To live our motto of “Growing a Greener Village, One Garden at a Time”, the WFB Garden Club extends beyond our home gardens and has restored, rescued, created, and maintains several Community Gardens. Please click below to learn a little more about each garden and please visit and enjoy these spaces!
One of our primary initiatives is to restore and improve the ecological benefit of our green spaces by planting more native plants, reducing turf grass, and removing invasives. There is a large consensus among ecologists and environmentalists that a critical component of conservation is to plant more natives and reduce lawn on public and private land. This is empowering because it is something we can all do in our own yards.
Natives have a plethora of benefits. They:
- improve soil quality
- capture carbon
- catch and filter stormwater
- require less maintenance
- support our pollinators
Natives not only provide the best sources of food, they also serve as host plants for our pollinators. For example, milkweed is the only plant that monarch caterpillars can eat; without milkweed, monarchs cannot survive. Many of our pollinators have co-evolved to have this critical and dependent relationship with specific native plant species.
What can you do?
- Join the Garden Club!
- Participate in gardening sessions hosted by the Club at our Community Gardens.
- Plant natives in your own yard, especially keystone species. Keystone plants host a disproportionately high number and diversity of pollinators and are critical to the health of an ecosystem. They are the powerhouses of plants.
- Stop or reduce your use of herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers.
- Remove invasive plants; they spread to our natural areas and threaten native species.
- Reduce the size of your lawn by adding garden spaces. Experts encourage us to think of the lawn as an area rug, rather than wall to wall carpet.
- Leave some leaves in your yard and gardens in the Fall.
- Wait until Spring, when eggs hatch and pollinators emerge, to cut back perennials, especially natives.
- Have your yard, school, business, or place of worship certified as a Xerces Pollinator Habitat and raise awareness by purchasing and proudly displaying your sign.
Resources (each of these sites has lots of info, including lists of natives and keystone species by ecoregion):
Xerces Society
Homegrown National Parks
National Wildlife Federation