 Well, good morning everybody. My name is David Morgan. I'm the environmental planner for the town of Arlington. I am happy to welcome you here to our culminating sustainable landscape series. We were given a grant by MAPC, which is the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, under their Accelerating Climate Resilience grant program in order to accomplish this program and the purpose of the grant was to host these three workshops. We did one in Stoneham, one in Winchester, and now one in Arlington and we are taking the handbook that was developed by the town of Concord on how to do sustainable landscaping in a residential setting primarily and adapt that to be used in each of the towns on the grant. So you can look for that next and I want to thank my colleagues Ken Pruitt and Aaron Wartman of Winchester in Stoneham respectively and they are the ones that have been collaborating on this project so it will be about today. We've also been working with Kim Lundgren associates who put together the first handbook and we've been working on them or working with them on adapting it for the municipalities to use in the future and last but not least we have our colleagues at Bowler who will be facilitating today and I'll let them do their introductions as we start the day. Of course we've discussed upfront that we should make this a very conversational event so if you do have questions or comments along the way feel free to raise your hand and shout them out for the audio we'll repeat the questions back for the mic and so just be aware of process there. Onto Bowler. Thank you David. I'm Leslie Fanger. I'm a senior landscape architect with Bowler and I'm here with Lindsay Corsi who's a senior landscape designer. She's been helping me pull together this presentation for the third final workshop and as David mentioned I'm this is supposed to be conversational we would love to hear from the audience and you know we're learning a lot as we go and there's a lot of expertise in this audience I'm sure so let's let's have a nice dialogue. So David explained where the the money that funded this project came from. This is an example of the the final product for Concord that Kim Lundgren and Bowler collaborated on. It's very well received and we're adapting it to suit the needs of these three towns. So as David mentioned we've had one workshop that focused on design of sustainable landscapes. Another workshop about three weeks ago focused on sustainable construction practices and this third workshop will focus on sustainable maintenance. However what would like to do today is sort of do a recap of the first two so that you get the benefit of all all three workshops in this final one. So we'll probably spend maybe 15-20 minutes on design 15-20 minutes on construction and then we'll have an intermission and we'll show a case study that Ken Pruitt has been working at his own house to create a sustainable landscape so we have the benefit of seeing the design construction and the final product so that would be fun. So Lindsay and I will kind of tag team and she's going to run through the design so Lindsay take it away. Thanks Leslie. Can everyone hear me okay? Is that good? My name is Lindsay. As Leslie mentioned I'm on her team at Bowler as a landscape designer. So basically a sustainable landscape design doesn't require a lot of external input a lot of intervention. It's self-sustaining meaning it can keep itself surviving after you've established it right and that's our goal with sustainable landscape. So just some some things to think about in terms of sustainable landscape design we want to preserve existing native plants right? Native plant material will thrive here because it's native here to Massachusetts. It doesn't need as much water it doesn't need as much babying as some other plants that are from other regions of the world that you bring in and try to make work here. Invasive species we want to remove those to preserve a sustainable landscape because we want our native species to thrive we don't want invasive species to choke out the natives that we already have here. So mostly native remove invasives those are two really big components of this and we want to use less water and energy overall. We want less resource input right? For it to sustain itself we shouldn't be needing to use or expend that many resources to keep our landscape alive. So using native plants using less water valuing our soil trading these things as resources that we need to use sparingly and conserve to the best of our abilities. Energy, water, you know reducing the input of new materials as much as possible. So how we go about this there's a design process. First you want to figure out who's doing the work. Is it you or do you need to hire a contractor? Are you going to work in tandem and to what degree? A good time to plan all of this would be in the winter before they all book up right? You need to figure out what your property looks like from above. You need to get a map of your property which sounds like kind of difficult to do but it doesn't have to be super intense just go on Google Earth go on MassMapper take a look at your property from top down so you can get a sense of scale and size and then you can start to plan out the projects that you want to implement. So then you'll need to analyze your property. So identify the things that you want to remove the things that you want to add. What are your concerns? Where are their opportunities to do things? Do you have a big patch of invasive plants in the back of your yard that you really need to deal with first? What are your needs? What do you want to add? Do you want to add a pollinator garden or a rain garden? So then when you have a list of those things that you want to add and remove you can start to lay them out on the map that you have loosely and then just refining that you'll come up with your design. Design is basically just the refinement of those ideas being laid out on paper. So I'll get into that a little bit. So step one who will do the work? You or a contractor? And you need to consider who's going to be doing the design, who's going to be doing the installation, and who's going to be doing the maintenance because it could be different people for all of those phases, right? You might be doing it all yourself or you might be hiring a contractor just to do the installation and the maintenance. Maybe you do the design. So it might be a combination of those things. Step two, scaled map. So these are things that you would typically want to have on a map. It's okay if you are not able to get all of them, but the more the better. You want to know what the scale is so that you can draw things accurately to size. If you draw a bunch of circles on your plan for trees and they're not the right size at all, you're going to order too many plants or too little and you're not going to be happy. So you need the map for basically being able to plan your space accurately. You want to know existing things like trees, shrubs, existing plant beds. Utilities are important to know. If you have what is underground, you need to know before you start digging, especially if you're doing a lot of digging. So here's an example of a good scaled map. This was done by a professional. It looks kind of difficult to see up there. But this was done on a computer by a professional. When you do this, it's going to look a little bit different. You're going to be going on Google Earth or MassMapper, some sort of GIS website probably, saving that image of your house or home from above. And then you're going to be marking it up either on paper or digitally drawing over that with your scale, with your proposed trees and shrubs. And then after you get all that situated, you're going to start drawing out your analysis. So do you have invasive plants somewhere? Do you have a slope where there's a lot of ponding at the bottom? You have a big puddle that maybe that would be a good spot for a rain garden? Draw it out. You might not know the exact size yet, but just draw bubbles, like general areas of where these things are that are either concerns or opportunities. So what are your needs? What are you trying to accomplish here? What's your time span for what you're trying to accomplish? What can you reasonably expect to get done? And you probably can't do it all, all at once. So you need to prioritize, identify what those things are, and prioritize what are your must haves? What do I need to do this year? I cannot stand it if I can't get this done this season. And what's negotiable? What can wait until next year or maybe two years from now? So then this is an example of, I think that's a little bit clearer than the last image, but what that might look like conceptually, right? Just with a thick marker or anything, just mark up loosely. Here's why I want my patio. Here's where I want a pollinator garden or a rain garden and do it more than once because as you're thinking, processing, getting your thoughts on paper, doing it more than once, you might come up with a different solution the more you think about it. So the first, your first initial thought, your first pass might not be your final idea. So spend some time thinking about it and drawing it out more than once and you might get different solutions. And basically coming up with your design is just combining those solutions, looking at them, comparing them, which one, what are the best solutions from each one that I can combine on one sheet of paper into one design? What are the best elements? What are the best ideas that I have and how can I make them all work together? So it might look something like this, where you start laying out specific shapes