Trail to Earth Day #2: Make Your Property a Great Place for Birds and Insects — and For Yourself

Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly, photo by Michael Audette.

The Trail to Earth Day, a series of simple tips to help the environment (with music at the end!) will run through the 50th Earth Day, April 22. We’d be happy to send you one a day via text. Sign up here.

April 2, 2020 — Landscape for birds. Lots of us can make the property we live on far more sustainable, in lots of ways.

Reduce the size of your lawn, for example — turf grass is a monoculture with little environmental value. A smaller lawn means less water (try using a rain barrel to collect water for lawns and gardens) and less maintenance (especially if you usually use a power mower and leaf blower). 

Let the clover take over. Plant native shrubs and trees. Birds and other wildlife love viburnums and blueberries. Plant milkweed, which monarch butterflies need, and spicebush, for spicebush swallowtails, if you have the right conditions — open and sunny for milkweed, wooded and moist for spicebush.

Download our App and click on Native Gardening for a quick overview of Patrick Comins’s tips for a bird-friendly yard.

Pull invasive garlic mustard. Some people make a pesto from the leaves, a dab of which might be good with mozzarella and tomatoes if you plant a vegetable garden — so plant a vegetable garden, if you don’t already have one.

You can’t help but feel better about the world when the birds and dragonflies and butterflies are around. And keep some lawn for yourself — kids need a place to play, you need a place to sit and relax. If you do it right the summer lawn will hiss with life.