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So many lovely kinds to make so many snacks. Lemon cucumbers are fun. I should plant them again next year.
Also if you cut the skins off for something don't toss them because they make great fertilizer.
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So many lovely kinds to make so many snacks. Lemon cucumbers are fun. I should plant them again next year.
Also if you cut the skins off for something don't toss them because they make great fertilizer.
most of the time everything sucks but when the sky is blanketed in dark blue-grey clouds after heavy raining and the sun starts to peek through the clouds so that the tops of trees glint pale green and every white structure is starkly, blindingly silhouetted against the sky i’m ok.
like this
if theres one message i hope to spread it's that i genuinely implore each and every one of you to find an interest that relates to daily life like vehicles or dogs or bugs or plants. take photos and write and draw about the things youve seen and tell other people about it. life gets more bearable and even more enjoyable when you start to find the beauty and wonder in everyday things.
Plants!
Temperate tulsi (ocimun africanum) harvest from my garden. I needed a laundry basket for it all
Temperate tulsi tea from my garden
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!
There are ten trillion pictures of flowering trees to the point where they sometimes seem trite and overdone. But then you see a tree in full flower and go holy shit this rules and I've gotta show this to everyone so they can experience the same magic and wonder and there are ten trillion and one pictures of flowering trees
Temperate tulsi (ocimun africanum) harvest from my garden. I needed a laundry basket for it all
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if you want butterflies, you need to live with caterpillars.
i am not being metaphorical, i work in a garden center, stop buying plants 'to bring in the bees and butterflies' and then immediately poisoning every caterpillar that dares to consume a single leaf
you will not get butterflies if you kill all the things that turn into butterflies! what are you doing!
getting a lot of responses to this going 'ok but it would be good as a metaphor though' so I will accept a metaphorical interpretation as long as you ALSO (!) promise to be considerate towards larval forms of insects specifically and biodiversity in general, deal?
Matty Matheson Photographed by Christopher Sherman
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*CHASES TUMBLR* WHY IS THIS MARKED AS POTENTIALLY MATURE?!?!!!!!
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Sometimes I miss the cold.
SeedSavers - Garden Planning
Planning a garden involves deciding what crops to plant, how to efficiently use your space, and correctly timing the planting, care, and harvest of each crop. Whether you are planning a large backyard garden, a small community garden plot, or a container garden, these smart space ideas, tips, and strategies will get your planting efforts off on the right foot.
Where to Start
As it does with most endeavors, it pays to think through your garden project before you gather your seeds or transplants. The last thing you want is to have your garden feel like a chore rather than a source of inspiration and relaxation. Answering these following questions will help you develop a garden plan that suits your space and lifestyle.
Choose a Location
1. Sunlight
Does your garden location get enough sunlight? Most vegetables grow best when they get at least six hours of sun a day, so be sure to plant your garden in a sunlight-rich location.
2. Water Access
Does your garden have easy access to water? Sowing your seeds or planting your transplants near a water source will make it easier for you to keep your soil at the optimal moisture level.
3. Soil Health
Does your garden have healthy soil? There’s no way to overemphasize the importance of good soil: your garden will grow best in nutrient-rich, well-drained, weeded, and loosened (non-compacted) soil.
Before you plant each spring, take the time to enrich your soil with quality compost or other organic matter if you want to boost your soil’s fertility and your garden’s production. Mulch (like leaves, straw, and hay) also adds valuable nutrients to the soil and will cut down significantly on your need to weed.
Think About Your Space
Consider these factors before choosing the crops and varieties you want to grow.
1. Garden size
How much space can you commit to a garden? Maybe you have a large, dedicated garden space in your backyard. Maybe you have a couple of raised beds. Maybe you only have space for a couple of containers. Take into account the size of your garden (including space between rows), the amount of sunlight it gets, and its access to water.
2. Time
Bigger doesn’t always mean better when it comes to basic garden planning. If you’re new to gardening, or if you have limited time to devote to your garden, commit to a plot size that won’t overwhelm you, and concentrate on a selection of vegetables you like to eat that are also easy to grow. Radishes, lettuce, spinach, and carrots are just a few of the crops that don’t take a lot of time or experience to produce a harvest.
Get to Know Your Region
As you think about your garden this year, take some time to learn a little about the climate in your region.
1. Know your region’s first and last frost dates
Your region’s first and last frost dates are the key to successful garden planning. These dates are especially helpful when growing and saving seeds from annuals.Use your last frost date to determine when to start seeds
Use your last frost date to determine when to start seeds and plant out transplants. For example, here at Heritage Farm in northeast Iowa, our last spring frost is typically around May 3. Since it’s best to start tomato seeds indoors 4-6 weeks before transplanting out, we know to start the seeds 4-6 weeks before our last frost date.
Use your first frost date to determine the length of your growing season and which crops will have the time necessary to fully mature in your region.
Find your region’s frost dates here.
2. Know your region’s plant hardiness zone
Which plant hardiness zone are you growing in? The USDA’s Plant Hardiness Zone Map divides the United States into zones according to the “average annual extreme minimal temperature.” Knowing your plant hardiness zone will help you choose crops that will thrive in your location.The 2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zones Map
Your plant hardiness zone is especially helpful if you are growing perennials. If a particular crop type is “hardy to zone _,” then it can overwinter year-round in regions in that growing zone. For example, chives are hardy to zone 3 and are perennial for growing zones 3-9.
Knowing your hardiness zone is also helpful when saving seeds from biennials. In colder zones, the winters might be too frigid to successfully overwinter biennials outdoors.
Find your plant hardiness zone here.
Read the full article on SeedSavers.org
Additional Articles:
Container Gardening Guide
Create a Small-Space Garden
How to Plant a Fall Garden
Extending the Garden Season
Image Source - The Dallas Garden School
always gonna take the scenic route