#this and the next post is a queue by the way!~

[anipgarden]

Things to Do that Aren't Related to Growing Plants

This is my second 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! 

Some of us just don’t have much luck when it comes to growing plants. Some of us simply want to aim for other ways to help that don’t involve putting on gardening gloves. Maybe you've already got a garden, but you want to do more. No problem! There’s a couple of options you can look into that’ll help attract wildlife in your area without even having to bring out any shovels!

Provide a Water Source

Oftentimes when I see ‘add a water source’ in informational articles about improving your backyard for wildlife, it’s almost always followed by an image of a gorgeous backyard pond with a waterfall and rock lining that looks expensive to set up, difficult to maintain, and overall just… not feasible for me. Arguably, not feasible for a lot of people. And that’s okay! There’s still ways to add water in your garden for all kinds of creatures to enjoy!

There’s tons of ways to create watering stations for insects like bees and butterflies. A self refilling dog bowl can work wonders! Add some stones into the receiving tray for insects to land on or use to climb out, and you’ve got a wonderful drinking spot for all kinds of insects! You can also fill a saucer or other dish with small stones and fill it, though it’ll likely need refilling daily or even several times a day during hot times. 

I've seen people online use all kinds of things to make water features. Some go with terra-cotta pots, pebbles, and a cheap pump to get a small and simple fountain. Others use old tires, clay, and a hole in the ground to create an in-ground mini pond system. If all else fails, even a bucket or watertight box with a few plants in it can do the trick--though do be wary of mosquitoes if the water isn’t moving. In situations like these, a solar-powered fountain pump or bubbler are great for keeping the water moving while still making it a drinking option for wildlife (it not even more appealing for some)--and these items can be obtained fairly cheap online!

Bird baths are an option as well--a classic way to provide for birds in your area, they can be easy to find online or in a gardening store! The only downside is that a good, quality bird bath can be pricey up-front. However, a nice stone bird bath should last a long time, be easy to clean and refill, and be enjoyed by many birds! I’ve also seen tutorials on how to make your own with quickcrete! Bird baths will be a welcome sight to birds, as they provide a space for them to drink and bathe to regulate the oils in their feathers for flight and insulation. Putting a stone in the middle will also help insects to escape if they fall in, and provide a place to perch so they can get their own drink. You’ll want to change the water and clean the baths regularly--as often as once a week, if you can manage it.

If possible, it’s highly encouraged to fill and refill water features with rainwater instead of tap water. Tap water is often treated, so instead of using hoses or indoor kitchen water, collecting some rainwater is a great alternative. Collecting rainwater can be as simple as leaving cups, bins, or pots outside for awhile.

Butterflies and other creatures will also drink from mud puddles. If you can maintain an area of damp soil mixed with a small amount of salt or wood ash, this can be fantastic for them! Some plants also excel at storing water within their leaves and flowers (bromeliads come to mind), making them an excellent habitat for amphibians as well as a drinking spot for insects and birds.

Bird Feeders and Bird Houses

Some of the fancy, decorated bird feeders are expensive, but others can be pretty low-cost--I got my bird feeder from Lowe’s for around 10 dollars, and a big bag of birdseed was around another 10 dollars and has lasted several refills! If you don’t mind occasionally buying more birdseed, a single birdfeeder can do a lot to attract and support local birds! If you’re handy, have some spare wood, and have or can borrow some tools, you may even be able to find instructions online to make your own feeder. You may not even need wood to do so! Even hummingbird feeders, I’ve found, are quick to attract them, as long as you keep them stocked up on fresh sugar water in the spring and summer!

An important note with bird feeders is that you have to make sure you can clean them regularly. Otherwise, they may become a vector for disease, and we want to avoid causing harm whenever possible. Also keep an ear out and track if there’s known outbreaks of bird diseases in your area. If local birding societies and scientists are advising you take your birdfeeders down for awhile, by all means, do it!

