I'm Fucking obsessed with plants

I'm a pro at nouns! Go wild! This is my gardening blog, my favorite aesthetic is punk and my goal is eventually to become a conservation ecologist and work to preserve endangered species and ecosystems this is a side blog main blog is @the-thing-of-worms

[punkgardener]

Big news!!! Today is the day I begin planning my creek restoration project!!!

I plan on going down there on a warmer day this week and checking out the species that are already there and the ones that need to be introduced, I will also probably be bringing a trash bag so that I can get rid of some of the old bottles (there's some cool glass ones down there that I think I can repurpose down there too)

I think definitely my biggest challenge will be getting the big old tire out of there, it is weighed down by dirt and debris and also my anxiety tells me a snake lives in there (I'm trying to get around that part)

I will do my best to update you guys as this goes and if I get the energy I may go down there today and see everything that needs to be done for it, I look forward to starting this and fixing up the area!

Here's a picture of some mushrooms because I have nothing else to show you right now

If anyone has any tips or resources they'd like to share please do! I need as much help as I can get because I've never done something like this before! Just reblog or send me a dm!

[chase-solidago]

i hate that concerns about urban gardening/foraging safety is often met with "What are you, a cop?" scorn. I believe it's a suspicion of anything that hinders the punk/anti-system urgency to jump in immediately and do whatever feels right.

Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.

I know anti-intellectualism is viewed as activist these days, but like, surely you don't want to literally eat lead, right?

[chase-solidago]

Let’s check in and see how those rascally solarpunk kids are doing, surely they’ve learned by now that…..

Daily reminder: Leafy greens like kales uptake all those delicious heavy metals in urban soils like lead and cadmium.

Don’t eat sidewalk-crack kale.

Here's some cool references from the EPA on safe urban gardening:

REUSING POTENTIALLY CONTAMINATED LANDSCAPES: Growing Gardens in Urban Soils

Steps to Creating a Community Garden or Expand Urban Agriculture at a Brownfields Site

[onenicebugperday]

Meme C:

Some advice for this winter

[teathattast]

[gardenvarietygay]

My biggest gardening tip is that if you have $100 to spend on perennial plants you should aim closer to getting twenty little perennials than three or four big perennials. Planting four $25 plants will have a very small impact visually and you’ll be way too precious about them. Five small plants of the same species will make a bigger visual impact than one large plant of the same species. Plants are living things that you’re planting outside in the weather. You should be buying plants with the understanding that they are closer to folding chairs than Ming vases. If you spend $25 on a plant and accidentally step on it, you haven’t killed the plant but you’ve probably broken off about $12 worth of stems. If you step on a $5 plant you’ve caused like $2 worth of damage and it was probably young anyway so it might push out enough new growth to fill back in by the end of the season. You’d have to outright kill 5 of your $5 plants to equal losing one $25 plant. You will always kill some of your plants, or at least they won’t all thrive. Better to lose a $5 plant than a $25 plant.

Also plants grow, usually quickly. Very few perennial plants look good their first year in the ground, buying a bigger plant doesn’t really change that. Most of the time the difference between buying a gallon perennial and a pint perennial is that you dig a bigger hole for the gallon, you pour more water on the gallon, and you watch it look bad more closely.

All I’m saying is that it recently came to my attention that people when people complain about gardening being expensive it’s because they are spending $600 on landscaping that, frankly, looks like nothing bc they’re buying $50 to $100 plants.

[fucking-foxgirl]

gardening would be significantly less expensive if, hypothetically, you were to take some seeds and leaves and stems from various plants you found in, say, landscaping, or in parks, or growing on the roadside. and then propagate them and youd end up with exactly the same plant and nobody would know. which is of course illegal. but like as an interesting thought experiment if you did that it would be a lot less expensive than $25

[gardenvarietygay]

This is true. Also if you see a plant in a neighbor’s yard you like you can always ask for a cutting/division/some seed. I’ve gotten some fun stuff that way. I pretty much exclusively grow native plants which in my area are hard to find except in nature preserves. I discourage people from harvesting seeds from prairies without permission bc a lot of species in this ecosystem rely on reseeding. Most of the plants I could easily propagate from city parks or business campuses are daylilies which aren’t exciting to me.

