We recently talked with Professor Douglas W. Tallamy about the Homegrown National Park movement. It's a topic that appeals to many frugal-minded gardeners, and we wanted to—pardon the pun—dig even deeper on the subject.

Tallamy is a bestselling author, the mind behind Nature's Best Hope and The Nature of Oaks. For this week's episode, we talked about lawns, invasive plants, deer, and the simplest things we can do to save our local ecosystems.

Here are some practical tips from this week's episode:

  • Plant younger trees (or grow them from seed!); it's cheaper and better for the tree
  • Don't pay someone to take your leaves away; litter moths need them to survive
  • Protect young plants from deer so diverse systems flourish
  • Improve golf courses and corporate landscapes with native plants
  • Don't limit stewardship to a few specialists; it's something we can all do

 

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You can listen to our episode, How to Save the Planet, with any of the following services. Here's where you can listen online or download the episode for free:

Transcript of Frugal Living: How to Save the Planet

Professor Douglas Tallamy:

Most lawns are one species of grass. Some of them have two or three species of, of—they're all non-native grasses. They, the ideal aesthetic of a lawn is it's totally uniform. But you know, we have monocultures of soybeans and monocultures of corn. And there are a lot of forest. They're not restorations, but when agriculture was abandoned, the yeast and, and forest returned at the turn of the century. A lot of those are tulip trees because they can disperse better than other places. So a lot of forest patches in Maryland, they're almost a hundred percent tulip tree. So I say, well, that's practically a monoculture of tulip trees. The problem with that is diversity is a good thing.

And when you have a monoculture of tulip trees that support 21 species of caterpillars and no oaks that support 557 species of caterpillars, you've got a depauperate food web there. Now, if you had a mix of both, um, it would be much richer. So monocultures are not diverse. Diversity is the stuff of life.

This environmentalist book provides an ecological approach to backyard conservation by Professor Douglas Tallamy

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Ah, you know, there was a theoretical ecologist in the fifties, Robert MacArthur, who predicted that as you add species to an ecosystem, it becomes more stable and more productive. Very difficult to test. And he died long before that was actually tested. But he called it the law of nature anyway. Uh, well, it has been tested a number of times since then. And he was absolutely right that diversity creates stability in an ecosystem and also productivity. Meaning it's creating more ecosystem services and that's what keeps us alive. That's our life support. And every time we take a species away from an ecosystem, you have a less diverse, less productive ecosystem.

People always zero in on one species. Say, well, what good is a house fly? What good is this? What good is that? Thinking, what good is it to humans? It's part of that diversity that runs that complex ecosystem. That's all you need to know. So the loss of species anywhere, whether it's global extinction or local extinction. And by local extinction, I mean, look at the number of species in your yard today. Is it the same number that was there before it was your yard? I doubt it. That's a loss of species locally, and it has severely impacted what's happening on your property. We can put those species back, or at least a lot of them.

Jim:

Similar: golf courses. These are giant areas. Uh, obviously when we think of a golf course, we think of a manicured lawn that you have to pay to access. Uh, so it's both not available to a public and it doesn't provide much more value than a lawn does. What's a way we can address that? What's the ideal situation for golf courses aside from get rid of all golf courses.

Douglas:

You know, there are, I think it's more than 2 million acres of golf courses in this country, which is an area the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. So it's a substantial amount of real estate. A lot of people enjoy golf, but you know, if you look at, if you look at what a golf course is comprised of. Yes, it's a lot of fairway, but there's a lot of rough too. All of that could be native plants. There are a lot of trees. All of them could be native trees.

So golf courses actually can provide a fair amount of habitat. It's not gonna be on the putting green, but that's okay. You know, uh, we wanna transition. We're not trying to eliminate all forms of pleasure for humans. That's not gonna go very far. But there are there things that we can do to golf courses? Of course there are. And just, it's not just golf courses. Look at corporate landscapes. I mean, you've got the headquarters and then 40 acres of lawn. What's that all about?

Jim:

Right. The employees don't even go outside to use it. What challenges did you face in your own yard? Obviously, you had to remove a lot of native or a lot of invasive plants. What were the biggest challenges with that?