for trees or shrubs to size. You know, when you come up with your final design, you know, when you're just doing it conceptually, just some blobs are fine, but you want to eventually have something that is to scale. So these plant symbols that you see here, they're the right scale. So we know how much to buy, how big our space is. So it's important when you get to the final stage that you are confident in that you've scaled things, at least somewhat accurately. So here's an example of some designs that we came up with for our first workshop. I don't know if any of you were here for that our first workshop in stonem. We did a design workshop where we had an activity at the end and everybody worked together at tables to come up with a design for Ken Pruitt's house. And I mean, I think it was difficult for people to, you know, initially start to transfer their thoughts onto paper, especially it's scary to be the one person holding the pen, you know, at your table of five or six people, everyone's watching you draw, but they did great. And they came up with some great ideas, you can see here. You know, this is just a loose layout, but this could very well become a developed design with just a little bit more time and effort. So some elements of sustainable landscape, some practices that we want to impress on you, conserving water and energy, getting rid of invasive species, using natives as much as possible, reducing fossil fuels. So using electric equipment rather than gas powered, decreasing erosion and stormwater runoff. We want to capture water, not just let it all run off into the street and into nearby water bodies. We can use the water that collects on our site for plants or for storing in a rain barrel or something. We want to support pollinators and we want to use pesticides as little as possible. So native plants, what are they? They're naturally occurring in our region. They thrive because they've been living here forever, they're well adapted. And they what's important about native plants is that they provide ecological services for pollinators. And this is important because invasive plants do not do so nearly to the same extent. They don't pollinators don't need invasive plants to survive. They need native plants. They're dependent on them. So Keystone plants is a basically subset of native plants where these plants are identified as the most important, the most ecologically important native plants to pollinators. So this list is abbreviated, you have a longer, the full list as a handout. But this is just a screenshot from the handout that you have. You can see like white oak supports 436 pollinator species. I mean, that's crazy, right? Pines, crab apples. So just it's just something to keep in mind when you're looking for plants to use start here, because these are the most valuable plants for the ecosystem that you can use. Some more practices. For collecting stormwater runoff, rain barrels. We'll show you later Ken has one installed in his yard. So you can connect them to downspouts collect stormwater runoff and you can use usually there's like a spigot on a rain barrel that you can use to water plants. Really great way to conserve water. Rain gardens do something similar. They capture rain water by being kind of like a bowl. They're shaped a little bit like a bowl so that water runs into them. And then you use a rain garden with native pollinator plants like usually perennials and shrubs collects runoff and also provides ecological services for pollinators. Cues to care. This is my favorite side of design. So we're going to be talking about things that are typically perceived as a little bit messy like lawn alternatives, pollinator gardens, those types of things, not the traditional green turf grass lawn. So just to keep in mind as we go along cues to care are clean edges that define those messier areas. So just you know, don't be too intimidated or too afraid to keep up appearances with lawn because you can use a strip of lawn or a strip of stone to provide a cue to care that says, Hey, this is actually how it's supposed to look. And I actually am maintaining my yard even though some of it looks a little bit messy. So I'm going to hand it back over to Leslie for the construction review a little bit to add on where resources are for creating your own existing conditions plan. You can go to your town website. They have a GIS system where you can get your property boundaries and where your house is located, where the right of way line is out in front. So there's a lot of good information that you can just pull directly from the town website. We repeat this over and over because it's true. It's like, you can either get help or do it all yourself. And a lot of times it's a combination of the two. So if you're trying to construct something something and it's it's requires heavy equipment or a backhoe or something, absolutely just go ahead and hire a contractor to help you out. Our backs are very valuable. So we don't want to mess them up, right? And then, you know, of course, if you don't feel comfortable creating your own existing conditions plan or your own sustainable landscape design, you can hire company like like bowler, landscape architects, landscape designers, most nurseries have landscape designers on staff. You know, if it's not a real big job, you just want to a pollinator garden and you want some help with that, then you can work collaboratively with a landscape designer. This is just an outline of what we're going to go over in pretty quick order. Just these are the things that you have to keep in mind when you're doing a construction project. So the first one, you've got your design, and you've prioritized the design based on your available budget. So kind of, you know, in the winter, you say, okay, I really want to get this part of my yard. It's all invasive species. I want to rip it up and you start planning in the winter so that if you do need a contractor, you get on their list quickly and be kind of first in the spring, because we all know spring's about the best time to do any sort of planting. So you have a budget. You kind of prioritize based on your design and try and start early. If you're planning on doing the work yourself, you want to make sure that you have a decent list. And it's based on your budget. So if you're doing, you want to make sure you have the right tools on hand. And we have sort of a slide that shows what tools are needed for construction of a sustainable landscape. You want a list of plant materials that you're going to need. And determine if there is, like I said, heavy equipment that's necessary. Your neighbors are very good resources. A lot of times if you're seeing they're doing work in their yard, and you like the outcome, then certainly pick their brain on who they used. And then you want to make sure that you are able to get whatever equipment into the yard. So you kind of have to plan ahead. Say your yard is surrounded by fence, you may need to take a fence section out to allow the equipment to come in. So a lot of planning involved in a construction project. This is a number one very important. You always want to know what's underground because the last thing you want to do is start digging and then hit your sewer line or your electric line. Dig safe is free, and it's the law. So if you know that you're going to be digging in your yard, you make sure you call 8-8-1-1 and get them to come out and mark where the utilities are coming from the street. Another resource that Lindsay had mentioned is MassMapper. So you can find out more information about your property. They even have topography, and it's pretty decent. We use it quite often on conceptual designs and so forth. So this is the fun part when you start to implement and lay out where your garden is going to go. There's several options. I personally in my own yard use a hose to lay out my garden bed. And it's easy because you can just kind of move it around until it's got the right configuration based on your design. And it allows you to make adjustments in the field real time. Wood stakes, spray chalk is a very organic and user-friendly way to lay out a landscape rope. You can just edge it with a straight edge of some sort. When you start to implement your design, look at what is kind of in the way of what you want to do and decide whether it's worth saving or not. And if it is, then figure out where you're going to put it, dig the hole ahead of time, then dig the plant up so that it's seamless and the plant won't even know it's been moved if you do it properly. So I'm just going to go, I mean, you can read all this, but transplanting, it can be, if it's a larger plant, say you have a beautiful ornamental tree and it's still young enough that you can move it. Sometimes you can start earlier by just root pruning around the base of the tree. So say the tree is right here and you just take a shovel and just kind of start digging around the base of the tree, maybe two or three feet out from the trunk and start getting it used to the roots being cut and then leave it alone and then come back in the spring, do that again. By the time you're ready to move the tree, a lot of the shock will be alleviated by doing the root pruning earlier. Hopefully the soil in your yard is the original soil and it should be in pretty good shape. If it's a new construction, a lot of time contractors will bring soil in that isn't nearly as good as what's been there forever. A good thing to do before you start planting is to know the quality of your soil that you have at hand. And this is a great resource. UMass Extension Service, I think it costs like $20. You take a baggie full of soil from various parts