[guavamandering]

having a smart woman follow you back is so scary bc it’s like what if she finds out that im stupid

[vivisection1013]

@blizz4rd1203

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Okay, so The Everyday Naturalist is up on the Ten Speed Press and Penguin/Random House's websites (and various other public places), so I can FINALLY show you the cover!!! I have been saying for months that this book is going to be absolutely beautiful (in addition to informative!), and now you get a good taste of that. Ricardo Macia Lalinde is an incredibly skilled artist whose natural history studies will grace not only the cover but the interior of the book; I feel incredibly fortunate to have his work included in this project.

Here's a bit more about the book itself: "If you’ve ever consulted a field guide to identify a new bird at your feeder, you know the process isn’t as easy as it sounds. In fact, it seems like you have to know a lot about that mystery bird to even figure out where to start.

"The Everyday Naturalist fills in the gaps by explaining what traits to pay attention to when encountering a new species; how and when to use field guides, apps, and other resources; what to do if you get stuck; and more. Rather than focusing on one region or continent, these skills and tools are designed to help you classify nature anywhere you are—whether on familiar territory, traveling, or in a new home."

The book has officially gone to press with a release date of June 17, 2025. Which means in half a year we can all have physical copies in hand! I haven't yet been able to talk to the marketing folks at the publisher to find out whether I can personally take preorders for signed copies, but I'll keep you posted--in the meantime you can preorder at the bookstore of your choice, online or brick and mortar.

[punkgardener]

Fruit Review: The Pepino Melon

I was walking around today in my local store when I came upon this. A fruit I had never seen before. I looked at the label and it said it was a Pepino Melon and that sounded interesting so I decided to buy it. It was pretty expensive for a fruit (like 5$ expensive) so I was hoping it would be tasty.

I took it home and excitedly began to cut it up. The first thing that hit me was it's smell, it smelled like a mixture between a cucumber and a cantaloupe melon which was an interesting combination but It smelled good so it made me a little more excited. The flesh of the fruit is a nice pale golden color and as I cut it up I got to this very unique looking seed cluster!

It almost looked like a brain was holding all of the seeds in place. I'm not going to lie this kind of made me squeamish but I think the only reason for that is the fact that I simply don't like the cores of most fruit. They creep me out for no explainable reason.

Now is when I decided to take a bite. I took a piece cut from the end of the fruit and chewed it up and... Oh my gods. Guys it's disgusting. Guys it tastes so so so bad. It tastes like a rotten cucumber. I barely managed to swallow it down.

I thought that maybe I had just gotten a bad part of it, so I tried a slice closer to where the seed cluster had been (I scraped out the seed cluster because thats what the website i used recommended to do) and low and behold THAT TASTED WORSE. I ran to my trash can with the fruit in my mouth, realized I didn't have a trash bag in place, and fumbled with a trash bag while having the fruit stuck in my mouth. I do not like this fruit. I had to throw it all away because no one else wanted to try some of it and I felt a little bad about that but eughhh. This fruit is not for me.

And yes, I did make sure that I was eating it right, it is a fruit that's meant to be eaten by itself. It just did NOT taste good to me. To anyone who has experience eating this fruit, tell me how you eat it and if my description of the flavor fits what you typically assume the fruit to have. I could have gotten a bad fruit, and if that's the case I'll gladly try the fruit again if there's a way to find the perfectly ripe ones.

On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being awful and 10 being delicious, I'd give this a 2. I did like the soft melon-y texture of the fruit even if the flesh tasted horrible. Would not eat again.

[punkgardener]

Does anyone know why on earth I found a spot beside the road that just had hundreds of different bird feathers?

Like, look at this! This is only a fraction of what I saw! It was right around a boulder about a mile and a half in to a closed road, from what I can tell this is dozens of different species, it just doesn't make sense to me.

[punkgardener]

@logs-pods woah ..... Bird murderer.... Burderer...

