Monday, November 14, 2011

Backyard Habitat Certification

In August 2010, Jeff signed us up for the Audubon Society of Portland's Backyard Habitat Certification Program. But once we got planning and remodeling the house, the landscape and habitat certification project got put on the back burner. It didn't make much sense to spend effort planting plants that were just going to get damaged or destroyed during the remodel.

But now that we're back on the landscaping projects, Sharon revisited Audubon's certification requirements yesterday to see what we had left to do to qualify. Here are the requirements, lifted from their website.
Since we plan to focus on food production as much as possible, we probably won't reach the Platinum Certification level of 50% of the property being planted in natives, but we are planning to do all the rest of the requirements for Platinum Certification. It actually looks like we just need to put in bird/bat/bee houses and a water source, and we're there. And we could use some more yard cleanup to make it pretty; the huge dirt piles are not attractive.

We still have a lot more work we want to do on the yard, but likely most of it will wait until spring.

2 comments:

  1. If it makes you feel more virtuous, bees love bare dirt. :)

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  2. How very cool to have such a program!

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