Once upon a time, the land you tend was stewarded by others – or by nature itself. Learn how to assess your site and the plants that will grow best there.
Wild Ones is an excellent resource for this sort of thing. Find a nearby chapter and they can supply you with wildflowers that are native to your local ecology, grown from seeds collected in that habitat.
My lawn has gone through a journey and it’s been getting healthier each year.
I pull the dandelions which aren’t native or good for bees, because they totally took over my lawn.
Since doing that I’ve got a bunch of wild strawberries taking over a section and a ton of very happy and fluffy white cover. The strawberry is kind of annoying because it creates shoots into the garden, but I like it, so I just trim the shoots. The rabbits kind of help.
There’s still mostly grass, but the big dead spots are healed, rabbits are happy and not killing the garden, and there are tons of bees (we got cat mint, the bees love it)
I think this is an underrated way to get started. Remove aggressive weeds, consider seeding in a few native species that can coexist with the existing lawn and see what happens.
It’s even better to plant trees and shrubs to create more 3D habitat but just increasing the diversity of the lawn can have a positive impact.
