I'm in the Piedmont (South-east US) region with a hardiness zone of 8a. I have a large area of turf grass, and I want to plant native plants, attract butterflies, native insects, fireflies, all of it. I'm looking for trees, shrubs, small plants, anything would be nice to plant.

Where do I start? I see a lot of different species online, but where can I get seeds for them to plant? Is planting from seeds a viable option for a beginner?

Any help would be appreciated!

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15199305

[alt text: Text that says, "People [say] 'I never see butterflies or lightning bugs in my yard. Their yard: (colon)". Below the text is a photo of a birds-eye view of a large house with an equally large yard. The lawn is covered in standard turfgrass (probably Kentucky bluegrass) that has been recently mowed.]

I've been at war with Privet. No matter what I do, the little bugger comes back in full force. How do I get rid of this relentless plant for good?

I came home from bringing my daughter to an extracurricular to find a big pile of grass in the backyard. My wife said that she was trying to pull out some of the Ground Ivy that has been plaguing our yard and garden over the last few years and found that the sod just started coming up like a carpet, so she went with it. We spent the rest of the daylight hours as a family ripping up the whole damn backyard.

We still aren’t quite sure what we are going to put back there but at least this part is out of the way. I’m excited to see what we are going to do with it now.

Hoping we can knock out the rest of the Ground Ivy from the garden so it stops trying to choke everything else out.

A garden that’s planted purely by aesthetic decisions is like a car with no engine. It may look beautiful, the stereo works great, but you’re going to have to push it up the hill.

This is a really informative article by Popular Mechanics describing how to effectively landscape with native plants, as well as the long term benefits you will see as a result.

• Collecting Native Seed - US Forest Service
• Native Seed Collection Guide for Ecosystem Restoration
• You should collect and plant native seeds. Here’s how
• Native Seed Collecting

I recently replaced two outdoor light bulbs with dusk-till-dawn bug lights from Sunco. Immediately noticed less bugs around lights which means less bugs caught in the never ending spider webs.

Anyone else do this?

Another article with more science: https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/45105/20230727/what-bug-light-bulbs-effective-repelling-insects.htm

Especially ironic when suburbanites rave about how houses are infinitely better than apartments because they're "closer to nature." You want to be closer to nature? Let natural processes work and have a lawn of whatever grows in your area naturally (even an "invasive" species is better than lawn grasses, unironically, and lawn grasses are almost always also non-native species, just ones that can't actually survive in the environment.) Don't water, don't mow, don't fertilize, just let nature do its thing. It will also attract more pollinators, birds, wildlife in general and instead of a lawn, soon you'll have a natural meadow in your yard. That's nature, a lawn that needs excessive water, chemical fertilizers, and poison just to maintain isn't.

This story documents how the invasive grasses allowed the fire to grow.

Got all the plants and trees in yesterday, got most of the trees in the ground. Couldn't figure out where 2 of them should go so I'll be doing those by hand later.

These are mostly mocked up so I can figure out where to plant them. Let me know your thoughts.

A lot of overgrowth, other things to clean up in the background. Wood chips are next and then next year we'll do it all over again until it's fully covered!

Looks like I can only upload one picture with the post so I'll throw more in the comments.

Not sure if pay-walled. If someone will post a pay-wall bypass I will update the link.

starting my no lawn journey tomorrow. I'll post a different thread about it

25 native trees, 15 native bushes, 2 dawn redwoods because I'm oddly infatuated with them. pic of small first delivery.

I live in the Kansas City area which is comfortably Zone 6 from my understanding.

We've recently purchased our first house and the yard work is super time consuming! With .5 acres just mowing alone takes like 2 hours with my push mower due to all the trees and hills in the yard. I would like to have a pollinator friendly yard while also not having to spend so much time mowing. Using less gas in general would also be neat.

What I am thinking of doing is prior to first snow fall, over-seed with wildflowers from American Medows for most of the yard, and then in areas with some foot traffic, plant a mixture of clover and native grasses and then only worry about mowing in that area periodically.

Has anybody else ever over seeded with wildflowers? A lot of stuff I see posted here (and formerly on reddit) seem to be a bunch of elegant but hard and time consuming work like ripping up the yard, putting cardboard and mulch down, and then planting over that. However, I don't really have the time and money to do all that 🙁. Would I have desirable results with just over-seeding?