We Made Our Farm a Garden for Wildlife
(Page 3 of 4)
June/July 2009
By Ellen Sousa
If Life Gives You Manure, Make Fertilizer
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With horses at home, composting is a way of life for us. We produce incredibly rich compost using horse manure, kitchen scraps, pizza boxes, brown grocery bags, fall leaves and yard trimmings. I even shred white paper junk mail and add it to my compost — which I find very satisfying! Because of our compost, we use no chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilizers on our property. Adding the compost to the pasture and lawns encourages beneficial soil organisms and worms to thrive, and ultimately provides even more food for visiting birds. And, by composting our organic waste, we send little waste to landfills. With our town’s system of trash disposal, in which you pay only for the trash you throw away, we save money by composting what we would ordinarily send out with the trash.
We also reclaimed large areas of lawn and created planting beds by saving old newspaper and cardboard, dampening them with a hose and spreading them in thick layers to smother the grass underneath. Robert used a tractor to dump loads of partially composted manure on top of the layers. Within a few months, worms worked their way through the newspaper and turned the area into wonderfully rich planting soil for all the new plants and shrubs.
Our Vegetable Garden — Bounty for All
Coaxing crops out of the glacial rubble of our soil is not always easy, but by using raised vegetable beds enriched with semiannual tractor loads of compost, and including companion plants to entice beneficial insects and repel pests, we harvest great yields and rarely have pest problems other than the occasional potato beetle (easily flicked into a jar of soapy water and thrown into the compost pile). I plant lots of flowers in and around the vegetables to attract pollinators, whose services ensure a bountiful harvest. With all of the birds and bats — nature’s pest control — the garden has a natural balance.
In 2006, we registered our property with the National Wildlife Federation as a Certified Backyard Wildlife Habitat. But there’s still work to do. In woodland areas of the property, we continue to try to curb the invasion of Japanese pachysandra and vinca, which have spread from former gardens into the woods, crowding out native populations of plants. I’m on the constant lookout for the ubiquitous seedlings of Asiatic bittersweet and multiflora rose, and the highly invasive woodland plant garlic mustard has been spotted on nearby roadsides — so I need to keep watch for that new invader, too. Helping to stop the proliferation of invasive plants in the New England landscape is a satisfying way to help the wildlife who depend upon the resources supplied by native plants for all or part of their life cycles.
