Here's your chance to help this student-run group connect more people with nature
Yellow lupine and other natives grow in the Davis Rewilding Society's Dome garden in Davis. The group is fundraising to enable more community outreach. Courtesy Davis Rewilding Society
Help Davis go wild – again.
The Davis Rewilding Society is holding an online fundraiser to support its efforts to reconnect the community with native wildlife and plants. Its efforts won’t help only Davis but the area’s whole ecosystem – and beyond.
“The Davis Rewilding Society is dedicated to improving Davis’s urban ecosystems, increasing awareness of California's biodiversity, and fostering connections between people and nature through native planting projects,” explains the group.
“We choose native plants that support wildlife and cultivate them both on and off the UC Davis campus. Our volunteer-driven plantings are tailored to provide habitats for specific species – like the imperiled Crotch’s bumblebee and monarch butterfly – while offering experiential learning opportunities and spaces for students and community members to build connections with each other and nature.”
Through Tuesday, Feb. 11, the student-run society was closing in on its goal on the Crowdfund UC Davis page. Supporting the society’s 2025 activities, the fund drive continues through Feb. 28. Find it here:
https://www.givecampus.com/schools/UniversityofCaliforniaDavis/crowdfund-uc-davis-february-2025/pages/davisrewildingsociety?campaign_view=true#about
In addition to monetary contributions, the group also is looking for tools and volunteers.
“Our planting projects require native plants, tools, and eager volunteers to be successful,” say the organizers. “We will utilize the funding from this campaign to provide general support to the Society, including our current goals or purchasing seeds and plants from local nurseries and restoration supply companies. Remaining funds will go towards purchasing gardening tools and food and water for our hardworking volunteers.”
Davis Rewilding Society has grown along with its plants. This fund drive will help the group tackle even more projects this year.
“We’ve grown from one-off planting projects to actively maintaining three native plant gardens, taken our community on field trips to explore California’s biodiversity beyond Davis, and built a thriving, ever-growing community,” the organizers say. “Supporting our project means supporting the continued transformation of neglected spaces in Davis into beautiful native habitat gardens and raising awareness for the wildlife that depends upon interactions with native plants.
“With enough habitat, we may even attract native species unseen in the area since the late 1800s,” they add. “The challenges facing humans and the natural world can feel overwhelming, but we believe that everyone can play a part to ‘rewild’ ourselves and the spaces in which we live.”
Besides planting natives and maintaining native gardens, the group also hosts field trips and workshops including some family-friendly events such as a native plant scavenger hunt.
The society takes its interest in native plants and wildlife beyond gardening with such creative activities as poetry writing, crafting and painting. It’s a great way to learn more about the wild world all around us, while giving native plants and critters a helping hand.
For more information on Davis Rewilding Society and its events: https://davisrewildingsociety.weebly.com/
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Food in My Back Yard Series
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Garden Checklist for week of May 11
Make the most of the lower temperatures early in the week. We’ll be back in the 80s by Thursday.
* Plant, plant, plant! It’s prime planting season in the Sacramento area. Time to set out those tomato transplants along with peppers and eggplants. Pinch off any flowers on new transplants to make them concentrate on establishing roots instead of setting premature fruit.
* Direct-seed melons, cucumbers, summer squash, corn, radishes, pumpkins and annual herbs such as basil.
* Harvest cabbage, lettuce, peas and green onions.
* In the flower garden, direct-seed sunflowers, cosmos, salvia, zinnias, marigolds, celosia and asters. (You also can transplant seedlings for many of the same flowers.)
* Plant dahlia tubers.
* Transplant petunias, marigolds and perennial flowers such as astilbe, columbine, coneflowers, coreopsis, dahlias, rudbeckia and verbena.
* Keep an eye out for slugs, snails, earwigs and aphids that want to dine on tender new growth.
* Feed summer bloomers with a balanced fertilizer.
* For continued bloom, cut off spent flowers on roses as well as other flowering plants.
* Add mulch to the garden to maintain moisture. Mulch also cuts down on weeds. But don’t let it mound around the stems or trunks of trees or shrubs. Leave about a 6-inch-to-1-foot circle to avoid crown rot or other problems.
* Remember to weed! Pull those nasties before they set seed.
* Water early in the day and keep seedlings evenly moist.
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