Bird houses are naturally paired with bird feeders as biodiversity promoters for backyard spaces, and it makes sense. Having bird houses suited to birds in your area promotes them to breed, raise their young, disperse seeds, and generally engage in your surrounding environment. Setting them up takes careful selection or construction, preparation, and some patience, but sooner or later you might get some little homemakers! Keep in mind, you will need to clean your birdhouses at least once a year (if not once per brood) to make sure they’re ready and safe for birds year after year--you wouldn’t want to promote disease and parasites, after all. But they could be a valuable option for your landscape, whether you purchase one or construct your own! 

Again, do make sure you're putting up the right kind of boxes for the right kinds of birds. Bluebird boxes are some I see sold most commonly, but in my area I believe they're not even all that common--a nesting box for cardinals or chickadees would be far more likely to see success here! And some birds don't even nest in boxes--robins and some other birds are more likely to use a nesting shelf, instead! Research what birds live in your area, take note of any you see around already, and pick a few target species to make homes for!

Solitary Bee Houses

A bee house or bee hotel is a fantastic way to support the solitary bees in your area! For a few dollars and some annual cleaning, you can buy a solitary bee house from most big box nurseries. Alternatively, you can make one at home, with an array of materials you may already have lying around! You can even make them so that they’ll benefit all kinds of insects, and not necessarily just bees.

Though you don’t even necessarily have to break out the hammer and nails, buy a ton of bricks, or borrow a staple gun. Making homes for tunneling bees can be as simple as drilling holes in a log and erecting it, or drilling holes in stumps and dead trees on your property. You might even attract some woodpeckers by doing this!

Providing Nesting Area

There are tons of different kinds of bees, and they all make different kinds of homes for themselves. Not all of them make big cavity hives like honey bees, or will utilize a solitary bee house. Bumblebees live in social hives underground, particularly in abandoned holes made by rodents--some others nest in abandoned bird nests, or cavities like hollow logs, spaces between rocks, compost piles, or unoccupied birdhouses. Borer, Ground, and Miner bees dig into bare, dry soil to create their nests. Sparsely-vegetated patches of soil in well-drained areas are great places to find them making their nests, so providing a similar habitat somewhere in the garden can encourage them to come! I do talk later in this document about mulching bare soil in a garden--however, leaving soil in sunny areas and south-facing slopes bare provides optimal ground nesting habitat. Some species prefer to nest at the base of plants, or loose sandy soil, or smooth-packed and flat bare ground. They’ve also been known to take advantage of soil piles, knocked over tree roots, wheel ruts in farm roads, baseball diamonds and golf course sand traps. You can create nesting ground by digging ditches or creating nesting mounds in well-drained, open, sunny areas with sandy or silty soil. However, artificially constructed ground nests may only have limited success. 

Providing Alternative Pollinator Foods

Nectar and pollen aren’t the only foods sought out by some pollinators! Some species of butterflies are known to flock to overripe fruit or honey water, so setting these out can be an excellent way to provide food to wildlife. You may want to be cautious about how you set these out, otherwise it can help other wildlife, like ants or raccoons. Butterflies may also drop by to visit a sponge in a dish of lightly salted water. 

Bat Houses and Boxes

Big or small, whether they support five bats or five hundred, making bat boxes and supporting local bats is a great way to boost biodiversity! Not only will they eat mosquitoes and other pest species, but you may also be able to use the guano (bat droppings) as fertilizer! Do be careful if you choose to do that though--I’ve never had the opportunity to, so do some research into how strong it is and use it accordingly.

Provide Passageway Points

If you want your area to be more accessible for creatures that can’t fly or climb fences, allowing or creating access points can be an excellent way to give them a way in and out. Holes in the bottom of walls or fences can be sheltered with plants to allow animals through. 

In a somewhat similar manner, if you’re adding a water fixture, it’s important to provide animals a way to get into and out of the pond--no way in, and they can’t use the water. No way out, and they may drown. Creating a naturalistic ramp out of wood beams or sticks, or stepped platforms out of bricks, stones, or logs can do the trick. 

