It was a couple different things that made me decide to do a microprairie. One, I love gardening. I didn’t realize how much until I lived in an apartment surrounded by asphalt for eleven years. I longed for some lawn, even just a little dirt to dig in. The community garden across town didn’t cut it. The ten by ten plot was too big and and left me discouraged and exhausted, especially on those 90-degree days when the mosquitos were swarming in their death squads, out for blood.
I also wanted to help the climate, but I didn’t want to have to give up everything to do it. Until just recently, stopping climate change was presented as pretty much an either/or situation. We give up everything mechanized, motorized or convenient or we destroy our planet. And for those of you thinking moving to Mars is the answer, I’ll get right in line as soon as someone figures out how to deal with the lethal levels of solar radiation that planet is awash in. Until then, it looks like we’re stuck here.
Then a few years ago I became a homeowner. With a yard. A very sad looking yard. And in the process of researching how to fix my lawn without chemicals and tons of money (more on that in the future), I started learning about soil and how it really works. The dirt beneath our feet is teeming with life, or it should be. This underground world makes plant life possible. It’s how plants, the great exchangers of carbon, are able to pull millions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every year and sequester it the ground where it belongs.
And I realized something: it’s not that complicated. We don’t have to sit by helpless, waiting for world leaders to make a decision on something. We can take action ourselves. I’m not talking about going out and protesting and telling other people what they must do. I’m talking about what I can do, right here, right now. My own little yard can be part of the solution.
Doug Tallamy, in his book, Nature’s Best Hope, talks about how it’s not enough to preserve nature in a handful of big, isolated national parks. They’re too far apart to preserve native plants on any scale or to be of use to the animals and insects that need them. The concept he proposes is a giant “homegrown national park” made up of millions of front yards and back yards, home to bees and butterflies, and of course native plants, all squirreling away millions of tons of carbon beneath our feet. A National Park of Us.
Fixing the climate wouldn’t be a this or that, an all or nothing. It can be a “yes, and.” My little 2,500 square feet of front and back yard could be part of a bigger network creating a massive carbon sink. We wouldn’t need to eliminate the way we live now (although there are still plenty of things we can give up that would just be good for nature and the climate in general), but if enough people got on board, we could still sequester more than enough carbon to fix the atmosphere in a few decades, says Kristin Ohlson in The Soil Will Save Us.
I can do that. And so can you. We just need to start, and there’s a lot we can do. My 28 square feet of microprairie may not do much by itself, but together, combined with yours and yours and yours, then we start to have a real impact.
So that brings us back to the microprairie. The key here is native plants. I’ve known about native plants most of my life, but Nature’s Best Hope and Tallamy’s other book, Bringing Nature Home, made it very clear the importance of growing plants that grow naturally in your region. It didn’t occur to me before that so many of the problems we have with our gardens are caused by the fact that the plants we’re trying to grow aren’t suited to the conditions they’re planted in because they’re not from here. They developed someplace else, and so the means of surviving in that place are written in the plant’s genetic code. But still, we try to shoehorn these plants into places based only on sun conditions, maybe moisture conditions, and sometimes the acidity of the soil, if the plant is lucky. We don’t stop to consider that we’re stuffing them into soil and weather and a microbial and insect world they weren’t made for and wasn’t made for them.
Native plants on the other hand are eminently suited to the soil where they’re native because they have developed a symbiotic relationship with all the microbes under the soil and insects and animals and other plant life above the soil. Instead of having to baby the plant along, after the first year or so, you can pretty much set and forget a lot of native plants, and they do just fine. You do still have to consider things like soil type, soil acidity, soil moisture, and light because even in a small yard you can have a lot of different microclimates. But if you know all that before you plant (and we’ll talk more about knowing your yard later), you can pretty much take the right plant and drop it into the right spot and it will do just fine all by itself. And native plants are the food source for all those local pollinators and butterflies that are disappearing from our neighborhoods at an alarming rate. Native plants are a lot more likely to be host plants for your local pollinators since they all grew up together, so to speak. Within weeks of planting my microprairie, I was see more bees and butterflies and moths than I had seen in years.
And finally, microprairies are fun. Where I live in Minnesota, I’m right on the eastern edge of the great American prairie, the legendary sea of grass. Over the last 200 years it’s been turned mostly over to farming. But remnants of it still remain, and it’s glorious. So much more than just grass.
I visited some restored prairie in southwestern Minnesota last summer. Standing in the middle of that ocean of grass and flowers, watching the butterfilies and bees and grasshoppers going about their business, the absolute silence with no sound but the wind and the insects, it was for me every bit as majestic as looking at a mountain range. Okay, maybe not quite as majestic, but still incredibly beautiful in its own way. I could stand there and imagine this vast field stretching a thousand miles west to the Rockies and three thousand miles from the middle of Canada down to Mexico and know that there was no place else like this on Earth.
So why a microprairie? It’s pretty, it’s fun, and if you do a little homework on the front end, it’s easy, too. And you’re helping to heal the Earth. All right at your front door.