 All right let's go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for today's community conversation. My name is Marina Bach. I'm the communications manager here at Sierra Club Maine and I'll be facilitating today's webinar. These conversations have been a really great way for us to come together virtually and hear from some really wonderful organizations in our community. Today we're really excited to have Anna Fyalkov of the Wild Seed Project join us. Before we get started I just want to go over some zoom logistics with you all. I'm sure you're pros by now but we do ask that you please keep your microphone on mute to help with any background noise. You're welcome to be on or off video at your choosing. The webinar is being recorded so if you wish to not be seen feel free to turn your video off and lastly we invite you to put any questions in the chat. I'll be monitoring the chat throughout Anna's presentation and we'll have some time at the end for some Q&A. I'd also like to take a moment to just acknowledge the land that we're on here in Maine so Sierra Club Maine acknowledges Indigenous land and sovereignty. We are in the homeland of the Wabanaki, the people of the dawn. We extend our respect and gratitude to the many Indigenous people and their ancestors whose rich histories and vibrant communities include the Abinaki, Malaseed, Mic Mac, Pasamaquoddy, and Penobscot nations, and all of the native communities who have lived here for thousands of generations in what is known today as Maine, New England, and the Canadian Maritimes. Sierra Club Maine is honored to collaborate with the Wabanaki as they share their stories and we thank the Abbey Museum for their leadership and decolonization efforts in Maine. And without further ado I'd love to introduce our guest speaker Anna Fyalkoff as program manager at Wild Seed Project. Anna works to further the organization's educational programming, deepen relationships with partner organizations, and catalyze a movement to Rewild Maine. Before joining Wild Seed Project Anna was most recently Senior Horticulturist at Native Plant Trust Garden in the woods in Framingham, Massachusetts, where she designed and installed native plant gardens, managed interns and volunteers, and taught the public ways to incorporate native plants in their own gardens. Anna brings with her a deep knowledge of native plant ecology, horticulture, conservation, and ecological landscape design. She holds a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic and an MS in Ecological Design from the Conway School. So welcome Anna, we're honored to have you with us here today and without further ado I will hand it over to you to get started. Thank you very much Marina and I especially really appreciated the land acknowledgement that you did at the end of your piece. I think that's really important to be thinking about that we are on Wabanaki homeland. So I will get started with my presentation now as does everybody see my screen okay? Okay. And if you're not familiar with Wild Seed Project I just want to get you acquainted with us. So we are a small nonprofit based out of Portland, Maine, small but growing, and we sell seeds of native plants. That's one of the primary things that we do. We also strive to educate people and make people aware of the value of native plants. The Wild Seed Project was started in 2014 by our founder Heather McCargo and she saw a real need for more native plant education as well as supply of native plants in local nurseries in northern New England and especially in Maine. And since then we have raised awareness and now the demand for native plants is growing. The supply is working to keep up. So we actually put out an annual publication. We've had kind of a magazine in the past that is filled with lots of wonderful articles by people from the conservation and ecology world as well as gardening and native plant worlds with articles but also photographs and lovely illustrations. And our most recent publication is a native tree guide going in a kind of a different direction from our magazines. That's more of a how to resource for people on native trees. So today I really want to be talking to you about rewilding and what it means to rewild and giving you these 10 actionable steps that you can take in your own landscapes to rewild. These 10 steps are not necessarily needing to go in order but I kind of placed them in order of importance in my opinion and it doesn't mean that you have to start with one or another. I think anything you do out of these 10 steps is a really big step forward. So just to give you a sense of the background of what rewilding is all about. Many of you might be familiar with keystone species the word at least keystone species and that's derived from conservation where it's kind of a tool to think about the way that we can help conserve different habitats and the most biodiversity possible. I think the species like wolves and other kind of more charismatic megafauna have been emphasized as keystone species for a long time because the wolf for instance in Yellowstone National Park with its reintroduction in the 80s you really did see start to see a huge change in the landscape when the wolves were reintroduced because they were over you know over grazed and not very much vegetation was thriving in much of Yellowstone National Park and then when the wolves came they kept a lot of the elk and deer populations in check and then the you know the vegetation began to be able to kind of come back and a lot of other kind of trickle down effects happens from there so yes well our keystone species might be something like the wolf we also at Wild Seed Project want to think about keystone species as plants. Some plant species can be considered these because we also consider plants the basis of our food webs and without our native plants we start to see them unravel. So Doug Tellamy has done a lot of work in researching he's an entomologist at the University of Delaware and he's done a lot of work in researching insect and plant relationships especially those of moths and butterflies and plants and native plants because it's their caterpillars that so in in that one part of their life cycle earlier on in their life cycle the caterpillars actually rely on native plants their their leaves of many trees and herbaceous plants and alike to feed themselves and then in turn songbirds especially in spring rely on that protein rich diet of caterpillars to feed their young they also rely on other insects throughout throughout their whole lives but and as well as berries and fruits and nuts of native trees and other plants but it's those insects especially those caterpillars that are extremely important for them birds are actually kind of thought to be the bell weather of ecological health and well-being and so if we can create healthier insect and bird populations I think that will be better off overall in this time we've actually started to see quite a bit of a an insect and bird Armageddon populations of insects have dropped and in turn populations of migrating birds have dropped throughout the world so Doug Tellamy's research does point to this kind of threshold of 70% native plant biomass