#no dig garden

[balkanradfem]

Gardening makes me feel so powerful. I can, with my own hands and careful usage of my brain, affect the environment so an area is populated by plants that I desire to be there, which will give me so much food I will be safe and secure for the entire year? I can change an area so it feeds me? By putting my hands in the soil and knowing how to anticipate the rain and where the roots are likely to grow and how long it takes to get a seed to fruition? I can do this with minimal effort and by adding organic matter to an area that will stop all other plants from growing, and fertilize my plants, so only my plants succeed? I can, on top of that, have all kinds of flowers growing in it, making it beautiful to me and helping all kinds of little bugs and critters have a home? I can do it in a way that makes the land even more fertile and healthy? And I'm not some sort of a deity?

Being able to control an area of land and make it into what you need to survive is powerful. Seeing it in your head and then watching it happen by the work of your own two hands is invigorating. Some things we cannot change. But we can change the area immediately around us so it both feeds us, and become beautiful and rich to us.

[cynthiabrandel]

How To Plan A Garden

How To Plan A Garden

Garden Plan Organization Planning your garden can be overwhelming if you are not organized right from the start. Winter is the perfect time to write down your ideas, organize your thoughts, and draw a map outlining your future garden design.  If you want to be serious about gardening this year, there are a few things to consider before you buy your first pack of seeds.  Type of Garden Raised…

[offcampusstillnerdy]

Mulch, compost, make wormeries, and DO NOT DIG. (we don't need to mention, "don't use weedkiller or chemical fertiliser" on this site, I'm hoping? Too tired to do a mini story about the Green Revolution con, you can Google it. Just compost, people, compost.

I grew up on stories of the Dust Bowl.

My dad’s parents were Okies–environmental refugees, before anyone had a word for it. They left their families, the land they were renting, their animals, took their 1-year-old daughter, and drove to California. My grandpa worked in a peach packing plant. My grandma cleaned houses.

They were so lonely that after a couple years they went back to Oklahoma, with their total savings of $20. Later, they bought land. Built a house. Survived.

My mom’s dad was a kid then, and his family stayed in western Kansas. Stayed because my great-grandpa was too damn stubborn to leave, stayed when their neighbors had all left, stayed because they didn’t have enough money to leave. They slept with wet rags over their faces. My great-grandpa tied a string around his waist, tied the other end to the house, and went to check on the cows, while my great-grandma tried to make soup from a little milk and a little flour. There was so much dust swirling in the air, the soup turned to mud. She cried, begged her husband once more to let them leave, and they went to bed hungry.

My grandpa’s oldest brother was the first one in the county to leave his wheat stubble in the field instead of plowing it under after the harvest. His neighbors made fun of him. His parents scolded him for having messy fields. 70 years later, at his funeral, someone told how people from Japan came to visit the farm, to see what he was doing differently.

More than 80 years after the Dust Bowl, I stood on a mountain in Ecuador watching, horrified, as a man with a tractor plowed a steep field. He would back up the hill, set the disk in the ground at the top of the field, and drive down, breaking up the soil, dragging it downhill. Dust billowed around him.

The man next to me, a rich-for-the-area farmer, sighed happily. “Look at all that dust. Isn’t that great?”

“What? No!” I was shocked.

“Why not? That’s what a modern farm looks like.”

I thought of the old black-and-white photos, dust clouds like black walls rolling in across the prairie. That’s what a modern farm looked like, too.

The next field down, four people and four oxen–well, dairy cows used as oxen–were planting. They used plows, too, but instead of a disk pulverizing the soil, their plow was a straight piece of wood, metal from an old leaf spring bolted to the end. One team of oxen used that plow to open a furrow, the women walking behind dropped maize seeds into the soil, and the second team of oxen dragged the same kind of plow just above the first, closing the furrow and burying the seeds. They walked along the hill–side to side, furrows running along the contour of the hill. If they were raising any dust, it wasn’t enough for me to see from across the valley.

