The Common Violet (a native plant) signals to you that your soil is acidic. Adding lime to your yard won’t discourage this native plant too much…but it will make your soil more accommodating to a wider range of other plants. This plant gets a big thumbs-down from lawn-care-jockeys even though it is loved by pollinators, ‘wily wabbits’, and certain fritillary butterfly caterpillars. If you have moss, your soil is acidic. Once again, you can add lime to limit it but, you should still keep some around for birds to use for nest-building porpoises.This naturalized Hoary Bittercress makes tons of seeds for a little guy. It flowers in late winter and, in some regions, is often the first plant to feed a newly awakened pollinator. Every year I localvore the leaves, flowers, and seed stalks…cooking not required. This eminently-edible-by-man-or-beast dandelion is a little less abundant these days, especially because of constant 2,4-d applications by lawn enforcement. As you can see, the ‘evil’ of this plant is to lower the height of its flower stalk to below the height of the mower blade. You want this White Clover in your yard. It fixes nitrogen and, thus, will improve your crummy soil. Bees love it and mammals graze upon it. But, like with many of the plants on this page, lawn-lovers and NPNs would agree…”Herbicide it”!Lawn grass left on its own will always give way to other plants. Lawn requires mowing, de-thatching, aerating, over seeding, raking, watering, fertilizing, herbiciding, and insecticiding to stay competitive with broadleaf ‘interlopers’. My advice: raise the deck on your mower, forget about the other maintenance stuff, and let the dicots come.