that's needed to keep these food webs intact and if you haven't I also actually before I leave this slide I want to just say that if you haven't had a chance to it would be great to read something by Doug was telling me so one of his more recent books is nature's best hope and it outlines a lot of what I'm talking about in this presentation different action steps that you can take to rewild your landscape he might frame it in a slightly different way but a lot of our rewilding movement is based off of what of Doug Tellamy's research so I encourage you to read any of his books nature's best hope bringing nature home or the nature of oaks so rewilding at wild sea project really mean you know we use it as a verb it really means to us something kind of threefold it's not just about restoring native plants to our landscapes but it is a big portion of it if we can restore native plants and the natural processes where we live not just out in national parks or large conservation areas actually where we live where we have our homes and our businesses where our communities thrive then this is going to reverse habitat loss and support biodiversity we also need to think about what we do in the landscape not just what we plant but if we shift from harmful habits to more mindful practices that benefit wildlife in the planet's health then we're going to have a much bigger impact and then finally we all really need to come together and join forces with others whether it be our neighbors or family friends or larger community to connect these fragmented habitats that have been fragmented by development and become an advocate for native plants in our landscapes so all of the 10 action steps actually hone in on all these different pieces of what rewilding means and how to do it the first action step is to think about getting as many of those trees into the landscape that are keystone plants and the keystone plants idea these five native trees has really come from a lot of Doug Tellamy's research because he's discovered through his research that oaks willows and cherries and also plums and birches and poplars are you know host to more biodiversity more caterpillars of mobs and butterflies than any other native plants so starting by planting this kind of infrastructure into your landscape is a good idea it doesn't mean that you shouldn't also plant other genre of native plants but these are really important ones to start with and then you can kind of fill in from there with more diversity so the oaks for instance you know they host at least 400 to 500 species of mobs and butterflies depending on where you live so maybe in Delaware it's closer to 500 plus and in Maine it's a little bit more close to 400 plus but it's still significant I like I'd like to give you an example here of a tree that is one of these keystone plants and the life cycle of one of the mobs that it supports so I was a horticulturist at native plant trust before I started a wild seed project and I really enjoyed getting to firsthand do some moth rearing and butterfly rearing I raised them and got to see their whole life cycles so the sycropia silk moth was one of the ones that we were most successful with we raised broods of sycropia silk moths we raised we started with their cocoons they would over winter in a cage to kind of keep them safe from predators over the winter and then we'd put them in these pairing cages which are kind of like a netted cage with a little window that you open at night because the the mobs once they hatch out of their cocoons are enclosed from their cocoons they come out they they you know pump their the their wings to kind of get everything flowing into their wings and then they emerge at night the males fly out and find a female you know up to a couple miles away and then they mate and it might take a couple days for this process to happen and then the males will pretty much go off and pass away and then the females will lay their eggs and then they'll die after a couple days too so they're they're time as adults the winged adult stage which is so beautiful they're about the size of a small bird is very very short and they spend most of their lives as caterpillars feeding on the leaves of their host plants like black cherry is one of the preferred host plants of the sycropia silk moth and then over wintering as cocoons now the sycropia silk moth actually will hang on a branch late in the season around august and start spinning its cocoon pupating and then over winter hanging on that branch well there's many other moth species that actually drop down from the native trees and over winter in the leaf litter that's kind of a precursor to what's coming next so like the luna moth is a really good example its host plants are usually trees in the walnut family and and a few others but it actually will drop down from the leaves and pupate and its cocoon will will over winter in the leaf litter until it's ready to close that the following spring cherries also you know provide much other wildlife value too to bees and other pollinators with their flowers in spring and then later to birds and mammal small mammals with their heavy fruit set cherries are actually edible to us as well so then the wild black cherry but it does vary like tree to individual tree to tree can be really either tasty or bitter or a little too tart and astringent so it's really kind of funny how that varies but for most mammals they don't seem to really mind one tree or another I think for us our palate might be a little bit more refined in that way so planting native trees doesn't just involve planting a singular tree in the ground in a sea of lawn I really hope that when we do plant native trees we kind of step away from this more park like look that has is this is you know going on and in this kind of planting is going on in many of our commercial landscapes and our parks and our burrida but it's not necessarily going to create the health of a forest when you plant a native tree so if you don't have leaves under that tree then you don't have opportunities for those different caterpillars or of moths and butterflies to drop down and over winter in the leaf litter or spend some sort of part of their life in the leaf litter so this native black gum is a wonderful native tree to plant it's a slow-growing plant that can stay small and kind of conical shaped for much of its life and then when it gets bigger it does create more of an irregular canopy and it's absolutely gorgeous with its fall color it also hosts a lot of life from its berries to its fruit to its leaves it hosts has lots of opportunities for being a wildlife magnet and it can be used as a street tree it's a really great tree but I would encourage us all to kind of think about when possible planting native trees in more of a forest like setting and mimicking the forest layers so I really like this example here at Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts there's a flowering dogwood it that's even not the full canopy tree there's oaks that you can't quite see as well in this picture that are in the canopy and then the flowering dog dogwood is in kind of the sub canopy then there are trees and shrubs smaller trees and