IIRC there are ways to greatly speed this up by selectively planting certain fast growing trees to attract certain birds that will poop all over your lawn thus planting certain seeds. Basically you skip the first two steps with free bird poop. I think it was an old rail siding in London somewhere... or something like that. They planted a single willow tree that attracted the birds and BOOM ~~head shot~~ habitat.

https://www.rhs.org.uk/shows-events/rhs-urban-show/urban-gardening/guerrilla-gardening

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sylvia-wilde-a-forest-garden-primer

Okay so where can I grow something that won't be full of ticks?

You're going to have ticks in the native area too, especially the marginal zones. They love those. Ticks are native, unfortunately. Remediating your land for native insects' benefit will actually be better for ticks than having an acre of 2" turf grass, but that's just because short lawns are totally ecologically dead.

When I was more uninformed I was more of a purist. The more I've done on my own property, and the more I've consulted with experts, the more I've learned that it's actually a balance between human needs and ecology. Now I'm sort of in the "if planting turf grass by your house is what you need to be on board with the rest of it, fine."

We can't promise people ticks will go away, more like teach people the critical value of native insects. Keep tall grass away from your house, sure, but think about walkways instead of acres of lawn for the rest of it. People plant lawns and call Mosquito Joe to fog it all so "their children can play" but consider your children living in a world with no bugs at all. That's the trade off. IMO it's a lot more scary than ticks, and I fucking hate ticks.

For a lawn or yard you don't have to go all the way to a forest to have a stablish ecosystem. Perennials can do a lot.

Hehe. The image makes it look like pine matures to oak and hickory.

There's no way you're going to get Hickory growing naturally in your garden, unless your garden is in some very specific parts of the world.

What does the undergrowth of an oak hickory Forest look like? People can plant the trees, but how do you get the undergrowth?

this weekend we chiseled off the grass sod out of our backyard in preparation for planting native perennial species. it's all clay back there so it's going to take some soil prep.

Where I live you can't cut down a tree, and if it gets destroyed you need to pay thousands for a botanist to come out. I would never take the risk of planting a tree.

Plant some trees to skip a few steps!

I wish I could allow my yard to revert to the low brush it naturally was, problem is that a certain invasive weed from central fucking Asia would disagree. I blame the fucking Russians.

Huh, my back yard is a gradient of 1-4