Get or Keep Logs and Brush Piles

I’ve already mentioned logs a good handful of times so far in this post. To be used as access ramps, or as nesting areas for solitary bees. But they have value as much more than that! Logs on the ground provide shelter for all kinds of animals, especially depending on size--anything from mice, reptiles, and amphibians to things like turkey vultures and bears will use fallen logs as shelter. Inside of a decaying log, there’s a lot of humidity, so amphibians are big fans of them--meanwhile, the upper sides of them can be used as sunning platforms by things like lizards. Other animals can also use the insides of logs as nest sites and hiding places from predators too big to fit inside. Fungi, spiders, beetles, termites, ants, grubs, worms, snails, slugs, and likely much more can be found inside rotting logs, using the rotting wood as food sources or nesting places. They can then provide food for mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. They can also be regarded as a landmark or territory marker as wildlife get more familiar with your space.

So how do you get logs for cheap? Try Chip Drop! I talk about them more in a future post, but you can mark saying that you’d like logs in your drop, so they’ll give you any they have! In fact, you may even get a drop faster if you're willing to accept some logs. You may also be able to approach arborists you see working in your area and ask for logs. There may also be local online listings for people selling logs for cheap, or just trying to get rid of them. If there’s land development going on near you, you may be able to snag logs from trees they cut down to make space. Do keep in mind, you don’t need to have huge gigantic logs laying around your property to make an impact--even small logs can help a lot.

If possible, creating and leaving brush piles on the edge of your property can be a great boost to biodiversity--even if you may not see the wildlife using it. They’ll provide shelter from weather and predators, and lower portions are cool and shady for creatures to avoid the hot sun. The upper layers can be used as perch sites and nest sites for song birds, while lower layers are resting sites for amphibians and reptiles, and escape sites for many mammals. As the material decays, they also attract insects, and as such they’ll attract insect-eating animals too. As more small animals find refuse in your brush pile, their predators will be attracted to them as well. Owls, hawks, foxes, and coyotes are known to visit brush piles to hunt. Making a brush pile can be as simple as piling branches and leaves into a mound, as big or as small as you want. You can even use tree stumps or old fence posts near the base, and keep stacking on plant trimmings and fallen branches. Do note that you don’t want to do this near anything like a fire pit.

Don't forget, with all of these, your mileage may vary for any variation of reasons, so don't worry if you can't take all of even any of these actions! Even just talking about them with other people may inspire someone else to put out a bat box, or leave a few logs out for wildlife!

That's the end of this post! My next post is gonna be about ways to get seeds and plants as cheaply as possible. For now, I hope this advice helps! Feel free to reply with any questions, success stories, or anything you think I may have forgotten to add in!

[july-19th-club]

angel is like when i say i love you i mean it as much as i’m capable of but also i’m never going to be healthy about it and i’ll never believe that i deserve love in return, so our relationship will be a toxic soup of emotional codependency, interrupted by brief moments of pure terror and un-thought-out bliss

riley is like when i say i love you it means i need you and the need has to be reciprocal; i don’t know how to perform love outside of a certain set of parameters, ones you’ve never really fit inside, and i refuse to sit with the reality of you long enough to accept that; i just want you to already be what i need

and like. spike is all kinds of fucked up for a while in terms of what it’s about for him but what he settles on, the important part is when i say i love you it’s got nothing to do with me. it’s just that the - you - of you is worth love; that the things you already are inspire awe in whatever it is that i am. and that’s enough

[wasyago]

chip chip chip chip

[transldpdl]

Louis de Pointe Du Lac 'In Throes of Increasing Wonder'

[fizzytoo]

all moved in!

