#no till 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.

[seeecha]

Until the end, that trace never let the Creation become a lonely boy

[purrfectlycontent]

till’s pupils reflecting red only when he’s looking directly at ivan

[hirecchu]

garden

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

This is the start of something new

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[joybeantown]

I LOVE HER INTROOOOOO

Ive been blasting awe of she but i wanted to do a quick piece with the bird in it as well

[grimfolks]

yeah this is gonna take forever

[daily-beast-wirt-brainrot]

[Day 25] My Jason Funderberker[frog] bag arrived not too long ago!!!!! Went for a more enamel pin and/or sticker look with this one, which was accidental.

[sandwichsapphic]

i think about this part of Joy In The Morning all the time. As far as Jeeves knows, Bertie was just randomly in that garden in the middle of the night, no wonder he tried to flirt. I'd be FUMING if I got told to 'switch it off' when im dropping the most romantic shakespeare i can think of

jeeves had really no reason to begin quoting verse- he didn't even pry to hard into bertie's excuse for being out. in fairness they were already on holiday together because "my valet wanted to go fishing" is bertie's sole reasoning for the entire book, so i suppose jeeves decided to be fair and woo him as well. what a gentleman

feat. my written comments as i read the book lmao

[chibassy]

I would have liked to pick flowers with you

[killertoons]

I had a vision of what Julie was like before she was found to live at home.... literally a cave dwelling monster...hair so big and unkept it was her clothes...she's out here running around acting like a feral animal and is found digging in franks garden

Best way to describe it is that one SpongeBob episode where he lives with the jellyfish and Patrick was NOT having it

[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.

[dimsilver]

over the garden wall / till we have faces by c.s. lewis

[purrfectlycontent]

thinking about all those years ivan spent learning about boundaries and how to maintain healthy relationships but then throwing that away (and, subsequently, his relationship with till) during round 6 by initiating that kiss

comic translations by @/whatafruit on twitter x (except for the last two, those are mine)

[ingridgh0st]

If Ivan and Till escaped

Ivan has a talent and he's not afraid to use it

[byerscity]

completely out of the blue (kinda), but does anyone else have this fear/dread of what reactions general viewers/anti-bylers will have if byler is canon? let me elaborate.

last season, especially during pt2, it was stupidly clear that will was gay/had feelings for mike. it’s not even that this was a sudden thing because most fans that delve deep into theories and scenes from the show can tell you, with definitive evidence, that will being gay isn’t new. so, after s4 pt2 dropped, everyone picked up what the duffers put down and figured it out, finally!! but oml the pushback was more than i expected, and you see this a lot with shows and movies with (god forbid) more than one queer or non-white character. people were automatically saying the duffers were pandering to the bylers, who if you weren’t there pre-pt2, were getting a lot of “recognition” as the byler theories became more popular.

what i’m trying to say is, and sorry if i’m rambling at this point 😭😭, that does anyone else have a fear that the casual viewers will just relentlessly shit on byler?? the homophobia is actually gonna be crazy. like they’re just gonna call it woke, pandering, unexpected, or whatever. and i’m not one to care what people think, especially about a show, but i feel like this is just going to infuriate me if it does happen. i’m just so tired of people lacking any brainpower to infer and see past what society expects these characters to be. like OMG U CAN LITERALLY WATCH THAT SCENE IN S3 WHERE MIKE SAYS THE INFAMOUS LINE, “it’s not my fault u don’t like girls!” yeah so yall r stupid and i hate everyone and i love will byers and i cannot stand people calling him slurs like that’s why ur mom doesn’t love u BYE