Love how University extension websites are creating "if you like this Home Depot plant, you may like this plant that is native to your region" guides. Extremely useful service. #plants#gardening#nativeplants
Aralia spinosa, devil’s walking stick: leaf buds and mature leaves are edible. Buds taste like broccoli/brussel sprouts (w/o bitterness), leaves taste like salad green + asafoetida. Dried berries give me slight allergic reaction but ppl use it as a pepper substitute.
Today on the #PhotoBlog: five recent photos of the irresistible annual bloom of Ceanothus tomentosus (Woolly Leaf Ceanothus, sometimes also called California Lilac), which colors the hillsides blue with its beautiful little flower clusters.
We seaside, zigzag, and maybe one other type of golden rod coming up. Native strawberries already seem to be spreading. Cutleaf Coneflower definitely need editing. Lots of blueberry buds.
I have for the first time heard about the No Mow Day movement.
It is not a comment practice in the USA and I have never heard of this until a user talked about it.
It is a movement that we fully understand, and even in the area that I live in it will be a hard thing to implement, we think that it is ok not to mow the lawn for May.
Although here we are trying to put on year-round strategies by creating specific gardens and spaces for the pollinators.
Spraying compost into those areas and your lawn will make the topsoil more resilient and help the biodiversity and biology to develop.
Anything that disrupts the "perfect lawn" mindset is probably a plus, but keep in mind that in North America, a lot of our common lawn weeds are non-native and our local insects didn't evolve with them and generally can't use them. No Mow May works better in some places than others. Where I live, it's not much help to #pollinators, so I'm trying to gradually replace lawn with #NativePlants.
The curry tree (Bergera koenigii) in my (presently largely wild) garden had been distressing me all winter. It had become so barren and aphid-infested. Not anymore! Spring has peaked over here, and the trees and weeds are all in bloom 🌿 Quite a number of birds and butterflies, even a few bees, drop by everyday. I want to have nothing to do all morning but garden and doodle ✏️
And maybe cook with curry leaves, too 🍃 thinking of @skinnylatte
I have taken exactly 1 programming class. I know about this squints at gap between fingers much Python.
I really, really want to build a tiny little database thingie for plant taxonomy. I have enough Python written up to make a JSON dictionary or a CSV that I can then feed to a web thingie that makes pretty force-directed graphs. I'm a very visual person, so to relate to this data I want floating bubbles GIMME FLOATING BUBBLES THEY MAKE ME HAPPY.
I'm trying to figure out how to download/scrape or whatever the info from places like calflora and the USDA plants database to populate my thing. In the meantime I've manually typed up about 500 partial entries.
I'd really like to at least be able to generate a taxonomy tree. From the species binomial it should be easy to just relate each plant to its parent branches-- species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom. Simple, right? Ish?
Later I also want to be able to tell my bubble cloud to rearrange itself according to, say, which plants need more or less water, which ones are edible, which ones grow together in different habitats in different areas, all sorts of different things.
Oof. I miss being in class, where I could go to the computer lab and hunker over this sort of thing with buddies.
Native to the #EasternUS, the plant, azolla caroliniana Willd—commonly known as #CarolinaAzolla—also could ease #FoodInsecurity in the near future, according to findings recently published in #FoodScience & Nutrition. The researchers found that the #Carolina strain of #azolla is more digestible & nutritious for humans than azolla varieties that grow in the wild & also are cultivated in Asia & Africa for livestock feed.
OK! Insect Bad News Roundup: We all know by now how ecologically harmful honey bees can be, but new research has documented honeybees physically stealing the collected pollen of other foraging bee species. US coverage of the ecological damage of pesticides tends of focus on neonics, but a new study out of the EU shows that “less harmful” pesticides are also reducing bumblebee colony health across the continent.
What we really need is to get Tony from "Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't" to do "DA BEAUTIFUL CHAOS OF DA..." with as many different ecosystems as we can.
For #WildlifeWednesday here's a Carpenter Bee digging in on some Golden Eardrops (Ehrendorferia chrysantha).
Golden Eardrops are so-called "fire followers." Their seeds lay dormant in the soil for many years until wildfire burns an area, after which they grow quickly (and tall), stabilizing the soil before slower growing shrubs take over again. Nature is cool.
Ditch the weed stigma! Milkweed, butterfly weed, ironweed, and joe pye weed are stunning native blooms that pollinators love. Adding them to your garden isn't just about aesthetics, it's about supporting the delicate balance of our ecosystem. Plant these beauties and witness the magic of coexistence unfold.
Back to "working" (volunteering) on prepping my March workshop on invasive plants of #NevadaCountyCA.
Rather than presenting this bc I'm an expert (I'm not), I'm doing it bc I wanted to know the topic and there wasn't already a hyperlocal reference source.
I am learning so much. Am on the section now on practical control strategies. Starting with the Brooms bc they're so prolific and difficult to remove. They make the others look easy.
Pic shows Scotch Broom lining a trail in a public park here in December. In summer, these will be loaded with yellow flowers.
Broom crowds out natives and is flammable, so a wildfire hazard.
Today I canvassed a nearby patch of about 50 acres that I've been birding for several years. It has private properties with a small pond surrounded by an equestrian facility, family ranchettes, lots of big old oaks, some foothill pines, and grassy pastures. It has a good mix of birds. Here are those I got closest to today: Canada Goose, Western Bluebird, Golden-crowned Sparrow (one sheltering in California Wildrose, a native plant), and Red-tailed Hawk. Enjoy!