Common Ground Land Trust, Inc.

06/11/2026

This is what is needed!

Delaware is so small you can drive across it in an hour, and it just created an entire government commission to protect things most people can't name. The Native Species Commission is legally dedicated to reversing the decline of native plants and animals statewide, and in a state where development pressure from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. squeezes from every direction, that is not symbolic. It is survival infrastructure.
The commission has teeth. It coordinates between agencies that previously operated in silos — agriculture, transportation, environmental protection, education. It mandates native species considerations in state contracts. It funds restoration projects that use locally sourced seed and plant stock, not the generic mixes contractors used to buy by the pallet. And it tracks populations, creating baseline data for species that were slipping away unnoticed.
The salt marsh in the photo is exactly why this matters. Delaware's coastline is a web of tidal creeks, mudflats, and marsh grass that filters pollution, buffers storms, and feeds the Atlantic fishery. But invasive phragmites was choking the native cordgrass. Development was fragmenting the marsh edge. The commission targeted these chokepoints with native plant restoration — marsh hibiscus, seaside goldenrod, saltmeadow hay — plants that hold the mud together and feed the insects that feed the birds that feed the fish.
Delaware didn't just form a committee. It formed a lifeline.

06/10/2026

Plant an oak tree

One tree. That's it. One oak in a yard changes everything that lives there.

The canopy is a cafeteria — hundreds of caterpillar species feed in the leaves, and the birds follow them up. Warblers, chickadees, orioles. The whole summer chorus moves into the branches because the food is already there.

The trunk is an apartment building. Woodpeckers drill cavities. Screech owls move in the year after. Flying squirrels take the ones nobody else claimed.

🌿 Below the tree is where most people stop noticing:

The leaf litter is six inches deep by fall. Firefly larvae hunt in it. Salamanders shelter under it. Earthworms process it into the soil that feeds the roots that feed the tree that drops more leaves.

And every fall, she produces thousands of acorns. Squirrels bury them and forget about a quarter of them. Those forgotten acorns become the next generation of oaks.

One tree. A whole food web wrapped around a single trunk 🌿

06/09/2026

Loving the new ground cover at the Pollinator Pathway called Shrubby Five-Fingers or 3-Toothed Cinquefoil (Sibbaldiopsis tridentata). It looks a lot like wild strawberries but it has evergreen foliage and is very tough!

05/24/2026

Plant the right trees

A neighborhood full of trees and no songbirds often has the wrong trees.

Native oaks, cherries, willows, and birches host caterpillars in numbers that ornamental trees can't match. Nearly all backyard songbirds feed their chicks on caterpillars during nesting season — regardless of what the adults eat the rest of the year.

A single mature native oak in a yard can host more caterpillar species than every ornamental on the block combined. The caterpillars don't harm healthy trees — the herbivory is part of the system.

🌿 What the food chain needs:

- At least one native canopy tree — oak, cherry, willow, birch, or maple
- Understory native shrubs that host additional species
- No broad-spectrum pesticide on the canopy during nesting season
- Patience — a newly planted native tree takes a few years to build its caterpillar community

The trees look the same from the street. The food web underneath them is completely different 🌿

05/24/2026

Wild strawberries and violets are great ground covers. Let them grow in your lawn. They can be mowed and are resilient

05/24/2026

There is progress at Leicester Library Pollinator Pathway! The red columbine, pale beardtongue and shrubby five-fingers (cinquefoil) all came back after this winter and are blooming their heads off! Hummingbirds, rare bumble bees and tiny native bees all have newly created habitat on route 9 in Leicester!

05/14/2026

We have a lot of weeding and planting still to do, but the Pollinator Pathway in front of Leicester Library is beginning to take shape! See what is being planted for endangered pollinators at Http://www.commongroundlt.org/leicester-library-pollinator-pathway.html

05/14/2026

Every morning you wipe out engineering that took eight hours to build. A single garden spider constructs a new orb web from scratch each night — geometry precise enough that researchers have studied its mathematical structure for decades. You walk through it before coffee and never think twice.

That web caught between thirty and fifty flying insects overnight. Mosquitoes, gnats, small moths, leafhoppers, fungus flies. Not selectively — anything that blundered into it. A garden with healthy spider populations has measurably fewer airborne pests than one without, and no one had to buy anything or plug anything in.

Spiders also eat each other's competition. Wolf spiders patrol the ground and take out crawling pests — slug eggs, beetle larvae, root aphids — while orb weavers handle the air. Jumping spiders hunt visually during the day across your porch railings and windowsills, picking off flies with accuracy rates that outperform most predatory insects.

🐛 What's already working your property line:
- The messy cobweb in your garage corner belongs to a house spider catching dozens of insects per week without moving more than an inch
- Wolf spiders carrying egg sacs across your patio are mobile pest control units — one brood releases hundreds of spiderlings across your yard
- A garden with visible webs every morning is a garden where the night shift showed up and clocked in

You knock the web down at seven. It's rebuilt by midnight 🌿