We didn't really know what we were doing.
The goal wasn't necessarily to create habitat.
We bought the property because we wanted a place to ride our bikes,
and as we started building,
we started learning about the native species.
We didn't create it, it was here before we were here.
But we brought it back.
We're like in a looking glass of nature.
All we have to do is look out the window
and it's nothing but butterflies and bees.
It's incredible.
I'm Jeff Thomsen.
I'm Amy Thomsen.
We are west of Burton at Coyote Run.
We had our AgriLife agent come out.
We just wanted to do like a plant identification
to figure out what we had out here and
he said these really foreign, weird words to us
which was, "You have a post-oak savannah."
I just said, "Wow! What's a post-oak savannah?"
Never heard that before.
We thought, this is so cool. Why don't we like
try to bring it back to some semblance of what
a post-oak savannah would be?
I think the idea was get rid of some of the yaupon and the cedar.
And almost instantly, the native seed bank came up,
and we were just amazed at all of the things that were here.
This is definitely my happy place [laughter].
Her line is, "I'm in heaven,"
is her line [laugher], as she's walking through
and seeing everything.
You ought to see this one.
Look at this one.
This is our yard.
Most everybody we know,
even out in the country,
they have St. Augustine grass yards.
Most people are taken aback by the house being surrounded by wildflowers,
or tall grass.
Everybody feels like they need to manicure right around the house.
I have noticed that the more our friends come out here
and they observe the insects, they observe the wild bees,
it starts jelling for them, they start getting it and they start to understand that
you don't have to even have short mowed grass all around the perimeter of your house.
In a restoration is diversity.
You've got to have something for everybody.
You're never going to go wrong by having a larger variety of native plants.
I go out and collect seed every year because every year there's something different that
has set seed and had the right conditions to germinate and grow that particular year.
So for example this year we have some really cool
sunflowers growing up the road that today I'm gonna go harvest the seed for.
Last year the bee balm was crazy here
and it was just so thick and the bumblebees were just everywhere.
When I go seed collecting,
I pay special attention to what's blooming at the end of the season.
You don't want everything to bloom at once and then go away
or there's no food for the foragers.
The idea is to have some come on early
and some come on late,
and it just goes all the way through the season.
We definitely leave sandy areas open.
There's always somewhere where the ground-nesting bees can nest.
We had learned that you know, you can put blocks of wood up and the mason bees
you know you drill holes and...
We've got several snags around here that we have purposely left up
just for wildlife purposes.
For fireflies and for butterflies
and for frogs and you know for everybody.
We do shred it once a year and it's usually
January and February and that was always a battle as soon as the
flowers were gone I wanted to go ahead and mow it down
and what I learned is that there are insects and then birds
that will use that tall grass all the way until February, maybe even March.
We do go out and assess insect activity
and make sure that we time it so that it's
the, you know, most dormant time of the year.
It's incredible when we, when we mow and everything's brown on top,
we shred it to about six inches tall and everything's green underneath,
and it just takes off as soon as we shred.
Problem is when they have these mowers and they come from your neighbor's property,
they pick up all the seed and deposit it on our place.
Amy has seen mowers in the neighborhood and she'll go talk to the mowing crew
and tell them, "Don't mow in front of my house!"
"Please don't mow in front of my house. I'm putting signs up."
It's frustrating to do the restoration and then see them mow it
and next thing you know you have Johnsongrass and Bahia coming up
in your natives and those
introduced species will choke out all of the natives in a heartbeat.
If you walk along that easement along the driveway,
you'll see all the same insects that you see back here.
There's no need to cut it all down.
We eventually mow it and we don't let the trees grow out to the street.
We're maintaining it, it just looks a little different than everybody else's.
Something that I had never really even thought about
before is the competition between European honeybees and native bees.
We started the process of regaining agricultural exemption on this property
by being bee farmers, so we're apiarists.
So we have several bee colonies, we were up to 12 because that was what was required
to get your agricultural exemption.
When we reached our agricultural exemption we decided to transition to wildlife exemption
because we felt like having 12 bee boxes for European honey bees was too much pressure
for the native bees on the land and we wanted to create more of a balance
so we're actually down to four.
It's not horrible to have European honey bees but too many
is a problem and it's kind of like what they do for cattle here.
The stocking rates are, it's too much
[It'll decimate your property if you put that much cattle on it.] It's too much.
We'd like to see the stocking rates for bees and cattle less
and be able to support the native vegetation more and support the
native wildlife more and the native bees and all of the native pollinators.
What I would say is get a good, qualified, knowledgeable consultant
up front.
And take as many classes as you can and read as much
literature as you can on restoration.
There's not a playbook that says do this on this date
and everything will be beautiful.
You know, this has been a learning experience. We plant all kinds of stuff,
some stuff comes up, some doesn't.
Two years later what we planted all of a sudden does come up, so.
We've simply learned to assist mother nature in what mother nature does best,
which is, you know, heal and regenerate and create wildlife habitat.
We're very passionate about it, we love doing this.
We find that it is our way of giving back to the world.