shrubs like rhododendrons azaleas that are even lower down and then may apples and ferns and merry bells which are the ground covers the herbaceous ground covers and all those layers in the forest play a function the canopy trees shelter and shade the forest floor many of the small trees are flowering trees providing lots of pollinator opportunities and the same with the shrubs many of the herbaceous plants do that as well but also if they create a ground cover they keep the soil from eroding keep moisture retained in the soil and create kind of a green mulch below that if you can leave the leaves that is a great thing to do for wildlife so native street trees are also important to think about you know they don't have to be a large tree necessarily but I think something like a beach plum which I think it's classified in with the cherries is one of the keystone trees is a great thing to plant if you have a small space so the beach plum you know bear really tasty fruits they're about the size of a cherry but they're they taste just like plums because they are plums and they're flowers bloom in spring providing lots of pollinator options and they also you know our host plant to moths and butterflies and you know I encourage you to take a look at that recent publication that we put out native trees for northeast landscapes because we actually have about 31 species of small medium and large native trees that would work well in a variety of different landscapes and we have a couple different nice plant lists one is street trees a native street cheese and then another one is the a list of plant guilds so thinking about the trees the shrubs the herbaceous plants that all work together that grow in similar growing conditions that you can plant in your backyard so it's a nice kind of cheat instead of having to create your own plant list to look at what we have in that plant list but yeah beach plums are some of my favorite native small trees to plant they can actually become a little bit more like a scrubby shrub if you don't kind of prune them like a tree so if you prune them more like a tree it's just a matter of when you grow them at a smaller stage when they're a young whip or something like that you prune out the smaller start by pruning out the smaller kind of leafier branches lower down and allow for maybe one to three major stems that end up becoming kind of the leaders and if you prune the leafy leafy branches out above your at around eye height or a little above then that gives it also more of a tree-like look and a tree-like feel this one is kind of being grown and being pruned so that it can stay kind of more a little bit more on one plane in this small garden bed up against a road or a driveway and I think that's another nice way to have them too. The second rewilding action step is to think about shrinking your lawn so many of us might know the detriment of lawns but lawns are really not healthy landscapes for a number of reasons for one they're practically sterile they don't actually have many opportunities for wildlife value and there's in most of our lawns you know the single species Kentucky bluegrass lawn that often many of us are trying to maintain to look clean and well taken care of it's actually sprayed with lots of fertilizers and pesticides and those can become major pollutants in water bodies and also become a detrimental to many of our pollinators and then you know we mow our lawns and in order to keep them at a certain height we have to mow them over and over again throughout the season and that create puts a lot of fossil fuels into the air if you do have an electric mower that's great but it still requires energy to mow and then not to mention that lawns are actually the second most irrigated crop in the US if you kind of take a minute and think about that why are we putting so much of our our precious water resources into lawns when they often are just the default in our landscape and not really are not really doing a lot for us um I think you know lawns do have a place they're important places for outdoor rooms um and you know places for gathering and recreation we need something to place soccer on in the backyard throw frisbee on and has pathways that convey us through the landscape but otherwise you know all the lawn that's left over in our suburban and urban areas could be taken away um all of that that's not being utilized so why not stop mowing a good portion of your lawn and maybe leave the outside frame of the outdoor rooms and pathways unmowed for places for pollinators and other wildlife to find forage and cover and shelter um you can do a couple different things to shrink your lawn you can either stop mowing which is actually a slightly more advanced technique and I don't recommend it for the beginner because you'll see especially if you're in an urban or suburban area or an agricultural area that's surrounded by a lot of invasive species and weeds you'll have a lot of that coming up and it's a lot to manage especially if you're unfamiliar with the species that might be coming up in your lawn but it is doable um some if you do have an area that um has a lot of native species already present then it might be more doable for you um but you can theoretically stop mowing and allow what um you know the plants that you find beneficial to keep reproducing and then kind of discourage the plants that are weedy or invasive to not keep reproducing and that can be by a number of techniques including mowing and smothering or mowing certain areas that are um that are you know full of the non desirable plants or smothering certain areas that are you know filled with invasive species manually removing them making sure to cut those plants back before they have a chance to go to seed is essentially what you want to do for the plants that you don't want there and allowing the plants that you do want there to go to seed but i'm not going to go into a huge depth um on this method today because it's a little too complicated to talk about in a short amount of time another way that you can reduce your lawn is to think about um starting over and adding new plants into it so that might involve sheet mulching the lawn which is a really great method to get rid of your lawn excuse me there's a big motorcycle going by my window right now um but so if you sheet mulch that means you can put down cardboard um and maybe make sure it's nice and overlapping and either spring or fall and then put mulch on top of that and that mulch can be aged bark mulch or aged leaf mold um and you can find those either locally um at your um you know local landscaping business or find a good business that that does it well um and let those age for a good three months or so so if you're putting it down in the spring let that age for the full growing season and break down and add organic matter to the soil and smother the grass below and then plant into it in the fall or if you put it down in the fall plant into it in the spring so one of the interns at um native plant trust's nasami farm which is their plug nursery decided to convert uh as her intern project um this big lawn parking lot island into native lawn alternatives and she actually put down um sheet