uwu :3 reblog if you love kissing girls and mwah mwah 😘😘😘😘 looove women and girls :3 or if you think cars should be abolished expediently

romantic moodboard

that picture of the little boy holding a puppy and smiling with the writing on the bottom that says hi daddy this is my doggy chelsea isn't she cute i love you and the picture of the cat with the writing that says our michael... pet photos of all time

these ones

Why DO gardening books refer to plants by genus name???

Especially when it's stuff like Salvia where there are so many plants within that genus

"This plant is a sage. We're not telling you which one."

I think most sellers of plants intentionally muddy the distinction between cultivars and species of plants, and I hate them for it

"This is a 'Cleveland' pear tree! Totally different than the Bradford pear! You should totally buy it!" (exact same species) (the two cultivars are themselves self-sterile) (because they are clones of the same individuals) (but 'Cleveland' and 'Bradford' trees can produce fertile offspring with one another) (which are invasive monsters worse than Kudzu that form horrible all-devouring masses of foliage bristling with huge thorns)

Listen

Pyrus Calleryana decorates the boulevards of Hell

I have pulled over 50 seedlings of these fuckers from my back yard

They sprout earlier than anything else. They get started in early March. And they root in the ground like they wanna hold hands with Satan himself. If it's over 6 inches tall, you cannot pull it by hand. You gotta get the shovel. It will have a foot-deep taproot

And once they grow up these bastards have reverted to their wild ancestors so they have THORNS

Like BIG, well-over-an-inch-long, send-you-to-the-hospital thorns

Their foliage is so dense and they grow so close together that virtually nothing else can survive. They pretty much fully shut down the process of fields reverting to forest.

They are the pugs of trees, fugliest thing you ever did see, with weirdly dense twigs and often a disastrous growth habit that makes them rarely survive 25 years without splitting clean in half, but that 25 years is enough because they spread like crazy

They grow damn fast. Reportedly they don't die from fire or being cut down.

And when they're in bloom, they smell like cum

Kudzu you can defeat with a herd of goats or cattle. Callery Pears? Chainsaw, Glyphosate, and prayers to the Lord

I love plants and I know they're all an important part of the ecosystem somewhere on Earth, but I fucking hate these things with every cell in my body

Like Amur honeysuckle beats it in terms of sheer negative impact on ecosystems, but consider: Callery pear's vibes are rancid

You know these neatly round shaped trees they put in nice suburban neighborhoods?

That tree is one of the worst invasive plants yet to emerge in the Eastern USA

I wasn't joking about the thorns, either

Ohio recently BANNED them (Rare Ohio W) and many cities literally pay people to cut their trees down because they suck so bad

There's a map of Kentucky in the forester's office where I work that has each county marked by whether Pyrus calleryana presence has been detected

I know of fields that are literally acres and acres of these things

i got this book The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee from library and I had high hopes about it but unfortunately it's much more focused on design aesthetics than actual ecology, and makes some baffling incorrect statements

first of all, genus Rubus includes all brambles and other plants including raspberries and dewberries, second, North America does in fact have several native blackberries, and third, their aggressiveness is various. Allegheny blackberry behaves itself pretty well if you just cut it back.

WHY does this writer have such furious hatred for Canada goldenrod of all things. Solidago is basically THE best thing you can plant in North America to support bees.

I totally believe that it can be super aggressive (it's ultra invasive in areas of Asia) but maybe I'm biased, since my meadow began with the most miserable possible soil on Earth, and its ability to survive is a positive from my point of view.

Gardening books are bizarre experiences for me because their approach to the subject is usually so different from mine, they might as well be on Mars

like this? It's part of the school of thought that reasons, well, designing an aesthetically pleasing outdoor space is essentially the same as designing an aesthetically pleasing indoor space, a matter of choosing and arranging decorative elements according to design principles.