of your yard and then you can go online and download this form and send along with your sample and they'll come back with a very detailed analysis of the nutrient level of your soil, the sieve analysis, which means the composition of rock and silt and clay and all of the different materials that make up a soil and then tell you whether you need to add organics to allow nutrients to be taken up by plants. Erosion control is very important. As Lindsay had mentioned, you want to make sure that runoff doesn't go into surrounding water bodies or even out into the street. So when you start a construction project, you want to make sure that you've got some sort of a barrier, whether it's a lot of times you'll see road construction and in preparation of the road construction, they've got these little, they're called little socks basically and they fill it with mulch and that helps to kind of filter any of the dirty water and the silt will fall out of the water as it moves through the silt sock. All sorts of different ways to retain soil. Retaining walls, of course, they've tried and true. That can be just rocks you find in your yard. There are some great products out there, precast concrete, retaining walls, they're very good looking these days. You can just do riprap, which is basically just taking rocks and placing them to retain the soil. And then the rain gardens, we'll keep talking about that because it's a really nice option. Say you have a little low spot and it always is damp and moist and you just hate mowing it and it's just a nuisance. So rain garden is the perfect option for a condition like that. And then the fun part, you get to go shopping who doesn't like that. So you want to try and see what's around, you know, try and support your local nurseries, garden shops. I try to avoid big box retailers, even though they're clients, but me personally. You know, I love Mahoney's Garden Center is wonderful. Russell's Garden Center is great. So, you know, try to support them as much as you can. I think one of the most fun things to do in your yard is to try to figure out how to reuse something that you already have. And it's, you know, just repurpose it. And the name for that is Free Cycled. So it's free if you're, if you see that someone's moving and they're having a yard sale, see if there's anything there that maybe you could use in your yard as as part of your your own sustainable landscape. Again, you know, this Free Cycle concept is really taking off. We want to remove things from the waste stream as much as possible. You know, there's, there's fewer and fewer ways to get rid of our old stuff. So look for creative ways to, to take what you already have and repurpose it or give it to your neighbor who's doing a project. Put it out in the, you know, front yard and say free. So things like the rocks are free. Plant swaps every, every spring communities have plant sales or plant swaps your local garden club is a good resource for that. And then my favorite mulch is just leaving leaves where they are or I have a kind of a rhododendron border in the back of my yard. And my husband loves to take his leaf blower and blow every leaf off the lawn into that shrub border. And I used to rake it all out. Why am I doing that? She just leave it there. And the rhododendrons have never been happier. It's been probably 10 years and they're just just growing like crazy and very happy. So save yourself the work and just leave the leave the leaves where they are or in a spot that's going to benefit plants that you already have in your yard. Some of these pictures urbanite. I love that as well. You know, people are always tearing up concrete. Well, that's a great resource. If you want to do some sort of a little paved area, you can just use it as a paver or create raised planter beds. So all sorts of uses for stuff that people just end up throwing out. Another thing that you really have to keep in mind is just arranging for the delivery. So if you're getting mulch, mulch is a great resource that helps retain water. I know that people think it's probably, you know, not as sustainable, but it really is. It helps add nutrients back into your, your soil. You don't have to mulch every year. Every other year, every two years. The last thing you want to do is have mulch building up, you know, up the past the root flare of any of the plants that you have, particularly trees. So as far as, you know, getting mulch delivered, you want to make sure you have a tarp somewhere where you can store the mulch and have it not get in the way of you circulating around your property or accessing it for whatever improvement you're going to be doing. Tree installation. How many have ever planted a tree? Yay, that's great. It's so fun and satisfying, isn't it? It's a lot of work. And this diagram here is, is excellent. You want to make sure that you don't plant your tree too, too low. You want to make sure that the tree, when it's done and settled, is at the slightly higher than the surrounding existing grade. The worst thing that can happen for a tree is for it to settle and have materials building up and building up. It allows moles and voles to go in and start eating the bark. It kind of strangles them. It doesn't allow air and water to get down to the root system. So much better to be slightly high. Don't do any of those like volcano mulch things that you see landscapers do in office parks. Very bad practice. The best time to plant is spring, in my mind, because it's, it's cooler, especially this year has been a great year for planting. It's been nice and cool. And then, again, in the fall, there's all sorts of ways to get trees. You can either get them bald and burlap, which is, which is the typical, you can get them containerized. It's the middle image, or you can get them bare root. And bare root is a very economical way to get a tree. If you have the time and patience to allow it to, to grow, then I would recommend bare root. It's a, it's, it's better for the tree. And the, the soil that you have already, it will get acclimated to much sooner than trying to break through the probably heavy clay root ball of a tree that may have been grown in South Carolina. Right? Another thing, look for local nurseries as well. Because it'll be more adapted to the soil conditions that you probably have in your own yard. So I won't go through this in detail. All of this information is going to be included in the guidebook. So I see people taking notes, which is great. But it will be available in the final product that will be on everyone on the town's website. So you can start looking for that sometime around December, January. Okay. Yes. Yeah, David said that we could put this, this presentation on our, on the websites. Yep. Watering. Definitely. I mean, that goes without saying you have to water a new tree. The kind of rule of thumb that I've learned is that for every caliper inch, so let me explain what caliper inch means. You see a tree trunk, like say it's, it's this big. The diameter measured from one side to the other is the caliper. And there's some debate about where you measure that. Nurseries love to measure it about six inches above the root ball because it's a fatter section. I would I was taught it was DBH, which is diameter at breast height. So but more than likely, what you will get sold will be a caliper that's closer to the ball. Yeah. So for every caliper inch of tree, it takes about the equivalent number of years for that tree to get established in your yard. So you really do have to baby it. If you get a three inch caliper tree, which is probably, you know, about that big, it'll take about three years for it to kind of feel like it's, it's home. And watering's a very important part of that. Go back to rain gardens. They're pretty easy. If even if you don't have a low spot in your yard, maybe there's a little bit of a slope, you can help retain it with a soil berm that kind of outlines the lower half of your rain garden. So all you need to do is dig out whatever material whether it's invasive species or lawn, then take some of that soil and just make a berm around the lower edge. And there you have it. That's it's as simple as that. So we are going to ask our own David Pruitt to come up and kind of walk you through. Yeah, sure. So you don't want to be watering the leaves on the tree. You want to make sure that you direct the stream of water so that it gets down to the root root system. Good question though. Thank you. I'm Ken Pruitt, the sustainability director for the town of Winchester and happy to talk about this crazy project that we're doing at our house. Just happens to be coinciding with this workshop series. But just give me one second. I'm going to see if I can adjust the screen because it's a little irritating here. Well, it's not going to be perfect, but we'll we'll figure it out. So we so my wife and I live in Winchester. We have about a half acre property. You're seeing the front, the front yard there. That berm you see with the trees and shrubs was put in a few years ago by a contractor that was doing some local mitigation for a huge subdivision they put in across the street from us. So that that was pre existing, not part of this project. But you can't really see it. But this lawn, it wraps around and it's so fairly extensive. So our and you can see it. It's basically that that's the this whole area and this whole area is lawn. Our goals for this project were we wanted to kill our lawn. Both because it's sort of boring, but also for to promote to provide better pollinator and wildlife habitat. We don't really water but also less maintenance for mowing that extensive area. We wanted to put in a pathway, a stone