mulch in the spring and then planted into it later in her internship a couple a couple months after she put down the sheet mulch she put down lots of great lawn alternatives like the pennsylvania sedge which is a grass-like plant it's not a true grass but it doesn't require as much mowing and inputs and water is a lot of native or as a lot of non-native grasses require and she put down um foam flower she also planted three-toothed sink foil and pussy toes which are great for the drier and well-drained sunny spots in the lawn and this whole network of um native lawn alternatives was kind of a trial to see how each one would do and eventually they all started to knit together and some would do especially well in the spots that they were most well suited to while maybe others that were not as well suited to an area would fade out and get taken over by another so it was kind of a nice experiment to see how that worked out and I think it was very successful another way you can think about shrinking your lawn is not necessarily by doing a giant project all at once because I knew that can be very overwhelming but to think about kind of hemming it in each year just by a little bit so you can put down your cardboard on just the edge of a garden bed kind of thinking about edging that garden bed in the way that you'd like and then put down your mulch on top of that and then plant into it in a couple months and that will create a nice new edge of your garden bed kind of extending it out and if you can think about instead of just planting long alternatives maybe lawn alternatives are great for certain areas that you would like a lawn like look or would like lawn in but you want something different than Kentucky bluegrass that's great but if you can put multi-layered plantings into the areas that you can change from lawn that's actually even better so this is brings me to my next action step which is to fill every open niche in the landscape and so if you can have as many layers in your landscape as possible or if you're like me and an apartment dweller and don't have many places to plant natives you can do things like put them in pots put them on window boxes I actually put the center bottom photo is my apartment and this is where I've actually put in a lot of native plants and pots like cardinal flower and iris and blue Lobelia and Virginia creeper all sorts of lovely natives that do well in pots and many many do and it's a great way to experiment with what you have I also think it's important to think about filling every niche of the landscape by encouraging vines like I love this native vine on the upper left that's called coral honeysuckle or trumpet honeysuckle both the same same plant but different common names that actually attracts many pollinators including hummingbirds and it creates a really nice dense kind of almost shrub-like structure where I actually think it provides a lot of cover for birds so this was a vine that was outside of the or it still is outside of the horticulture building at garden in the woods and that used to be my office and whenever we'd open the door throughout the growing season we'd we'd hear a bird fly out and I think we realized over time that there was a nest of robins inside this this really densely growing trumpet honeysuckle and what was great about it is the trumpet honeysuckle is not one of the more kind of aggressive vines it stays in in one central place and it's just a lovely one for any sunny average soil spot. You can also think about planting natives into what's called the hell strip or that space between the sidewalk and the road where it's a really tough place for a lot of things to grow usually especially around portland a lot of those hell strips are filled with grasses that have just kind of seeded themselves in non-native grasses or lawn or they're just empty dirt pockets sometimes they have trees growing out of them but nothing else sometimes I see people plant like a ring of native or non-native but of annuals into those hell strips and I think there's a lot of opportunity to do if you have a hell strip in front of your house to you know plant native plants in like cone flowers and I love the idea of the prickly pear cactus it'll keep dogs out of it as well as the Carolina Rose with their armored foliage and prickles so that's a really great way to think about adding more natives into every little spot in your landscape that you can get them and you can take it even further if you do have some yard you can cram as much as you can those layers that I've been talking about stack pack and layer things you can add more containers that add some really lovely seasonal interest when things are not in bloom if they have are colored and glazed terracotta or things that don't fit in your landscape like maybe a small shrub that wouldn't be able to fit into this small garden bed here the small shrub that's in the corner is actually a aromatic sumac that turns lovely colors in the fall and I love just the way that this little courtyard informal courtyard is is planted with trees and shrubs and vines asters and golden rods and cone flowers and all sorts of things that are filling every little niche and actually a lot is in bloom in this fall landscape it's quite beautiful another way that you can think about filling every open niche is thinking about urban areas again and taking cues from the myawaki mini forest movement so myawaki was or is a japanese man who brought over the idea of planting many many small native seedlings and saplings into a small area and kind of mimicking a mini forest they actually have shown research has shown that these mini forests will actually grow into the layers and biodiversity that a more mature forest can hold in about two to five years versus you know 50 to hundreds of years for a regular forest so this is a really great way to add biodiversity into an area that that isn't very wild it it might look a little bit more wild it's a great way to take like an abandoned lot or you can do this in a much more kind of neat and gardeny way but this is sort of a more wild looking one it's actually been something that's this is a movement that's been taking hold across europe and the uk for instance has planted at least 150 of these tiny forests across their cities so i think we can take cues from what's happening around the world and do it in the us and do it in portland main or other cities and towns in main if we can our next action step is to think about targeting certain pollinators to support in our landscapes so we can do that by planting those keystone plants and i want to highlight a few other keystone plants like the the goldenrods and the asters as well as combflowers and other plants in the aster family are considered also keystone plants because they host hundreds and hundreds of moth and butterfly caterpillars um on their leaves asters and goldenrods are also really essential plants for late season foraging nectar of nectar and pollen for bees and wasps so if you can plant an astra or goldenrod in any new planting that you put in and there is one suited for at least one suited for any new garden that you put in i think all gardens should have them so the candidate