A great new years resolution is a Healthy Yard and clean drinking water! An easy way to make a big difference.
A happy, healthy New Year to everyone!

The Great Healthy Yard Project is now an affiliate of The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center! We hope many people will learn from us that native gardening can help protect our water quality and the health of our families. Of course it also protects our horticultural heritage, our birds and pollinators, and biodiversity. And designing and gardening with native plants makes our gardens more beautiful and vital.
The Wildflower Center is located in Austin, Texas, but is a resource for the entire country. Visit their website and get to know their Native Plant Data Base. It gives detailed lists of native wildflowers, shrubs, trees, and grasses for every region. Can’t find the answer to a question about native plants and wildflowers? Mr. Smarty Plants can help!

Removing Barberry is important because it outcompetes native seedlings and also secretes chemicals that kill native plants. When you pull out Barberry you can compost the waste, making sure that the roots are exposed and dry out. It actually provides shelter to birds and wildlife while it degrades, too. This is a picture of Troy Weldy, Senior Conservation Manager, The Nature Conservancy of New York, supervising the removal of invasive species and planting of natives at the Conservancy’s Mount Holly Preserve. Unlike Barberry, Bittersweet is even more aggressive and needs to be bagged or tarped with heavy plastic to reach temperatures high enough to degrade it.

Radishes and other cruciferous vegetables are good scavengers, pulling nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and micronutrients from deeper in the soil with their taproots. Joel Gruver, Western Illinois University found that when they are planted as a cover crop and frost killed, these nutrients are released into the soil, and those already in the soil become more available. The result is more nutrients are available for crops in the spring than would be with if synthetic fertilizers were used. We can plant radishes as a cover crop in our gardens in areas where it frosts, and there isn’t any clean up in the spring, the radishes just degrade!

The Great Healthy Yard Project is thrilled to be included in the first weekly video for the Permies web site!I am enjoying their forums and learning so much from members. Check out their piece on raising chickens.

Very fortunate to have been asked to do a book promotion and question and answer forum on the Permies web site, the largest permaculture web site on the internet. Fantastic articles, videos, and forums. Information on how to make every aspect of our lives more sustainable. One of my favorites is the information on diatomaceous earth, a safe, natural bug killer. I hope you will join the discussion!

Over a third of our food is directly dependent on pollination by honeybees. Since 2006 30% of hives have been lost every winter from a combination of exposure to pesticides, disease, and lack of a wide array of plants that bees and other pollinators need to survive. The USDA is going to give farmers and ranchers in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Michigan over $4 mill in technical and financial help to improve habitat. Providing cover crops, forage, and other plants that are pollinator friendly, removing invasive species, and improving soil health so crops are naturally resistant to pests are among the measures. In our yards we can similarly remove invasive species, plant pollinator friendly plants, and improve our soil health with aeration and compost. We can also avoid synthetic pesticides and weedkillers that harm our bees and other pollinators.

Bats are important to pollinating crops and spreading seeds. They are especially important to plants whose flowers open only at night such as figs and peaches. In our gardens night blooming cereus flower are often very fragrant. The saguaro cactus, the state flower of Arizona is one, and the evening primrose is another. They eat lots of mosquitoes, too! Many bat colonies are struggling to survive with the spread of white nose syndrome, caused by a fungus. If we take care of our gardens without synthetic pesticides and herbicides, we help protect bats.

“Inert” implies inactive. These chemicals are not in fact inert, but can cause significant harm to people, animals, and ecosystems. Active ingredients in a pesticide are tested for specific biological activity-they cause a desired effect at a specific dose. They also have undesirable side effects, but presumably the pros out way the cons. The “inert” ingredients are mixed with the listed, active, chemical so that it can be used in a reasonable dose in the desired manner. Most of us presume that they are inconsequential, but in fact they are usually the bulk of the material we are applying. The 72 chemicals being removed included volatile organic chemicals like Formaldehyde and Vinyl toluene. Benzoyl peroxide and potassium bromate were included, too. Check out the list, it is eye opening. It is good to see the EPA beginning to tackle this problem, but we have a long way to go. There are many more. Lets hope the EPA can remove these chemicals. In our yards we almost never need the synthetic pesticides, weedkillers, or fertilizers, that are manufactured with these chemicals. If we don’t use them we don’t have to worry about exposure to the active or “inert” ingredients in our yards or in our drinking water.

Three years ago Ms. Barringer replaced the lawn in front of her house with native plants. The lawn used to extend from the street to the stone wall. She planted tiny plugs of native plants and began to see many, many “great bugs!” Her pictures show Joe Pye Weed and New York Iron Weed this past july. Among the many pollinator friendly natives in her yard are also Great Cone flowers and Cardinal flowers. She is an inspiration!