#it's just a busy ass month

[circusk]

i care him so much guys . guys. hes blorbo bingus

[balmungkriemhild]

i haven't drawn touhou fanart in a hot minute, have I? Have this Purikura-Style Yuyuko

(consider reblogging & donating to my Ko-fi, thank you!)

[anipgarden]

What Kind of Plants to Add

This is my sixth post in a series I’ll be making on how to increase biodiversity on a budget! I’m not an expert–just an enthusiast–but I hope something you find here helps! 

I’d love to be able to give a quick and easy list of things to add, but frankly I can’t do that. I can strongly encourage you, however, to look at these categories of plants and do further research to discover what’s native to your area, so you can plant things that’ll have the most impact in your particular area.

With that being said, I will mention a few plants as examples. This is in no way, shape, or form me telling you that you have to or even should buy these specific plants. Not every plant works well in every place in every garden, not to even mention across countries. Above all, if you’re wondering what plants you should be adding, I can wholeheartedly say plants that are native to your area--or at least nonnative non-invasive.

Flowers

Flowers are some of the most common ways people work to increase biodiversity in their gardens, and who can blame them? Seeing pops of color out your window, and directly seeing the impact via butterflies and bees visiting the garden? It’s a win-win for us and the wildlife!

Flowers--especially native wildflowers--are a quick, easy, and cheap way to increase wildlife traffic in your garden. Perennial gardens are more likely to get you the most bang for your buck, as they’ll come back year after year if you treat them well. But don’t dismiss annuals--if you get ones that easily reseed, they’ll eagerly return on their own! If you can, do your best to ensure that the flowers you plant all have different blooming periods--that way, your garden can support wildlife throughout the year instead of for just one brief season. 

Flowers are environmental super boosters. Their nectar and pollen can feed insects and birds, their stems and leaves can provide nesting materials for all sorts of creatures, and their seeds are a popular food source among birds at all times of the year.

Climbing Plants

Climbing plants can be fantastic options for maximizing your impact. If you have limited ground space, growing up can provide interest as well as additional habitat for all kinds of creatures.

Training plants up a trellis, fence, or bare wall offers food, shelter, and habitat. Trumpet vines, passionflowers, honeysuckles, and more will provide sweet nectar for pollinators as well as nesting and hiding spaces for other wildlife like birds, bugs, and lizards. Do note that in some cases, climbing plants can actually affect the structural integrity of walls and roofs if allowed to climb too much and too far along a house, so be careful. 

Bushes/Shrubs

Bushes provide shelter for creatures, which then provides hunting grounds for other animals. Their fallen leaves and petals can be food and shelter for detritivores, amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals--and they also provide good cover for moving around the garden, for creatures who like to stay hidden. They can be a bit more pricey to obtain--unless you get cuttings or seeds and are willing to wait--but they’ll definitely be worth it, and they’re typically low-maintenance once they’re established.

Bonus points if you get a flowering and fruiting bush, like bottlebrush, serviceberry, lilac, or others. This’ll make your bushes not only a place of shelter, but a food source as well--and depending on the kind you pick, may be food for you too! Making a garden border with a series of bushes can be a great option to providing lots of habitat, if you can manage it.

Shrubs with pithy or hollow stems are excellent options for supporting solitary bees. Some examples you could look into are elderberry, raspberry, blackberry, or sumac.

Trees

Trees have a high up-front cost and take awhile to grow, but once they’re settled in place they provide crucial habitat to all kinds of creatures! Insects will be attracted to flowers they may provide, or to nest in the wood. Others may eat the leaves as food, or use them as nesting materials. Birds will perch and nest in trees, and feed off the fruits and seeds and insects that also use the tree. Squirrels also use trees as nesting places, piling up dead leaves into huge clusters to raise their young in, and will absolutely feast on any nuts the tree may provide. Mice, badgers, and more will feast on fallen fruits or seeds, and bats roost in the trunks when given the chance. Detritivores eat fallen leaves and decomposing fruits, providing further food for hunting creatures. Trees can also be good for us--they help block out noise and air pollution, and are the poster child for taking CO2 and making it breathable oxygen. Not to mention they can provide plenty of food for us, too. Nesting grounds, hunting grounds, shelter from weather, and more--trees are, in my opinion, likely to be the best way to boost biodiversity long-term. If you can get your hands on a sapling for cheap and can care for it for awhile, I’d definitely give it a shot! Make sure the tree won’t get too big for where you’re growing it, though--you’ve definitely gotta plan for the long-term before you plant any. 

Some trees can be grown in containers. Though they won’t become gigantic branching behemoths, they’ll still do their part to support all the life that depends on them. Growing a tree from seed may take awhile, but could be an easy option to getting one if you have the patience--the trees are more than happy to help you, as they drop tons of seeds and fruit in fall for you to gather. 

Groundcover

Bare soil is the enemy of microbial life in the soil, and while small pockets of bare soil can be great nesting places for bees and other insects, having swaths of empty soil should be avoided. Groundcover plants grow low to the ground in a sprawling habit, and will often spread quite easily on their own. This is a great way to provide shelter, keep soil temperatures cool, block out weeds, and give your soil life a chance to thrive.