goldenrod is one that is gets gives a lot of our goldenrods a more of a reputation for being weedy um and creating kind of large swabs of just one plant because they are a little bit more aggressive but there's actually a lot more um garden worthy goldenrods that we can look to at a plant instead like the wreath goldenrod or another name for it is the bluestem goldenrod the downy goldenrod and the zigzag goldenrod and those are those three species are available on our seed sale and then there's so many asters as well for different conditions and that are garden friendly like the bluewood aster the whitewood aster the flaxleaf stiff aster that's more for sunny spots um and i encourage you to just take a look at all the diversity of asters and goldenrods that we do have and think about finding one that can work for your site another way you can look at targeting certain pollinators to support is to look at one pollinator maybe that you would like to support in your landscape and trace its life cycle and find out what it requires and then you can actually manage your landscape accordingly and plant accordingly so the baltimore checker spot butterfly for instance if i wanted to support that one it is in decline in much of its range and its range actually its native range does reach um up to southern new england not as much into main but i think with climate change we could start expanding its range and including also bringing its numbers back up where it is so um i think we could you know plant more of its host plant which is the white turtle head that's one of its main host plants at least um and it leaves its or it lays its eggs on the undersides of the white turtle head in spring um when its eggs hatch the larvae come out and they go through different instar stages like any other insect um they um that means that as they get bigger they shed their skin and um take on kind of a slightly different look with each instar stage but they stay together they're a little different from a lot of caterpillars they're gregarious so they form a protective webbing around them um to protect protect them from birds and other predators and they use this webbing actually to make little bridges from one branch to another when they've eaten all from one they can go to a fresh branch um then they crawl down to the leaf litter they actually take two uh years to complete their life cycle so they crawl down to the leaf litter at the end of the growing season and overwinter in the leaf litter as caterpillars leaving them extremely vulnerable to any disturbance in the leaf litter then they crawl up and eat more for the rest of the next growing season and then pupate um into these gorgeous chrysalises starting the cycle over again so what does that mean it means that we need to think about planting more of its host plant in um its native range as well as as um leaving the leaves when possible so that they have a chance to reproduce year after year so um that brings me to the next action step for rewilding which is changing your management regimen and that includes leaving those leaves I know that's a hard thing to for a lot of us to kind of wrap our heads around with different gardens that we might have or different landscapes for instance if you do live in an area with a lot of black top and lawn um it's definitely tricky to figure out where all those leaves do go if you're gonna leave all of them on your garden beds I know that um it can be tricky to you know think about you know the new emergence coming up through them the next year is it gonna smother the lawn is it gonna smother my plantings those are all things that go through a lot of our heads and so to mitigate that we're often mowing and blowing and carrying our leaves off-site rather than keeping this precious resource on site um to add to our garden beds and yes there are often too many leaves so one thing that you can think about is to reduce your lawn like in the earlier action step and that will provide more um planting bed spaces for the leaves to go um or to consolidate your leaves by either composting them in a compost pile or shredding them but shredding them can be detrimental to those pollinators that overwinter in them as well you can also think about cutting back our you know certain standing vegetation but leaving others up um so over the winter I like to make sure that I don't cut back every bit of standing vegetation especially things with with important seed heads that will be forage for birds over the winter or grasses places for birds to find cover in any of my nice structural plants that look nice I'll keep up and then sometimes I actually will cut back in the spring those pithy or hollow stemmed plants like common elder and joe pieweed cone flowers etc flowering raspberry for instance um in order to open up the chambers for some of our native bees to lay their eggs in so those pithy or hollow stemmed plants provide a lot of opportunity for both hibernating bees as well as um young larval larvae of bees for them to lay their eggs in and and for them to overwinter in so um another thing that you can do you know is leave those pollen sticks and branches in the landscape and you can clean up to some degree without cleaning up too much so re or think about reorganizing I guess instead of cleaning up it can be a great creative opportunity to do things like create a beautiful fallen log sculpture in your yard or wood lot or pile up sticks that have fallen instead of you know taking away all the messy sticks and putting them in the compost or burning them or making a leaf column or different debris fence that organizes your materials and helps break down your leaves a little faster eventually some of those leaf fences actually become living fences as the bottom layer breaks down pretty quickly and becomes compost and a lot of native plants in your garden might start to seed into them like the wood poppy in this picture um also there's other ways that you can add wildlife value to your site without doing the gardening things but thinking about other things in your landscape like um having some sort of water feature could be a bubbler or just a bird bath or even a waterfall or taking some storm water infrastructure like in this photo um the gutter that's come off the roof goes into a really um neatly crafted storm water plan where it goes into an old satellite dish and then that tips into another um gutter that goes into a retention pond there's some really fun things that you can do that running water sound is actually going to bring migrating birds in the fall closer to your property and if you have native plants there um to feed them with nuts and berries and insects then you're going to have all the more reason for those birds to stop um on your site also lowering the lights that you have on your site or making sure that their lights are not pointed upwards or having motion sensor lights is important for moths because they move around a lot of the time at night to find their partners to reproduce and they can get kind of caught by lights they're attracted to lights and never finish their what they set out to do other things like having bird boxes and be bat boxes and things like that