The man with the tractor probably finished in an hour or two. The whole group, people and oxen and all, probably spent the whole day planting the same size field.

As the maize grew tall, you could see the difference: In the tractored field, the top rows were yellow, spindly, trying to root in the yellow-brown clay the topsoil had once covered. Down below, in dark, rich earth, the maize was tall, green, strong.

In Mali, years later, a farmer explained to a group of visiting scientists why, despite having made erosion control bunds, his rows of maize still went up and down the slope, instead of along the contour, parallel with the bunds. “Because of the wind,” he said, like it was obvious–because it was. In the rainy season, the wind comes from the south, and when storms come it blows hard enough to send dust and dishes and clothes left on the line flying and tumbling with it.

The rows of maize have to be parallel to that wind, or they’ll blow over. So sure, you can put the scientists’ earthen ridges in to block the downhill flow of water, but your rows can’t follow that meandering contour. Your rows have to face into the wind. 

For thousands of years we’ve been coaxing, wrestling, dragging our food from the soil. If we’re careful, and lucky, we can make our peace with it. If we charge into places unknown–the high plains of Kansas and Oklahoma, the steep slopes of the Andes, the storm-swept fields of West Africa–if we plow, and plant, and harvest without thinking? Without learning from the place? Dust clouds blackening the horizon, stunted maize on worn-out soil, crops blown down in  thunderstorms–the earth is forgiving, but only so far. We have time to learn, to make mistakes, to do what is easy even when it does harm, but only so much. Beyond that, we destroy the very literal foundations of our lives.

[gieoki]

some context for the gardener stuff: i just think it’d be really cute if she became closer with the rest of the dreemurrs and started working for asgore’s flower shop

[fishtrouts]

A desperate attempt to have an aesthetic photoshoot with this thing 😐

[arrimorr]

I am one step away from submerging into a complete brainrot which I suffered since I was 14, which is thinking about the meaning of white flags in Pottsfield.

It just seems weirdly specific to me, you know. It would have been one thing, if they were a decor element of the maypole, and it would have been one thing if they only gave the white flag to that lone citizen at the border, but no, its a repeating element. The flag even goes BEFORE Enoch in their formation in Aardman's short. So, what does it represent? For the town, for its celebration.

[chaoticnoisy]

first of all, good boys can do whatever they want, so jot that down

[madeline-kahn]

@PSCENTRAL EVENT 27: SCENERY

A Filmic Tour of Hatfield House: the Marble Hall

The Favourite (2018) dir. Yorgos Lanthimos Shakespeare in Love (1998) dir. John Madden Enola Holmes (2020) dir. Henry Bradbeer Bridgerton (2020 - ) The Flash (2023) dir. Andy Muschietti Get Him to the Greek (2010) dir. Nicholas Stoller All The Money in the World (2017) dir. Ridley Scott Batman (1989) dir. Tim Burton Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) dir. Jon Watts Orlando (1992) dir. Sally Potter Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) dir. Shekhar Kapur Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) dir. Burr Steers Rebecca (2020) dir. Ben Wheatley

[sporeclan]

< Previous | First | Next >

Finally, we officially have SporeClan's first newborn kitten!!!

[moon13dreams]

What if during the years Luo Binghe was in the Endless Abyss, Shen Qingqiu not only knelt at the sword mound, but he also started planting white lotuses around the Peak?

It would start slow, just a few lotuses appearing in places they hadn't before, but they were so sparse that no one really took much notice. If they did, who would complain? It was just a flower and a lovely one at that. Their Shizun surely wouldn't mind the sight of them. He had been so distraught after the conference... Best to not trouble him with something so inconsequential.

Slowly more and more of those lotuses began to pop up, spreading to every lake and pond on the Peak. That couldn't be an accident. Never had lotuses grown on Qing Jing Peak before. Perhaps their Shizun commissioned An Ding to plant the lotuses, but for what reason they didn't know. Their Shizun had developed more of an interest in beasts than flora, but even that passion was smothered by his grief. Whatever the reason for the flowers, they must be special.

