EcoBeneficial Interview: The Humane Gardener

[@pattic.9376]

I just finished reading Nancy Lawson's book...beautiful, and a perfect compliment to The Pollinator Victory Garden!🐦🐛🐝🐰🐸💚

[@tadblackington1676]

Great video. We are faced with huge environmental challenges and need to get our acts together. To that end I believe we really need to get our heads around the ecology. I believe we have made some fundamental errors in our assumptions. The first assumption that is wrong is that here in the eastern US is that we should be using closed canopy woodland as the reference. We view the continent as having been pristine until Europeans arrived. This is not the case North America lost the vast majority of its megafauna at the end of the last ice age. This is important because they were the drivers of the vegetation. This is the great insight of Dr. Frans Vera whose work demonstrates that areas that are now viewed as closed canopy woodland were actually a kaleidoscope of closed canopy grove and grassland maintained by grazing pressure and predation. This is born out by the fossil record and even Dr. Tallamy's list of vital food plants as oaks, willows and cherries are all sun lovers and fade in the deep shade. We wring our hands over deer browsing, what would we think if we also faced another cervid or two, 2 to 3 species of wild cattle, 2 sorts of peccaries, horses, tapirs, bear sized beavers and capybara, 2 or 3 sorts of ground sloths and 2 sorts of elephants. These animal may be gone but all the species out there today evolved with them so their ghosts still haunt your garden.

[@EcoBeneficialVideos]

Thank you for sharing your perspective. Food for thought as we try to achieve a far better ecological balance. If we can drastically reduce the monocultures of "green deserts" (lawns) around us in favor of biodiverse landscapes, that will be a great start.

[@tadblackington1676]

@@EcoBeneficialVideos Even if we could change the fashion of lawns so it could be a short meadow with forbs, grasshoppers and garter snakes instead a poisoned and polluted green yard shag even lawn can be so much better.

[@PlantNative]

We’ve had a drought most summer. I leave an insect-watering station for them all. The wasps use it the most and they never ever bother me.

[@Jem544]

Great videos!

[@adiposerex5150]

Needs to be assigned watching for high school students.

[@EcoBeneficialVideos]

So glad you enjoyed it! Make sure to pick up a copy of Nancy Lawson's book - "The Humane Gardener"

[@LostInThisGardenofLife]

We’re gonna have to start changing these native plants’ names to things more “appealing,” so people get to planting them more. 🤣

[@ThereIsNoLord]

I did appreciate this speaker. HOWEVER, I think she is underestimating the problems created by deer to getting plants established when you are trying to get rid of lawn. I am experimenting with fencing. But I don't understand the objection to deer culling, especially if the meat is not getting wasted. We got rid of the wolves and coyotes that used to do the culling, so now we are left having to do it, to restore the balance. This doesn't mean every deer has to be killed, but we do need to break from excessive deer numbers while we are trying to restore the landscape that we have ruined with lawn and foreign plants.

[@lanialost1320]

Humans have excessive numbers too. Need to start reducing them first.

[@LostInThisGardenofLife]

@@lanialost1320 *COVID-19 enters chat*