I know that um bee hotels have become pretty popular lately but I actually unless you're there used as an educational tool for kids I don't think that they're actually always the best because um those do need to be cleaned out pretty frequently so that diseases don't spread um among bee populations so I think if you can leave those pithy or hollow stemmed plants in your garden leave open spots of soil especially sandy soil for certain ground nesting bees and leave logs and things like that for any bees that nest in the hollow chambers of logs in old woodpecker holes and things like that those are all going to be better and more kind of long-term solutions for creating bee habitat next I think we can think about stop stopping fertilizing and using pesticides in our landscapes these two things are not really necessary for beautiful and healthy gardens or plantings and um I'll go over a few reasons why and how you can reduce these things in your landscape first of all I think fertilizers are really I think you know leftover from more traditional ornamental horticulture where you're often um trying to amend the soil to meet your the plant's needs when you plant something from another continent or a lot of veggie gardens need richer soil but a lot of our native plants some native plants need rich soil and some native plants need poor soil some need well drained soil some need high pH some need low pH and so if you can find the plant that's best suited to the conditions that you have the light and the soil conditions then you're going to have a much more sustainable landscape than um having to constantly you know take soil tests and add amendments um to your soil to make it better suited for the plants that you plant um pesticides are also not really necessary for beautiful and healthy gardens um and so I encourage you to all think about stopping these practices because these do become major pollutants and contribute to things like colony collapse um which is something that European honeybees have gone through but a lot of our native bees are actually um you know eating and consuming a lot of the leaves of plants that are treated with pesticides and that's detrimental to them too so this can carry into where you buy your plants from so becoming a wise consumer is important and the things that you need to think about are buying plants that haven't been grown with pesticides if possible and most native nursery I mean sorry most nurseries in general do um actually grow their plants with pesticides these days um and it's a real problem so you can do things like call your local nursery that you want to buy plants from and ask them if they use things like neonicotinoids um and ask them to stop using them or say you know tell them that you're going to go to a different nursery that doesn't use them and the consumers will drive the demand for these organically grown plants just like um we have done for lots of our food organic food products um or you can also grow your own native plants if you grow them from seed even better because those plants will be more genetically have more genetic genetic variation and be better adapted to potential futures like stressors from climate change the drought and flooding and periods of heat um and you'll have they'll be cheaper and you'll have a lot more fun doing this at home how the seed sowing calendar works is that you actually for native seeds you actually sow them in late fall through early winter and so you get to do some gardening when nobody else is out and about in their garden you can do this inside though you can sow them in pots cover them with sand then you put them outside with some screen to protect them from rodents and let them over winter in the spring they should start germinating for most species and then you can grow them on for that growing season then plant them the following fall so it's a really fun way to kind of get out and do your own gardening and reduce the cost of plants um as well because I know that it can be overwhelming to think about how many plants you need to buy to replace your lawn and getting towards the end here um another thing you can think about with rewilding is removing invasive plants and I know this can be an overwhelming thing to do um I think if we can think about it more as a community effort we're going to be better off um so in our public places we can think about getting groups of people together like the rewilding main movement actually it's a separate movement separate rewilding movement from the wild seed project rewilding movement it was started before wild seed projects rewilding movement it's a group that actually hopes to spread awareness and education about um certain skills and things you know different techniques that are nature based and based on a lot of times traditional knowledge or um or you know skills that have been lost so things like basket making and things like that and sometimes they have different kinds of workshops where they remove an invasive species like the asian bittersweet and then do basket making with those stems afterwards because it's a nice flexible um vine and I really like the idea of kind of creating more movements like this as well as you could gather friends if on your property and work on an invasive pullout or at your local school kids love to do stuff like this um it's very empowering to do it with a group of people and see how much you get accomplished and then after you've removed your invasive plants definitely make sure to replant with rugged native plants we have a great plant list on on the wild seed project website um that goes over all the different native plants for different conditions that you might want to replant after removing an invasive because otherwise those invasive plants could come roaring back and so once you've removed an invasive plant that's not the end of it you do have to think about care for that area and tending it for several years afterwards at least and if you plant with native plants that will fill the void um and get that those plants established to kind of battle battle it out with any new sprouts of invasive plants that might be coming back so with all of that being said those are all different kind of actions that you could take on your own or with a group of people but I think it's best if we can join forces with others to um spread the message about rewilding and what we can do to support more life life in our landscapes that can involve putting out a yard sign for you know that might show people why you're not mowing a certain section of your yard or a leave the leaves sign um that explains why you're leaving the leaves that you're not just neglecting your site you're actually doing something intentional and giving people those cues to care um so that it doesn't look just kind of like a wild unintentional landscape you can also with these yard signs really um kind of reach out to people in a non-confrontational way so you might get neighbors or passersby asking you about your yard signs and what you're doing and this could spark some really good conversation rather than kind of you know grumbling at your neighbors next door that they're mowing too much or fertilizing too