Healing the Land

Restoring habitat is not limited to wilderness preservation. Significantly more biodiversity can also be had by improving landscapes around our built environments. Many private residences are prime opportunities for owners to boldly transform lawns and lots into small wonderlands teeming with beneficial and beautiful beings. Conservation landscaping is a discipline that encourages such transformations and offers tools and guidelines to empower practitioners.

Photo by Jayscratch

The suburban living experiment has left occupants with half-finished properties. Having met human needs for shelter and infrastructure, builders leave restoration of the remaining devastated environment largely to homeowners. Planting turf is but a temporary salve on a bare wound. The soil under turf will not be anywhere near as healthy as it once was or could be again if covered with deep-rooted plants.

Turf, as much trouble as it can be to maintain, can also be very comely. More often, unfortunately, lawns are a less attractive mixture of weeds and uneven patches of turfgrass. Conservation landscaping doesn't call for eradication of lawns, but discourages their dominance on a property. Over time, homeowners are encouraged to transform the less fecund areas of their property with plantings that can supply many functions such as insectary, water infiltration, and curb appeal.

For those living in the Chesapeake Bay region, some tools that are available to make garden design and plant selection fast and fun are the Conservation Landscape Design Tool of the Anne Arundel Watershed Stewards Academy, or for a more step-by-step design approach, try the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay's version (also available through the Chesapeake Native Plant Center). I did a design, and wanting a more comprehensive set of native plants to select from, alternated between the tool's suggestions and those plants that met my more precise specifications at the Ladybird Johnson Native Plant Database. If nothing else, the exercise has helped me recognize a few more native plants.

Fields (of Fire?)

Like a life-sized game of Stratego, the lines are being drawn between pastoral landscapes and sprawling development in Maryland. With the enactment of renewed Program Open Space (POS) legislation that expands and reclaims some of the legacy funding to create agricultural and conservation easements in perpetuity, landowners who want to dedicate some of their holdings to posterity have a little help through POS.

Photo by Jean  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Quite sensibly, the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Program targets prime farmland and the Maryland Rural Legacy Program similarly targets areas that have high value to local ecology. For Calvert County, the latter includes an area along the Patuxent River north of Huntingtown, the area between Prince Frederick and Port Republic, and most of the Patuxent River side of the peninsula south of St. Leonard. Statewide, the targeted ecological areas form a semblance of wildlife corridors that could offer resilience to a multitude of species in this time of climate chaos.

Another recent governmental move to stymie loss of agricultural land in Calvert County was the limiting of transferable development rights (TDRs) to farmland, as opposed to the former practice of setting aside residential lots, such as the one I merged to my place of residence at minimal cost a couple of years ago.

Another factor favoring a regrarian Maryland is a faltering economy driven, in the main, by world population exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. While suburban sprawl is projected to continue apace in our state, economic disruptions and declining resources will, at least, temper growth in the coming decades.

In fact, do you see what's happening in Europe with the wave of refugees flowing out of the Middle East? That is what our countrysides could experience in a few years with waves of unemployed, starving urbanites looking for sustenance outside of dried up food deserts. Project Open Space funds might be best spent on building campgrounds in preparation for such fiascos.

Agricultural land preservation probably won't be able to keep pace against greed and Gaia, so your best insurance at this point may be found among those who have been planning for catastrophe.  The PrepCon this weekend in St. Leonard coincides with Calvert Green Living, which I have already signed-up for. Either event may be a good use of your time if you are concerned about surviving the future.

Chickening Out

If there is one food species other than crab that Maryland is known for, it is chickens.  Purdue, Tyson, and others run vast chicken farms on the Eastern Shore.  If one wants to raise chickens in their backyard, however, that can be problematic.  The state only requires that poultry keepers register in case of an avian flu outbreak.  Counties have their own rules.  Calvert county only limits the number of birds you can have if you are raising them as pets, rather than for production.  The hangup occurs with homeowners associations.  A good number of homes are part of HOA's, including our own.  I have searched the rules for several of Calvert county's HOA's and found that one thing they have in common is prohibition of poultry and livestock.

In a state that prides itself on supplying a good deal of the country's chicken meat, this is singular. The reasons may be that odor could reach neighbors, or noise, or disease.  These rules are not in step with the times, however, since cities these days commonly allow backyard chickens.  The list of concerns can be addressed with rules similar to the one concerning barking dogs - if a neighbor complains, the burden is on the purported offender to make it right.  Disease is only a concern insofar as a neighbor or their pet comes in contact with an infected bird.  This would not be a problem since the chickens would be fenced in. I think the real reason chickens aren't allowed is that HOA's still think they live (as the Monkee's put it so long ago) "in status symbol land."  Get over it!  Suburbia, (much less exurbia) was a huge mistake and a trap if you persist in the notion that you can escape the problems of the world by commuting out of it.

My daughter-in-law's parents in Greece claim to be ready for the difficulties ahead, in part because they raise vegetables and chickens.  I envy them.  They may fare better than us unless our HOA or future municipality wakes up to the very real possibility that these "good times" won't roll forever.