>>2764501You can plant some early succession plants to help things along like salal, sword ferns, oregon grape, alder, maple and doug firs. Would be better than just sitting and watching your grass and other invasices grow long and go to seed, but not cheaper. Salal is edible, it grows like crazy in August and is our native blueberry essentially. It's a major understory plant in lowlands (you've likely seen tons of it before).
Lots of threatened species in our area rely on oak prairies which were maintained by controlled burns for millennia as well. You could plant oregon oaks, bracken ferns, camas and other wildflowers to restore some precious pnw prairie. Our precious few western gray squirrel populations would be doing a lot better if people kept oak prairies around, but unfortunately they're "perfect" for agriculture and 95% or more are gone now.