The obvious, incredibly important difference is that outdoors is alive and indoors is not. A lamp or a decorative vase is an inanimate object; a plant is a living creature with its own needs, behaviors and interests, and Nature herself is her own entity with her own relentless agenda.

While this book claims to provide an alternative to the lawn, it still adheres to the American lawn and garden philosophy, where your back yard is like another room of your house, just with decorative shrubs instead of curtains and grass instead of carpet.

But if the outdoors is like the interior of a house, the house is certainly haunted. The furniture moves by itself, the paintings change, the mirrors always reflect something different, and if you try to put down carpet, sometimes it will turn brown and then change into tile.

My coffee table sadly crumbled into sawdust, and I forgot to feed the couch some loose change, so the stuffing has deflated out of the cushions. However, the dining room chairs are doing great! There's 25 of them now. Does anyone need some chairs? It's getting a little hard to walk through the dining room...

another absolutely baffling thing most gardening books do is refer to plants exclusively by their genus name

Some genera include literally thousands of species, so I have no idea why anybody decided this was a good idea

Also, i'm in a state of perplexment at why goldenrod, yarrow, and blazing star are being referred to as "daisies."

I guess it's because they're in Asteraceae? my friend, everything is in Asteraceae

really bold to tell people to destroy Canada goldenrod on sight and then tell them to plant an invasive species

@the-real-lilac-elf and this is the problem with the aesthetics-based, interior-design-adjacent approach to gardening: it doesn't WORK

like, if you drive around neighborhoods and through towns you don't ever see gardens that look like in the gardening books, because an assortment of plants selected based on aesthetic appeal isn't necessarily going to Work together ecologically

you're going to have plants that are really poorly adapted to what you're trying to do, and you're going to have plants that are well adapted and they're going to become the main attraction because they spread and flourish whereas the poorly adapted ones kinda just Exist, if they survive at all.

And you're going to have weeds, which are Nature's contribution to the pile, and they are almost inevitably far better-adapted to a freshly created garden than anything you purposefully grow there, because weeds LOVE disturbance (like tilling, digging, weeding, ripping up sod, etc...)

And the thing about Outside is that it changes seasonally. So most the plants you picked out are only going to look the exact way you want them for a few months out of the year. Flowers stop blooming and leaves turn yellowy-brown and withered.

So this concept where a discrete number of plants are carefully chosen for Aesthetic...it's going to look like ass and it's going to make you sad because it takes a lot of work and the coneflowers look great when they're blooming but...the rest of the year the flower bed fills up with crabgrass and dandelions where those ornamental grasses died, and it just doesn't look good.

And so my approach has been totally, radically different. I don't do the whole "pick out a bunch of plants and arrange them in a visually appealing manner" thing.

You're not creating anything when you build a meadow. You're not God, you're just the Caretaker.

The gardening book recommends to entirely clear a patch of garden so you have a weed-free place to plant. "Why would I want to do that?" I think to myself, well aware that intense disturbance resets the process of succession and causes Weedmageddon. Anyway, weeds are important. They're great. I love weeds. I respect weeds. I selectively pull them as I introduce more plants to my meadow, but I try to avoid entirely clearing a place of weeds as much as possible. They're holding the soil in place, fixing compaction, stopping erosion, retaining moisture, and giving the little creatures a place to live, and they are the initial stage in the healing of a place to something more biodiverse. Weeds know what they're doing and they're damn good at it.

Prostrate Spurge is a terrible weed where I live. A bunch of it grew over a pile of bare dirt in my back yard. Early in spring, it was all a gross mat of dead rotting plant material. I peeled it up and the dirt underneath was perfectly light, soft, crumbly soil, protected perfectly from erosion and compaction. You could have planted a garden in it right away, with no need to till. I was amazed.

Not everything that grows as a weed is good. Most of the work I've been doing in my meadow is getting rid of Kentucky bluegrass—the bane of my existence! Contrary to the name, Kentucky bluegrass is NOT native to Kentucky and it is a scourge because it takes over and chokes out other plants!

