During a Tellico Village Garden Club meeting Thursday at the Yacht Club, Justine Cucchiara, park manager with Seven Islands State Birding Park in Kodak, provided tips for turning yards into certified wildlife habitats.
“When people are coming to look at homes, they look at everything, including the garden entrances,” Carol Fenton, one of the meeting facilitators, said. “Our garden captains play a very important role in keeping everything well-maintained.”
During her presentation, Cucchiara said park officials are working to provide an outdoor trail system for human and critter visitors.
“The purpose of this presentation is we have identified our mission,” Cucchiara said. “What we need is to have more habitat in our yards.”
Certification areas detailed included food, water, cover and places to raise young animals.
Cucchiara suggested planting native vegetation to save water, provide low maintenance and support local ecology.
The cover aspect includes providing protection from weather and predators through the use of bird boxes, which can be obtained online or in stores.
She recommended mounting bird boxes to poles to prevent predators, including snakes and raccoons, from getting inside.
Cucchiara also suggested building bat boxes.
“One little brown bat can eat 1,000 mosquitoes and other insects in just one night,” Cucchiara said.
Another type of home to consider implementing into the backyard includes bee hives.
“There are 4,000 native varieties of bees in Tennessee,” Cucchiara said. “None of them make honey. We are inviting other good critters into our yards to get rid of the bad critters.”
To become certified to house a wildlife habitat at home, Cucchiara said two of the following must be in place, including a wooded area, a bramble patch, a cave or evergreens, along with other options.
When it comes to raising young, Cucchiara said butterflies need to find milkweed in order to complete their life cycle.
“In keeping with the native plants garden idea, the Tellico Village Garden Cub is following up on a previous speaker, Bill Reeves, who has been spearheading the ‘Save the Monarch campaign’ with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency,” Tim Pyles, co-chairman of programming, said in an email correspondence. “Through their project, they are distributing seeds for plants that help to encourage monarch butterflies to stay and reproduce in our area. The Garden Club expects to have seed packets available in April to assist with this project.”
Cucchiara spoke about implementing earth sustainable practices such as mulching, reducing lawn areas, being water-wise, gardening with native plants and removing invasive plants such as English ivy or bamboo.
“Not only can you make your own neighborhood a certified wildlife habitat,” Cucchiara said. “But all of Tellico Village could be a certified neighborhood. There’s a neighborhood in the Knoxville area that created a certified neighborhood. This is fun. This is not an imposition.”
For more information on making certified wildlife habitat lawn, visit www.nwf.org.
Also during the Garden Club meeting, members learned that the Loudon County Education Foundation will be holding a garden tour fundraiser April 23, which includes a luncheon with guest speaker Neil Denton. Cost is $25. The club annual garden walk will take place May 19. The tour will include five to seven gardens located throughout Tellico Village, including the Kahite neighborhood.
