realmsofcompost

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The 20 year old accidentally bonsai'd apricot tree that I finally planted in the ground has truly established himself and has chosen a branch with which he will form his main trunk. He's putting all his energy into this one branch and it's making dozens of tiny offshoot branches and it is rapidly growing taller

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one more for the collection of leaf curler condos

leaf curler's deluxe apartment by the lemon tree

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Orb weaver having a nice rest! I think she's been eating the bronze orange bugs off this tree, there seem to be less of them recently 😅

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Garden Variety Dykes: Lesbian Traditions in Gardening, 1994

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this little guy was under my tomatoes and almost got watered

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Vegetable Patch II - Fiona Willis

British , b. 1953 -

Watercolour and ink , 24.5 x 32.4 cm.

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stored these in the shed thinking to turn them into sheet mulch but they started biodegrading already

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my little goblin heaps of treasure

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Things were blooming.

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this little guy just came over to inspect the guttering

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I am being driven to madness by the fact that bees and butterflies aren't better studied than other pollinators because they are more important to the ecosystem, they are just better studied because...people like them more?

Seriously

My plants are attracting HUGE amounts of flies, ants, wasps, and moths, and when I identify them and look them up there is no information! Especially flies, wow. They're so diverse, there's SO many different kinds. I'm getting a ton of bee-mimic flies and hover flies.

Wikipedia says hover fly larvae eat aphids while the adults are pollinators. That means they are beneficial in two ways at once! But most of the Wikipedia pages for species are only one sentence, if they exist at all. Likewise here's the wiki page for the most common bee mimic fly where I am. It's one sentence!

If you only pay attention to butterflies and bees, and plant the plants that are the best for butterflies and bees, you would maybe neglect keystone plants that support the largest amount of other insects. And these insects are like, a massive proportion of the bugs in a healthy ecosystem. And birds and mammals need bugs for food! A lot of birds are mostly insectivorous, and anyways, an unbalanced diet of all bird seed can't be healthy even for the omnivorous birds. They need to eat a variety of foods!

Not to mention that larvae are necessary for feeding baby birds!

The back yard is overflowing with birds. There are red-bellied woodpeckers, a gray catbird, a barn swallow, tree swallows, wrens, sparrows, house finches, goldfinches, bluebirds, bluejays, grackles, orioles, cardinals, doves, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting about, and they are constantly singing and making a commotion, and it's louder now than the ugly man-made sounds that are always barging in through the quiet.

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But seriously, when we got our property, it was all just…grass. A sterile grass moonscape, like a billion other yards. With two big old maple trees. Just grass and maples, that was it. 

But then I got my grubby little paws on it, and I immediately stopped fertilizing, spraying, and bagging up grass clippings and leaves. I ripped up sod and put in flowers and vegetables. I put down nice thick blankets of mulch around the flowers and vegetables. 

When I first was sweating my way through stripping sod, I saw a grand total of 1 worm and 0 ladybugs. The ground was compacted into something that would bend shovel blades. 

Now, six years later, I can’t dig a planting hole without turning up fourteen earthworms, and there are so many ladybugs here. Not the invasive asian lady beetles; native ladybugs. They winter over in the mulch and in the brush pile. I see thousands of them. 

The soil is soft and rich. There are birds that come to eat, and bees of many sorts.

Like this is something that you, yourself, can absolutely change. This is something that you, personally, can make a difference in.

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foxgloves

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The framberry bed is looking its best and I cannot get enough of staring at it.

I went a little overboard with thinning last autumn and then my dog decided to sleep in it a couple of times, so it was looking pretty pathetic at the beginning of spring. I didn't have much hope for it this year. I'm very surprised by how well it bounced back.