But if I ripped or dug out all the grass? Erosion and lots of bare soil. I thought about it. Grasses need to be grazed. Otherwise they get really long and then form nasty rotting masses of dead grass and choke themselves (and everything else). I got myself some grass shears so I could selectively crop grass and leave the flowers mixed in.

Without even realizing it, I was doing exactly what bison did—preferentially grazing on grass, giving an advantage to flowering plants! Incredible! Of course, I can't turn the grass into nutritious manure, but not everyone can be a bison. I do pull some of the grass up by the roots, but only about 20% of the grass I remove, the rest is just snipped close to the ground.

I used the plants that naturally grew in the meadow as a starting point. Then I selectively pulled and trimmed back the "weediest" (most disturbance-loving) plants—adding in more plants as I did so. Asters, Goldenrod, and Chicory grew all by themselves. I left them to do their thing.

By rescuing plants from roadsides and parking lots, I unintentionally optimized my plant selection for weedy, tough characteristics—which is awesome, since they will thrive in the depleted, early-successional-stage site as it recovers from years of exhaustion and abuse. Blue Mistflower, Yarrow, Common Evening-primrose, and Wingstem appear to excel at hanging out with the Asters-and-goldenrod-stage community.

If I was making a system to group plants for inclusion in a meadow planting, I would rate them all by weediness (since you need a selection of tough disturbance enjoyers to really get things exploding with life early on) bloom time (since you want to always have SOMETHING blooming) growth habit (since you gotta fill space in three dimensions) and whether they prefer Dry or Wet (since this is the basic axis of variation upon which plants' preferences are plotted, after filtering for sun-loving plants that thrive in your region)

But a meadow is a journey, not a destination. It's not a matter of buying $700 in plants and then having your result after a weekend's work, you have to work with the site and care for it over months and years, introducing new plant biodiversity bit by bit.

I wish I knew a name for this besides gardening, cuz advice like this is so helpful - that you have to cut grass, for example, because grass needs to be grazed, I had no idea. all I've ever known is people trying to maintain plain grass lawns. I didn't even know what would happen if you let grass grow out. there's no easy example to look to if what you want is to maintain land so that it's both a aesthetically pretty and a good ecosystem that can support bees and bugs and is self sustaining and compatible with the soil. like it genuinely feels utopian to suggest that such a thing could exist!! but of course it isn't, plants are living things and of course plants with the right conditions and caretaking can become a healthy ecosystem

anyway I just feel like so much energy goes into "gardening" and mowing and maintaining land in all of these ways that are super labor intensive and don't have good results cuz they're working against plants and not with them. the flowerbeds in the parks and yards by my house are usually seas of mulch, and there's strips of grass mowed next to every road and business that no one's even using for anything. and meanwhile, unkempt areas are still growing wild but are being completely choked by honeysuckle because no one does anything to maintain them!! and it feels like such a waste of energy and time, all the effort going into fighting plants into an aesthetic box that could be going into actually helping remove invasive species and cultivate meadows and forests that are actually healthy and beautiful

You are speaking directly into my soul this is like the narrative in the background of my brain 24/7

It's crazy how little inquiry there is into a form of gardening that integrates more seamlessly with nature!

I have learned so much just by observing how plants grow without being planted by humans, and transplanting "weeds" that pop up and taking care of them. It's gotten to where I can make guesses about how something works, and then read about it in a book and end up being right.

For example, I observed that the growth of the grass was overtaking the flowers, but I didn't want to pull it all out, so I decided to trim it back to the ground, and then thought, I wonder how bison would have affected this interaction between grass and flowering plant? So I looked up things about bison's diet, and my instinct was right!...bison graze on the grass and make room for the flowering plants to thrive. I was imitating a keystone species without even knowing what I was doing!

That happens to me a lot. Observing the ways of the plants closely gives me an instinctive nudge in the right direction. I've been transplanting from pavement cracks, gravel piles, and roadsides for a year now and my brain has expanded so much it's a little overwhelming.

