#garden ramblings

[sunflowergardens-world]

Sith Obi Wan

Ok, so I've seen plenty of the Sith!ObiWan AUs floating around out there, and honestly they're super cool, but am I the only one who thinks they are all just OOC? Like, I genuinely think that there is no possible way to write an in-character Sith!Obi Wan, mainly because one of his defining characteristics throughout all of SW is that he actively chooses to stay in the light! It is literally the foundation of his character, and while I appreciate wanting to see that alternate universe, it never feels right to me, because Obi Wan has been faced time and time again with plenty of opportunities to give in to his fear, his anger, his hatred, his suffering, and he just HASN'T! He lost everything he held dear, and still retained his trust in the force, and his compassion for those around him, and I can't help but wonder, if losing everything and everyone you love to the hand of someone who you once considered a brother isn't enough to turn you to the dark side, what is?

[anipgarden]

Some of you may have heard about Monarch butterflies being added to the Threatened species list in the US and be planning to immediately rush out in spring and buy all the milkweed you can manage to do your part and help the species.

And that's fantastic!! Starting a pollinator garden and/or encouraging people and businesses around you to do the same is an excellent way to help not just Monarchs but many other threatened and at-risk pollinator species!

However.

Please please PLEASE do not obtain Tropical Milkweed for this purpose!

Tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica)--also commonly known as bloodflower, Mexican butterflyweed, and scarlet milkweed--will likely be the first species of milkweed you find for sale at most nurseries. It'll be fairly cheap, too, and it grows and propagates so easily you'll just want to grab it! But do not do that!

Tropical milkweed can cause a host of issues that can ultimately harm the butterflies you're trying to help, such as--

Harboring a protozoan parasite called OE (which has been linked to lower migration success, reductions in body mass, lifespan, mating success, and flight ability) for long periods of time

Remaining alive for longer periods, encouraging breeding during migration time/overwintering time as well as keeping monarchs in an area until a hard freeze wherein which they die

Actually becoming toxic to monarch caterpillars when exposed to warmer temperatures associated with climate change

However--do not be discouraged!! There are over 100 species of milkweed native to the United States, and plenty of resources on which are native to your state specifically! From there, you can find the nurseries dedicated to selling native milkweeds, or buy/trade for/collect seeds to grow them yourself!!

The world of native milkweeds is vast and enchanting, and I'm sure you'll soon find a favorite species native to your area that suits your growing space! There's tons of amazing options--whether you choose the beautiful pink vanilla-smelling swamp milkweed, the sophisticated redring milkweed, the elusive purple milkweed, the alluring green antelopehorn milkweed, or the charming heartleaf milkweed, or even something I didn't list!

And there's tons of resources and lots of people willing to help you on your native milkweed journey! Like me! Feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any questions!

Just. PLEASE. Leave the tropical milkweed alone. Stay away.

TLDR: Start a pollinator garden to help the monarchs! Just don't plant tropical milkweed. There's hundreds of other milkweeds to grow instead!

[not-available-for-comment]

So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood

As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building

BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM

These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[sunflowergardens-world]

This is something I've had to work with as a music teacher, in that I am naturally a fast learner, and especially so when it comes to music. But when all you have to go on when you're teaching someone else is your own experience, it means that, in my case, I often am left scrambling for ways to try and communicate with my students that work for them, and it often is slower than what works for me. That's honestly a big reason why I enjoy teaching as much as I do. Because it challenges me in a way that my own learning can't!

I used to do cross country in high school, and there was this guy on the team that was wonderful. Great guy. But his advice to everyone that asked how to get good was to run 20k a day.

If you don't run, I'll just tell you, most people's bodies cannot take that kind of abuse. No matter how much you train, you will not be able to run 20k a day. It's like how you can't train to make your cuts heal faster. You recover as fast as you recover. So while a big part of what made this guy so succesful was the dedication and mental toughness needed to actually run 20k a day, an equally big part was that he healed like fucking Wolverine. And that's fine, but it would've been nice if he knew that and stopped telling new guys to commit suicide by jogging.

Different guy on the team ran like, 5-6k a day, which actually isn't all that much. His problem when he gave advice was that he didn't really get that 5-6k a day doesn't generally produce elite results for most people. He was lucky in the sense that he didn't have to work all that hard to get great results, and unlucky in the sense that if he pushed himself much further than that, he fell apart.

I think about those two whenever I get advice from succesful people. The very things that make them outliers also make their advice useless to most people. Worse, they're often outliers on totally separate ends of the same spectrum, so their advice will be contradictory.

