Wildergarden – A Local Resource

Guest blog by Julia Wilder of Wildergarden

Hello. We are Wildergarden, a .13 acre residential yard in Broad Ripple. It is highly visible as a demonstration garden on a busy street corner. Our purpose is research and education in residential urban ecology.

Wildergarden invites you to visit and take home some ideas for your own yard.

For the last 10 years or so we have been fortunate to work with Kevin Allison, Urban Soil Health Specialist, at MCSWCD. He has conducted soil sampling at Wildergarden, helped facilitate a cost-share grant, and held a backyard program for neighbors. We are documenting the soil health in our habitat. This provides support for our biodiversity.

We’ve been active for nearly 33 years stewarding our garden, forest, and habitat—transforming it from turfgrass lawn. We’ve shared our journey with neighbors, and on media in Indianapolis. Our strategy is experiential learning. By performing stewardship tasks we learn from nature.

As of 2022, we formed a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Our mission: To empower homeowners to restore sound ecological conditions in their yards. We are pursuing community education and service. How can we help you transform your yard?

If you would like to get started, visit our website at https://wildergarden.net. Our website explains in text and photographs how we made the gradual transition into urban biodiversity. We are also on Instagram and LinkedIn. Come visit us by appointment. We can give you a tour. We are also seeking volunteers and interns.

Building community is important. People pursuing nature restoration at home need support and guidance from one another. Even just a “like” on Facebook helps. We respect the autonomy of landowners to find their own style.

Founder Julia Wilder, a retired attorney with a career in agriculture, believes that sustainable nature restoration is a property right. To succeed as an urban garden, forest, and habitat we are mindful about complying with local ordinances, and we work on documenting the benefits of nature.

We started with five trees. We now have about 271 trees, and the majority are native. 67% of them are volunteers. The term “volunteer” is used in nature restoration. A volunteer is a plant that was not intentionally planted by humans. It is planted through the actions of birds, small mammals, insects, and the wind.

Wildergarden has shrubs, wildflowers, grasses, sedges and other forest plants (and animals). Our primary gardening method is passive restoration. It has been amazing to witness biological succession.

The mission of MCSWCD is similar to our mission. We respect soil type as an indication of what flora and fauna are natural to our neighborhood. We are Miami Urban land complex.

Our most recent soil test was in October, 2023. We have 15.01% soil organic matter in front and 7.73% in back. Our goal has always been to increase organic matter to support our native plants without fertilizers. To support climate resilience, we are pleased that the amount of carbon sequestered in our soil is 115,227 lbs per acre in front, and 65,137 lbs per acre in back. We also measure the carbon sequestration in our trees. Most are young trees, but they already collectively measure 188.5 tons of biomass and 94 tons of stored carbon.

We add plant litter to our soil, keep our soil occupied with diverse plants roots, and have experimented with winter cereal rye cover crop. We have additional soil tests pending. We plan to collect data on soil phosphorous and soil microfauna (bacteria and viruses). Soil structure is also important to us, thus we track bulk density and crumb aggregates. We plan to start testing rainwater infiltration.

To fulfill our charitable educational mission, we would like to keep you informed about our outcomes. If you have questions, please contact us. We anticipate seeing more local homeowners do similar work at home.

You can make an appointment to visit by emailing us at wildergarden@wildergarden.net. We hope to hear from you soon!