pathway from from the street to the front because anytime anyone came to our house, even to deliver a package, they would walk up the driveway and walk this way and it seemed a little ridiculous. We this almost the entire roof. You can see the roof is mostly on in one stretch here, all down to here down a gutter downspout to this spot. Plus most of this vegetable garden also drains down to this point. So a lot of water comes to this part of the property and then it would just sort of a road across the front lawn. So we wanted to put in a rain garden that would infiltrate a lot of that stormwater here. And we also wanted to the other goals were just to beautify the front of the property. And we wanted to put in a bunch of fruit trees to generate fruit. So that's those are sort of our main goals. We knew we wanted to do this for a few years. We've been planning to do it. We knew doing it all at once would be expensive. So we budgeted about $5,000 for this project. We didn't think that we didn't feel confident with a property that's, you know, an area that's about 35 feet by 70 feet that we could creatively come up with our own plan. So we did also decide to hire a landscape architect. So here you see some of the prep work. Again, if we had had a smaller area, I could have just taken out a hoe or a pickaxe to remove the lawn, even though it's backbreaking brutal, brutal work even for an area that size with a 35 by 70 foot area. No way. So we hired a company to come in a landscaping company with this machine called a sod cutter. It's it's an amazing almost magical machine. These guys just pushed it along. And then you can roll up the grass like a carpet. They also took it away. We're talking pretty large, very heavy quantity of of grass with soil in this entire green area that they that they removed, which was which was incredibly helpful. And they replaced it with four inches of a 50 50 soil compost mix to in preparation for planting, which came next. Oh yeah, so you can see this is after the lawn was removed. This is the 50 50 soil compost mix being spread. That's it being dumped. And then they you know, they sort of use this little bobcat to bring it around. So this is what it looked like after the grass was removed and the 50 50 mix was spread. We also had them excavate our rain garden. We knew we wanted it to be it's a lot of water that comes to this point. So we knew it couldn't just be the six to eight inches that Leslie was talking about. But we wanted, you know, essentially a stormwater detention basin practically. We repurposed stones that we had dug up previously and other projects for the bottom of it. And then we also had these blue stones from leftover from another project we did that we decided to use to create our front, our front walkway from here to here, you'll see a picture of that in a moment. Yep, there we go. So we speaking of pickaxe, I pickaxed out this trench about three and a half to four inches deep. We had a bunch of crushed stone delivered from Martin Yeti's in Wuburn dumped that spread it out. And then put I had my daughter lay out the pattern ahead of time. She's an engineer. So she loves this kind of thing. So she pre laid out an attractive looking layout. Once all the gravel is in, I then moved them all in and we ended up with this walkway to the to the front door. You can start to see stakes that were laid out by our landscape architect to delineate certain things. And so the key things are, we left 10 feet of lawn in the front as a cue to care, as Leslie was talking about. Can't quite see it here. But there's a there's a additional area that we're going to we've receded to be a grass cue to care on the edge about four feet wide right up adjacent to the driveway. But we wanted a little bit more than that. So we there's a pathway here. That's going to be mode, mode grass, and then a curved pathway through here that's also going to be mode grass. And then of course, the stone walkway. This is the rain garden. We also created we have blue, we're going to put blue stones in here to go from the mode walkway to a a piece stone round seating area where we have Adirondack chairs. A lot of neighbors, we know a lot of our neighbors and they walk by and they come and say hi and they want to hang out a little bit and chat. Now we have a place to actually sit down and talk to them. These are these three plus these three are actually fruit trees, apple pear and peach that we're putting in the front. They're about two inch caliper size trees. And then the rest is going to be a mix of shrubs and flowers and grasses for the most part. These are these are mostly these are mostly shrubs that are that we're putting in. And this is a mixture of shrubs and other plants that were that we're putting in including right right in the rain garden. So we're we sort of laid stone took out certain stones and actually put plants so that the rain garden will have a mixture of plants and stone which we think will be quite attractive. So there is that's my wife planting one of the plants right there. This is what it looked like. Well, first of all, you can see the our landscape architect spray painted set, not you know, biodegradable spray paint. The path and had first measured out the location of the stakes. So you know, you start with a you start with a site plan and then it's to scale. And then you can you know, stake out. You know, you can use a hose as Leslie was saying, you can different ways you can sort of lay lay out what you want. We then had our landscape architect ordered all the plants. They all came and were delivered on one day and he actually placed them all throughout the yard in their ultimate destinations. And then one at a time we would move move the plant out of the way, dig the hole, put the plant back and and then later on we put leaf mulch. I think there'll be a picture would ordered eight yards of leaf mulch as well that we spread over the entire area, except for the walkways so that they wouldn't inhibit the the grass growth for our mode, mode pathways. Let's see anything else on this slide. I think that's it. Yep, so now you can see them, you can see everything planted. They're out of their black containers. They're all in the ground. We're talking about roughly 175 plants that we planted. We have relearned that New England soil is feels like it's mostly rock with a little bit of soil mixed in between working as fast as I could. I could do is about 10 to 15 minutes per plant. For the ones that I planted, somehow my wife went faster. I don't understand how that I think I'm too much of a perfectionist. But that adds up to a lot. So this is hours and hours and hours and hours of digging and planting. And now we're and now we're now we're watering initially every day. And then after the first week, we're going to it'll be every other day. And then we'll slowly spread it out. Let's see. Oh, yep. So then you can see the rain garden basically fully installed. Can't see you can't really make out the depth there. But it's it's it's fairly steep. We've had to learn to be careful walking into that rain garden. It's do a little bit of a tap dance and try not to fall down. It's pretty uneven. You can see the the sitting area. This is a little fern garden that we've put back here with cinnamon fern and Christmas fern. That's our that's our rain barrel. I will say you see an electrical cord coming out of here. We actually put a submersible pump in here. Because yes, water will come out of this bigot into a hose, but under almost no pressure. And it's very hard to water things in my experience that way. So we plug in the pump and water comes out at much higher pressure. We can actually use this hose to spray with almost as much pressure as city water. So that's a little little tip that we find very helpful. And let's see. These areas are highlighted. What Why did you guys highlight these areas? What was the point you wanted me to make there? Oh, these correspond right. So this this little circle is right here. This rain garden is right here. The rain barrel is actually the rain barrel is right here right at where the downspout comes down. And then and so we have a there's a little diverter on the downspout and you flip it open when you want to fill the barrel. And once the barrel is filled, you can flip it back up. And then and then the rain just goes out this downspout and right to here. So we we that's how we do it. There's also a little escape hole here so that if it's pouring rain in this fields, the excess just pours out that out that hole or over the top. And you can see all the rock to keep erosion from happening. Where all this water pours down. Let's see any other comments. So yeah, so I will say a few lessons learned. One, if we could redo this, we would have done certain things one year and the rest the other year. Like we've been this has been much more time consuming than we expected. It's great. We're getting stronger and have spending a lot of time outside and breathing the fresh air and listening to the birds. That's all great but awful lot of time doing all this work. So I probably would have done if we could redo this probably would have done the rain garden. And maybe this sitting area and the walkway one year and then maybe half the front yard, the next year and the other half either in the different season that same year or the next year. Also, we went for a wide variety of plants, including fairly large trees. Our planting cost alone was about $3,500. So pretty substantial, probably another 1500 for the landscape architect. And then still more for the crew removing the lawn, bringing in the soil mixture, the leaf mulch that we've spread. It's going to be an almost $10,000 project now that we're done. And we did save up over a period and prepare for this. But we thought it would only be $5,000 is ending up twice our budget. It is really going to be beautiful. And we're going to love it, but a lot of work, a lot of money. And we could have, in retrospect, maybe we could have done an area this size one year and then trying to do this entire 35 by 70 foot area all at once in one spring is a lot of time and effort and a lot of money all in one shot. And I think we could have been a little less ambitious about just having... Right. So just a few words to the wise. We could have cut, I think, the cost of this project in half if we, for example, had done smaller sections. We could have removed the lawn by ourselves. There's a lot of things we could have done ourselves. And we could have been a little less crazy about having such a variety of plants. They're all native or native cultivars. That part I wouldn't have skimped on. But it's a lot to do it once. But we're delighted with the outcome so far. And within a year or two, and this is all, all these spaces, people keep, they walk by and they're sort of, the neighbors are just completely baffled. Everyone stops with their mouth open. And they sort of ask questions like, well, are you going to put lawn between the plants? I mean, what do you just like, like, no, there's going to be no lawn. So all these plants are going to grow together. And it's going to be a multi level, native, pollinator friendly, you know, tree shrub, herbaceous, natural, fairly natural area. And people just can't understand it. We're the only person in our neighborhood in this almost anywhere in town that I've seen doing anything like this. But it's it's intriguing to people. And they I think it's showing them that there's another way. It's going to some of our other neighbors, I think are going to be a little braver to try something out of the ordinary. And hopefully they'll they'll do it in a way that's ecologically friendly. Do you want me to cover anything else? Oh, yeah, and then questions, I'm happy to answer questions. Yes, Charlotte. Oh, yes, we we there's a little black, you can't see it here, but there's we bought black edging plastic edging landscape edging. And so we first, you know, dug six inches down. Then we put the edging in with with stakes to keep it in place and then pour and then put landscape fabric fabric down to make sure nothing grew up from that through that in the future, and then put down the piece down. But it is still, you know, some of it's going to get kicked out sometimes. And because I'm me, I'll get down my hands and knees and put put on put it all back. Yeah, hopefully once once the all of this area is all vegetation except for the little blue stone walkway, then yeah, hopefully everything will be locked in place pretty much. I saw one other hand. Yeah. Oh, yep. Sunny, you should mention that. We've had selective predation of our some of our plants from the pesky rabbits. They a lot of them hide in these lilies and irises. Oh, which we're going to that's one place we economize, we're going to transplant these lilies and irises mostly in this area here. So that's saving us a little on on plants for that area. But yes, we have quite a few rabbits. They're sort of picking out random plant. We've lost about six of our 175 plants so far. They're very cute. But when I see them out there, eating our plants, I want to get a BB gun. But I have not done that yet. It's an issue. And you know, we haven't put tried to put down any smelly substance or or anything like that, or cages to try to keep them away yet. But if they if it gets serious, then we'd have to do something like that. And then run the back here. That was my same question. Oh, yeah, it's it's an issue. There's no question. And all the way in the back. Yeah. Yep. In fact, the grass that we're planting in the the walkway, the pathways is going to be mostly white clover with some tall fax pesky mixed in. So hopefully the rabbits will can satiate themselves on the clover. Yeah. Yep, that makes sense. Yes, go ahead. Yeah. So the question was why, you know, if you want to reduce mowing and planting all these native plants, why keep why have any grass to mow? And it actually came up to our landscape architect asked the same question we he knew we had planned to have, you know, a mode path here. And he said, you know, you could just put down wood chips. And you know, it'll be a pathway and you won't need to mow it. And it came down to just, you know, personal aesthetics, my wife and I talked about her, she was kind of like, I don't really care one way or the other. And I thought about it for a while. And I remembered some some, you know, places I've visited that had, you know, wild meadow style areas with a little a little mode path. And I always thought that was just really beautiful. So it was just aesthetics. I just thought it would be beautiful. I'm not delighted that I'll have extra mowing to do. But, you know, it's going to be pretty, pretty limited as one or two passes with the lawn mower on those little paths. So there's no right or wrong answer is just personal preference. I mean, the white clover is is kind of that. But I don't know. Okay, lawn alternatives. Yep. Go ahead. Yeah, I like that idea. Yeah, the question is about, you know, can you have an sort of an automatic watering system from your from your rain barrel, you know, pressure is, you know, this is a low point, you could probably even put this lower. And you'd have the water pressure. So you could you could even have drip drip irrigation coming out of that. So just, you know, even a garden hose and then poke a bunch of holes in it, or you could even better to get, you know, a specialized hose that is and then just spread that around through the garden. And yeah, you wouldn't need to do a thing. Yeah, it does. Yep, if we if we somehow were to, you know, we'd have to like build a shelf up here or something and lift it up for one thing. This thing is tremendously heavy when it's full of water. And, you know, so it's it's hard to, you know, you see places where the drinking water barrels are on the roof of buildings, the same idea that, you know, the higher you get at the, the more pressure, but it's just kind of logistically difficult. And, you know, a lot of crap comes off the roof onto this thing, I have to, there's a there's a screen underneath this cap. And I need to shake out the screen fairly often, because it's, you know, leaves and I mean, small, small leaves, pine needles and little little stone dust from the asphalt shingles comes down the downspout and starts to clog things up. That's the other thing I'd worry be worried a little bit about with like drip irrigation is that, you know, some of that stuff would make it and then start clogging up the drip irrigation. I'm not sure. Anything else? Yeah, go ahead. Oh, thank you. I meant to cover that. Thank you. So yeah, so this again, you know, this is a big, this is a big area. And, you know, initially, we watered all 175 plants by hand, we're just standing there with the hose. Plan number one, plan number two. And it was very time consuming, but it was, it was kind of satisfying, you know, after all that work is like, you know, just this, you know, for whatever reason, it was weirdly satisfying. And now the satisfaction is worn off. And so we have one of those big oscillating sprinklers now that we've hooked up. And we put it on for about an hour. Once a day at this point, and it, it, we put it right here. And it covers this, this zone. And then this zone, we're doing by hand still. Because it's there's not an ideal place to move the sprinkler for that second zone, we don't want to waste a bunch of water. So that's sped up our process by more than half. Just by using that sprinkler. And I know not everyone's just this concern about watering the leaves and then could create fungus or something. And I'm just not worrying about that. We're just, I think it's fine. And if that's it, I'll pass it back to our main presenters. I'm going to do an interjection in our little interlude here. So on the opposite side of Ken's very planned very, very well designed improvements at his home. I'm a renter. I live in the heights in a three family building. I've got probably, I don't know, let's say 300 square feet in my backyard. And I've done what I can do too. So if you're looking to start very, very small, and you're willing to take a bit of chance, then I can offer a bit of guidance in that regard. I went with seed because buying plants was far more expensive and I was able to procure first a wildflower mix and then I went with some straight native species that I got from I think American Meadows and then maybe a couple of other sources. And this ran me maybe 50 bucks all told. So I just ripped out some grass, ripped out the invasives, spread the seed and let it go. And so far so good. We've been subject to a lot of rabbit and squirrel intervention, but we, you know, if your garden's not feeding something, it's not part of the ecosystem. So we're happy to just let it go. And the things that they're not eating have come in and done very well. So if you look to do something very, very small and just have a have less space to work with, then you could go that route and do a very minor intervention that might flourish. Another separate interjection here. If you're enjoying spending time in this room, you might want to come back this evening because we're having the MBTA communities conversation in this room. I believe it's seven tonight. I'll double check while I'm talking. But this is the present 730. This is the presentation of the multifamily district