Whew. I finished posting a series of articles on the Terra Foundation Grant which I received from the Landscaping with Colorado Native Plants Conference in April 2024. The grant was for $1000 toward native plants which support birds, with the additional requirement of turf removal and some additional things:

“The Terra Foundation Residential Grant provides $1,000 for native plant material to install a new garden where turf has been removed in a home landscape. The Terra Foundation is committed to biodiversity and water conservation. Please see additional requirements listed in Section 2. Ten grants available.” Here are the extra requirements: 

1. Removing existing non-native turf grasses from the area for your new garden. Non-native turf grasses include Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, tall fescue, and fine fescues (creeping red, hard, chewing, and sheep). 
2. Irrigating new plantings with drip irrigation or by hand, as part of Terra’s focus on water conservation. 
3. Including a diversity of native species and growth forms to support biodiversity. 
4. Maintaining a record of plants, documenting successes with photos. 
5. Purchasing plants from local growers. 
6. Reporting at least 20 observations of plants, pollinators, and birds on community science projects. Ex: iNaturalist, Budburst Phenology Project, or eBird.

I took the requirements very seriously, and I wrote extensively about why removing non-native turf benefits birds, methods for removing turf, my actual experiences removing turf, how I chose to address watering plants, how I went about choosing native plants to support birds, the actual list of what we planted and how we maintain that list, how we sourced plants, maintaining a record of what’s going on in our yard, and our observations of what’s going on in our yard with regard to birds (community science).

It’s been two years since the plants went in and I started monitoring for birds in earnest. What are my thoughts?

I guess the first is that the grant was one chunk of three critical things which dramatically changed the way we gardened. While I’ve been a gardener forever, what pushed our yard over the edge into becoming mainly native plants was the City of Boulder Pollinator Advocates program (and being forced to assess my yard and come up with a plan, which I’ve slowly been carrying out), turf removal subsidization from the City of Boulder via Resource Central, and the Terra Foundation Grant. A strong ongoing fourth is Wild Ones Front Range and its seed swaps and plant swaps, and I guess a fifth is working at nurseries. What I’m saying is that a philosophical framework (native plants which support wildlife) plus free or reduced price plants has made a huge difference. I think the final elements have been having the gardening knowledge and skills and having the physical strength and people power to carry it out.

Another reflection is that it has been good for my family–note the mix of “I” and “we” and “my” and “our” above. While I’ve been the driving force behind the changes, my adult son, who still lives at home while he saves up for grad school, has also been heavily involved and has been a critical part of some of the more laborious aspects of the yard (swales, berms, moving flagstone, etc). He and I went through the Native Plant Master training together. He and I went through the Pollinator Advocate training together. My spouse has gone from more hands off to maintaining his own bird list and moving us forward on an eventual crevice garden. My youngest child, who is studying environmental biology, shares plant, bird, and insect observations with me. The middle kid is a good sport about all of us.

The grant has really pushed me forward in water conservation. While I got certified in water harvesting design the year before I received the grant, the grant provided a focal point to work toward and a very strong why, similar to the way birds have provided a good framework for what to plant and how to garden. As we have done the actual rain gardening and gutter diversions and mulching and so on, I have understood better what water does in our microsite, and I’ve connected with the resources to keep moving forward. This is a definitely a mix of observation, action, and continuing learning. What we’re working on right now is mainly greywater projects. I know that nearly every drop of water that falls from the sky is staying on site. However, in a year as dry as the current one, there’s very little coming from the sky, while some water continues to be consumed inside the house. While every faucet and shower head is low flow to minimize indoor water use, we have been thinking about how to shift some of that water out onto our landscape. We’ve installed a Laundry to Landscape (L2L) greywater diversion to deliver water from our washing machine to outdoor plants (along with using a biocompatible detergent which doesn’t harm plants). We have built a Tippy Tappy, a very simple foot-operated outdoor handwashing station, positioned over some plants. We collect casual greywater in the kitchen (rinse from handwashing dishes, pasta cooking water, etc) and pour it on our compost. We are designing an outdoor shower (with solar heated water!) to allow the shower water to go straight to the landscape. More on this in a future post.

One thing that has been rattling around my brain, and I will devote an entire blog post to the topic, is that I feel a tension between folks who are doing native plant gardening purely for aesthetic reasons (in my head I call them “horticulturists” and the folks who are doing native plant gardening more for habitat purposes (I call this camp the “ecologists”). While I do love flowers and the beauty I see in my yard through the seasons, I am firmly on the habitat side. More on this in a future post.

One very pragmatic thought that I’ll end with is that I wish we had taken far more “before” pictures, more “in progress” pictures, and more pictures through every season and at every point along the way. It has been helpful for me to look back at where we started, what we did, and to really digest the very real changes which have taken place in our yard. There is definitely a little fear in the “before” and “in progress”, because some of those scenes were not very attractive (I especially shudder at the sea of plastic when we were solarizing and how dead everything looked the first winter). I’m still a pretty terrible photographer, but at least I recognize the need to do my very best (and to ask others to also take photos).