much or that they should do this or that this allows them to come to you um and ask questions instead and get curious and um you can also do things like use the hashtag pledge to rewild we're trying to encourage people to use a hashtag for their neighborhood too so it might be pledged to rewild portland main for their city or pledge to rewild longfellow square that's where I live um to show that you're actually doing this in a specific area and then you can link up with other people that are doing this somewhere else you can use the next door app um and the next thing that we're working on with at wild seed project is figuring out ways to get people to connect with each other and share their rewilding together so that they can also connect habitat they can both join forces to spread this message but they can think about their neighborhood as maybe a connected wildlife corridor that they're creating so maybe multiple neighbors in a neighborhood are doing this and when you have more native plants it's going to attract more um more pollinators so maybe in an area that's isolated you might have a new native planting um without any other native plants around and you you actually could see um not very many pollinators at first but if you get more and more habitat in your area um then you're going to have a larger area to attract the pollinators and allow them places to migrate through and you can think about educating the wider community around you um so using something like our resources at Wild Tea Project we have a couple of great resources on our website that you can use to educate um the wider community and that might be the Portland Pollinator Vision Plan this was actually a project done by students from the Conway School in Massachusetts and they put together this plan looking at all the different places that they could add while a pollinator habitat in the city of Portland it could be you know public places could be neighborhoods businesses parks um that would be plantable and potentially where you could get landowners to come together and create these corridors um so this is one way to look at it and we really hope to flesh this out over time and start reaching out to um different municipalities to get this message spread even further. Also we have a great resource called the Maine DOT Roadside Guide on our website too so this is something we actually worked with Maine DOT to create a guide for um helping sustain populations of native plants along our roadsides and our median strips and on the edges of the highways and roads throughout Maine and this involves both a different kind of management regimen or mowing regimen for the roadsides not mowing during the growing season and then doing more um seed collection and allowing as much um as many native plants to kind of populate the roadsides as possible while also maybe in removing invasive species in favor of native plant habitat and maybe doing some restorations in certain areas. So this is another resource that we'd love to be spread far and wide and both of these are available on our website for free to look at. So thank you everyone I hope this inspired you to take the Pledge to Rewild and when you do take the pledge it's actually um you're going to get all these free resources it doesn't cost anything to take the pledge to Rewild we just want to inspire people to take action and plant natives in their own yards and so you also while you get something out of this you get free tools and resources and guidance and these 10 action actionable steps and links to articles and all sorts of how-to information you also get to show our collective impact so you get put on a map that shows all the pledge to Rewilders in the U.S. So I hope that you can join us in this movement thank you and I'll I'll leave you when we we do a Q&A after this I'll leave you with some resource slides so I'll go through them kind of slowly so you can take a picture if you need so thank you again and I'm open to Q&A now. Thank you so much Anna that was really awesome so much helpful information and I know I'm going to take the pledge and I look forward to slowly trying to figure out how I will Rewild my space so thank you. I'd love to take any questions for Anna you can put them in the chat um and I can read them to her one question I had Anna I was wondering about the leave your leaves sign I love the idea of that and kind of starting a conversation with your neighbors is that sign something that we can get from the Wild Seed project or where would we find something like that? It sure is it's actually on our website we have a shop page on our website so if you go to the main website wildseedproject.net up in the navigation bar the shop is right up there and you'll see that you can buy native seeds you can buy yard signs and other merch like t-shirts and aprons and hats and things like that but those two yard signs the do not mow native habitat sign and the leave sign are both available on our website and we hope to actually come out with more native sign or native habitat and rewilding signs soon that have other kinds of things written on them or a more general one for rewilding to say that I took the pledge so the look for those coming out soon we'll announce it in our newsletters and on our website and everything but keep an eye out. Awesome we do have one question from the chat can you incorporate vegetables into your native garden? Yeah of course so I gave that kind of rough 70% native plant biomass goal and if we can strive for that in our landscapes I think that's great if you want to do 100% that's awesome but if you feel like you also want to have a vegetable garden or integrate a productive edible and or medicinal or herbal plants into your landscape some native some not I think that's great too I don't think we have to kind of go all or nothing and it's definitely not a purist approach so you know whatever you can do to incorporate natives there are actually a lot of great native edibles so if you do have an interest in that I recommend you also take a look at our our some of our different blogs on our website because we have a couple of them dedicated to native edibles too. Awesome thank you one other question when you stratify seeds to sow in spring can you do this at the beginning of winter and dry them again? Let's see so stratification is the process that keeps the seed it brings the seed from its kind of dormant phase where it's not going to sprout into the sprouting phase that germination phase and it's it's going to be a process that helps break that hard seed coat and allows it to germinate so that means it might be adding moisture and cold to the seed or scraping it down or going through if it goes through the digestive system of a of an animal that's a form of stratification for many different native seeds and each native plant has a different type of stratification that it requires so once you do that you probably don't want to dry out the seed because usually most stratification includes moistening the seed to help break its hard seed coat and once you do that it's already kind of off on that trajectory to germinate so you probably wouldn't want to dry it out after that. All right good