and we'll have a lot of feedback. Of course, there's been input along the way. And this is the MBTA communities working group sharing the results of that feedback and displaying a map of where there's a proposed district or districts for the MBTA communities project. So there are many environmental issues to discuss in that forum. Stormwater ecological integrity and habitat preservation tree canopy, etc. I mean, there are many things we want to touch on. So I hope that you'll be able to join that conversation and contribute to it. I think there's a lot of opportunity there to enhance the kinds of things that we're discussing today in larger developments or just multifamily developments that are still on, you know, small scale. So, please do attend. It'd be great to see you there. I'll hand it back over to the crew. Sorry, go ahead. I have a quick question about getting ready for us. Oh, sure. Is there anything like there's something you're letting us burn in the sun just to get ready for us? I went with just my hands because I have a small space and it worked fine. It was already not in great shape. I neglected to mention that our landlord leaves the landscaping to tenants, which is a way of passing the buck, but he got really lucky finding me because I was like, let's do it. And it obviously was not well maintained to start. So I just, you know, took out what was mostly dead, mostly invasives and replaced it. But I'm sure maybe when we talk about long alternatives, we can talk about replacement strategies. Just touch on it. Thank you, David and Ken. That was a great case study, big and small. So I think it was well worth the break in the presentation. We're going to move on to sustainable landscape maintenance. Again, who's going to do the work? There are a lot of landscape contractors out there that are trained in sustainable maintenance practices. So, you know, do some research and try and find them. They're out there. So maintenance, you know, start planning in the winter, as usual, with anything. If you want a contractor to assist with any of the work, you want to get them on board early so that you're first on the list. So there's, you know, sort of a regular list of things to be done throughout the year. And we're structuring the presentation based on the seasons. Starting in the spring, we have this list of things that can be accomplished, summer, and then fall. All right. So spring, integrated pest management is sort of a buzzword, but it's a great method where you basically treat the issue rather than, you know, wholesale spray for bugs. If you have a problem, deal with it and try to deal with it in a more sustainable approach. So first off, you need to figure out, you know, what is the species that you're trying to deal with? Is it a bug or a plant? There are lots of websites that you can go to help identify what the plant or insect, lots of apps out there. I just found a great one. It's called Merlin. I just hold it up and it listens to birdsong and it tells me all the birds that I'm listening to. It's fantastic. So there's lots of apps that can help identify whatever it is you want to figure out. You know, IPM, integrated pest management means knowing the species you are attempting to control and tarting that species. You don't want to treat for ants and kill the bees. You know, that's the whole philosophy. Planting early, using resistant plants, reducing plant stress. You want to monitor, kind of go see how everything's doing. One of my favorite parts of the year is the spring because I go around and see who's made it. You know, yeah. How you doing? Go good, you're okay. And then, you know, turn a leaf over and see if there are any aphids or what have you that may have taken up residence. And then if you want to intervene, then try to do it in a biological way. There are bug species that you can bring in. What's a good one? Ladybugs for sure, yep. And so you can get a list online of some of the beneficial species that can help deal with pests. Sometimes it's just they're overrun and you really do have to intervene with some sort of natural solution. Or you can go and just if you have grubs, there's milky spore, which is a very effective treatment. It's a little persnickety to use, but basically you take milky spore and in a grid of every foot or two, you put a tablespoon on the ground and you do that all through your yard and it'll last for up to 25 years. And it's just a biological control that's fairly inexpensive and really does work for grubs, which can be a real pest. So, you know, have a yard where birds want to live and they'll help take care of pests better than anything. So bird feeders, this is a great list of beneficial insects. Again, you can see this whole presentation online if you're interested. All sorts of spices. I had a problem with moles, so the plants I planted, I added a tablespoon of cayenne pepper to the soil. And it seems to have worked because the plants made it without getting the roots eaten off. Plants can be a natural deterrent, something that has some fragrance. Mint, lavender, basil, lemongrass, which was news to me. I love growing it. It's beautiful, almost ornamental plant, and then you get to use it in different recipes once it gets big enough. Natural solutions. So boric acid is one. You can take your dish soap, mix it with water, and put it in a spray bottle, and that will help as well. It depends on what the bug is, but that's been effective, sometimes very easy available. Vinegar, same thing. Lots of natural solutions. There are some invasive worms that don't like diatomaceous earth. That's a mouthful, but if you end up getting that invasive worm, that can help eradicate it. The best way to do it is pick the bugs off if you see them and put them in a cup, like say you have slugs, a cup of beer. It's really kind of gross, but it works. And you know, mulch we talked about earlier. You can do a thick layer of mulch and it will help keep the weeds down. I think someone asked about getting rid of some lawn. One way you can do it is to almost pasteurize the lawn. You put black plastic down. It'll super heat the lawn, kill the roots, and makes it easier to dig up over time. That also can work for insect control, that if you have something in your soil, a lot of times people will leave tulips to kind of naturally just die back, but that can also introduce a fungus into the soil. So if you're trying to naturally eradicate the fungus, you can also try that solar method. Going out and picking weeds, picking off bugs, works as well. You see the deer fence there. So I have a garden and I put a four foot fence up thinking that would keep them out not high enough. So that's, you have to be strategic. Deer, if you do have a problem, I'm out in the country so I do have a fairly large deer population. They are creatures of habit and I think maybe rabbits are as well. If they can get a meal, they'll keep going back to the same spot. So I recently, last year I lost my entire hosta garden. It got mowed down. They all came back, but not as strong. So I took a deer fencing and just laid it over the top of it and you really don't see it. It's a very light black mesh and so far it's working. Again, I encourage people if you have your own solutions that have worked for you, raise your hand and speak up. I know we have some experts in the in the audience so feel free to offer up some solutions that you've had. One of the biggest problems that Massachusetts is facing is invasive plants. I think you also, as a handout, we gave the invasive species list last time. Okay. It will be included in all of the presentations, the previous presentation, but it will be included in the guidebook. So it's a list of invasive species. You can go online, see what they look like. I know Oriental bittersweet is a very common one. Japanese knotweed, really hard to get rid of. You know, with Japanese knotweed, you almost have to get a backhoe to take the stuff out. It's tenacious. And then you have to like monitor it. If there's even a little root left in soil, it'll continue to grow and come back. So monitoring is very important. I think we mentioned earlier there's lots of great apps. Picture this is a great one and plant net is another one. So you can, if you're taking a walk in the woods and you want to know what the plant is, you know, you want to assume it's a native and you can just take a picture of it and picture this will tell you what it is. Yes ma'am. I did not know that. Thank you. It's awesome. So is that just the latest version or has it been in? Oh wow. Okay. I'll have to look. Thank you. You know, we don't want to use chemicals but sometimes it's necessary. So the first option would be just to try and like take a shovel and dig it out and you know burn it or put it in a bag and put it in the trash and off it goes. You can cut cut back anything that's looks like it's getting out of control if it's an invasive plant. Sometimes if you cut it enough it'll just die which is ideal. If you do need herbicides a lot of times you can just maybe cut say it's a oriental bittersweet. I've seen the roots that not roots but the vine going up and they get very thick. You cut a section out of it and paint it with an herbicide and then the herbicide doesn't rather than spraying for it it will get down into the root system and kill it in the root system. So that's a very effective way. Poison ivy, same thing. It's not an invasive but you know a lot of people are allergic to it and don't want it in their yard so that's an effective means of reducing it. This last point is a really good one. Once you remove the invasive species you really should plant something in its place so it doesn't get