Alexander County Native Plant Sale
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Collapse ▲The N.C. Cooperative Extension – Alexander County Center will be hosting a native plant sale September 14–15, 2022 outside the Alexander County Services Building (151 W Main Ave, Taylorsville). Pre-order your plants by September 12th by going to the following link: Order Form
We will be purchasing plants for various site conditions from our friends at Carolina Native Nursery in Burnsville, NC!
You may ask, “Why should I plant natives?” or “I have enough to manage with my lawn alone, why add something else to my plate?” Native plants are amazing for you and for the natural world around you. Because these plants are native to our area and have evolved to be adaptive to our soils and climate, they are actually a lot easier to care for in the landscape. Most native plants require “no babying”, using less water and fertilizers than many ornamentals, not to mention they are BEAUTIFUL!
Because our way of life is urbanized now more than ever, we have a lot of fragmented land. This means that in some places, land has been broken up where it was once continuous and full of native plants to support wildlife. The remaining isolated areas are sometimes not enough to support the wildlife left in them. In our own landscapes, we have transformed the land we have into a monoculture of turf, concrete, and exotic plants, repelling pollinators, beneficial insects, and wildlife.
Adding a few natives back into your landscape instead of overusing ornamentals or exotics helps to preserve the complex web of biological diversity, which we call “nature”. They improve the health and help to restore ecosystems by providing food and shelter for pollinators, beneficial insects, birds, & mammals. Native plants also offer great nesting sites for birds, and act as larval hosts for many of our butterflies and moths!
It has been shown that this type of action also creates a “snowball effect”. This means that when you install natives in your flower beds and you get excited about seeing all the beneficial insects, birds, or butterflies, you begin to tell your friends & family. Then they add some native plants to their landscapes and so on. What you do for your ecosystem has an impact!
Tips for adding native plants in your landscape:
- Diversify your landscape with: evergreens for winter cover & berries, plants with seeds, fruits, and nectar for food, grasses for shelter and seeds, and host plants for insects with larval stages.
- Plan to have some visual interest in every season – this can be tough in the winter sometimes, but dried seed heads from coneflowers, plants with winter berries, or even grasses are beautiful in the winter!
- Don’t plant too close to windows (because birds will accidentally hit them).
- Mimic nature by planting in gentle sweeping curves, irregular shapes, clusters, and layers.
- Plant so that your plants have room to grow! (Read that again!)
- Expect & be OKAY with some foliage missing! – you can’t have beautiful butterflies without the caterpillars!
Come out and support your local extension office and your ecosystem this September by purchasing some native plants! If you have any questions about ordering, please contact Cari Mitchell, Horticulture Agent, at 828-632-4451.
“Because life is fueled by the energy captured from the sun by plants, it will be the plants that we use in our gardens that determine what nature will be like 10, 20, and 50 years from now.” – Doug Tallamy, American entomologist, ecologist, and conservationist