I wanna get to that point too I'd love to have that kind of understanding of plants

also if you wrote a book about what you've learned I'd definitely buy it, or a post with advice for meadowscaping / native gardening, cuz I'd love to learn more abt it

i got this book The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee from library and I had high hopes about it but unfortunately it's much more focused on design aesthetics than actual ecology, and makes some baffling incorrect statements

first of all, genus Rubus includes all brambles and other plants including raspberries and dewberries, second, North America does in fact have several native blackberries, and third, their aggressiveness is various. Allegheny blackberry behaves itself pretty well if you just cut it back.

WHY does this writer have such furious hatred for Canada goldenrod of all things. Solidago is basically THE best thing you can plant in North America to support bees.

I totally believe that it can be super aggressive (it's ultra invasive in areas of Asia) but maybe I'm biased, since my meadow began with the most miserable possible soil on Earth, and its ability to survive is a positive from my point of view.

Gardening books are bizarre experiences for me because their approach to the subject is usually so different from mine, they might as well be on Mars

like this? It's part of the school of thought that reasons, well, designing an aesthetically pleasing outdoor space is essentially the same as designing an aesthetically pleasing indoor space, a matter of choosing and arranging decorative elements according to design principles.

The obvious, incredibly important difference is that outdoors is alive and indoors is not. A lamp or a decorative vase is an inanimate object; a plant is a living creature with its own needs, behaviors and interests, and Nature herself is her own entity with her own relentless agenda.

While this book claims to provide an alternative to the lawn, it still adheres to the American lawn and garden philosophy, where your back yard is like another room of your house, just with decorative shrubs instead of curtains and grass instead of carpet.

But if the outdoors is like the interior of a house, the house is certainly haunted. The furniture moves by itself, the paintings change, the mirrors always reflect something different, and if you try to put down carpet, sometimes it will turn brown and then change into tile.

My coffee table sadly crumbled into sawdust, and I forgot to feed the couch some loose change, so the stuffing has deflated out of the cushions. However, the dining room chairs are doing great! There's 25 of them now. Does anyone need some chairs? It's getting a little hard to walk through the dining room...

another absolutely baffling thing most gardening books do is refer to plants exclusively by their genus name

Some genera include literally thousands of species, so I have no idea why anybody decided this was a good idea

Also, i'm in a state of perplexment at why goldenrod, yarrow, and blazing star are being referred to as "daisies."

I guess it's because they're in Asteraceae? my friend, everything is in Asteraceae

really bold to tell people to destroy Canada goldenrod on sight and then tell them to plant an invasive species

@the-real-lilac-elf and this is the problem with the aesthetics-based, interior-design-adjacent approach to gardening: it doesn't WORK

like, if you drive around neighborhoods and through towns you don't ever see gardens that look like in the gardening books, because an assortment of plants selected based on aesthetic appeal isn't necessarily going to Work together ecologically

you're going to have plants that are really poorly adapted to what you're trying to do, and you're going to have plants that are well adapted and they're going to become the main attraction because they spread and flourish whereas the poorly adapted ones kinda just Exist, if they survive at all.

And you're going to have weeds, which are Nature's contribution to the pile, and they are almost inevitably far better-adapted to a freshly created garden than anything you purposefully grow there, because weeds LOVE disturbance (like tilling, digging, weeding, ripping up sod, etc...)

And the thing about Outside is that it changes seasonally. So most the plants you picked out are only going to look the exact way you want them for a few months out of the year. Flowers stop blooming and leaves turn yellowy-brown and withered.

So this concept where a discrete number of plants are carefully chosen for Aesthetic...it's going to look like ass and it's going to make you sad because it takes a lot of work and the coneflowers look great when they're blooming but...the rest of the year the flower bed fills up with crabgrass and dandelions where those ornamental grasses died, and it just doesn't look good.

