Rewilding My Lot

We live on an urban property in a new housing development in Seguin, Texas. When we moved here in February 2023, from a nature point of view the land was virtually sterile. Any soil that had originally been fertile had been scraped away to be replaced with stones, sand, and poor quality dirt. Also, plants installed by the builder did not encourage or support wildlife.

My overall goal here is to transform this little piece of land to a place where wildlife is welcome to visit, shelter, breed, grow, eat, and drink. To be as complete an ecosystem as possible, there has to be a reliable source of water that is accessible to a variety of visitor types. Achieving that in some way has always been in my plan, but I wanted to take at least a year to consider options as the garden begins to develop.

One way to provide water would be to install structures such as bird baths. They would need to be at different heights — some for flying visitors, and some for creatures on the ground. They would need to be shallow and to have good entry points for the tiniest visitors. And they would have to be cleaned/filled/monitored every day.

A more elaborate (and expensive!) solution would be to create an ecosystem pond to meet all of the nature needs here, and which would require less daily maintenance. After much pondering (sorry about the pun), this is what I have decided to do and Vivid Outdoor Solutions have been contracted to do the job. More posts will follow!