Forget the milkshake — native plants bring opossums to the yard.
A backyard camera caught a visitor and its babies on a nighttime stroll. The homeowner shared the sweet footage to the r/gardening subreddit.
"Opossum Uber," they wrote. "Caught the mom working overtime as an Uber driver."
When an opossum baby — called a joey — is young, its mother carries it in a pouch near her stomach. When joeys get bigger, they forgo the pouch and cling to their mom's back. This opossum is carrying seven babies on her back — she's a hardworking mother.
Adorable visitors are common in backyards with native plants. Traditional grass lawns are ecological dead zones, but natural yards support and shelter all kinds of wildlife. Homeowners with native plant lawns frequently find creatures from spiny lizards and slow worms to baby bunnies and sleeping fawns.
Native plant lawns are also great for pollinators, including bees, butterflies, birds, and beetles, which help humans by protecting our food supply. Dedicating even a small section of your yard to native plants, such as wildflowers, can bring in a bunch of bug biodiversity — equivalent to an entire meadow.
Not only will rewilding your lawn help cute little creatures, but it'll save you time and money, too. Once established, native plant lawns require significantly less maintenance than traditional lawns — less weeding, watering, mowing, and fertilizing. Traditional "lawns and non-native plants can take 2400% more time than a native garden," according to The Plant Native.
You don't have to redo your entire lawn to enjoy these benefits. Even small changes, such as chaos gardening or switching to a clover lawn, can save time, money, and the environment.
The sweetness here was out of control, and other Redditors loved it.
"OMG I can't take the cuteness," one user said.
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The way it looks 🤩 "How cute is that," another wrote. "Thanks for sharing!"
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