And so my approach has been totally, radically different. I don't do the whole "pick out a bunch of plants and arrange them in a visually appealing manner" thing.

You're not creating anything when you build a meadow. You're not God, you're just the Caretaker.

The gardening book recommends to entirely clear a patch of garden so you have a weed-free place to plant. "Why would I want to do that?" I think to myself, well aware that intense disturbance resets the process of succession and causes Weedmageddon. Anyway, weeds are important. They're great. I love weeds. I respect weeds. I selectively pull them as I introduce more plants to my meadow, but I try to avoid entirely clearing a place of weeds as much as possible. They're holding the soil in place, fixing compaction, stopping erosion, retaining moisture, and giving the little creatures a place to live, and they are the initial stage in the healing of a place to something more biodiverse. Weeds know what they're doing and they're damn good at it.

Prostrate Spurge is a terrible weed where I live. A bunch of it grew over a pile of bare dirt in my back yard. Early in spring, it was all a gross mat of dead rotting plant material. I peeled it up and the dirt underneath was perfectly light, soft, crumbly soil, protected perfectly from erosion and compaction. You could have planted a garden in it right away, with no need to till. I was amazed.

Not everything that grows as a weed is good. Most of the work I've been doing in my meadow is getting rid of Kentucky bluegrass—the bane of my existence! Contrary to the name, Kentucky bluegrass is NOT native to Kentucky and it is a scourge because it takes over and chokes out other plants!

But if I ripped or dug out all the grass? Erosion and lots of bare soil. I thought about it. Grasses need to be grazed. Otherwise they get really long and then form nasty rotting masses of dead grass and choke themselves (and everything else). I got myself some grass shears so I could selectively crop grass and leave the flowers mixed in.

Without even realizing it, I was doing exactly what bison did—preferentially grazing on grass, giving an advantage to flowering plants! Incredible! Of course, I can't turn the grass into nutritious manure, but not everyone can be a bison. I do pull some of the grass up by the roots, but only about 20% of the grass I remove, the rest is just snipped close to the ground.

I used the plants that naturally grew in the meadow as a starting point. Then I selectively pulled and trimmed back the "weediest" (most disturbance-loving) plants—adding in more plants as I did so. Asters, Goldenrod, and Chicory grew all by themselves. I left them to do their thing.

By rescuing plants from roadsides and parking lots, I unintentionally optimized my plant selection for weedy, tough characteristics—which is awesome, since they will thrive in the depleted, early-successional-stage site as it recovers from years of exhaustion and abuse. Blue Mistflower, Yarrow, Common Evening-primrose, and Wingstem appear to excel at hanging out with the Asters-and-goldenrod-stage community.

If I was making a system to group plants for inclusion in a meadow planting, I would rate them all by weediness (since you need a selection of tough disturbance enjoyers to really get things exploding with life early on) bloom time (since you want to always have SOMETHING blooming) growth habit (since you gotta fill space in three dimensions) and whether they prefer Dry or Wet (since this is the basic axis of variation upon which plants' preferences are plotted, after filtering for sun-loving plants that thrive in your region)

But a meadow is a journey, not a destination. It's not a matter of buying $700 in plants and then having your result after a weekend's work, you have to work with the site and care for it over months and years, introducing new plant biodiversity bit by bit.

I wish I knew a name for this besides gardening, cuz advice like this is so helpful - that you have to cut grass, for example, because grass needs to be grazed, I had no idea. all I've ever known is people trying to maintain plain grass lawns. I didn't even know what would happen if you let grass grow out. there's no easy example to look to if what you want is to maintain land so that it's both a aesthetically pretty and a good ecosystem that can support bees and bugs and is self sustaining and compatible with the soil. like it genuinely feels utopian to suggest that such a thing could exist!! but of course it isn't, plants are living things and of course plants with the right conditions and caretaking can become a healthy ecosystem

