Endangered Gopher Tortoise in Florida
We’ve already talked about why your garden is so important and what Ecosystem Gardening means, but in the spirit of fun, let’s take a look at the best reasons NOT to be an Ecosystem Gardener.
- You really LOVE your lawn mower. You’d rather spend the time pushing it back and forth or riding around in circles in your yard than any other way you could spend your time.
- You’ve really embraced the ideas of the “RAID Generation” where you know that every minor inconvenience in your life can be eliminated by grabbing a can of some chemical and spraying your way to a completely happy and fulfilled life.
- You’re thrilled that all those chemicals that you add to your lawn keep it the perfect shade of green throughout the growing season. These chemicals run off into local streams and kill the organisms that can’t tolerate these chemicals, but that’s not your problem, right? It makes you really happy that not only are your local streams devoid of life, but these chemicals accumulate and do more damage on their way to larger bodies of water, like the Gulf of Mexico that has a dead zone larger than the state of New Jersey.
- You’re happy that we have national and state parks where you might see some wildlife while you’re destroying those habitats while riding your ATV. But wildlife has NO place in your perfect garden.
- You’re so excited about the new Walmart that’s being built right up the street, even though they had to destroy the breeding grounds for an endangered turtle to build it. There’s always more turtles, right?
This list is by no means complete, but I’m hoping you will play along and add to it in the comments below.
Yes, I’m being sarcastic and joking around with you a little bit. But it’s sometimes a good thing to look at some of our views through the lens of humor.
So what do you think? Do you have some other fun reasons why we should NOT use an Ecosystem Gardening approach in our wildlife gardens?
© 2010, Carole Brown. All rights reserved.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
You want to be like everyone else and everyone else is planting English ivy and oriental bittersweet and all the other most hated plants.
Ha, this is funny! Yes, and you love spending hours each week trying to keep that ivy from pulling down your trees or growing through the siding on your house.
Your sterile blossomed green coneflower is much nicer in a garden than a native blooming wildflower “weed”. No matter they don’t provide food to the butterflies or any other pollinator. New is always better in the plant world.
Lisa´s last blog ..“It’ll never grow.”
All those new cultivars have to be much better! It’s so cool that scientists create them. They must be so smart. And I don’t want any BEES in my garden, anyway. That’s what RAID is for. LOL. Thanks for playing along, Lisa!
You want to pretend that you live in the tropical rainforest and have unlimited water for your moisture loving plants and sea of green front yard, even though you live in the desert, high plains, or other arid places of the Southwest/Rocky Mountains. After all, when “they” made those watering restrictions, “they” were thinking of someone else’s yard besides yours. The birds, wildlife and insects won’t really miss that water when it’s gone from the rivers, streams and lakes.
Kathy Green´s last blog ..Spring Cleaning in the Garden is not always what you think
Trees shed leaves and are so messy! Leaves everywhere! Better to have a mile of high maintenance Bermuda grass and then spray the daylights out of it with pesticides since it’s where Japanese beetles breed.
Karyl´s last blog ..Woodland Vegetable Gardener