to know another question here so someone is wondering if Wild Seed Project is involved with schools in terms of native seeding as classroom projects anything like that? Yes we are we we actually offer we have a program where we offer teachers in schools a couple of free seed packets each year and so we usually send out a call to teachers in one of our newsletters in the fall to let them know that we want to do that. We want to add on to our programming for schools and teachers because we do think reaching out to youth is really essential getting them excited about plants and learning about the life cycles of plants and their pollinators is wonderful so we have a couple of different projects that it we're working on but we haven't finished any of those yet so look out in the next year or two for different local Portland schools that we'll be working with. Also we do have a really nice resource on our website for it's a it's a plant list for people who want to think about native plants that would work really well for schoolyards so definitely check that out if you're interested in planting some native plants in a schoolyard because there's some plants that are just great plants for kids that are kind of more whimsical or edible or medicinal and would work well in a schoolyard. Awesome that's great to know that you're involved in schools and I love the idea of planting in schoolyards that's awesome. Patricia says that I actually bought some seeds from the wild seed project last fall and started them in pots as suggested but I left them out too long and ended up with a mess of roots to disentangle. When is the best time to transplant them and would you pot them on or move them directly to the garden? We get that question a lot that's a good one and I don't think you waited too long I think you could plant that whole pot in the ground just as a big mass of little seedlings and that's okay too actually that's one of the methods we suggest and you could do that in the coming spring I think right now it might be a little bit late for planting because when you plant you want to allow though fall is a good time to plant I'd say that's more like the end of August through September and then maybe early October but fall can be a little you can get a little late if you're not giving that plant enough time for its roots to start anchoring into the ground and keeping the plant from heaving over the winter with the freeze and thaw so that's something to consider you could plant it next spring or next fall and if you want to learn more tips and tricks or just get some questions you know questions answered about your property or your plantings feel free to become a member and then you get access to these monthly Q&A sessions that our founder Heather McCargo and I lead and we answer people's questions for a whole hour over Zoom so it's a really great way to you know learn from other people's question and answer and then hear your own answered with the group of people on the Zoom call. Oh that's awesome I'm sure that's super helpful that sounds great yeah I apologize for the drilling that's happening outside of my house it's really loud but oh no problem you can barely hear it are there any other questions for Anna one last question I had you mentioned a lot of removing invasive plants do you have any tips or tricks on identifying what is invasive and what might we want to keep yeah I think invasives are are most of the invasives are really easy to identify compared to a lot of other plants and that's because they're ubiquitous in the landscape they're everywhere so what I would do is when you're when you're in doubt about a plant that's coming up in your on your site let it come up and maybe go to flower and when a plant's in flower that's usually most of our resource guides and our field guides are geared to identifying plants when they're in flower that's a real important tool in identification and you can you can look at things like there's some field guides that I really like that are handheld that you can take with you like Peterson's field guide I also really like wildflowers of New England by Ted Elliman that has photos of our native plants and naturalized and invasive plants I also like Nukem's wildflower guide that's one of my absolute favorites for apps I think iNaturalist is the is the best there's also things like flower checker but unfortunately those use algorithms of photos so you could have some wrong answers from something like flower checker or picture this because it's not going through the real process of elimination with identifying your plants I also really like Go Botany that's an online key and that's that they have a simple key that's made for beginners as well and then if you look at let's see the main natural resources council website that will have lots of information on main invasive plants and it'll have photos and identification guides and a little bit of information on how to remove them as well so that's a nice thing to do if you if you think you might have an invasive plant it'll it'll show you you know the top invasive plants to look for awesome thank you that's helpful and I've seen the apps on phones and stuff so i'll check those out and the guidebooks thanks so much we have someone wondering if they could be added to the email list so what would be the easiest way to be added to the wild seeds email list yeah so if you want to be on our newsletter list you can go to our website and you'll if it's the first time visiting the website you should get a pop-up that asks you if you want to join the newsletter and just follow the prompts otherwise you can go to the bottom of the page and there's a little button for that there too great thank you all right any other questions for Anna all right well with that i'm just going to share my screen one more time what's that there i stopped sharing oh thank you all right well i just wanted to thank everyone so much for joining us today and a special thank you to Anna for sharing so much knowledge and awesome action steps and things we can do at home to better our environment thank you Anna it's been really been a pleasure to have you um and i will send everyone the recording of this presentation and also some follow-up steps and links that Anna has sent me so that you can get more involved and as far as sierra club we invite you to follow us on social media to stay updated on our work you can also subscribe to our newsletter there and then before we take off i just want to invite everyone to our next community conversation which is next tuesday october 19th at noon so a cross-sector collaboration is working together to understand the ecological benefits and community benefits of oyster reef restoration specifically to phippsburg main so i hope you join us we can learn about oyster restoration and the collaborative community-based approach to addressing the rapid changing coast that we have here in main and i'll actually put a link in the chat where you can register to that and i hope to see you there and thank you so much again Anna it's been awesome learning about all of this thank you everyone thanks for having me all right have a good rest of your day everybody thank you bye