[notsosecretlyalesbian]

Cousin Vinny aka Vin Diesel

Abbott Elementary | 02×04: Principal's Office

[benkyoutobentou]

Ranking the books I read in Japanese this year

It’s the end of the year and I don’t think I’ll be finishing any more Japanese books this month, so I thought it would be fun to rank what I read! I read twelve novels in Japanese this year, hitting my goal (but not quite reading one a month). There won’t be twelve rankings here, though, because I read multiple books from the same series and will be combining those.

9. コーヒーが冷めないうちに - 川口俊和: This book just didn’t do it for me. I listened to it on audiobook in February for a target language listening challenge and got stuck in a vicious cycle of not paying attention because the story was boring me and being bored of it because I wasn’t paying enough attention. Most other people I’ve seen who have read it in Japanese also thought it was boring, though, so I’m not mourning any loss.

8. 宝石商リチャードの謎鑑定 - 辻村七子: I really wanted to like this series but the negatives outweighed the positives so much that I only read the first volume. The most damning part of this for me was that I couldn’t stand the writing style. It was extremely confusing, and having a language barrier on top of that just made it miserable. I’m really glad I read this with others because I was not the only one who found the writing style to be ridiculously confusing for a book that doesn’t even handle confusing or difficult topics. Seriously, the writing was so bad that I considered continuing the series in English. But the characters were good.

7. あん - ドリアン助川: Now we get into the books that I enjoyed, just not as much. I liked this book well enough, but it was just a bit middling. I wasn’t overly invested in the characters or story and I found myself wondering how on earth this story could go on for another hundred pages. It was sweet, but ultimately I don’t think the story will stick with me at all.

6. ちょっと今から仕事やめてくる - 北川恵海: This was another audiobook read and although I know I enjoyed it, I really don’t remember much about it. I’m also not sure if the twist, which I did think was really good, actually happened or was something I misunderstood (I’m pretty sure I understood it though). Overall, this one goes on the to-reread pile, just as soon as I can find a physical copy of it.

5. 旅猫リポート - 有川浩: This was an adorable story perfect for cat lovers, but the end had me a little bored. Honestly though, it was quite the experience to go from being a bit bored to crying my eyes out in the span of ten pages. The writing style and the main cat’s perspective was super charming as well.

4. 人間失格 - 太宰治: This was my first classic in Japanese and wasn’t as difficult as I expected. Dazai’s writing style is a pain in the ass, but I will admit that it started to grow on me as the book went on and now I find it endearing. It also wasn’t as depressing as I had heard it was, and I really enjoyed getting a perspective of that time period.

3. 美しい彼 - 凪良ゆう: I only read one volume of this, probably exclusively because I suddenly couldn’t stand romance when I had fifty pages left of this. What can I say, I love a good toxic gay romance. The writing style is chronically readable and the story is super engaging.

2. No. 6 - あさのあつこ: I’m a fan of the anime for this and the novels have not let me down. I’ve only read two so far, but the story and characters are super gripping. I really love the emphasis on dialogue in this series, I really feel like it makes the characters pop more. The only problem I have is this odd quirk in Asano’s writing style, where the majority of the series is told from third person point of view, but will suddenly switch to first person point of view for a single sentence. It’s not enough to deter me, but it is a little odd to see.

1. キノの旅 - 時雨沢恵一: My number one favorite read in Japanese this year and no one should be surprised. I’m a massive Kino fan and read three volumes this year. I love books that I can analyze the hell out of and this is exactly that. Additionally, I think the writing style and the way both Kino and Hermes are characterized adds so much to both the stories and the underlying meanings that Shigusawa is trying to get across.

[boyfhee]

happiest birthday to the loml

[cozylittleartblog]

∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿ya boi made washi tapes, please consider Purchasing them. at cozylittleartshoppe on etsy. good print, good sticc, i am obsessed

[holocene-sims]

for better or for worse, i've been bitten by the fallout 76 bug 🫡

[probablygayattorneys]

I told my brother that if I never play Azran Legacy then Emmy never leaves and I can keep her in that moment forever

And he decided to lift the burden on me by just telling me why she left, thereby ripping off that bandaid. Only problem is, he’s never played Azran Legacy (or any Layton game, for that matter) so he doesn’t know either. But he wasn’t going to let that stop him, so he came up with a reason. And then a few more, just in case.

