An overarching goal of Nature's Action Guide is to make taking the urgently ecological actions accessible to all. In it, I strived to provide clear DIY instructional steps to overcome limits of skills and knowledge. I made every attempt to explain cost-free ways of taking the actions and free, readily accessible, often online resources.
Many of the actions can be done entirely for free. With a little planning, others, such as planting a starter bed of ecologically beneficial native plants can be planted for around $40 (with $25 for seeds and $15 for soilless potting mix), and, if you're starting completely from scratch, perhaps an additional $20 for a garden knife and a pair of gloves.
Most yards can be entirely transformed into an ecological planting for under a hundred dollars (here again, the expense would be for seeds and seeding mix). This, of course, requires lots of elbow grease . . . and some patience (okay, a lot of patience). For example, by learning a few basic propagation skills, hundreds of plants can be propagated from seed using household supplies and repurposed items from the recycle bin along with plant waste from the existing landscape (grass clippings, leaves, and trimmings). In addition to the expenses required for a starter bed, the only initial outlay for a larger space would be for additional seed and potting mix. If you know someone who is growing native plants, they might grant you permission to gather seeds from their plants. This is easy to do and is explained in Nature's Action Guide in Action 10: Propagate or procure lots of keystone plants or you can research online for “how to collect native plant seeds."
You might be thinking that I'm wearing rose-colored glasses with these estimates when you compare it to the high price tag for a professional landscape designer to come and design your yard complete with hardscape and landscape, but I’m really not. To support wildlife with an ecological planting, expensive fancy hardscape isn't needed. We simply need to put in a bed and plant it densely with native plants (and, yes, the plants will be quite small at first!). Ideally, the landscape bed should contain the different layers of the landscape: trees (perhaps by incorporating an existing one), shrubs, perennials, and ground layer plants. Then, by adding a water feature, a little bare space for ground-nesting native bees, a rock and some logs, you'll have everything wildlife needs.
When we do ecological plantings ourselves and on a tight budget, it does take longer and it requires more patience, and it probably won't look quite as orderly as a professionally designed bed, but through the process, we learn about the plants and the wildlife that visits the planting. Most important, we learn how to add ecological plantings to our landscape so that we can do it again and again, amplifying the biodiversity that is beginning to blossom.
I hope this gives you the confidence to add an ecological planting to your yard. Step-by-step DIY instructions for prepping the site, selecting native plants, and propagating them are covered in Nature's Action Guide: How to Support Biodiversity and Your Local Ecosystem, a companion to Doug Tallamy's Nature's Best Hope. In the meantime, if your shoestring budget doesn’t permit purchasing the book, please let me know if you have any questions and I'd be happy to help you get started. We hope you'll join the movement to help support wildlife and biodiversity where you live and work. Let's show the world it can be done!
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