Douglas:

The biggest challenge, uh, remains the biggest challenge. And that is overpopulation of deer, overabundance of deer. That is one of the major causes, one of the major reasons, that we have invasive plants because deer tip the competitive balance toward the invasives that they don't eat. They don't eat burning bush. They don't eat buckthorn, they don't eat autumn olive. And they do eat every single oak tree or, or, you know, a productive plant that pops up. They eat it right away. Now there's a few exceptions. They don't like spicebush. It's a good native plant. And that's why spicebush is, you know, it's, it's everywhere in our understories because the deer don't, don't eat it. But diverse native plants, the, the, the forest, the canopy trees have no, uh, seedlings coming up because the deer eat them all the time.

When you block out the deer, when you do a deer exclosure experiment, our native plants are quite competitive with the non-natives with what we call invasive. So the invasive quality of a lot of these species would disappear if we got our deer back down to, to proper proper numbers. There, you know, depends on where you are. But it's at least 10 times over the carrying capacity for deer, meaning the amount of deer that could be sustained there forever. And in some places it's 14 times over the carrying capacity. Uh, in our neck of the woods, you know, southern Chester County it's like we've got too many deer from coast to coast.

But we certainly have them here in our yard as well. So that has been the major challenge. If I don't put a cage around some young planting that I want, I, I don't have it the next day. It's that simple. We can't, I hear all the time, let nature take its course. I wish I could, you know, but we have created unnatural situations by removing deer predators, uh, and by bringing in plants with no natural enemies themselves. That is not natural. So we can't let that unnatural situation take over.

Jim:

I'm sure. Yeah. Maybe that's a partnership we need to look into. So we've talked a little bit about what the average person can do is, you know, plant a tree. Easy thing, plant young. One thing we've talked about in previous episodes that I think would be a good parallel here is can you give me an example of something you can do in each season? So plant a tree, probably in the autumn or in the early spring, I'm guessing. What about the summer? What about the winter? What are things we can be doing in those periods?

Douglas:

Summer is a great time to enjoy what you've done in the other seasons. It's not a good time to plant. Most, uh, most places of the country, um, have the risk of water shortages during the summer. And you don't wanna plant a plant in the middle of a drought. So yes, plant in the, in the spring. Uh, early spring is best or early fall. If you're gonna plant in the fall, you have to plant early enough that the roots can get out beyond the hole you've dug and become anchored in the local soil so that when you start getting freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, it doesn't heave it up out of the ground. Um, that's very common. So planting in November, that's way too late, you know. I would say mid-September at the latest, depending on where you live. But, uh, people talk about fall cleanup. We gotta clean up. The leaves fall down.

And a lot of that is about protecting that precious lawn. If you leave the leaves on the lawn, it's not, not great for the lawn. But leaves, think about what leaves are. They are the things that were on the tree during the summer. They contain the nutrients that that tree used that summer. When they fall to the ground in a natural system, the, the critters in the ground—all the detritivores, the mites, and the nematodes, and everything else—will break down those leaves and return the nutrients to the soil so that the tree can use them again in a future year. When we rake our leaves away, we've just raked away all the nutrients that our tree needs for the future. And when you do that every single year, uh, no wonder our trees don't live nearly as long as they should.

You're also raking away 70 species of what we call litter moths, where the caterpillars actually eat dead leaves. We're raking away the habitat where our fireflies, uh, exist. And all of those caterpillars that are driving the food web up on your, your local oak tree, or your black cherry tree, or whatever you have in there, many of them have, have curled up a leaf and spun a cocoon to make it through the winter. And that falls to the ground. And that includes your very fancy Luna moth and all these, these other beautiful things. And then you rake it up and either mulch it or burn it or put it out as trash. And then we wonder why we don't have a lot of, uh, diversity in our yards. So the real key is to keep... Think of leaves the way we think of water now. We want all the water that falls on our property to stay on our property so it can infiltrate and, and, and replenish that water table.

Same thing with your leaves. All the leaves that fall in your property should stay in your property somewhere. And we talk about creating, uh, soft landing, safe sites for these caterpillars that develop as caterpillars on the trees. And then they fall to the ground and pupate in the ground. Um, they can't do that in a compacted, uh, we compact the soil and, and mow it underneath our, our trees. So every tree should have a big bed under it. It creates a safe site for those caterpillar, so they can complete their development that returns the nutrients to the soil.