These reasons include:

-Roundhouse kicked a high ranking government official and is avoiding trial

-Layton doesn’t kill people… but he doesn’t always save them either, and then the train crashed.

-Took the fall for Two-Face killing cops so Harvey Dent’s legacy will live on

-She was the only one who could disarm the bomb but to keep her wife and kids safe she let Descole break her neck.

-Flashed her titties to everyone and is now off to find new people to flash

-She wasn’t actually the Professor’s assistant, she was his apprentice, but near the end of the game she really deepens her connection with the Force and starts to believe that she can overpower him and become the new Professor… however, when she tried to pull off this fight, it’s over, Emmy, the Professor has the high ground.

-Got a job at Hooters which has been a longtime dream of hers and the Professor told her she absolutely could not abandon her dreams to stay his assistant

-Bees.

-She learned the greatest secret the American government has been trying to keep from the public for years (Obama's last name) and had to be eliminated by any means possible.

-Emmy sacrificed herself to save the rest of them from the balrog but she comes back in New World Of Steam as Emmy the White.

-Got a ticket for the Eras tour and is still stuck in traffic leaving the stadium

-She was in a motorcycle accident and plowed into the side of an airplane hanger. She was so innocent… and stoned, apparently.

-After they all sang Seize the Day, she wasn’t able to escape from the cops and they hauled her off to the refuge.

-It’s not Emmy. The first Emmy you see, the teenage one he helps is Emmy, but every single one since is Don Paolo.

-She was just a courier, meant to deliver something to New Vegas, but the game was rigged from the start.

-Moved to Seattle with Grosky to start their own law office.

-This one just says "Bones"

-Was killed by 30-50 feral hogs that ran into her yard within 3-5 minutes while Luke was playing.

-Drove a segway off a cliff

-Bruce Willis was DEAD the ENTIRE TIME!

-Left a note that says “Professor’s Assistant Emmeline Altava Chooses Death” and then fucked off to Europe or something for a year

-She ran away to be with Descole. She was attracted to his manly figure. His Waluigi like body. His spindly little legs. The cut of his jib, if you will.

-Rode her Vespa into a crowd of people while screaming “PEPSI MAN!”

-Didn’t learn STREET SMARTS from JJ Bittenbinder and went to a secondary location

-“Tell me about the rabbits, Emmy.”

-She’s a Russian sleeper agent sent to kill the professor and it’s just taken so damn long because a good hitman doesn’t leave collateral damage but she finally got Layton away from Luke long enough to get the job done.

-Was at a bar on international women’s day, did two shots and tried to fight another girl which caused an all out full bar fight and she fell into a coma after a third girl hit her over the head with an almost full bottle of Hood River Gin.

-Professor Sycamore’s airship flew her to places she’d never been… now she’s lying on the cold hard ground (goat noise)

-The time machine wasn’t stable enough to keep her in the present and it sent back in time to the moment the time machine exploded, sealing her fate.

-Moved to France to learn how to be a heart surgeon.

-She finally was approved to manage her own Dairy Queen franchise.

-She is dead and has been for the past ten years. The professor needs to let her go. The accident wasn’t his fault.

-She walked to Memphis to become a dentist. Anything but this.

-Most think... She died.

-....But I think we oughta believe she made it to the other side :)

[theloopus]

to me BJ is butch in the gay man way like he's a butch queen but he's more femme than Hawkeye. meanwhile Hawkeye is more masculine but more effeminate. also Hawkeye was a twink but now he's in his 30s and graying so he's just some fag. you understand

[seventh-district]

.

[rithmeres]

genuinely these panels are going to make me ugly cry

[enochianghost]

i'll probably be more quiet for the next week or so. im going on a little trip :)

[septembersghost]

with love