HGCNY projects
Our "No Mow" lawn experiment
Here's a photo of one of our members' No Mow experimental strip of No Mow grass - the strip between the flowers and the regular turf grass. So far we're pleased with the results - and the environmental benefits of needing no fertilization, watering, and limited mowing (perhaps once or twice a year.) We bought the seed from Prairie Nursery. It's a blend of Chewings, Azay sheep, SR3100 Hard, Scalis Hard, Creeping Red, and Dawson Red fescues.
YOUR yard can help butterflies
and other pollinators
“It is the gardeners of the world who can open their gardens to the pollinator refugees, who can provide temporary or permanent shelter until humans refine our outlook on the natural world.
By actively sheltering pollinators, we gardeners remind ourselves that we have the power to positively overcome some of the humankind's more destructive tendencies.
Additionally, our gardens provide a teaching laboratory for young children to connect with an ever-vanishing natural environment.
Our gardens might provide a network of urban and suburban biological corridors that link more protected sites and allow pollinators to move freely from one natural area via our gardens to other natural areas.
And finally, all lofty, Earth-saving notions aside, you might wish to encourage pollinators in your gardens simply because they are more interesting than any television show you can imagine.”
Eric Grissell, author of Insects and Gardens
Create a Monarch Waystation
Monarch butterflies need our help! As habitat resources for food and raising young diminish due to urban sprawl and other factors, our yards become essential for providing what monarchs need: milkweed plants and nectar plants. Create a Monarch Waystation in your yard and register it with Monarch Watch, a University of Kansas program.
Help our pollinators!
Pollinators are essential to life. Nearly 80% of our world's crop plants require pollination, and pollination of other plants is vital to ecosystems. Pollinators need protection. Due to biodiversity threats such as land development, pollution, and pesticide poisoning, we are losing pollinators around the world at an alarming rate. Greater awareness and global action are required now to change this trend.
We participate in a service project each year to help habitat outside our own yards.
Black swallowwort
Black swallowwort is especially harmful to monarchs since as a milkweed relative they fool the butterfly into laying its eggs on this plant and also because it crowds out the milkweed that unlike swallowwort supports the development of the larvae.
Here are photos of the events:
Garlic mustard
In 2007, we revisited the area we adopted in 2006, and again "eradicated" the garlic mustard in the area. We know it will reappear next year as the existing seed bank sprouts, but we'll continue our work on this area each year until the seed bank is exhausted.
Here are photos of the events: