Restoring Your Backyard Ecosystem
Decatur Metro | April 1, 2009 | 8:19 am
The city’s Amanda Thompson forwards this note about a really interesting sounding Saturday class near Avondale on April 18th from 9a-10:30a.
The Georgia Urban Forest Council is sponsoring a program on restoring your backyard ecosystem at the Georgia Extension office near Avondale. A friend of mine is teaching it and it will be excellent and inspiring. More info below. It will cost $25 and includes a complimentary membership to GUFC. It will be Saturday, April 18th. Hope to see you there, register HERE.
Class Description
Learn how to transition your backyard to a natural landscape. A natural home landscape offers advantages over a traditional high maintenance yard in several ways: 1) Natural plantings of trees can reduce energy consumption in summer by better shading the home; 2) natural plantings require less time and energy to maintain; and 3) natural landscapes provide a virtual outdoor classroom. The challenge in moving from a high maintenance landscape to a more natural and sustainable one is to understand how your yard functions as its own ecosystem and then work with nature to restore the natural processes.
Eric King, ASLA has been designing gardens in Georgia for decades and has appeared on numerous TV/radio programs and in garden magazines throughout the country, and he will demystify the process of natural succession and offer a better path to creating a more natural home landscape.
This is something I’m very interested in. I have a love/loathe relationship with my backyard. I have great trees that provide awesome shade. These same trees also make it impossible to grow a lawn. Thus in rainy times like this my yard is like a mud pit and during dry times it a dust bowl. I’m really not sure of the solution because I don’t want to cut the trees down, even though many of them are pines which are less glamorous than oaks or maples. My wife suggests we mulch the whole yard but I’m not sure about that as a solution either. Has anyone seen this backyard ecosystem at work? Am I the prime target for this class?
Chad, I could have written the exact same description about my yard. At one point we had moss that covered the shady, rear portion of our yard. But the drought killed most of that. Now? mud pit.
I’m wondering if I need this class too.
hey writerchad, you are definitely a candidate for “Restoring Your Backyard Ecosystem”. The speaker, Eric King, is really well informed and interesting. I work at the Georgia Urban Forest Council (we are in Decatur!) and this is a program I strongly recommend for all neighbors that are wondering what to do with their backyard, be in balance, and not spend a ton of money. It will also be great time to ask any tree questions you might have. By the way, I always feel Pines get a bad rap, they are really great trees. Personally I love the layered bark, how they look after a rain, the efficiency of needles, and the power of pine cones.
Chad,
Whether you like it or not you already have a backyard ecosystem–we all do. The question is how healthy is it? A healthy ecosystem is like the terrariums many of us made as children, that is to say they require much less input from us to thrive. In America we have institutionalized a pattern of yard maintenance that is both labor and energy intensive which results in a standardized landscape that looks predictable and consistent. While there are elements of the landscape that benefit from this standardize appearance, in general it results in higher maintenance costs with lower environmental benefits.
The backyard ecosystem approach focuses on working with nature by creating areas that follow the rhythms of nature. These areas could be fern gardens that grow around collected roof runoff, or open woodlands full of Trilliums and Christmas fern covered in natural leaf litter. In this class I will focus on 1) Understanding the natural landscape 2) Benefits of working with nature 3) A case study.
I hope this helps.
I had the moss too. I miss it. I like it better than mud.
Treesrock and Eric King,
Thanks so much for your responses. I’m definitely looking forward to learning more, especially more about the power of pine cones. And ferns sound fantastic. I can’t wait to show my kids the cool and efficient design of a fiddle head.