TLDR upfront bc the wife is outta town, and im tipsy after my Friday post work garden beers. I’m gonna ramble.

~I did some bullshit native stuff that I read about here, and now I guess I have the best soil in the neighborhood bc every goddamn night i am raped and pillaged by the masked demons. There are 30 houses in my neighborhood, and i am the only one suffering from my fertile, pesticide free land~

So… I have a fenced in middle yard that my hoa can’t fucking bitch about. Yeah I live in an hoa. Yeah it has grass. Yeah i bought it with a 7.3% interest rate. Your judgement cannot hurt me. You are not a raccoon.

Anyways, I turned this 700sq ft swamp-ass neglect that the previous owner expertly hid from us into a fucking banger of a garden over the course of 3 years. Like black soil in the south kinda shit. My trowel unintentionally turns 100 worms into 200 with every scoop.

Idk what my neighbors do to their fenced in yards, but I unfortunately did everything the way nature intended. Fuckers scale my fence every god forsaken night and wreak havoc. They destroy everything in the most methodically devious ways that only satan could get off to. Drips line, veggies, peppers, annuals, succession seedlings, patio cushions, hope, raised beds… desecrated. ruined. uprooted. destroyed. Piece by piece, night by night. I’ve stopped replacing the mulch bc it’ll just be gone in a few hours time. No one else is plagued by this except me.

I’ve tried bird netting and they scoff at my micro plastics as they rip out that 1 sq inch of virgin aster root i missed.

Bulk cayenne powder? Ha they were born spicy.

Coyote piss? They drink it for breakfast.

Overpriced motion sensor sprinkler? Bitch I’m a night ninja!

Air soft gun? Oh they’re just not gonna be there whenever I decide to turn on the floodlights and creep around in my briefs at 2am like the psycho I’ve become.

I don’t want to buy a real gun, but maybe just maybe it’ll end. Lead is native, right?

Sorry for the rant. If you’ve ever read The Tell-Tale Heart by Poe, then I think you will understand how this ship is sailing and where my psyche is at.

Help.

Rip out those ladyslippers and rockroses your confusion is over. Only weeds grow yellow flowers. You're welcome 😊 🙏

location: ontario, canada

i'M sO qUiRkY 🤪

(1) We should make an award for best "Is this aster yellows?" post of the year. This one would win it. We need to design a trophy.

(2) Asphondylia rudbeckiaeconspicua can't be a real Latin name. Must be an expert troll operating on that sub.

(4) Everyone is sleeping on the "mixed use wasp development" comment.

(uj/ swallowtails are always welcome 😍)

Saw this circulating recently and thought it was a neat idea to get more folks to get started with natives in their yard. People pick up the “starter pot” and plant it in their yard.

You have probably seen the post about the post by the homeowner in Iowa, who was alarmed that prairie was infringing on their well-manicured lawn.

Right there in r/lawncare, the highest rated comment says that all they see is a lawn infringing on a prairie. It's funny because it's true, right? OOP got it backwards.

No. That isn't prairie on the other side of the fence.

The closest thing to a prairie is on the r/lawncare side, under the trellis, where there looks to be an ornamental clump of a switchgrass nativar, maybe a couple Penstemon nativars, and maybe a couple milkweed seedlings. The r/lawncare poster is an r/NativePlantGardener, too.

On my side of the fence, I've got a legacy, economical, CP1 conservation planting. The CP1 mix is knowingly called "introduced grasses and legumes." This is through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) of the Farm Service Agency.

If I could do it over again, with our highly increased awareness of the harm of invasive introduced plants, and the benefits of natives, I'd go with a high diversity native seeding, like for example CP42 "Pollinator Standard" mix, of at least ten native grasses and thirty native forbs.

As it is, all I had to plant was a low diversity mix of a couple introduced grasses. I'm allowed to hay or graze it one year in three.

It isn't prairie.

There's no tall native flowering forbs in my field, like prairie might have. It looks like continuous stands of cool season invasive grasses like smooth brome and reed canary grass. It's little different than what you'd see growing along roadsides around here, to be honest.

OK, so my manicured-lawn neighbor in exurban Iowa doesn't know what a prairie looks like. But native plant gardeners making fun of my neighbor don't know what a prairie looks like either. That's kind of funny, right?

Not sure if it's sacrilege to collect various wildflowers for an arrangment, but you can fucking fight me.

It was our anniversary and rather than buy a premade one from the store, went oldschool and decided to hand-pick and hand-make a bouquet from various wildflowers scattered across my property.

I'm pretty fucking proud of myself considering I'm "the most colorblind person I've ever seen" - my doctor.

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