Peaceful Yard
Action alert:
TODO Join the peaceful yard Facebook group, and natural landscape Whatsapp chat or Signal group.
Advocacy to Defend Natural Landscapes.
Did you enjoy the lovingly (and defiantly) cared-for natural areas past which Harrisonburg's half marathon or rece to beat breast cancer ran? Help protect them by signing up to: tell Harrisonburg City Council to protect natural yards and urban forests.
Did you see a sign at a People's Day event? Celebrate our win with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. We got a ban of toxic parking lot sealants –the trash you can't pick up.
The path to making a culturally sensitive transition in environmental justice neighborhoods includes using the American Climate Corps to and Ayana Pressley's Job Guarantee to help those aging in place with "beautification" as the standard of "beauty" adjusts.
If you have a different perspective, e-mail it to bees at peaceful yard.
No Mow May – Every Day: We are the vast majority.
We are grateful to Bee City USA for their colorful signs and valuable resources, but they hold back unnecessarily over concerns about what neighbors will say. Surveys by Plantlife, the originators of the No Mow May movement, the London parks, the Minesotta parks, and Harrisonburg's Building Better Communities newsletter have documented that the vast majority of people (over 90 percent) favor initiatives like No Mow May. While some push back has appeared from the hundred billion dollar landscaping industry, the objections don't stand up to scrutiny.
Leave the Leaves.
The Xerces Society provides another colorful sign for this time of year.
The Xerces Society, which runs Bee City USA and Bee Campus USA, gives permission for this No Mow May sign to be printed. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license.
Non-native is better than turf.
Another question that makes people hesitate to abandon sterile turf lawns is the question of native or non-native plants. With changes to habitats driven by the natural and human factors driving the global climate crisis, habitats that made sense in a place, no longer make sense in that place and non-native pioneers may help make the best of the inevitable transition. The best we can do in most places is resilient naturalized ecosystems with sustainable high biodiversity. Unmowed grass is better than turf lawns, and may be better than some cultivated landscapes. A much better approach than hiring a landscaping company to put in a "native" meadow– something few people can or will do– is that successfully demonstrated by Marlene Condon of simply letting the yard go, intimately getting to know what is in it, selectively adding and encouraging desired plants that make sense in the local ecosystem and discouraging those that are undesirable.
Dealing with Pests.
Pests are animals that are where humans don't want them to be. They don't know the difference between a park, a woods, professionally landscaped shrubs in the yard of an exclusive neighborhood, a naturalized yard, or an abandoned lot. They are animals. They have taste only in their mouths.
Your front line of defense against pests, scaling from your garden, to your yard, neighborhood, city, bioregion, and planet is: ecological complexity.
Make your yard more attractive than your home.
The best way to deal with pests, is to give them a place to live that is more attractive than the place where you don't want them. Don't mow your paper alley. Don't let City Council approve the clearing of woods.
Invite everyone.
If a species becomes overabundant in a habitat, their population will attract predators, and the population that can spill over to the places where you don't want them will be naturally held in check.
Be a considerate host.
Get to know the habits of your guests so you can fine-tune your living spaces to avoid unwanted encounters.
Tips for specific "pests."
Skunks eat wasps and hornets.
Skunks are your best friend when it comes to wasps and hornets. If they come by your property and find a nest they can access, they will eat it entirely. Skunks, as well as opossums, are your friends.
Paper wasps are attracted by sugary fruit. Yellow jackets are attracted by food waste. Both need access to water. Neither is attracted by tall grass and weeds.
If you have to get rid of wasps, use a peppermint and soap solution to kill them, a soap, sugar, and apple cider vinegar solution to trap them and then put up decoy nests and keep a skunk-friendly neighborhood to keep them away.
Garter snakes eat mice where owls and foxes can't.
Garter snakes are harmless and beneficial. They and water snakes are the only snakes you are likely to find in Harrisonburg (the latter in the water). No venomous snakes have been reported in Harrisonburg in living memory.
You can't have Lyme disease ticks without mice.
Mice stay close to home.
Mice travel not more than 50 feet from their nest looking for food and nesting material. They leave trails of urine that are easily spotted by predatory birds so are easy prey if they have to cross open spaces.
What about opossums and ticks?
Field and Stream reported on a single paper by a mathematician claiming to have disproven the conventional wisdom that opossums kill ticks. In an area with a tick infestation, you could expect opossums, which efficiently remove ticks through grooming, to function like tick tubes for reducing population, though not for breaking the link to the white-footed mouse vector. In any event, an animals contribution to the ecosystem is much bigger than preventing Lyme disease. Opossums were benign creatures benneficial to humans long before that disease emerged. And being benneficial to humans in not a criterion for being allowed to exist.
An ignorant resident of a wooded part of Harrisonburg has been using the Field and Stream article as an excuse to illegaly trap and kill or poison beneficial wildlife, benneficial in that they prevent other wildlife from getting out of ballance and becoming pests to humans, including opossums and skunks.
Rats move farther but are city dwellers. They don't have what it takes to live off the land.
Complexity with appropriate buffers can protect you from the most serious pests.
Natural Landscapes: Myths and Facts , from Penn State.
Cutting
Cutting in a peaceful yard involves the right tools for the job. Over time, a peaceful yard will evolve from a scythe, to a reel mower, to a sickle and a pry bar.
A scythe will keep you in compliance until you can overturn your lawn ordinance. You can use it to keep short turf, cut off seed heads to stay below a height maximum, and to seasonally re-set areas to tip the balance from on group of plants to another.
A reel mower can be used to mow paths as a yard starts to transition from turf. Once your establish your paths, deer and other animals will help you maintain them. You can put away the reel mower.
A sickle lets you fine-tune you yard, keeping a path clear and selectively bringing forward individual plants.
A flat pry bar with a rounded end that fits into the ball of you hand is the last stage, for rooting out plants like wire grass that are in a place that would be better for other plants or uses.
Peaceful Yards in Harrisonburg: picture to-do list.
Visit and support the Harrisonburg Parks for Pollinators project at iNaturalist, but stop by here for updated pictures and links as well.