More seeds arrived in the mail this week. I took the same approach as with the first batch. Several of the packets had just a few seeds, like the Delphiniums, but others had thousands.
Another Batch of Native Seeds
Baby Steps
In my enthusiasm to bring native bugs back to my yard and neighborhood, I ordered a bunch of native plant seeds. They are not necessarily easy to find and are not necessarily inexpensive. Clearly, though, for me to expand my own garden and provide material to the neighborhood I need to flex my seed-starting muscles. I used Amazon.com as a resource and also Plant World seeds. My hope is that getting the right species in place will be sufficient–that the local fauna will be adapted to that species regardless of its origins. Below are the seeds that had landed by last weekend:
To maximize my chances of success, I planted a number of each seed in a repurposed plastic egg carton and popped them into a crisper in the fridge for a couple of months.
These were planted on January 11th. I’ll keep the packets with the rest of the seeds in my seed drawer and plant them closer to spring. More seeds are coming, as well!
Hello world!
Thanks for visiting my blog and welcome to my new adventure: IF YOU PLANT IT, THEY WILL COME, with a goal of covering 25% of my yard with highly productive native plants, and at the same time spreading the word on local biodiversity to get my neighborhood, in Seattle, Haller Lake, to increase native plantings to 25% of private and public lands.
My inspiration for this work comes from the brilliant Doug Tallamy, a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware. You can find an excellent video of Doug explaining what he found and how we can start to heal our world HERE. His books are available on Amazon.com–Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants, Updated and Expanded and Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard
Implementation in my own yard will involve growing and adding native plants amid the myriad alien ornamentals I’ve already planted. Over time, I will eliminate many of the aliens and replace them with natives, too, to maximize the benefit to local fauna.
Some of the fauna I want to see more of include birds, but also these bugs that I saw near the house in the last year or so:
The first garden I’m looking to improve with natives is my Memory Garden, the parking strip garden I planted just two years ago with a cottage garden theme. I’ve ordered a bunch of seeds for perennial Seattle natives and will get those started