[cygnetbrown]

Rambling in the Garden

Last Year’s Garden During the past couple of weeks, we have been planting potatoes, onions, lettuce, and brassicas in the garden. One of the ways that we grow potatoes is in fabric bags. We used the same bags that we used last year and put different soil in the bags. Another way that we planted potatoes was directly in the ground. Right now we don’t have a lot of mulching material with which is…

[bluerosefox]

Kidnapped Persephone Style

Me: *tossing prompt idea up and down in the air before chucking it into the Void we call the internet*

Jason is dating Ghost Prince (not yet King) Danny and goes on a really awesome and romantic date on his day off. He forgot to tell the fam though. So when Red Robin comes to give Jason an update on some entil, he watches in muted horror as Jason is 'kidnapped' by a glowing entity in black armor and a nightmare looking horse (Danny is a bit busy doing paperwork, so he had his Fright Knight pick Jason up) off of a Gotham rooftop and into a green portal, while the knight had proclaimed Jason as their future Kings 'intended'..

No one on coms is ready for Tim to yell out

"I THINK JASON JUST GOT KIDNAPPED PERSEPHONE STYLE!!"

[solarpunkani]

Listen I’m not saying that *I* have the balls to buy a reflective vest and go off on a roadside or retention pond somewhere and start fucking around guerrilla gardening

But I am saying that the past week I’ve driven past many MANY people in reflective vests either doing roadwork or maintaining roadside shrubbery or whatever and the amount of times I considered questioning what the fuck they were doing is zero and the amount of times I would’ve even had the TIME to question what the fuck they were doing is zero

I saw groups of people I saw someone solo I didn’t question it I just figured ‘eh they’re doing SOMETHING and carried on. Depending on the location you pick, anyone who WOULD Karen up and interrogate you won’t even have the time space or ability to

[evesedenramblings]

Something so underrated about Eva Tsunaka is how incredibly egotistical she is. It flies under the radar most of the game, probably because she’s paired with Damon “my talent is better than your talent” Maitsu for most of it, but I would say she’s actually MORE egotistical than Damon is, it’s just easier for us to see Damon’s ego since he’s the protagonist and we can access his inner monologue.

Yes, Damon is definitely egoistic but there’s some logic behind it. Damon has a philosophy of talents needing to be useful, and it’s only when those talents don’t meet his standard that Damon gets an ego. When it’s people like Wolfgang with ‘useful’ talents, or just of use to him in general, Damon tends to demonstrate a lot of respect. He is capable of seeing others as his equal.

Eva, however? She respects nobody but herself, not even Damon. Absolutely nothing is ever her fault, it’s everyone else’s fault because she can’t accept they matched her intelligence, something her ego is rooted in as the Ultimate Mathlete. She “deserves to live”, as though she was the exception to the rules of the Killing Game and was above punishment. She bluntly calls her fellow students and their ideas stupid. When Damon notices the doorknob in the boiler room has been flipped, but only after the fact, Eva remarks that she “would have noticed in the moment”, and she rubs that in too. She needed to assert herself as more intelligent than her only friend. This particular example is crazy too considering Eva changed the doorknob herself! I sure hope she would have noticed it was switched!

So much of Eva’s self worth is rooted in needing to be better than everyone else, and unlike Damon she’s not willing to accept being equals. She has to be better, or else she’s nothing.

[bilolli]

you think he would look nice in blue and white...if only he didn't like red so much...

Stars in the Garden Sun by @jackofallrabbits

[reference]

[sunflowergardens-world]

Not to be all Christian on main here, but what if humans weren't always like this? What if we used to think in the same language one, a long time ago? What if that changed one day? Say, around the same time as the languages of the nations were confused? What if God didn't just confuse the language of our spoken word?

if we could read minds I still don't think we'd understand them.

[halfratsalready]

In two weeks, I’m going to be sitting in Madison Square Garden with my best friend, in the same fucking room as Brennan Lee Mulligan, Zac Oyama, Emily Axford, Lou Wilson, Siobhan Thompson, Brian Murphy, and Ally Beardsley while they play dnd, and despite the fact that I’m in a very difficult chapter of my life right now that makes it very hard to see any brightness in the future, good god does it feel good to know that I’m going to be in that position in only 14 days.

Gauntlet at the Garden you are going to change my life, even if just for an hour or two, and I absolutely cannot wait 🌃✨

[drfirefly08]

hypocrisy

the snake who said not to trust anyone but trusted the one that started it all

the crow that wanted love yet pushed it away, blinded by her pain and misery

the wolf sheep that preached kindness yet isolated those who disagree

change

the butterfly who transformed from someone "unlovable" to someone who "was"

the snake that used to be bright but smothered that light to survive and win

the chameleon whose identity is blurred and always adapting to be like others

[sunflowergardens-world]

It has been A Week, but there are a riot of new leaves on every tree I see and the wisteria is going wild, and there are flowers scattered throughout the woods, so I can't find it in me to feel discouraged or frustrated.

[sunflowergardens-world]

Is it odd that I find this comforting? At the end of the day, I'm just a speck of dust, loved by God. And nothing else seems to matter much in light of that.

[anipgarden]

Hot take but HGTV needs more of the G

Like you’re telling me you’re renovating a house, renovating a backyard, and all you can do is mention one (1) of the 12+ plants you’re putting in and be like ‘heehee pretty leaf’ and nothing else?

Give me more gardening on the home and gardening channel dammit