Plant NOVA Natives – February 2018 Update
Newsletter article – Please see the short article at the bottom of this update and send it out via any newsletter or social media you can think of.
Second Annual Grand Meeting of the Partners: February 27 – Over forty organizations constitute the Plant NOVA Natives partnership already, and we welcome any private, public, or non-profit group to join us in this collective action movement to create a Northern Virginia that supports wildlife. Details about the leadership meeting are here.
Spring volunteer calendar – If you know anything about why native plants are a wonderful thing, you know more than 99% of the general public and are qualified to staff a table at a public event. We are listing opportunities on our sign-up sheet (as well as on our website calendar) and will add more as we learn about them.
You ARE Plant NOVA Natives! Please consider being our contact person to arrange and staff a table at your local fair, festival, workplace event, etc. You supply the time, we supply the materials and ideas for effective outreach. (There are lots of other ways to help as well.) Let us know if you have an idea for an event.
📷Moolah helps, too – For every $20 you donate, we can reach about a 1,000 people on Facebook. This is an amazing bargain, as advertising goes. Bur our goal is to convince 100,000 people to actually plant a native plant, so we need a lot of ads!
Couriers needed for two days – Let’s rotate the job of moving our exhibits between libraries on the last and first days of the month. Email plantnovantives@gmail.com to sign up for a pair of back-to-back days. We have reserved display cases in one or two libraries each month for the next year.
Matching grants from Earth Sangha – This grant is designed to help citizen-led small-scale restoration efforts get the local-ecotype native plants they need, at a discount. No project is too small, whether it’s a community-led invasive pull, or a larger project with multiple partners.
Is your zip code listed here? If not, please let us know if you could submit our monthly newsletter article to your neighborhood NextDoor.com site. It’s free to everyone, and it’s a great way to reach people who have never heard of native plants. (The correlation between NextDoor neighborhoods and zip codes is not exact, but it should be good enough to avoid overlap in most cases).
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Some upcoming events:
February 10: Homeowner Rain Garden Workshop 9:30 am. Fairfax.
February 11 Living in the Liberated Landscape: Lecture by Landscape Architect & Author Larry Weaner 2:00 pm. Manassas Park.
February 22 Gardening for Butterflies and Other Pollinators 7:30 pm. Arlington.
March 7 Braddock District Tree Forum: How to Protect and Preserve Trees in our Yards and Neighborhoods. 7:30-9:30 pm. Burke.
March 10 Annual Gardening Symposium 8:30 – 4:00. Leesburg.
April 12 Earth Care Forum at Fairlington Presbyterian Church. 6:30 pm. Alexandria.
This month’s newsletter article – Please reprint or link to these articles on social media and in any newsletter you can – work, faith community, HOA, club, PTA, etc. Best of all, link to them on our blog, which includes previous articles in this series.
Save the Planet for $28.90
Would you like to help the birds and butterflies but have a limited budget for landscaping? What the living world needs right now from Northern Virginians is for us to plant native plants, and lots of them. Luckily, we can obtain seedlings of several kinds of trees and shrubs at a bargain price - or even for free.
📷The familiar Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis) is a lovely example of the opportunity afforded by planting native tree seedlings. Like all trees, transplanting a Redbud when it is very young results in a healthy, full-grown specimen at least as quickly as if you spent $75 on a larger specimen. (In fact, this species in particular objects to being transplanted when it is older.) The result is not only a lavender mist of ephemeral beauty but a source of food for pollinators in April and for songbirds in the fall and winter.
There are some tricks to planting seedlings. The Plant NOVA Natives website has advice for success and a list of where to find sales and giveaways in your area. In many jurisdictions, now is the time to place your order. For instance, you can get 16 bare-root seedlings for only $28.90 from the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District. Check out our video for a preview.
Plant NOVA Natives is a joint marketing campaign of over forty private, public, and non-profit organizations and hundreds of individuals. Our mission is to educate the community and to promote the benefits to water quality and natural habitat of planting beautiful Northern Virginia natives, through the efforts of committed volunteers using multimedia outreach and events, and by working with local growers and sellers of native plants. All are welcome to participate in this collective action movement.
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