CONCERN FROM A PASSERBY Hello friends. We have been allowing the grass to grow and encourage wild flower growth in front of the zoo to promote bee, butterfly, and other insect and invertebrate habitat and some messaged me with concerns about it. I thought we should make a post as I dont want people to think we are just being lazy and let everyone know what we are doing..... AND.... Encourage you to try this at your homes and see the amazing things that happen as a piece of your property comes alive... The concern was; Hi! I drive by your place everyday to work.....and I always think.....if you cant mow your lawn and take care of the yard how can u take care of animals? Thinking your image would look better if you tidy up a bit. Thanks! My response; The reason we are not cutting the lawn is to promote butterfly and insect habitat. We have a summer camp and the kids are comparing the amount of life in the uncut grass vs the cut grass. If you notice there are some cut sections for the children to explore as well. If you have children, a great experiment would be to indeed let a small patch of grass grow on your property. You will need to leave it for a good month and then look in the grass with your little ones. It is amazing what you will find and it does not have to be big. A 6 by 6 area would amaze you. Maybe we should make an post about it? We did think about putting a sign up but cars are going by at 80 plus km/h so no one would be able to read it anyway so we have not. Maybe I will cut a bit more of the front right at the road but the zoologist in me really doesnt like unnecessarily destroying animal habitat. If you think about it, it is kind of ironic that you are wondering how can we care for the animals if we can not mow our lawn when we are not mowing the lawn and seeding for wild flowers because we do care for animals. Please let me know if you have any other questions about this. Thank you for expressing your concern and giving me the opportunity to address it. Hopefully this makes sense to you as a good thing. Little Ray. I do hope this explanation makes sense to people and I do hope some of you try this with your family. It is incredibly cool so see and you may just end up keeping a few small patches of uncut grass on your property afterwards. If you are in to gardening, you are accomplishing a lot of this already. Check out the photos. The first photo is the area behind the sign on the road that we are trying to encourage heavy growth. It is coming along nicely. The second is what we are hoping to accomplish. Excellent growth teeming with life. The third I found this morning. It is a bunch of aphids on a plant. Incredible, and I am certain disgusting to some people, but aphids are an excellent food source for many animals. Quick Funny Story - I was speaking to my mother in law Pat this morning about it and she said nicely, But imagine if the city just let everyone do that? There would be wildlife all over the city. In her intonation I believe she was suggesting this was a bad thing :-). My response, of course, That would be awesome! She started laughing and said to Papa Ben, I need to remember who I am speaking to :-). And to be clear, I cut my lawn and keep my property tidy at home but I do have gardens with primarily indigenous plants and flowers and I do leave areas of just natural growth and my children LOVE it and so does the wildlife. Have a great day everyone and let me know if you try this as an experiment at your home and what the results are. Little Ray.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 14:27:10 +0000
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