Sustainable Garden Tour Coming in June

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Virtual experiences from each of this year’s incredible garden tour sites are available on the NVSWCD website.

The 2020 Sustainable Garden Tour will be held VIRTUALLY this year throughout the month of June.

For this year’s Sustainable Garden Tour, Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District (NVSWCD) is partnering with the Fairfax Food Council Urban Agriculture Workgroup to highlight front-yard gardens and edible landscapes. You’ll also see garden tour favorites like rain gardens, native plant landscaping, rain barrels, backyard wildlife habitat, composting and more. Local residents open their gardens and share their experiences landscaping with natural resources in mind. Hidden treasures and verdant landscapes await you!

Virtual experiences from each of this year’s incredible garden tour sites will be added throughout the month of June. Check the website for more information and a tentative schedule, or follow NVSWCD on Facebook to see garden tour materials as they are released.

View Resources for Sustainable Gardeners.

For more information or to nominate a future site, please email NVSWCD or call 703-324-1423, TTY 711.

Firescaping-A Virtual Training, May 14th

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Zoom training
Thursday, 14 May 2020
10am – Noon
Please contact Holly Campbell for link and password.

Wildfire season is fast approaching. This is occurring amid reports of the highest temperatures on record in some parts of the country and the continued megadrought in the southwestern U.S.- which is reported as one of the worst droughts in 1200 years! As well, extreme weather and other factors continue to fuel tragic wildfires every year across the country. For these reasons and more, it’s imperative that communities better prepare for wildfires. A new USDA-NIFA funded training was developed recently, Preparing for Wildfires with Firescaping, to teach naturalists and gardeners about fire-resistant landscaping so, through their outreach and education efforts, they can help reduce their communities’ wildfire risk.

This free, Zoom training on fire-resistant landscaping, or firescaping, will teach naturalists about what firescaping is and how to implement it in their communities. Specifically, participants will learn about fire history and behavior and ways to prevent home ignition through understanding plant flammability and firescaping design. The presentation will also address ways to maintain wildlife habitat with firescaping. This Zoom training will include presentations, “interactive” activities, and a discussion period.

Speaker: Holly Campbell, Public Service Assistant, University of Georgia, Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources. Project Manager for the USDA-NIFA Smith-Lever funded project, Preparing for Wildfires with Firescapin

Conservation Advocacy 101 for HOAs and Condo Associations

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Do you live in an HOA or Condo Association? Have you been thinking about how you can better our natural world through work in your community and/or on the common property of your association? Maybe you’ve been considering a tree planting or tree replacement policy, thinking about better lawn maintenance practices, or wanting to install a pollinator garden.

Join Renee Grebe through the Audubon Naturalist Society (ANS) and attend their Conservation Advocacy 101 Workshops. They’ll be holding this two times – pick whichever date works best for you. They will cover some key introductory advocacy skills like identifying issues and ideas for solutions, researching and communicating ideas, developing an action plan, talking to decision-makers, and building community partnerships to broaden support for your issue.

You’ll get a chance to think about your own community, begin developing your own action plan, and participate in breakout discussions. Please RSVP to ensure you get a Zoom link prior to the webinar.

Thursday May 14th – 10am – 11:30am – https://anshome.org/events/advocacy-101-for-hoas-may2020/
Wednesday June 17th – 7pm – 8:30pm – https://anshome.org/events/advocacy-101-for-hoas-june2020/

ANS is asking for a nominal donation of $5-$15 to support their conservation work for this webinar, but it will be worth your while! There is much to learn about a long-term successful approach to driving change locally. This webinar will be geared toward community associations, but the skills are translatable broadly for advocacy work you seek to do on your own.

Bird Behavior Course – Webinar

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With: Bill Young 
When: May 20, 21, 27, 28; June 3, 4, 10, 11, 7:00 to 8:00 PM
Fee: $40 for all sessions
Register here

Join Audubon Society of Northern Virginia for 8 one-hour sessions examining a variety of bird behaviors, including avian feeding, reproduction, migration, visual and auditory displays and more. Each session will feature video, audio and photographs to help people learn about the many aspects of bird behavior. Classes will draw on the knowledge Bill has gained from birding locally and on all seven continents.