Sometimes, ground covers don’t even have to be planted in the ground. Shallow-rooted plants like succulents, ferns, and alyssum can be planted into cracks in stone walls, and moss can be planted by making moss graffiti and painting it onto a surface. As with climbing plants, do make sure that you don’t cause extra damage to important walls and housing foundations.

Host Plants

Host plants get their own section, because plants of all kinds can be host plants for different creatures! It’s common to think only flowers can be host plants in the beginning, but in reality, many bushes and trees are host plants to dozens of species of butterflies and moths. Honestly, I feel that factor's not talked about enough. Look up what insects live in your area and what kind of host plants they need, and plant some if you can! Bonus points if you can plant a variety of them--I know that there’s hundreds of kinds of milkweed, each one flowering and leafing up around different times of the year. Planting several varieties of milkweed, then, would provide monarchs with food through several seasons, allowing many more of them to grow up in your garden!

Nectar Plants

Plants that provide nectar to insects is a great foundation to increasing biodiversity! This is, of course, many native wildflowers (and even nonnative wildflowers, though be sure they aren’t invasives who’ll do more harm than good), but many native bushes, vines, and trees will also provide nectar to hungry pollinators! 

Keystone Species

To be frank, some plants can have a bigger impact than others in a landscape. By all means, every bit helps, but if you want to boost biodiversity quickly there are a few plants that can essentially serve as the backbone of local ecosystems that you can grow in anything from a balcony pot to a small patch of your backyard. These plants can be different depending on where you are, so do your research to find out what would be best to grow in your area. If you can’t get them all? That’s alright! But even hitting just a few of these target species really can do a lot.

That’s the end of this post! My next post is gonna be about things to keep in mind/continue to do once you get plants in the ground! Until then, I hope this advice was helpful! Feel free to reply with any questions, your success stories, or anything you think I may have forgotten to add in!

[okiidokii]

🌌🌟Space Girl, show me the stars You know the galaxies of my heart 🚀👽

progress gif!

[labeanzsz]

Have some Tiny Turbos for the week

Edit: Drew this quick doodle at school, he fell over >:}

[spoopy-nevermore-dump]

Hey pssst hey. Have you ever considered: Montada?

I hate it, and it nearly killed my hyperfixation

But I understand my opinion on this may affect others, and many may be hurting from this episode soooooooooo

Art requests open

[sydmarch]

jumanji

[gummy-worms-in-my-brain]

put jevil in there >:)

how did you know i was watching over jevil for a while?? actually, you know what, i'm going to just chalk it up to this being a simple coincidence. just some clown-related sixth sense. best not to think too hard about that, all these clowns are already driving me mad,.,,, we've got a few pictures of that clown around town during the period he was here though!! jevil was(past tense) staying here for just a couple of weeks but damn he was quite a handful, couldn't get a break while that clown was around, how am i supposed to sprinkle salt on rouxls with this fella causing chaos,.,,,

a word of advice, make sure you have no weapons of any kind around your place,.,,, rouxls got cut in half(below the cut(no pun intended)) at some point and it was really inconvenient,.,,, oh well, i just hope that whoever it was that picked jevil up from here is better prepared for chaos chaos than i was

[astranauticus]

A thrilling and horrific tale of 5 strangers caught up in a mysterious supernatural conspiracy, will they uncover the secrets of the peculiar artefact bestowed upon them or will they fall to what lurks in the shadows? Find out in Curse of the Amulet, coming to a theatre (heh) near you this Halloween season!

[streetlightgoblin]

Happy pride from the wanderers!!

A little thing for y’all this June!

[lucabyte]

Do you have any happy and not at all upset or stressed loop art let them be free of the torment nexus for two seconds pls also who is funding all of loop's divorces they only have a silver coin so it's not them

hrmmm. (takes stock of my wips) (squints). so i haaave... fiiive wiiips..... and i think ooooone of them counts. maybe. as them just chillin. oopsie. sorry im putting them in the pear wiggler

go look at these old ones to tide you over (x) (x) (x) <3 and also look at domesticated loop again i love domesticated loop (LINK)

[sucrate]

ASHE! ASHE!!!!

MUTUAL VIBE CHECK!!

Have been a time since we talked! I hope you're doing alright and having a good night/day!!

Just came to say 'hi' because you're a very special person to me! you were one of the first person I talked here on tumblr and I will never forget the funny little thing we would send each other. I wish we could go back to talking with one another someday, I really miss you!!

HI OMG HI OMG !!!! FOXY:-) TYSMM RAA ? ? ? I MISS U 2 WTF !!! tysm 4 this omggg im doing sooo well <- KILLED IN THE ACADEMICS . i hope ur doing well too >_< !!!!!

[innielove]

every weekend im like. this is it im getting my life together, on monday i will start dealing with my responsibilities and i will do all the things that are not just the bare minimum. and then i don't do any of that. i absolutely fail to do anything the following week.

[voidcat]

once again at my wits end bc of men

[the-holy-ghosted]

Totally anonymous user here to say you should add a character to your artfight profile. If youre ready to/have one in mind ofc. Totally not so i can bookmark them and save their images to use as refs. Ofc not.

-100% anonymous raccoon 🦝

im working on it i promise ;-; im so slow to draw lately but ive got a reference for 2 characters going currently, ill hopefully have them up and posted by today !! and then after them ill work on the other three

[voltrons]

uhhhhhhh