When my wife and I moved out of the big city and onto our small acreage of 2.5 acres, I had a lot of work to do. I started to plant as many trees as possible, and ordered about 600 trees of various kinds from the province, called shelter belt seedlings. I had to flag them or they would get run over by my lawn mower. Some survived and some had to be replaced. I noticed that my neighbors had established yards and mine was a blank slate. I also noticed that their yards were perfectly manicured, and my wife wanted that for our yard too. I had another idea of how our yard was going to be. I wanted to have a refuge for any animal that wanted to use it. The moles and gophers left big mounds of dirt all over the yard, all the neighbors killed them as a pest, and I just raked over the hills spreading the black loam over the area being dug out. I call it natural aeration, the dirt soon grew over with grass, leaving it greener and looking healthy, I allow the yellow dandelions to grow because the bees need their nutriants first thing in the spring and dandelions are the first flowers to give them their early spring diet. I haven’t sprayed any herbicides for the last 8 years because I’ve noticed that there were no bugs in my lawn, which the birds need. The deer that pass through use my trees as a scratching post, taking branches off while they do it. The trees are not perfect like the guy’s next door but the deer use my yard and not theirs. I love my natural yard and will maintain it in this way for as long as I live here. My trees have grown and my yard is beautiful, in a natural sort of way, and I love being in nature and use it as much as possible. My wife is getting used to the idea of having a yellow yard in the spring and fall during dandelion season. This is their world as well as mine and nature needs us to help them out, not kill them because of our need to have a perfect yard.
A thriving eco system in my own back yard
