today i saw an old man wearing a shirt that said "thyme 2 turnip the beet"..... Fuck yeah you funky little gardener....

the bad news is that my mom was sad that her eggplants haven’t been growing; however, it turns out that the reason her eggplants haven’t been growing is because her eggplants were actually spinach. The good news is that her spinach is growing very well. She was also sad that her peppers haven’t been growing either, but it turns out that the peppers were actually eggplant. And I’m happy to report that the eggplant is also growing very well.

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

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.

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:

^^ 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.

But seriously, when we got our property, it was all just…grass. A sterile grass moonscape, like a billion other yards. With two big old maple trees. Just grass and maples, that was it. 

But then I got my grubby little paws on it, and I immediately stopped fertilizing, spraying, and bagging up grass clippings and leaves. I ripped up sod and put in flowers and vegetables. I put down nice thick blankets of mulch around the flowers and vegetables. 

When I first was sweating my way through stripping sod, I saw a grand total of 1 worm and 0 ladybugs. The ground was compacted into something that would bend shovel blades. 

Now, six years later, I can’t dig a planting hole without turning up fourteen earthworms, and there are so many ladybugs here. Not the invasive asian lady beetles; native ladybugs. They winter over in the mulch and in the brush pile. I see thousands of them. 

The soil is soft and rich. There are birds that come to eat, and bees of many sorts.

Like this is something that you, yourself, can absolutely change. This is something that you, personally, can make a difference in.

Like, last year I watched no fewer than twenty-nine monarch caterpillars grow up on my milkweed and fly away as butterflies. I watched swallowtails and moths grow. There are hummingbirds fighting over flowers now.

I did that. Me. You can do the same.

gardening with birds. done with tvpaint

Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”

“Friend”

Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.

Plants don’t wage war

Ever heard of blackberries?

Yes, plants do wage war

Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else. 

I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.

It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.

Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.

And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.

This post did not go where I expected it to.

Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.

Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.

Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed. 

Can second the comments of Kudzu.

I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.

I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:

See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.

Southern Gothic knows Lovecraft. We have fucking kudzu.

Trees definitely do war. My little sister and I both got tiny fir saplings for arbor day when we were sprouts. We planted them about 8′ apart. 25 years later, mine is a mighty forest giant, at least 50′ tall. Hers is a dead stump because mine stole all the water and sunlight.

textbook chaotic good

Thank you to everyone in the comments calling me a faerie

Payback for not listening to her reasonable speech about Earth’s resources.

honest to god, this is a lot funnier if you pay attention to the plants in the last few panels. I recognize a few of the poisonous plants, but there are also breeds of flowers that specifically smell like rotting meat. 

this is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen

it’s gardening season! please don’t plant lettuces/greens directly into the ground in an urban area or close to a building without getting a soil test. the risk of lead poisoning is very high. if you can’t afford a soil test and you must plant into the ground, try to grow something where you will only be eating the fruit and not the leaves & stems (i.e. tomatoes, cucumbers, etc) bc there’s less of a chance that heavy metals will migrate to the fruit tissues. better yet, build a raised bed or plant in pots!

Wow, I had no idea - thank you.

The preschool is buying heirloom sunflower seed in bulk. We’re going to make a ‘Sunflower House’.

How to grow a sunflower house

@bacheloretteofscience THIS WORKS so well!

If you want to get super fancy, do a second ring on the outside of 4’ tall sunflowers then a third outer ring of the 1’ tall teddy bear sunflowers.  If there are any gaps you can interplant with cosmos, amaranth and nasturtiums or (if there are huge gaps) gourds.

My mom used to do this for me in the backyard as a kid- it really works and I always loved it! Spent so many summer days having tea parties with teddy bears in my sunflower house.

Okay so… I could witch the hell outta this

do you want faeries? this is how you get faeries

TRY SOMETHING NEW EVEN IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!!

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8 vegetables that you can regrow again and again.

Scallions

You can regrow scallions by leaving an inch attached to the roots and place them in a small glass with a little water in a well-lit room.

Garlic

When garlic begins to sprout, you can put them in a glass with a little water and grow garlic sprouts. The sprouts have a mild flavor than garlic and can be added to salads, pasta and other dishes.

Bok Choy

Bok choy can be regrown by placing the root end in water in a well-lit area. In 1-2 weeks , you can transplant it to a pot with soil and grow a full new head.

Carrots

Put carrot tops in a dish with a little water. Set the dish in a well-lit room or a window sill.  You’ll have carrot tops to use in salads. 

Basil

Put clippings from basil with 3 to 4-inch stems in a glass of water and place it in direct sunlight. When the roots are about 2 inches long, plant them in pots to and in time it will grow a full basil plant.

Celery

Cut off the base of the celery and place it in a saucer or shallow bowl of warm water in the sun. Leaves will begin to thicken and grow in the middle of the base, then transfer the celery to soil. 

Romaine Lettuce

Put romaine lettuce stumps in a ½ inch of water. Re-water to keep water level at ½ inch. After a few days, roots and new leaves will appear and you can transplant it into soil.

Cilantro

The stems of cilantro will grown when placed in a glass of water. Once the roots are long enough, plant them in a pot in a well-lit room. You will have a full plant in a few months.

they saw the opportunity

and they fucking seized it.