It wasn't until Ning Yingying informed her shixiong that she had been assisting the Peak Lord in cultivating the lotuses, hoping that it would ease his troubled heart. He had lost his most favored disciple and even after a year, their Shizun still knelt every day at the sword mound when he wasn't avoiding the memories haunting him on the Peak (though they would never speak of such things around their Shizun out of courtesy).

And so, they said nothing about the lotuses. If gardening and caring for the flowers that overtook their lakes and ponds brought comfort to the grieving heart of their Shizun, who were they to rob him of it? He was still in mourning, but when they did chance at seeing him caring so tenderly for the blossoming lotuses, they could see a little bit of that old light return to him, even for just a moment.

At some point, even the common people in the surrounding villages began to whisper about the widow of Qing Jing Peak, endlessly beautiful in his mourning amongst the tall bamboo and pure as snow lotus blooms.

[balkanradfem]

How to make gardening easy

If you've grown up watching people garden, it's likely you've seen them working around with a big hoe, digging the soil, tilling it, constantly at the war with the weeds. This is traditionally how people garden, because of simple fact that no matter where you plant something, there's going to be native wild plants growing around it, likely suffocating it, unless you do something about it. So people traditionally, have had to fight a lot of weeds, so their garden plants could have all of the space, nutrients, water and sunlight to grow.

Due to this natural issue, that makes the planet a living space for us, the first problem you hit when you're starting a new garden, is a bed of weeds that need to be dealt with. There's grass, there's dandelions, maybe some tall native plants, and you're standing there sighing, thinking of how to convert this into a garden-friendly space. And the first human instinct is to get the space tilled and leveled. But that's difficult. Here's how you can do it without as much effort, by being super smart.

The smart thing is to start early. If you look at your intended garden space 4-6 months early, and you know you're going to have to deal with all these native plants, you can instead, prevent them from growing, by blocking the sunlight from them, and then letting the time take care of it. This is done by several different ways, but all of the include covering the ground with something that won't let sunlight get trough. The most common way is to get a bunch of cardboard (ideally without print), lay them out over your gardening space, put some rocks or weighty stuff over them, so they don't get blown away, and then you can walk away, get back in 4-6 months, remove them, and fresh and ready soil will be waiting for you. All that plant matter will die without sunlight, some of it will get eaten by bugs and turned into fertilizer for you, and you did maybe 1/20 of the work and invested some old cardboard.

If you don't have/like cardboard, this can also be done with a big tarp! A third way to do this, maybe not 100% efficient, is to cover the ground with mulch instead. This is what I do. I bring bags of dried leaves to the garden, spread them across the beds and cover them this way. It doesn't need to be leaves, you can cover the ground with straw, hay, dried grass, wood chips, pine needles, any organic matter. It's not completely efficient, because this organic matter will fall apart and turn into soil itself, so it might not give you a perfect coverage, and some plants might just grow in that instead, but! This method also makes sure your soil is already somewhat fertilized, and your plants will absolutely love all of the degraded organic matter; it will bring in bugs, it will bring in worms, it will bring life to the soil, your garden will be rich in life.

Now, let's say you've done it, you've gotten your empty garden bed, and you're about to plant in It, do you need to work the soil still? I would say no. Gardeners love to work the soil until it's in tiny little pieces, so the new plants have an easier time pushing the roots trough it, so it's easier to work with. And yeah the worked soil is lighter, fluffier, more filled with air pockets, which new plants do like! But what happens next is, the rain falls, the soil absorbs a lot of moisture, and then condenses and turns into that same hard airless dense matter that it was in the start. Digging the soil can only make it lighter and more filled with air, temporarily. That's why gardeners need to do it often!

