Beginnings

Hi, I live in Florida and I just had my yard certified by the National Wildlife Federation. I am pretty proud of that accomplishment, but most of the credit goes to my 12 year old son. Back in March he decided he really wanted to build pond for his science project, and we started researching the net. Most places told up how to keep the frogs and the wildlife out of the pond, but that is not what he wanted for his pond. While researching we found information on ponds and wildlife at the National Wildlife site and realized that we could certify our yard with some work. We started on a butterfly garden by putting in beds with flowers and as many native plants as we could find. We put in some bird feeders, we already had a few large trees. My son is a reptile lover so we had to build a brush pile for our anoles and black racers to hide. Step by step we made our yard a lot more friendly to wildlife, including putting a few bird baths in the yard. We started seeing more butterflies, we had host plants and started getting caterpillars on the plants and watched them turn into butterflies. More on the garden later