reestablished and that plant should be a native. I know we talk a lot about planting natives or native cultivars or adapted plants. You know there are so many beautiful plants that we all love and cherish that are not native. We're not suggesting that you can't plant those but maybe you know the percentage could be higher you know 70 percent natives and maybe 30 percent are beloved flowering plants from another country so we're not we're not trying to to shame people that have beautiful flowering plants that aren't native. Weeding and pruning, I had meant to bring a twig to show people how to do proper pruning and I forgot I apologize but with the springtime a lot of people are talking about no mow may and I thought that was intriguing and the reason for that is that are there are a lot of butterflies and moths that are still in their cocoons and they're like snuggled into the leaf matter that is in your yard or on your trees and shrubs and you want to give them a chance to come out and if you clean up too early in the season sometimes you just you disturb them and they they don't have a chance so I tend to wait until you know mid to late May before I start doing my my spring cleanup. With pruning you want to you know maintain the shape and the size there's different techniques and tools that you can use for pruning and we'll have a kind of a a list of those coming up. Deadheading it just helps the plant look better and helps the plant fill out more. I think the best way to get rid of weeds is to go and just pull them out as you're walking around with your morning coffee or your glass of wine in the afternoon and just keep a little bucket somewhere and just when it's full then you go dump it. Dump it in your compost pile. It's compost is about the cheapest form of form of fertilizer that you can get. This one is steaming. I didn't know about this one either David you were he had mentioned he hadn't known that but during during our research there are tools out there that can help remove weeds and kill them one of which is a steaming tool and lots of different tools have been developed that help remove weeds from cracks and and between patio pavers and that sort of thing. Vinegar also works just a little smelly. Edible weeds I think you know mint is a favorite a lot of people eat the dandelion leaves so not all weeds are bad and then composting just all sorts of options you know take your kitchen waste put in a little bin underneath your your sink and then bring it out to the compost bin when it's full and it's the best nutrients that you can get for your garden. After it decomposes you spread it in the lawn you can spread it in your vegetable garden and in your perennials and so forth so composting is is probably the most sustainable thing that you can do you're taking that material from your kitchen out of the waste stream and helping your neighbors and in town deal with an overload of stuff in their dump and again you know top dressing your lawn with compost very good practice helps put nutrients back into the soil and then this is a handy little tool that Lindsay came up with for calculating how much mulch you really need so it's sort of a depth by square foot area and then all sorts of different mulch as well it doesn't have to be the typical bark mulch that we see everywhere. Pine needle straw I have lots of pine needles in my yard that's what I used on my perennials last year. This year I you know they decompose a little bit and this year I used natural bark mulch so leaf mulch again just leave it in a shrub border and it'll decompose add nutrients back into the soil. Ground cover is another one all sorts of really nice ground covers that are aesthetically pleasing and also keep weeds down. Grass clippings that works as well it's not my favorite because you have to mow and collect them and rake it all up but all right I'm going to hand it over to Lindsay to talk about summer. So I'm going to start out talking about the typical turf grass lawn we're all familiar with and then we're going to get into some lawn alternatives that you might want to try out. So first to cover the traditional lawn you never want to mow more than a third of the length of the blade of grass and a single mowing. Mowing really far down setting your blade really low could cause some stress to the lawn and cause it to be more susceptible to damage and disease and for the same reason you want to keep make sure that your mower blades are sharp something you can do in the winter while you're waiting around for spring and summer make sure they're sharp so that you get a clean cut just for the same reason to keep your lawn healthy and keep it from being susceptible to problems. This little handy picture in the lower right corner you should try to mow in different directions each time you mow it just promotes healthier stronger grass no reason not to it might be more interesting when you're going back and for the back and forth switch the direction next time okay now i'm going to get on my soap box so kill your lawn we're all familiar i mean this is a culture right we are expected to keep up appearances by having a nice crisp green lawn with nothing in it but lawn maybe because you are all here you don't necessarily subscribe to that idea as much as the typical american my own father i i can't convert to uh lawn alternatives just yet because he's it's such a sense of pride for people right to maintain and say look at look at that it's almost a competition like who has a greener lawn whose lawn is better i know people think of it as a competition in my neighborhood um so it's a little bit of a mindset shift right like you know converting to lawn alternatives is by no means the norm um but maybe it could be and like ken said earlier you know maybe people in his neighborhood will be braver now to try different things because he's done it successfully and they'll start to see it grow in and become beautiful so you know something to consider the traditional lawn wastewater it really doesn't do much for biodiversity pollutes water bodies with all the fertilizers that we put into it to keep it alive and as green as possible it's just not super beneficial to our environment so i wanted to bring up something that the town of concord's doing um somebody told me about this in the last workshop actually that concord has three different demonstration lawns throughout town so the locations are junction park west concord and then cchs oh and and the main library i'm sorry so three different places where they have three different lawn alternatives one of them is pennsylvania sedge then they have rupture wort slash green carpet in another area and then micro clover for the other location so i took these pictures right off their website so you can go check it out if you want um on concord's website they have more information about all of this but you know maybe you could go swing by next time you're in the area scope it out see which one speaks to you if any at all and so i'm going to go through some examples of um alternatives to the traditional lawn this is not an exhaustive list you can get creative and i encourage you to do research because there are a lot of alternatives out there and there a lot of them are kind of different from each other so you know you might need to do some research to find out which one is best suited for your needs white clover we're going to start there um i think someone in the back mentioned um that they have white clover and it kind of attracts rabbits and almost like is like a diversion plant like from things that you don't want rabbits to eat i think that's such a good point because someone else said like if your plants aren't getting eaten they're not part of the ecosystem so why not add things that are part of the ecosystem and then maybe plants that you don't want to get eaten will you know pressure will be taken off of them a little bit if you add more things like clover another one's moss um that's a little bit different in color and texture from clover as you can see um more i think it looks more beautiful in like shaded areas for sure easier to do there look how beautiful it looks among like steps i have a a hillside in my yard where we have terraced like bluestone steps and moss growing on either side and it's just so it's just so beautiful does great in shade requires no maintenance no mowing another one wild strawberry these get these plants get a little bit taller than white clover and moss um it's more of like a ground cover type but of course certainly you can use ground cover anywhere you want it just might not be as low and uh like like might not have as much like likeness to lawn as you might like it's more of a ground cover type plant creeping time is also beautiful beautiful pink flowers and it's a nice green when it's not in bloom this is a lower one um but you know also resembles more of a ground cover than lawn i put these two on the same side because of the texture being kind of similar where it's not as smooth looking as maybe like moss or white clover might be but just still a great alternative if you're open to it now we have pearls premium and low mo fescue these are more similar to each other because they are more grass like pearls premium is a grass seed um it's just a specific seed that requires less water and less fertilization than the typical seed that you would get low mo fescue it's called low mo because you don't have to mow it very often and i think this one looks so beautiful because it's so swishy and looks so like just a nice beautiful meadow look it's so unique but it still looks like a lawn enough where you maybe wouldn't be as nervous to try it because your neighbors aren't