Worked soil, especially rich in clay, will also get a very dry top surface, which can get rough and fill with cracks, making it look desert-like. Plants do not love this, and gardeners often have to work the soil just to break that cracked surface and get their plants some air. Soil that is dry and dense will also struggle to absorb a decent amount of water, so rainfall won't give it as much goodness as it could. So, what can you do instead, to make the soil palatable to your plants, and not susceptible to being dried  up and dense and difficult for your plants? You can again, add organic matter on top.

If you're sowing your seeds directly, it's good to wait for your plants to grow a little, so they don't have to fight the mulch, but as soon as your plants are taller than a few inches, you are encouraged to cover the ground around them with any organic matter. What this will do is 1. Stop the surface of the soil from drying out, keep it very pleasant, soft and damp for the plant 2. Stop additional weeds from growing, save you from tons of weeding, 3. Protect your soil from erosion and 4. Fertilize your plants.

Soil erosion is a common problem in agriculture, where dried-up top of the soil is eroded by the wind, and ultimately turned into sand, which in a monocrop situation, can turn the entire area into a desert unless there's frequent rain. Now I'm not suggesting you could ever, by growing your little garden, create a desert area – you will not. But keeping your soil safe from both sun and wind will make sure it doesn't lose nutrients, water, and it's own structure, you're keeping it safe! And adding even more richness to it by letting the mulch slowly fall apart on top of it. Whenever it rains, the rainwater will fall into your mulch, take in nutrients from the parts that have composted, and then carry it down to your plant's roots. Your plants will get to eat new food every time it rains.

Generally once my plants outgrow all possible weeds and are not longer in the danger of being suffocated, I forget about weeds and just let them grow, they're not threat to me anymore, and having lots of greenery in times of drought is good for both the plants, and the little critters in your garden. Oh I forgot to tell you about the critters! One thing your garden needs is airy soil, filled with little holes and passages, that gardeners usually make manually with their tools. But what you're doing is luring thousands of little worms, bugs, critters and underground creatures, by all that rich mulch they love eating, so they dig the ground for you. They make holes and passages and air flows through them, making the soil light and fluffy. I've found that keeping the ground covered with mulch during the winter creates the entire different quality of soil than the one that isn't covered; the soil that was covered is so light and easy to work with, you can plant using just your fingers.

Having the quality of your soil improve to the point where you can work it with fingers, will usually happen after 3 years of gardening like this! In the meantime, you might need some tool just to get the seeds underground; I've been using a single spoon to plant everything in the garden. It's the smallest, and thus least-disruptive to the soil type of tool. We want all of the creatures in there to feel safe and undisturbed.

Even though I wrote all this pretending like I can totally garden like a smart person, in the reality I absolutely will completely ignore some parts of my garden all winter, check on it in the spring when it's super weedy, pull the weeds out by hand, and only then mulch and plant, laughing at myself for letting the soil quality go bad – but it still works. As long as I add mulch at some point in time, the garden succeeds. So if you're right now, in the height of spring, considering planting some beans – but you haven't done the whole '6 months earlier' procedure, no worry. I didn't either. I pulled out some weeds and planted beans today with a spoon, I'm gonna add mulch when they come out, and I'm still 100% certain they'll be fine, as long as there's rain. So many of our efforts cannot compare to even one single rainfall.

[leafie-draws]

leafie dragon 🍃

[grailknightmonty]

its the mounders!

i was possessed by something last night to scribble out some designs for this alliance :D They're just such a fun and silly group, I love their vibes so much already 💚

[knifeforkspooncup]

South Downs retirement Crowley but instead of tending his garden like a well-adjusted cottagecore gnome he prowls the vegetable patch revving a weed whacker and threatening to pave over the yard if the pears and dill don't grow well.

[pettyprocrastination]

whoever this beloved anon was I am so touched by your kindness! You definitely didn’t have to do this but I am so happy you enjoy this idea and I will happily expand upon it for you!

this is just a collection of word vomit bullet points for the time being but I will happily answer any and all questions about this pair!!

warnings: violence, angst, child death (Sarah Miller), foul language, the same warnings that apply to tlou, reader is Sarah's mom and described as having similar features to her. 

