosion is certainly a consideration, and it will be more likely in some places than others. Seasons will also affect that. And while they’re all bad, all invasives aren’t equally bad. The native plant group in my state was able to get legislation banning the physical and ownership transfer of invasive plants passed by rating invasives of a scale of badness from red to orange to yellow, then only putting the red plants on the list (they’re working on getting the oranges added to the law now). So if it’s one of the super bad ones, you’d definitely want to remove it. But if it’s one of the not as bad ones, it might be better to wait until erosion can be controlled. Talking to people who know your local environment would be the best way to figure that out.
Edit: I wrote most of this this morning before work and left it 'til now. Just saw your latest post. Glad to hear the facebook group was helpful!
Best idea is to keep getting advice from a local native plant group. However, best thing you can do it prepare the site for planting in Autumn/Winter. Clear or cut the weeds and you cannot go wrong with mulching. Mulch is the key, particularly if you mulch over the top of the cut weeds - and for natives it does not need to be high quality. Wood chip works well - and you can often get that cheaply from council or landscape supplies. If you have some aggressive spreading weeds we know people who have had great success by covering with black builders plastic over summer that cooks many weeds. Some may continue to grow, but once the plants look white/yellow under the plastic (couple of weeks) wait for a hot sunny day and remove the plastic - so the sun burns the plants. After that, mulch it so that the soil biota can start to break it down and improve the soil. Never use weedmat or plastic under the mulch - just destroys the soil. If you are worried about weeds, put a layer of 4-5 sheets of newspaper heavily overlapping down first and cover with mulch. Don’t plant in summer - even natives have trouble. Autumn is the time once cooler.
In Vermont (USA) there are many public talks on the broad topic of Natural History and also gardening. A local artist named Brian Collier runs a project called Unlawning America which encourages ‘inaction’ in your garden. I’m about to give a presentation on trail cameras (camera trapping); there’s so much misrepresentation around the topic of pest and vermin control that alternative points of view are needed for some balance. Opossums for example are regularly targeted by pest control companies despite the very well-known benefits they provide.
A) with iNaturalist: create a project to record everything wild grows in your area. Try to keep in touch with citizen and encourage them to know the biodiversity, both native and alien, that characterizes that area. This could allow you to create a group of people exploring the land to record living beings.
B) without iNaturalist: start from the bottom, for example proposing to the municipaly the creation a flowerbed with the most characterizing wild plant species of your area. You could also add a panel with the basic information regarding the planted species. This will surely be more useful than a common flowerbed with just ornamentals.
Be aware of the most striking environmental issues of your area and start to read up everything regarding this issue. This could allow you to propose a solution.
To build on the comments about boosting locally-native plants, I have several specific things I do:
Use BONAP to look up fine-level detail about range maps so I can focus on locally-native species. I also research each species habitat preferences using a lot of different sources.
Look for volunteer seedlings of native plants and “rescue” them. I have gotten permission from not only my landlord, but many other property-owners in my neighborhood, to transplant any seedling that comes up in their mulch beds. The property owners get free weeding, and I get to give the plants a new home. I take care to leave the beds looking nicer than before I went in. I talked to my bank’s landscaping crew, numerous homeowners, and the municipal government. Then, I transplant these things either into places in landscaping where they would be attractive and suitable, or wild or semi-wild areas, such as areas along roads or railroads, or just random wild thickets at margins of properties. My apartment complex is surrounded by a lot of this and has given me permission to plant whatever I want, which they like because I tend to remove a lot of non-native thorny / vining vegetation that is a nuisance to them and I tend to be careful about what I plant.
Gathering and distributing native plant seed. I especially look for seed that is likely to fall in unsuitable habitat: for example, if there is a native plant growing next to a path, leaning over into the path dropping its seed in an area where it is just going to get mowed or sprayed with herbicide, I might gather them and throw it just across the path into a suitable habitat. In other cases I might find a large, healthy population of a plant species, and then distribute it to a more degraded habitat where it is not found, but where I think it might grow. In other cases I take seed of landscaping plants that are doing well and producing abundant seed, and that do not seem to be cultivars. I also hit up trees during masting years, like this past year some American beech and Northern Red oak were masting and there were so many nuts it was out of control, and I took the opportunity to plant nuts and acorns in areas where I thought they would do well, but were absent.
I tend to focus seed distribution on places where I and/or others have been doing invasive plant control, or where there are disturbances that create risk of invasives getting established. For example, the city government here sprayed herbicide on a huge patch of bamboo a number of years back, and I’ve distributed a lot of seed into this area. I also have put down seed in an area where a vehicle went off the road, plowing through a lot of vegetation, and the whole area got disturbed. I also have targeted areas where the railroad company cleared vegetation to do maintenance work, while staying off railroad property. I wait until the wind is blowing the right direction, then take a bunch of wind-dispersed seeds to blow into the target area.
I spend a lot of time looking at highly degraded habitats and seeing what thrives in them. For example, I ride the train near me sometimes. I sometimes see interesting things. For example recently I found a lot of broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus) growing along the railroad. However, it is absent from the mile-or-so stretch of track nearest to me. I also have found switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) growing along the track, but it’s also absent from the track near me. The only grasses along the track near me are several invasive species. I have started gathering switchgrass seed from local populations (again, focusing on plants where it is likely to fall in unsuitable spots) and trying to get it established along the portion of track near me. Also, I noticed a few gray birch (Betula populifolia) trees thriving in a disturbed area along the railroad track, and this inspired me to go out and find some seed of this species, to try to get it established. In the past, I did similar things with forested habitats, observing which species I found competing favorably against garlic mustard, then spreading seeds of these in areas where garlic mustard had formed a large monoculture.
In this manner I’ve gotten tons and tons of native plant species established in small, fragmented habitats that were previously almost entirely dominated by invasive plants, many of which were dead zones, with few insects. Many of these plants have now established sustaining populations, and it’s really exciting to watch. As expected, tons of insects have shown up to utilize the new plants.
I also have seen an increase in utilization of the habitats I’ve been doing this in, by migrating warblers, an increase in overwintering seed-eating birds, and a huge increase in toad populations as well as more snakes (garter snakes, possibly eating the toads?). I also have seen a fox, which has always been around the area, spending more time around the area.
What’s also really exciting is that other people have also talked to me about the area too, like people see me working and then they share photos with me that they’ve taken, like of snakes or hawks or other animals. So I think talking to people who ask what you’re doing is also really important. I can’t even count how many conversations I’ve had when doing this sort of work! It’s one of my favorite things about it!
I would say the single most important thing would be planting native plants! These will be what the species depend on in your area for all the things they need to survive such as food and shelter.
Adding in other sources of food, shelter, water, and places for animals to safely raise their young is a bonus and a lot of fun. There are tons of books on how to do this. I love reading about this subject!
It’s certainly a legitimate strategy when the species are non-invasive non-natives and you aren’t able to put in the time and effort to replace them with natives. And some invasives are not quite as bad as others. The very bad ones, it doesn’t matter. Get rid of them because they hurt far more than they help (Callery pear and garlic mustard are examples where I live). The not quite as bad (perhaps as in your case?; I don’t know if those are classified as invasive where you are)…sometimes it’s a judgement call as to what immediate efforts will lead to the most longterm mitigation. Ideally they would all be removed asap and replaced with natives, but life doesn’t always allow for that.
I <3 Bonap. I (only just getting into plants) randomly stumbled on it one day years ago and am constantly surprised by how few native plant people (advocates, sellers…) know about it. I try to spread it around by plugging it on the native plant facebook group I’m in whenever someone asks a question it can easily answer.