A new free app from Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation aims to make native gardening a lot less intimidating for Texans and a lot more helpful for pollinators.
It’s called Wild Thumb, and the goal here is to help Texans with planting and caring for drought-tolerant native plants that help struggling pollinaters – like native bees and butterflies. It’s all part of the broader Pollinators & Prairies initiative from Texas Parks and Wildlife.
Julie Shaddox, director of development and conservation programs at the Texas Parks & Wildlife Foundation, joined the Standard with a breakdown of the app. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: For those who don’t know or haven’t heard of it before, tell us a little bit more about this Pollinators and Prairies program.
Julie Shaddox: Yeah, so Pollinators and Prairies works to increase the quality and quantity of pollinator and grassland habitat in the state of Texas. People may not realize this, but grassland habitat, which is also called prairie, is the number one most-endangered habitat type in North America.
Really?
Yes. And as much as 98% of Texas’s historic tall grass prairie no longer exists. And, you know, pollinators, that’s the habitat that pollinator’s need, right?
And so when that habitat declines, you see declines in pollinator species, and then that sort of feeds back in – since they’re pollinating the grassland species – that feeds back into the decline of native grasses, native plants, wildflowers, and all of that.
So that creates a lot of problems for the ecosystem as a whole.
Well, so how would an app help solve that problem? Could you explain what this Wild Thumb app is supposed to do?
Yeah. So one of the strategies that Pollinators and Prairies uses to increase that pollinator habitat is to educate and engage everyday Texans in the small actions that we can all take to make a difference for pollinators.
And so one of the things that anyone can do is use more native plants or plant native plants in your landscaping, in your yard, in your garden. And so Wild Thumb aims to make that much easier for people to do by helping people select the appropriate native plants for their space and be successful growing those plants.
Okay, I’ve gone to wildthumb.org here on my browser and I see it’s actually a beautiful, very straightforward web page. And it says, “the only native planting app made just for Texas. Let’s grow wild!”
Tell us what actually happens once you download the app and you click through it. How does it make plant recommendations?
Yeah so users enter their zip code and from your zip code you learn what ecoregion you’re in and your ecoregion guides the plant recommendations – so which plants are either native to your ecoregion or adapted to your ecoregion so they’ll grow well.
And then you also answer some questions about the type of space that you’d like to plant in. So roughly what size is the bed? Or you can even do potted plants on your porch. How many pots do you want to do? And is it full sun? Part sun? Roughly about how much light do you have?
You don’t have to get crazy with measuring it. And then from there, once the app knows where you are and what your space is like, then it recommends native plants that will grow well in that space.
I have a lot of friends who are green thumbs, they know what they’re doing. I don’t. How far does the app go in helping you actually nurture these plants, help them actually grow once you’ve got the seed in the ground?
Yeah, so the app has a directory of nurseries that sell native plants, which we’re always trying to grow that directory, as well as seed providers if you want to do like a seed mix for a pocket prairie, which is more like an assemblage of grasses and wildflowers versus individual plants that you’re planting in specific locations. And so the App will guide you through where you can purchase the native plants.
And then it does give simple instructions for how to plant the plants or if you need to remove some existing vegetation, how you can do that. And we try to keep everything really simple because of course there are master gardeners out there, people that know a lot about gardening. But you don’t have to know that much just to get started.
And so of course experts can use the app, but we tried to make it very simple for beginners to just get out there and put a couple native plants in their yards.
One other quick question, because I was kind of struck by the fact that Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation was doing something like this. I don’t generally associate you folks with app development. Have you done this before?
No, so this is our very first app and it was new and very exciting territory for us.
Well, it certainly does look like it’s exciting, and it’s free, right? So anyone can download it, and you don’t have to have an iPhone, you can have an Android device too, it looks like.
Correct. It’s free and it’s available for iPhone, Android, and iPad.
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