Aren’t those called fireflies?
Depends on where you’re from
Alright I’m going to need all of your suggestions as this is the project I’m working on right now.
A bought a small townhouse in Ontario 7 months ago and I have a tiny yard.
The yard had mostly grass, but had a little bit of moss, crab grass, and clover. There is a small garden, and many dirt patches in the yard.
I have spread clover seed in the yard, especially in the dirt patches.
Then I weeded the garden area, removed about half the rocks but left some in the garden, I have my mother coming over next month to help me pick local garden flowers, and I had to pull a tiny tree out because it was planted right beside the foundation of the building and would eventually cause damage.
What else should be added to the lawn? Should I be pulling out the crabgrass? What wildflowers are native to Ontario?
Given that you are asking in a thread that is the subject of fireflies, we are going to assume you are asking for suggestions to improve firefly accommodations.
In this regard, do not ever clean your yard of any loose leaf vegetation or damp rotting vegetation and it will attract fireflies. Do not remove the weeds unless you can positively identify they are harmful to people, or are invasive non-indigenous. Go to nearby privately owned plant nurseries and ask them for native species for your garden. They will be significantly more expensive to purchase from, and will likely be less aesthetically pleasing plants.
If you don’t care about insects, and are asking simply to project to us a fake progressive personality, then resume decorating your yard with non-native invasive species from your local commercial/franchise garden center, from what it sounds you are currently doing.
Visit some Garden Centres near you- often they’ll have seed mixes of local perennial flowers available for purchase, you just need to spread the seeds in the spring or autumn.
Also, “weeds” aren’t always weeds, they’re just plants that some people decided get in the way of monocultures. If it’s flowering, it’s feeding insects, so leave it be.
The fireflies are awesome in my area this summer and my humble yard is part of that. It’s honestly so satisfying watching plants come back year after year, bigger and bigger
Lightning bug, eh? I smell a Pennsylvania native
They’re called that in a lot of places.
Source: I’m from Texas.
And here’s a pretty picture to prove it.
Funny that Californians even have a strong opinion
Ha, great observation. For those that don’t know - the fireflies/lightning bugs known to the east coast don’t live on the west coast.
Apparently there are species that live west of the Rocky Mountains, but they are active during the day, and even at night the light they produce is too dim for the human eye to perceive. So the west coast doesn’t get the beautiful light shows that the east enjoys.
It makes me happy to see the phrase “lightning bug” used so often here on Lemmy. I grew up calling them lightning bugs, yet I felt like it’s been ages since I heard or saw that word. Then I started coming here, and I see it in every post about this topic. The term brings me back to my childhood, picturing the way my parents’ backyard used to light up every summer evening.
Huh, the more you know.
Yinz can get ahtta tahn.
My neighbor HATES me because I’ve been converting my backyard into clover. We have fireflies, Butterflies, bees, bunnies, all sorts of wildlife. It smells beautiful, but we are an oasis amongst upper-middle class lawn zombies… Mowing, edging, pesticide spraying, weed killing zombies.
Meanwhile, I have milkweed, clover, chive, snapdragons, black eyed susans, grapes, raspberries, lilac, echinacea, chamomile, lavender, hydrangea, coreopsis, and salvia. I welcome wasps that eat pests, I buy bags of ladybugs, I compost… I’m really trying. It’s only 1/4 an acre, but I’m trying.
I dislike the mowing robots because they seem to encourage the Flatt grass only gardens and I hate them.
You can still have flowers around them yes, but the grass is mostly a plant and insect desert.
Spray your neighbors lawn with salt water
The cartago treatment
Since getting my own place I can actually have a more natural garden, removed so much concrete. So many bees! I can even hear them from inside now that they are swarming around the poppies. Sage and to some extent chive flowers got a few bees earlier in the year but those flowers have died off now.
Should take pictures of them so that in the future we can remember what bees were.
Hey, that’s pretty cool! Just make sure they’re not actually starting to build a hive inside your walls
Please keep doing it. As a poor landless peasant I celebrate your attempt to preserve some of nature. You’re buying time, which is vitally important
From 1 internet stranger to another, thank you. It really means a lot to me that people are doing what they can at their own level like you. I know how demotivating and isolating it can feel to be the only one doing the necessary work.
Lightning bugs never get costed where I live 😞 I didn’t realize they were real until my mid teens even
West Coast?
#nolawnsMine too! My lawn is slowly turning into a sea of clover, I throw wild flower seeds all over the place, and get to see all kinds of cool bugs! Hopefully they enjoy my 8 acres of natural habitat.
Incredibly based thank you for your service o7
Man im working so hard to be that yard, but its not as easy as just stop mowing!
Always on the lookout for invasives, poison ivy, tree sapplings (my yard isnt big enough to support any more trees without threatening the house), and other undesirables.
Then theres also the english ivy encroaching from the corner that I’ve pretty much given up on :/
English ivy is a tough one, but at least getting the vertical growth is a fairly easy to manage. the vertical growth is also more problematic because it is a requirement for producing berries and killing trees
It’s great that you’re helping your native plants stand against the invasives, they’re like the schoolyard bullies of the backyard.
It’s great that you’re helping your native plants stand against the invasives, they’re like the schoolyard bullies of the backyard.