anyway I just feel like so much energy goes into "gardening" and mowing and maintaining land in all of these ways that are super labor intensive and don't have good results cuz they're working against plants and not with them. the flowerbeds in the parks and yards by my house are usually seas of mulch, and there's strips of grass mowed next to every road and business that no one's even using for anything. and meanwhile, unkempt areas are still growing wild but are being completely choked by honeysuckle because no one does anything to maintain them!! and it feels like such a waste of energy and time, all the effort going into fighting plants into an aesthetic box that could be going into actually helping remove invasive species and cultivate meadows and forests that are actually healthy and beautiful

i personally do lateral tripod. dynamic tripod is the "proper" way and i believe most common, feel free to correct me.

✨TWINK POLL GRAND FINAL✨

Howl Jenkins Pendragon (Howl's Moving Castle) vs Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)

IT'S FINALLY HERE, GANG! You know who they are, you have your biases, you have your propaganda ready...

VOTE FOR THE ULTIMATE TUMBLR TWINK!

Note how she states that it was more difficult to get permits to do this shit than actually coordinate the drones.

Companies will want to do more of this, but environmental/wildlife laws make it difficult. So, they'll lobby to weaken them. Be vigilant. This woman accidentally said the quiet part loud. They won't let that happen again - this is our only warning

Time to play duck hunt, drone edition :)

'horseplay' and 'monkey business' being treated as synonyms means something. don't know what though

Monkeys are so silly that what they consider business, horses consider play.

12 trains enter the semifinals, tonight there will now 6 polls to vote in

Meet our lovely quarter finalists

California Zephyr- running from Chicago to Seattle

The City of New Orleans - running from Chicago to New Orleans

Sunset Limited - Running from LA to New Orleans with an extension to Mobile on the way

Empire Builder - running from Chicago to Seattle

Cardinal - Running from New York to Chicago through Cincinnati

Maple leaf -Running from NYC to Toronto

Northeast Regional- Running from DC to New York to Boston

Acela - Running at high speed from DC to New York then to Boston

Coast Starlight - Running from Los Angeles to Seattle

Lakeshore Limited - Running from Chicago to New York and Boston

Cascades - Running from Portland to Vancouver

Capitol Limited - Running from Chicago to DC

things to update after a legal name change!

*Please add to this list if you can think of anything else!!!

#1 thing I notice trans people forget to change after just a social name change is their voicemail recording!

ilove people who work at front desks of things. i can walk into a building and go to the desk and i ask how do i do this thing. and then they just fucking tell me !!!!

i walked into my college found the first desk and asked hey where do i pay my student fees. did that. ok where i do find the academic advisor? got the general direction, went up to the first desk i saw, asked where to go to drop a class .awesome. went to the bookstore, walked up to the desk, asked how to find out what textbooks i need. and AGAIN they had answers for me. this is so cool thank you desk people

no this is so real actually !! it always feels like you'll be expected to know everything when you do Adult Things but you don't, actually, you just need to know who to ask

image id: a screenshot of tags from this post that read “they never tell you this about being a grownup but most places have people they’ve hired to stand there and tell you how to do stuff” end id.

Folks, friends, y’all…. esk*mo is a slur. I understand a lot of people don’t know that, I don’t want to be a dick about it, but I’ve been seeing it in fics. Wanna write “esk*mo kisses”? Just say “nuzzled noses” or something.

I’m not here to call anybody out, it’s been in multiple fics, I’m not vague posting. This is just a psa. 👍🏻

If you could help me spread awareness about this by reblogging, I’d really appreciate it.

I’ve had this post on insta saved for sometime ❤️

[Text Description: “Hey! Reminder: Eskimo is a slur. It means ‘snow eaters’ in Cree and is a slur against Inuit . Also don’t use ‘Eskimo kisses’. It’s called Kunik. It is a greeting mostly used for family… Kunik was how I’d greet my mom and grandmother as a small child.” /TD]

!!!

The line between binary and nonbinary trans people is nowhere near as clean as some of yall think it is