Darlene

Your grassland is beautiful! That's great that you have offered your space as an experience for summer campers. Who knows maybe you launched some future biologists, naturalists and gardeners.

Well we have clover growing in part of our front yard. To my knowledge no one planted it. I can't answer its value to the birds but can share the bees absolutely love the clover. When I go out onto our property in the Spring and Summer passing through the clover on the way to our vegetable garden, the bees are always present. I don't worry  about the getting stinged by them as they tend to be non-aggressive. We have both domesticated bees and native bees. I'd like to have bee hives but our area has a growing population of black bears and even our local bee association said hive keeping isn't going to be possible in our area due to the bears. So, I buy honey at our local co-op, a win for everyone. I have also enjoyed this class, especially the links to resources.

I have three rock gardens created by the previous homeowner. Over the years, I have tried to plant perennials, however, in the process of this course, I am inclined to pull up one of them that has a number random volunteer plants including tree seedlings. The area is last summer was heavily overgrown.Part of the overgrowth is due to some native mountain mint that I bought at botanical garden sale and planted a couple of years ago. I have pulled some up but the mountain mint is a vigorous reproducer. One of my other concerns is that there are two large rocks that have a top larger than the bottom and are perfect for snakes to inhabit or at least I am imagining so. We have removed several copperheads over the years. I'm envisioning removing a couple of knockout roses  and a beauty berry planted three years ago that could become a focal point in the garden. My questions what are the best plants, where can I buy these natives etc. I will use some of the links in this course to assist with this information as well as I sent an email to a native gardening group in my area and am hoping to hear from them.

It was interesting to find out the specifics of my ecoregion, I'm located in the Eastern Temperate Forest, South Eastern, USA Plains, Piedmont< Southern Inner Piedmont. Commonly the area is referred to as the Upstate, Piedmont Mountain Region. Our area has a heavy clay soil consistency, in fact in dry periods the soil can be so hard that you need a pick ax or gas motor cultivator to break it up. Raised beds are popular around here for gardening flower or vegetable. There is also a lot of large granite in our area and apparently, we are on a granite that extends from one of the local mountains. We tend to have small earthquakes which generally are not noticeable. My home area is bounded by pine and deciduous forests, thus our cleared area has a number of these trees: pines, hickory, oak, dogwood, redbud and poplar (tulip) trees. Blueberries and Blackberries grow quite well in the acidic soil.  As a result of this course I am thinking of adding some winterberry for the birds and purchasing another beauty berry. We have kept the front lawn area as an open space. I have no idea what kind of grass I have but there are plenty of dandelions, violets and other wild flowers in the spring.

The key that was most surprising to me was the distance from the feeders to the windows. We have an area with three native dogwoods and several flowering shrubs among them. There are three feeders including a suet feeder. Over the years we have noticed that resident birds do fine but visiting migratory birds sometimes have trouble with window strikes. We purchased decals that are basically invisible to us but break up the window for the the birds. Window strikes are notably less. Out back, I believe we need to either add or move feeders closer to the  forest shrubs and trees as the birds tend to grab and fly to the shrubs and mountain laurel to eat. We have an increased presence of hawks in our area and that may be impacting both the bird and chip monk and squirrel population