The Most Noble of Dingbats @serbonkerstargaryen - Tumblr Blog

This is EXACTLY what it’s like.

I’m very much a proponent of “food not lawns” but I’m also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and getting into gardening is daunting as fuck. I’ll excitedly encourage it but if people can’t or even just don’t want to then that’s FINE. I hate the posts full of pictures of idealistic food lawns. Even outside of the actual growing and care, just processing a harvest takes so much damn time and More Energy and More Resources or Techniques and acting like it’s as simple as “just grow your own food!” is setting people up for a huge letdown when they realize how much that can take

roach-works

i watered my garden every single day it didn’t rain last summer. no matter how tired i was, i had to go trundle around with the hose and the watering can. because i didn’t use pesticides, i lost all my pumpkins and squashes to a squash borer. my carrots didn’t really amount to much. all my watermelons died on the vine, tiny. my grape vine still hasn’t fruited. my herbs pretty much universally croaked. my lettuces looked great but were so bitter. i didn’t harvest my cabbages in time and only got to eat one–the slugs got the rest. i planted a bunch of peppers and got almost nothing from them, just weird little gnarled green fists.

then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. i’m still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.

your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff you’re not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.

i love gardening! it’s great, it keeps you grounded, it feels wonderful to materially contribute to the local ecosystem, to see the wasps and spiders and bees and butterflies, and fresh tomatoes are delicious! but it’s SO MUCH MORE WORK THAN A LAWN.

moniquill

Hi, indigenous person here with good news: The food not lawn doesn’t have to be food -for humans-

You can do amazing work for your local ecosystem by replacing your lawn with native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Which have the added benefit of generally not needing any looking after -because they are native and evolved to be there-

The following infographics are going to be North American (and specifically Northeast) centric because guess where I’m from:

elodieunderglass

^^ this is it, and “what would happen if you did LESS maintenance” is such a good question to center with.

In terms of human food, I’m a big fan of allotment/community garden style food production, where you go away from your immediate home to a place shared with others with individual personal plots for the purpose of producing food. People are available to help, it creates a place to go, it becomes a social center, you can have events and work days, and if you form enough relationships then someone will be available to (say) water your plants through the tricky periods or during vacations; plus, if you get bored or hate the work, you simply stop paying dues and hand the plot to the next eager person. Of course, this isn’t available everywhere - but setting one up might be a valuable use of time and energy, with more resilience than converting your home plot to something high-maintenance.

memeuplift

@memeuplift

hoshi-neko-hikari

The very definitions of everyday heroes

lionsandtigers

We need more of this hero compassion

flodaya

#best chaotic duo of 2021

questions-within-questions

Bugs Bunny isn’t your conventional trickster god - he doesn’t steal or lie; rather he inflicts on us a societal hubris. He traps us in the rules, conventions and expectations we’ve made. Forcing us to go through the niceties of the barbershop or DMV at the times most inconvenient to us. If we didn’t have these rules - if it was twelve thousand years ago and all we had was a snare and a knife, Bugs would be nothing more than a mortal rabbit. But now we have built so much and he has become a god.

mousathe14

Been a while since I’ve seen this good post.

whetstonefires

trickster god of bureaucracy

yayfeminism

Very informative thread -source

lastroseofspring

Dr. Sarah Taber fucking SNAPPED

no-lo-lo

Well here’s a buncha stuff I didn’t know

dragonsateyourtoast

Being an American right now is so fucked up. Like hi I'm living my life. I'm gay. I'm doing great. My government is trying to take away my human rights. I can vote but it might not do anything because of gerrymandering. Sometimes people here deliberately spread deadly viruses because Freedom. We're told this is the best country in the world. I can't escape. I don't want to leave. I want to escape. I love the land itself. The government is like five steps from actively trying to kill me. We have brand new lawmakers who better understand the will of the people. The highest court in the nation is rigged to side with fascists. I'm graduating soon and I have an incredible life ahead of me. My planet is dying.

What the hell do I even do, man

dragonsateyourtoast

Like. This sounds overdramatic but you know that scene in the two towers where theoden looks out at saruman's army and realizes he made all these warriors just to destroy Rohan which is full of innocent people and his people and he says "What can man do against such reckless hate?"

That's how I feel on a daily basis

I don't think I CAN do anything except keep doing what I'm doing. Keep myself alive. Make stuff that helps other people be happy. Encourage activism and change. Plant flowers. I have to focus small. There ISN'T anything I can do against the big pharmaceutical companies causing millions of deaths from covid (among thousands of other medical ailments) because they refuse to release the patents on lifesaving medicine. I can't do anything about it I literally can't

All I can do is fucking write stories and posts and run stupid little dragon RPGs and plant flowers and hope. But if it helps other people too, what I'm doing, then it's worth it.

I am very small. I need to remember that and not try to pick a fight with an enemy that's much bigger than me. It's not selfish to say it's probably for the best if I just focus on my life and immediate vicinity. It's realistic and I think I can do more good this way.

There's a lot of pressure to like, fight for every problem ever but I think I need to remember I can't do that and I shouldn't do that and I need to limit myself to what I CAN do

Idk, it's clear a few other folks were also Feelin' This. I guess we all have to scale down. It feels gross because like... Obviously I care about shit that's happening, but I literally cannot deal with emotionally and intellectually engaging with all the awful news I'm bombarded with.

Being an American right now is still fucking awful, but being me doesn't have to be

dragonsateyourtoast

Hey I know it's long but reblog this version of the post actually

chained2012

paxamericana

princesscolumbia

“…you come to MY HOUSE…?!?!?!?”

babyanimalgifs

Puppy crashes local news report

(Source)

hjarta-deactivated20260124

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

scienceoftheidiot

They existed *before beetles*

somethingaboutsomethingelse

spacedandelions

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

ignescent

https://xkcd.com/1259/

Bee Orchid

sepdet

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:

Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world.

nerdadventcal

Dec 4: Remember that time we learned Clark Kent totally peeked at all his Christmas presents with his X-Ray vision? (Justice League, “Comfort and Joy”)

lucianite

Because Clark is awesome and loves christmas.

bizarrodf

remember that time we learned clark kent is a grown man who still believes santa exists

antifamutant

He’s an alien and a superhero who knows other superheros in a world with a talking telepathic Gorilla, ofc he believes, anything is game.

theoriginalcrazyferelden

Thats because Father Christmas/Santa Claus totally DOES exist in the DC universe, and every year, without fail, Santa fights through Apokolips’ defenses just to give a lump of coal to Darkseid.