You've got habitat for your fireflies and everything else. So that's something you should do in the fall is prepare those beds as you're going to reduce the area of lawn and, and keep the leaves on your property. Winter time, you know, uh, watch, watch the birds in your yard. There's not that much going on. People sit and wonder, "Can I, you know, is it good to feed the birds?" And, and the answer is, yes, if you do it properly. Uh, the, the birds that overwinter here, um, for the most part, at least 50% of their diet is seeds. And they depend on our feeders because a typical suburban, uh, habitat doesn't have nearly enough seed for the chickadees and the titmice and the woodpeckers, and the other things that hang around. So putting out suet and, and sunflower seeds is a wonderful thing for the birds. Uh, they enter the breeding season heavier. They can lay more eggs, and they're healthier. Then you get to that spring cleanup time. "Oh, what are we gonna do?"

Well, if you have a little meadow, if you have your, your black-eyed Susans, or, you know, your flowering plants that produce seeds, everybody wants to cut them back to get, because it, because it's, looks like it's dead material. More or less dead material, but it's also loaded with the eggs of the insects that are gonna continue on next year. It's filled with overwintering bees that have spent the winter in the hollow stems of, of your goldenrod and other things. So, um, the real recommendation, if you have any kind of a, a, a meadow is to, you only treat a third of it each year. So you mow or burn a third of it each year, and then two thirds remain untreated. So that third you did treat, it's gonna kill everything. So the two thirds you didn't treat will recolonize the area you did treat.

Now a meadow doesn't stay a meadow unless it is treated periodically. And people wanna mow all the time to control the woody plants that wanna come into your meadow. It doesn't control the woody plants. It cuts them back to the ground, but their rootstock is still there. And they come back really, really very quickly.

So the real way to control your woodies is to spot treat them. Either, dig them out or spot treat them with something they don't like. And that's something that you'd probably wanna do in the spring. You don't wanna do that in the fall because all of those meadow plants have seeds themselves. That's what the sparrows and the other things, the goldfinches are eating all winter long. You don't wanna throw that away in the fall. I don't know, have we covered the year yet?

Jim:

Yeah, I think, I think we got all the way around.

Douglas:

Okay, good.

Jim:

I like your advice here because a lot of it allows me to be a little lazier than I would've been otherwise. You know, don't like, don't like raking? Don't like putting your stuff out, you know, all of your yard waste out by the curb for someone to pick up? Don't. Just don't.

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Douglas:

What do you think what nature demanded from humans before we got here? I'm not—

Jim:

I mean it's... Right, no one did it before you.

Douglas:

All of it, all on its own, you know, so it doesn't need that much input from us. In the past, we have assigned earth stewardship to a few specialists, you know, a few ecologists, a few conservation biologists. And then we give everybody else a green light to destroy the planet. That makes no sense because everybody on the planet requires healthy ecosystem. Everybody. Doesn't matter what your political view is. Everybody requires it. Even if you live in a city, even if you don't. Everybody requires it, which means it's everybody's responsibility to take care of your local ecosystem. Most people don't know that.

We're very poor at, at teaching earth stewardship to our kids and our, and our peers. That's gotta change. And that would enhance this grassroots conservation effort. For the first time everybody will be responsible for good earth, earth stewardship. So if, if your listeners have never heard that, I'm talking about you. That is your responsibility. Whether, even if you don't own property, if you don't own property, help somebody who does. You know, a park or, or a land conservancy. They're all underfunded, they're all understaffed. And then they depend on their volunteers very heavily. So there is something everybody can do.

And if you're in a 12th floor apartment and you're 96 years old, and you just can't do this anymore, you can vote and you can donate. And those are two things that are also essential towards the future of conservation. Our politicians are mostly lawyers. They have no ecological, uh, background. Yet they're determining ecological policy. That makes no sense either. Let's vote for the people who understand that there are serious problems on this planet, understand it when there's still time to fix it.

Jim:

Fantastic. And anyone who wants more of this information, I can personally recommend Nature's Best Hope, which is also on Audible. But there are a slew of other books that are worth checking out by Professor Tallamy. And we'll link to several of them—all of them?—in our blog at Frugal.fm. <music> Thanks to Professor Tallamy for joining us in this conversation. I learned so much and I left inspired. I'm going to go stand in my backyard and plant more things, more native plants, more native trees, more native wildflowers to support my local food web.

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