Going Native!

My family and I were honored this past weekend at the William & Mary Do One Thing (DOT) Sustainable campaign thanks to the DOT Facebook pledge that I made to get my free water bottle.

My Facebook Pledge is this: "To identify every plant on my small 1/2 acre property. Remove it if it's invasive or non-native, and plant all native plants. I will also advertise and preach this to all of my privet loving neighbors! Native plants attract native bugs and native birds."

It all started when Lorri Sutter, a grad student at VIMS, dangled a fancy, free aluminum drinking water bottle in front of me! Then, she showed me the DOT pledge deal where you make a pledge on the DOT facebook page to get one.

Apparently, out of 1000 DOTs, mine was in the top 10! This surprised me since there were so many great pledges, like a guy who installed solar panels and calculated that he is producing 40% of the energy his family uses, etc.

Anyhow, I took my family to the DOT/Earth Day festival at William & Mary where we were honored on stage and given a sweet T-shirt and Frisbees!

Rowan Lockwood is the very dedicated W&M geology professor who was the first to contact me and give me the great news. She also invited me to the event. I invited my family since we would be coming directly from a T-ball game, which was actually canceled due to the threat of rain.

Erin Ryan (not shown in the picture) is the law professor who actually handed me the gifts!





Also, before the whole thing W. Taylor Reveley III the William & Mary president read the Lorax, with the real Lorax present! It was very entertaining.



Oh and when I spoke with Rowan before the ceremony, she said that Cathy Lewis, on NPR's Hearsay recognized my facebook post. So, this is pretty cool stuff, which means that now I need to produce!

I chose my pledge because I felt like I needed to pledge something new. I've been reducing, reusing, and recycling. I used cloth grocery bags, take navy showers, turn off lights constantly, weather proofed the house, etc. Plus, we moved into our new place in Seaford in the fall of 08. Since then, we've been fixing up house stuff and until this spring not doing anything in the yard. Oh, btw, we moved to York County mainly so that we can both be closer to work. We commute 220 less miles per week as a result!

All I can say right now is that I used my lawn tractor to pull a huge privet piece by piece by the roots. It was a lot of fun because every time the strap that I had tied from my little tractor to the privit tightened at 4 miles per hour, one of three things would happen. 1. I would come to a dead stop, 2. the strap would snap and break, 3. the privet would come up (most likely).

Here's a picture of where the privet was. The bush next to the water that is much relieved is a wax myrtle. According to Jim Perry the privet is also allelopathic. In other words they emit biochemicals that influence the growth of nearby plants, not for the better.


Also, complements of Jim Perry, I've planted 28 black choke cherries along the fence on the south side of the property and two native hibiscus plants (Hibiscus palustris) near the mailbox.



Exceptions for food:
Finally, I will admit that I've made an exception for food plants for the following reasons: 1. Growing your food on your own property is a great, sustainable way to reduce the fossil fuel needed to transport food to the table. 2. I don't think any food plants will take off and be invasive like kudzu, even if they're not native. 3. Michael Pollan said that we should all have vegetable gardens! In my garden I've planted tomatoes(S. America), zucchini (native), eggplant(India), cucumber(western N. America), tomatillos(Central and South America), cayenne peppers(native, I think) and basil (Asia). Gosh, I guess I should have planted some corn!