First post here, so sorry if I get it all wrong.
I'm in a rental house which I'm using as my first permaculture design experiment. I'd like to leave the property with better soil, more critter life and new (but low-cost) food-producing trees and plants. But it is a rental, so I'll also need to maintain the existing plantings and get permission for any large-scale changes.
The current plantings include a lot of common non-native ornamental species which I should maintain plus a few native, potentially more useful species that may be volunteers but that I'm choosing to believe were specially planted for me to care for and help thrive.
I have these nice looking shrubs in my front and back yards; I'm pretty sure they're Euonymus japonicus. They're pretty and inoffensive, but they also seem kind of pointless from a native-gardening standpoint. But they're growing incredibly well in my most-shaded spots, and I'm determined to figure out how they can be useful. Does anyone have either any ideas to use them, or even just a different way of looking at them as a benefit rather than just something I need to prune back occasionally? I guess I'm trying to figure out how to value and use everything I have rather than put them into "good" or "bad" categories in my mind.