Instructor: Bill Young is a writer who lives in Arlington. He is the author of The Fascination of Birds: From the Albatross to the Yellowthroat (Dover, 2014). He is the co-creator of the MPNature.com website, which contains information about birds, plants and other aspects of the natural history at Monticello Park in Alexandria. Bill also makes nature videos, and his YouTube channel has had over half a million views.

Sustainable Landscaping Solutions for Faith Communities, June 14

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When: June 14, 2:00-4:30 pm

Where: Either via videoconference or St. Peter’s in the Woods, Fairfax Station, VA

Join Plant NoVa Natives as they discuss how and why faith communities are using their places of worship to demonstrate stewardship of the Earth. Learn more.

Native Bee Species Ebb and Flow with Native Plants Bloom: A Year’s Calendar with Sam Droege, watch webinar

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Zoom Video Conference
Held Thursday, 14 May 2020
Watch recorded presentation

All of our nearly 500 species of native bees are dependent on pollen to feed their young. No flowers, no bees. Like flowers, each bee species has its season. During a bee’s flight time they are often dependent on the pollen from only a small group of plants, ignoring the rest.

What you plant has consequences for the bees you support on your property. Travel through a year in the region, tracking the flowers and their bees, or…the bees and their flowers (depending on your point of view!)

Sam Droege has been spent most of his career at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. He has coordinated the North American Breeding Bird Survey Program, developed the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, the BioBlitz, Cricket Crawl, and FrogwatchUSA programs and worked on the design and evaluation of monitoring programs. Currently he is developing an inventory and monitoring program for native bees, online identification guides for North American bees at www.discoverlife.org, and with Jessica Zelt reviving the North American Bird Phenology Program. His group maintains high resolution photographs of insects and other macro natural history objects at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/.

Continuing education credit available for master naturalists.

Create Helpful Habitat with Native Planting, Virtual Learning

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Looking for a reason to get out into nature?  How about making your property more wildlife-friendly by adding plants native to Virginia?  Find out why this is important during this webinar hosted by Audubon Society of Northern Virginia’s Audubon at Home program. The webinar was recorded on Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, 2020, and is also is in celebration of our partnership with Green Muslims during National Arab-American Heritage Month.

Watch the webinar! Master naturalists earn one hour of continuing education credit.

Natives Knoll Project

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By Sherry McDonald

Don’t you love it when a plan comes together? In this case a ‘plan and a planting’.

Sally Berman knee deep in the knoll

In September 2019 the FMN Communications team gave a shout out to FMN membership that South Run Recreational Center wished to improve the health and heartiness of a barren, unattractive knoll on the center’s grounds. I became a ‘first-responder’ to that call and I am excited to report that shovels, hoes, and rakes are in full swing and the patient is recovering nicely.

I worked on this project with both Sally Berman, Lead Landscaping Volunteer and Joseph (Kurt) Lauer, Volunteer Coordinator for the Park Authority at South Run and we became fast friends. Sally mentioned to me it was as much an education as it was fun for her. The project demonstrated to Sally the benefits of native plantings and I was able to exposit how emergent processes are created between native insects and birds and animals and even the soil, that are not as viable when incorporating non-natives only.

Natives Knoll in Work

The goals of the project were to transform a weedy, unsightly knoll into an attractive landscape and stabilize the soil to prevent erosion using native plants.With guidance from Matt Bright who runs the non-profit Earth Sangha (which grows native plants for our area) a plan was developed and South Run RECenter purchased more than 90 native plants for this project.  Even with the uncertainty of consistent help due to COVID-19 restrictions, volunteers (high school students, church family and friends) have been working to create the “Natives Knoll”, the whole time following social distancing guidelines. 

Sherry McDonald

As the project nears completion I reflect on how therapeutic gardening has always been for me and how it is a haleness that Sally shares as well. The hope is that when the park re-opens people will stop by to view this emerging Natives Knoll and increase their awareness to the benefits of native plant-scapes. Future steps and goals are to incorporate plant signage and potentially qualify the project as a certified Audubon at Home wildlife sanctuary. As the knoll attracts birds, pollinators and human benefactors, perhaps some of the latter will be inspired to join our landscaping team to share in the knoll’s continued growth.