going to walk by and go oh my god what did you do what is this like are you going to put grass seed in between these plants you know it still looks like grass yeah the comment was about pennsylvania sedge and how it looks similar to low mo fescue when it gets grown in um so definitely if you're in the conquered area go check that out at some point um because i don't know when they installed those demonstration lawns a couple years ago so it's probably pretty filled in by now and and might look pretty lush like these images here thank you for that um so i just also want to say you know weeds we think of weeds as bad but you know some of them are edible a lot of them aren't invasive traditionally we're kind of expected to eradicate all of the weeds within our lawn i had a professor once that told me that he thinks a lawn full of or a field full of dandelions is way more interesting to look at than a vast green expanse of nothingness so you know it's a cultural thing it's something that you know most people might not agree with but um it's a shift that kind of needs to happen so just something to think about maybe it's better to have something that's more interesting to look at and more supportive of local wildlife than something that's desolate so if you have an area of lawn that's burnt or dying or just not doing well why not just turn it into a alternative that's going to function and you're not going to have to maintain or try as hard to keep alive and to maintain um your lawn alternatives or your landscape i also want to say just if you can switching to electric is a good idea if you're committed to sustainability not using gas powered equipment leaf blowers lawn mowers weed wackers chainsaws hedge trimmers um something i also want to say about leaf blowers in particular be gentle if you can or if you can avoid using them at all that's great just for the the fact of when you're blowing everything around you might also be blowing around insects and pollinators who don't need to be disturbed so you're blowing leaves around but you're also blowing other things around um that you're not trying to so just be mindful be careful of that so manual equipment that you can use this is not an exhaustive list but just things that you probably will need if you're going to be doing um a landscape project by yourself in your yard loppers shears hand pruners you might not know the difference between some of those that's fine um wheelbarrow push spreader for seed cultivator to break up your soil and break up your mulch hose push mower um rakes for different purposes you know like a plastic flimsy rake like this might be fine for um leaves but if you're trying to prep your garden bed for vegetables or you know do some kind of serious cultivation work or pushing around you might need a metal rake to spread and smooth things out plastic rake might not cut it so um hand trowel gloves obviously please wear gloves especially if you have poison ivy in your yard or roses or barberry and i'm gonna hand this back over to leslie for i think i've already mentioned this before if you can just leave your mulches where where they fall or your leaves where they fall and they will be they'll break down and become nice mulch for your for your shrubs um and provide you know hiding place and and also protect the roots um of your shrubs from deep frost um so it's a great great alternative to going and buying mulch just use your leaves um these are some ideas for how to get your mulch or your your leaves to break down quicker you can just run over it with your mower and break it all up um or just put it in a compost pile i've been at my house for about 19 years and i have a mulch pile or not a mulch pile but a compost pile that's probably as big as that screen and i use it every year um to to plant new plants supplement my vegetable garden with nice nutrient rich soil um fall cleanup um just use soft materials under your trees uh don't build up against the root flare any higher than the root flare so here's the here's the tree trunk it's coming up like this that's the root flare you don't want any material against the root flare so things that you can start today you can start to research um any of the ways that you want to maintain uh in a more sustainable manner um this book here is a great guide for sustainable landscape construction it also talks about how to maintain it um it's it's like a bible to sustainability great great resource um don't use round up if you can help it uh it stays in our soils for generations um really doesn't even break down at all uh can enter into the the water system and if you have a well i don't maybe um not in these urban areas but you want to make sure you reduce the amount to round up um switch to electric and manual tools as lindsay was talking about um there's just every year the list of available electric or battery operated tools grows and grows and you know 10 years ago we really didn't have that option hi brucey good tip everyone heard that yeah good yes yeah yeah absolutely yeah just to reiterate um you know one you know one mower between five neighbors very uh economical way to to get what you need you know share your tools make sure you bring them back to whoever bought it that's usually the challenge um but um you know again things you can start today that are really easy and sustainable um you know start a compost bin that's so easy it's it's um i know kitchen waste it can get a little smelly but there are all sorts of like charcoal bins that you can get um you know at at the store that will help reduce the the smell of the kitchen waste so um you know again lindsay did a great job of of sharing some lawn alternatives um there are lots of pros out there i know we have a two or three in the audience including um or besides just lindsay and i um talk to your neighbors see who they've used and you know try them out um kill your lawn i'm not sure i'm there yet but good yeah so oh fantastic yeah excellent that's yeah i love it oh yeah and you just could just drop it and it'll just go right through it's just super soft tender rich soil and it was disgusting great tip thank you yes sorry yeah okay rubbing alcohol good one wow okay excellent i i think um you had a question and then i'll take yours yeah go ahead okay okay sure yeah absolutely we would love to hear from you so um if you have are you on um the towns like committees and okay all right nice yeah yeah yeah yeah what when we were driving into arlington today you know lindsay's like i've never been here i said yeah it's been a while for me i'm like it's very leafy and it is so you're you're doing a great job yeah well done um let's see i think i'm take her first and then yeah so yeah and wow yeah okay yeah so clover as as a transitional plant i just want to make sure that people can uh it yep it adds nitrogen back into the soil and can be a lot of alternative or uh just a cover crop for temporary yeah so thank you very much that's that's a great comment um okay um So I put all these ideas, I think we're all in the same page. But if you don't address artificial lighting and educating people, we're kind of defeating the purpose of taking care of our natural world. Very good point. And that's definitely be added to this list. Dark sky compliant. A lot of communities are, that's a regulation now. So it's good. We're heading in that direction. But there's probably more that we can all do as property owners to reduce the amount of light spilling out into our yards at night. So thank you. So I think that is just a recap. Start small. Don't overwhelm yourself. Know what you can handle and what your capabilities are. Take lessons learned from Ken and his experience. I thought that was great. And there's all sorts of opportunities at your own property. Share what you know with your neighbors. Try to spread the word. And a ton of resources out there. It's just endless. That's a good thing about the internet, right? And try not to be too intimidated. Start drawing your yard. And it'll give you confidence if you come up with a plan to actually go out and start to put into practice some of the things that you've drawn. You know, lots of professionals available. So reach out if you need to. And buy a little more material than you need because you always think that you have enough. And then you end up going back to the nursery because you didn't get as much as you needed. And try to look around your properties, your neighbors' properties. If they're throwing something out that you can use, go ahead, be creative. And that concludes our workshop series. So thank you all. Thank you everyone for coming. This has been a really lively discussion. I appreciate all the expertise and interest that you have in the topic. I wanted to mention that there were other folks, what I didn't mention in the intro, who informed this process. We had a steering committee. Jean Wildman, Jeremy Marin, Bruce E. Moulton, and Jennifer Tidwell. I think that was the person that I neglected to mention. So they were excellent. And as all things we try to do in the planning department, we have residents participating in the effort to bring this to fruition. So thank you to them and to all of you. I wanted to remind folks too that there is the Spring Fest up in the Heights on Saturday. And there's going to be a bunch of environmental tables there for community groups. Also, our Conservation Commission, Open Space Committee, and others are all going to have tables there. So opportunity to get plugged in to town goings on and meet like-minded folks this Saturday. It's in the afternoon, two to five, I believe. So again, thank you all for coming. It's really a pleasure to see you here.