Since move-in, in fall 2016, we have worked toward restoring the ecosystem, badly damaged through the years by monoculture farming.
First steps: We’ve created berms and swales on the hillsides to manage water and stop erosion. Berms are populated with fruit trees, berry bushes and hazelnut bushes. Groundcover plants protect and nourish the soil.
On the remaining land, we’ve removed invasive trees and shrubs. Periodic mowing will keep those invasives at bay, while allowing native plants to thrive, creating wildlife habitat and building biodiversity. We use no herbicides or pesticides, further protecting all life, both two- and more-legged.
Ponds both old and new provide us with all-night summer serenades from spring peepers and bullfrogs and visits by ducks, herons, sandhill cranes, other birds and dragonflies.
Why native plants?
Insects tend to be specialists, feeding on, reproducing on and pollinating a small variety of plants with which they share an evolutionary history (e.g. Monarch butterflies and milkweed).
Insects are at the very heart of the food web, so if insect populations decline – which they currently are, drastically – all other life is endangered.
Furthermore, an ecosystem with a rich diversity of life, based on native plants and trees, is resilient and adaptable to environmental changes.
Anyone can do this!
Any area of native plants, large or small, supports insect and animal life. University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy advocates for devoting half our yard areas to native plants, bringing ecological health to a vast part of the US and creating vital wildlife corridors much larger than any individual planted area. His website and others provide information and sources for native plants.
In all our work on the land, we’re inspired by Knepp Estates in the UK. From their website:
Until recently most of the land was devoted to traditional arable and dairy farming but in 2001 we shifted our focus entirely and embarked on a series of regeneration and restoration projects aimed at nature conservation – or ‘rewilding,’ as it has come to be known.”
We’re considering how we might follow Knepp’s example to restore not just the over-farmed soil, but the entire forest-hedgerow-ponds-meadows ecosystem. Knepp has seen the return of insects and birds not present in that part of England for decades. We hope to create, in a similar way, excellent habitat for native insects, birds, animals and plants.
Our Living Building project took years to plan and accomplish; this project of restoring the land and creating a truly healthy ecosystem will last a lifetime and more!
Leave a Reply