So the general Idea is that you and Joel are happily married before the outbreak. 

You had been Sarah's mother, his high school sweetheart he got pregnant when neither of you were old enough to have any reaction to the pregnancy test other than a fucking panic attack in one another’s arms. but you made it work 

you both worked but made time for one another and your sweet girl, going to museums every other weekend and joel insisting on swooping you off for a date every now and then 

nothing special. He knows you’re more of a diner gal than anything too fancy that makes you both feel out of place. 

On his birthday in 2003, you had planned to tell him that you were pregnant again. But the memories of your own fears of motherhood from all those years ago begin to swirl through your head again and you get cold feel. deciding to tell him the morning after

it is his birthday afterall, you want to focus on him. 

but when you’re woken up in the middle of the night because tommy needs to get bailed out, Joel kisses you sweetly one last time before promising he’ll be back and you can’t shake the feeling that something bad is happening. 

its you that shakes sarah awake that night. shouting at her to put on her shoes when she’s still rubbing the sleep from her eyes because you’ve been listening to the radio for the past two hours, calling joel again and again and again praying for him to fucking pick up but to no avail. 

Sarah, bless your little girl’s bleeding heart is the one who insists you check on the adler’s against your better suspicions and when you find the eldest looming over her daughter, blood and sinew dripping from her mouth, you grab your daughter hand and burst into a full sprint until something slams into your back and sends you tumbling onto their front lawn

its how joel finds you, struggling to keep the once sweet old woman, whose now nothing more than dead eyes and gnashing teeth straining to snap at your pulse point as you push against her while sarah shrieks before your husband runs forward and cracks her skull with a wrench. 

there’s hardly a moment of pause, just enough for him to pull you up and into his arms before he’s ushering you both into the car with an urgency. 

when the truck crashes, you get separated from them. Perhaps at Tommy’s side when the flames rise and create a wall, separating you from your husband, or maybe pulled into the mob of chaos when trying to escape from those already infected-

all joel knows is that you promise you’ll find him: just get sarah to safety and you’ll meet him at the river

Poor thing is already so frightened, held in her father’s arms with tears streaming down her face insisting they can’t leave you they just can’t but her father kisses her forehead and reassures her its going to be okay 

“we just need to be brave, okay babygirl? Your mama’s real tough, she’s gonna be alright.” 

he isn’t sure if he’s saying it to his daughter or himself. 

but when he comes to the river you aren’t there. Only a soldier who points a gun at the scared little girl in his arms and then he loses everything

its when the light is gone from his daughter’s eyes that he realizes. His voice cracked and raw from sobbing that he looks around to see his brother with drawn in shoulders and tears in his eyes but his wife is nowhere to be found. 

Tommy says you got lost in the chaos. Everything was so loud, so sudden that he turned around and suddenly you weren’t there. 

Joel wants to go back but its Tommy that stops him, that dulls the red in his vision to a sad faded pink because his brother points at the orange horizon not too far from them, so much of the city is already in flames. 

“We’re gonna find her, but not there.” 

So Joel searches. for the first year spent in the world post-outbreak its all he did. 

He became a smuggler because of it. 

Information came at a price and he needed to be able to fucking pay it, whether it be in blood or ration cards. He was willing to do anything to find you or any thin thread that lead your way. 

But it’s Tommy that asks him to give up. Not in those words of course. 

The youngest Miller knows better than to say something so cruel that would make his brother, the only person he has in this world turn on him. 

But his voice is worried when he asks him one night in Boston when he hasn’t even had the chance to wash the blood from his knuckles 

“You think she would have wanted this for you?” 

the fight that followed his words was brutal. Vicious insults and scarred fists slamming against each brother until they're both too tired and bloody to continue. Each leaning against a wall for support and Tommy’s wavering voice breaking the silence. 

