#I feel like I gotta try to undo their dumbassery somehow

[saiyuri-dahlia]

I used to wander the edge of the forest around my house when I was a child, and there were towers of kudzu, pink flowering trees in the spring, and this wall of black and red berries I was told not to eat but I used to smash in between my fingers. It was honestly pretty magical to me as a kid, and I was devastated when my father cleared out that area when I was 10ish.

In retrospect, it was kind of a good thing my dad cleared out that area bc kudzu is highly invasive and chokes out native plants--even if the towers look pretty magical. And those berries I used to smash? Pokeweed, a poisonous plant with poisonous berries. Thank goodness I was an obedient kid and never ate the berries bc I definitely wanted to.

Oh, and the native pink flowering trees are just called redbud trees, and as far as I know there's nothing scary about them. Now that I know what they are, I want to seed propagate them and plant as many as possible to replace all the ones my father cut down.

Since we don't even use that part of our lawn near the forest I'd love to plant native wildflowers, but I know the deer would come by and eat everything. Honestly, the deer are the reason we don't have a larger flower garden, or even tried to plant vegetables.

And our deer are persistent enough to ignore the usual tricks and hop/break fencing, so they're always going to be a problem for my future planting plans. You try to help out the bees, butterflies, and birds, and dang deer have to come along and munch every little green sprig coming out of the ground.