I have a small, yet still growing, grove of wild flowers and grasses. I just let my side yard grow whatever it wants (except invasives).
My lack of mowing gives us a light show every summer night.
Friendly reminder that lightning bugs need tall grasses present in addition to wildflowers and leaf litter. You can also improve their survival rates by removing artificial lighting or even just setting any safety lighting (like motion activated lamps) to their shortest “on” duration. Another obvious step is to avoid pesticides.
My yard is the only reason we have frogs and dragonflies.
Ha! This is me and my yard. Let’s go!
I believe like two people in this thread lol.
Just not maintaining your shit isn’t some praiseworthy, heroic effort to benefit the community. Letting your once normal lawn grow out of control is not rewilding anymore than throwing your food scraps out the window is composting.
Sure, vast expanses of perfectly manicured fescue are not helping fireflies or other bug species, but let’s be real, knee high thistles, dandelions, and crabgrass is not providing a profound service either.
Luckily no one gives a shit what you believe.
GTFO this thread you ignorant child
And yet here you are commenting about it. Neat.
I mean, nobody asked if you believed anyone
👏👏👏
Sure, maybe. But my yard has frogs and fireflies in it and my neighbors’ don’t. That seems pretty empirical to me.
The best bit of your nonsense is where you say composting isn’t composting
I’m not maintaining most of my shit, half-assed maintaining some, and meticulously maintaining some (veg patch).
The meticulous part doesn’t do well unless the unmaintained part is left to do its thing. When people interfere it suffers. That’s how nature and biodiversity work. Leave it to do its thing and generally it works out itself. Every now and then you may need to intervene if something is becoming problematic and choking out everything else, but generally nature knows what it’s doing.
The thing that makes not maintaining your shit some great intentional effort, is the constant battle against other humans who wish to cut everything down and maintain order. If you’re a sole owner you can tell them to fuck off, but if members of your family disagree or it’s a communal space, that may be far more difficult.
Funny you chose those plants in particular though, because dandelions and various types of thistle are both recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society as being of particular aid to pollinator insects.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/science/research/plants-for-pollinators
Wow you stepped right into the point and didn’t even notice.
Technically yes, you are composting by throwing food out your window and onto your yard. Technically yes, you are reclaiming space for insects and animals by not maintaining any area outside your house. Functionally, if you want to make compost, you designate a spot or get a container and learn anything about browns, greens, necessary turning, decomposition, and so on. If you want to help insects you might get a sod cutter and turn a section of (or all) of your outdoor space, you learn about what trees or flowers are native to your area and serve that purpose, then you plant. Unless your yard was grassland originally, there’s more work to do than just let it go until code enforcement comes and tells you to stop being a turd.
The most common weed plants are indeed good for pollinators, and spread chicken bones and pizza crusts will eventually add some value to your soil. However, I don’t think they bring you any more credit than, say, helping the bugs in your neighborhood by not cleaning up your food spills or washing your laundry.
Standing around high fiving because youre the nuisance house in the neighborhood who can’t be assed to pick up after yourself is fucking weird. Apparently you (specifically) can do some research so maybe you ARE being intentional, but that is not the general vibe I ever get from the “I don’t even mow, you’re welcome neighbors!” threads like this usually devolve into.
Edit: My garden growing in my compost on my lawn with a few of our fireflies. Would make a better gif but idk how to do it.
See all that foliage around the lake? That’s why you have fireflies in your yard/desert.
Isn’t it nice? That’s been carefully selected/managed by the HOA with the help of an ecologist. An effort which I have been managing since I joined the board 8 years ago. None of the yards are just no mow because you can have both tidy lots and natural spaces. We don’t just leave it and see what happens.
Edit: What’s growing there is intentional, and generally where it’s growing (as a natural boundary and erosion control feature) is.
‘HOA Board member’ puts this entire thread of conversation into perfect context.
Why wouldn’t I be on the board? It’s mostly just my rental properties in here and the other meat farm execs.
Absolute parody.
I appreciate your viewpoint, your garden looks great, but that short grass is a barren wasteland for biodiversity. You have to work out what’s important for you, and all sides should respect that decision.
It would be possible to maintain some of it as a native wildflower meadow instead, and keep the overall length managed without using weed killers and poisons and huge amounts of water like grass requires. There’s no such thing as a native weed, but you do have to remove some individuals for diversity and soil health if they grow too large. I do this with brambles and other large light blocking species, as I don’t have the space to support them, even though they’re great for wildlife, they end up having a short term negative biodiversity impact in a small space. Even a small corner or container of native wildflower would support native pollinators and vastly improve the health and biodiversity of your entire garden. Get a solitary bee hotel, if they exist in your country. Leave a pile of sticks/logs somewhere for insects. Get a pond if you can. You already compost so that’s good. Nature isn’t meant to be tidy, neat or uniform. But I understand that not everybody can appreciate the value that could be gained from millions of gardens improving thier biodiversity, and that conforming with others and past practices and traditions may be a stronger factor for some people to want to keep their gardens neat. You’re clearly a good gardener, but no wildlife conservationist, you can have both though. It’s not about being intentionally messy, it’s about creating conditions for wildlife to be invited in. Those fully overgrown gardens are probably great for nature, but you are right that they have to consider the size of the space and the proximity of neighbours before doing that, and not being considerate of that can make them a bit of an asshole.