“I don’t know where she is, Joel. But I do know you're gonna get yourself killed if you keep lookin’ for her.” 

All he can do is nod. 

It’s a few days later when he meets Tess. Who has heard plenty of stories about the elder miller’s brutality and wants him to put that muscle to good use for some extra profit. 

It begins his new life. One that empty and cold but one he can live. 

Until of course, Ellie comes along. The sweet and incredibly opinionated girl that makes him become something akin to the man he thought died twenty years ago. 

its when he’s traveling with Ellie, that it happens. When a warm familiarity has settled between the two because so much blood and pain has been shared he can’t help but see her as something close, something bright even though all he can force himself to utter in her reference is “cargo” 

when theyre traveling through the woods as Ellie chatters away, probing his memory about a movie that may or may not have existed thirty years ago because her descriptions of the plot are incredibly odd he hears a voice shout for them to stop and finds himself staring at a man- no, a boy- pointing a gun at them. 

Ellie stills, but Joel can see enough to know that from the lanky figure and dimpled face that he’s young. Maybe twenty, twenty-two at the oldest, but his eyes dart from Joel to Ellie with a pinprick of fear that allows Joel the time to charge forward and slam him to the ground before wrestling the gun from his hands. 

He has enough to time to tuck it under the stranger’s chin before he hears the sound of the safety being turned off and finds himself looking up and seeing a gun just inches from his face. 

Joel’s head whips around when Ellie’s voice calls out his name in fear, he turns to see another stranger holding her a gun point, shoulders drawn back and a shadow cast over their face by the had obstructing their identity. 

“You hurt one of mine, I hurt one of yours. That a fair deal?” 

Its takes him a moment to recognize you. It’s been so long since he’s heard your voice, the sweet tease when you would poke at him each time he woke up late despite the fact that you reminded him to set his alarm the night before, the times you’d chide him with a harsh “Joel Miller!” whispered in public anytime he was able to grab you a bit too passionately to be appropriate in public but the laughter in your voice let him know you were never truly mad at him. You didn’t know how to be. 

But that sweetness is buried under a cold rasp that cuts through the air as you point a rifle at the scared little girl in front of you.

“You think I won’t?” You’re older now, skin covered in scars from a life he didn’t know you got the chance to live and your eyes are cold as they regard your husband. “Put the gun down and get the fuck off of him, I won’t repeat myself.” 

Joel mumbles your name in awe. The woman he loved, the woman he mourned the one he fought so hard to find stands before him like some sort of hallucination and suddenly the world feels like its spinning until you bark orders at him again. 

“You’ve got five seconds Joel, make a fucking choice before I make it for you.” 

He looks down and realizes the boy under him, the one with the bleeding nose and snarling face has your eyes and his dimples. 

“One.” 

The one above him has Sarah’s hair. Soft brown curls that shine under the sun. 

“Two”

Wait. No, they both do.

“Three.” 

Twins. Jesus fucking Christ you had twins. 

“Four.” 

Joel holds the rifle up above his head and the one boy standing snatches it from his grasp, tossing it to the ground and kicking it far from his reach. He slowly stands, allowing your son- dear god your son- to scramble to his feet. 

Your voice softens just for a moment. “You okay, Duke?” 

Blood stains the bottom half of his face from where Joel slammed his fist into the boy’s nose just moments before, but he nods nonetheless. 

Now, they both stand on one side of you and he can see the resemblance clear as day the same way he would whenever Sarah was by your side.

When you order him to hand over his bag, he does so without question before telling Ellie to do the same. 

She watches him with wide eyes, her hands still up in the air but gaping at her companion as if he had grown a second head. 

“Joel!” “Just do it, alright?”

He doesn’t miss the way you watch their interaction with narrowed eyes until she tosses her bag to you and you slowly lower your gun. 

“Now, you want to tell me what the fuck you think you’re doin’ at my home?”