[punkgardener]

Does anyone know why on earth I found a spot beside the road that just had hundreds of different bird feathers?

Like, look at this! This is only a fraction of what I saw! It was right around a boulder about a mile and a half in to a closed road, from what I can tell this is dozens of different species, it just doesn't make sense to me.

[punkgardener]

Can anyone explain why I found hundreds of different types of bird feathers all piled up on the side of the road??

This is only a fraction of what I spotted scattered around the rocky outcropping I was on. I was walking along a closed road for an hour or so when I got to an overlook I decided to stop at, when I sat down this is what I found!

[rebeccathenaturalist]

This may be one of the coolest mushrooms I've ever found! Not because of species (I'm not entirely sure what it is) but because of its stage of development. It's in the brief period where the edge of the cap is separating from the stipe, and you can see those delicate little filaments of tissue still tenuously connecting them together. Had another hiker not picked or knocked this mushroom over, within a matter of hours those strands would have snapped as the cap continued to open. I've never gotten to see this stage in person, so it was a real treat to see such a fleeting moment in the fungal life cycle.

[sioltach]

god I love when there are full-blown festivals for tomatoes or garlic or salmon. truly what we should all be getting together to celebrate

[dykesandditches]

[bogleech]

Mosquitoes actually are not replaceable in any ecosystem that naturally has them and that includes replacing them with any of the non biting species because these are the traits that make them so core to food webs:

Tiny

Can use every single pool of moisture to raise generations no matter how dirty and stagnant and low in oxygen

Can fly

Males get by on just sugars

Females take protein from larger animals to manufacture thousands more eggs

All these things combined allow thst ecosystem to make huge volumes of insects from conditions barren to most other macroscopic life. You might think there are other insects that seem to make huge massive swarms out of nothing but there's really nothing that hits all the same qualities *except other insects that also suck blood.*

It's the precise combo of being able to "prey" on things millions of times larger and breed in nothing but a few drops of filthy rainwater or the moisture in a rotten log. That's the most efficient combination for anything that size to multiply that rapidly where nothing else can even survive, except of course the things that can move in because they eat them :)

[bogleech]

A lot of people ask "could they just not be itchy though?" and I regret to inform that isn't actually their doing, there's no evolutionary advantage to making you itchy. That's your own body detecting the intrusion of another creature's saliva into your skin, where it doesn't belong, and reacting with histamines.

If you've ever been bit hard enough by a cat, dog or even human you may notice a similar effect!

[kyanve]

I remember having a conversation with someone about my hummingbird banding volunteering and how the data went toward support for conservation efforts among other things.

They were all for that, and loved hummingbirds and supported it!

And made a quip about how the only thing they wanted to see extinct were mosquitoes and small biting insects/fruit flies.

40 to 60% of a hummingbird’s diet, and their main source of other nutrients, is small, soft bodied insects.

Including mosquitoes and fruit flies.

They had a massive struggle not wanting to accept that no fruit flies and mosquitoes = no hummingbirds.

[headspace-hotel]

Bluebirds also eat tons of mosquitoes!

[punkgardener]

The only way to healthily bring down the mosquito population is by planting plants and encouraging native species that eat mosquitoes! There is a lot of unbalance in most suburban ecosystems because a lot of the time the only insects hearty enough to survive are bugs like mosquitoes! Flip over containers you have that have old water in them, make a fountain (it's a lot easier than you think and you can even plant native water plants around the sides in some containers!)

Simply put if you want to get bit less make an ecosystem in your back yard that eats mosquitoes more!

[anarcho-communism-revolution]

[rosyish]

People being doomers and defeatist about climate change is really so interesting because you try to tell them they’re being unhelpful and they start tweaking out

[rosyish]

Like okay it’s never gonna go back to how it was but we still have time to do shit in the present and if you’re so deadset on that there’s nothing to do what then?? Like are you gonna kill yourself? No?? Okay so let’s do some damage control and be active in our community and try and try and try

[rosyish]

If you’re white and a defeatist I’m judging you especially hard like you literally need to snap the fuck out of it and get a grip. People are still here and the world is still here and you’re still here so get up