“At Home with Nature”
Nature-Friendly Practices You Can Adopt for Your Yard

OCT’s “At Home with Nature” initiative gives homeowners information and tools to practice nature-friendly landscaping. You’ll learn about native plants—a vital component of healthy home landscapes that provide food and nesting habits for our beautiful local birds and critters. By encouraging native trees, shrubs, and perennials, and removing invasive, non-native species, we can avoid using pesticides and thus help pollinators thrive. Smaller lawns that can be mowed and watered less often are part of the solution, too. All of these practices will help you save time and money and reduce the use of water—our most precious shared resource.

OCT is integrating “At Home with Nature” principles into many of our public programs: guided walks, presentations by experts, educational materials, and other resources offered at no cost to year-round and seasonal residents of Orleans. And we look forward to working with local partners on more educational programs. Protecting nature in our community is up to all of us—and it starts at home. Please join us!

The OCT Office Demonstration Garden

Installed spring 2023 at OCT’s headquarters on Route 28, the Demonstration Garden serves as an example for homeowners hoping to make their landscapes more nature-friendly. Volunteers helped the Trust transform turf lawn into pollinator gardens and native meadow habitat.

We began with the removal of three sections of the lawn, and a large patch of rugosa rose, an aggressive nonnative (and very thorny!) rose. We filled in two areas with gallon-size plants and smaller plugs and spread a seed mix over the third. Plants included the familiar black-eyed Susan, common and butterfly milkweed, and goldenrods, but there are over 30 species of grasses and flowering perennials. See the full plan and plant list.

Several native shrubs were transplanted from the Putnam Farm Conservation Area this past fall, salvaged before agricultural plots were expanded on that Town-owned property. A diversity of plants encourages a diversity of insects, and it also means different bloom times, which is good for the pollinators and good for human admirers, too!

We’ll use our office property as a teaching tool, adding educational signage to the garden, and future initiatives might include a rain garden to manage runoff from the parking lot and invasive plant control in the surrounding forest. All such efforts will involve the community to provide knowledge that residents can apply to their own home habitats.

Pollinator Pathway Cape Cod

At Home with Nature aligns closely with Pollinator Pathway Cape Cod (PPCC), a collaborative effort on which OCT is a founding member. OCT has been an active promoter of PPCC’s principles, and we registered the Demonstration Garden on the PPCC website. The site lists the OCT garden among several pollinator-friendly public gardens that people can visit, hopefully for inspiration for their own home gardens. PPCC also curated a Cape Cod Native Plant List.