Areas:
- ⬅️ Front west
- ➡️ ◀️ Front east left
- ➡️ ▶️Front east right
- 🛣️ Right of way
Our garden features around 50 species of native plants, mostly flowers and several lawn alternative species. We enjoy the low maintenance aspect of established plants and like seeing all the insects and birds!
Some areas look more intentional than others, but our approach in general is to let things grow and then move/remove what is in the way or if we don’t like it. The garden is a continuous work in progress. Every year we learn new things.
Finch eating seeds in the winter
Dragonfly on spotted bee balm
Front east left
This area contains plants from the “Pollinator garden kit”, acquired at an Ottawa County Conservation District native plant sale and planted as plugs in the spring of 2025. Some of the flowers bloomed that same year!
We divided the kit into two parts and planted a chokeberry in the middle.
Species:
Front east right
This area contains plants from the “Pollinator garden kit”, acquired at an Ottawa County Conservation District native plant sale and planted as plugs in the spring of 2025. Some of the flowers bloomed that same year!
We divided the kit into two parts and planted a chokeberry in the middle.
Species:
Front west
This area contains plants from the “Pollinator patch kit”, planted as plugs in the fall of 2024. It’s taking a while to fill out since the soil was quite heavily disturbed by a sewer pipe installation and is very sandy. However, a lot of volunteer plants started appearing in spring 2026. The milkweed grew there on its own and is a great natural addition!
Species:
Lawn alternatives
Prairie dropseed
Purple lovegrass
Little bluestem
Plains oval sedge
Pennsylvania sedge
Right of way
This area contains plants from the “Short and showy” seed mix (the 500 sq ft amount). The area was sown in the fall of 2024 and again in the spring of 2025. About 19 0f 46 species are growing. They don’t seem particularly short, maybe the soil is too rich.
