251 Hope Rd

Our yard is comprised of 4 eco-scapes.

We have our veggie garden that doesn't use pesticides or chemical fertilizers. We use rain water and home-made compost. We keep pests away with marigolds and nasturtium and a healthy bird population. We love when we see lady bugs and other predatory insects that also help with pests.

Next up is our milkweed garden. It sprung up out of nowhere one year and seeing it kicked off our passion for creating a pollinator friendly habitat. We've expanded it to include a butterfly bush, yarrow, and some other flowers but are now trying to focus on getting more natives installed. We learned the hard way last year how aphids can negatively impact our milkweed, but in the years prior we would colllect a few monarch eggs and released the butterflies which was so fun. We now keep gloves handy for yard walks to remove aphids by hand.

The end of our yard is a meadow mostly shaded by large over arching trees, and is chock full of white aster in late summer. Bittersweet vine, virginia creeper, poison ivy, and other invasives are sneaking in so we're hoping to tackle those and replace them with shade loving native ground cover. In June and July this part of the yard sparkles with fireflies because we don't rake and we don't mow there. The night time light pollution from the school across the street is a major bummer.

The last zone of our yard is our pride and joy - the wild flower garden. We used a Rhode Island specific mix from Amercian Meadows to get started two years ago, but are planning on adding more keystone natives. We added a small dragon fly pond that's seemingly been a success as we can see a myriad of them annhilating the mosquito population - haven't been bitten once so far this year!

We have a stream down in a valley behind our house (Hope Furnace) which has become a highway for other wildlife to end up in our yard. We've seen everything from heron, deer, coyoytes, rabbits, turkeys, groundhogs, we've even seen short tail weasels once. We take care of our birds, bugs, chipmunks and squirrels. While we do have plenty of grass, our goal is to eliminate as much as we can with an ever expanding functional, native, pollinator friendly gardens.