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Lily of the valley 💕🧚🌱✨

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TIL the reason you don’t find much Lyme’s Disease in California is not because we don’t have Ticks, or Lyme Disease Vectors; but rather: because the Western Fence Lizard (if you live anywhere in California this is your regular Garden Variety Lizard) has adapted a passive immune response that makes their blood lethal to Lyme Disease Bacteria. Any Tick that feeds on one gets its gut cleansed of Lyme Disease as a side effect.

Fucking neat.

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"The second best time to plant a tree is now"

But what if I accidentally plant an evil tree

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Saw this anti-wasp screenshot. Fixed it for you :)

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My mother in law bought us a cookbook from an iconic San Francisco restaurant (I have never heard of this restaurant and she’s never mentioned it before.)

I am going to end up on the news about it.

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The really cool thing about hydrangeas is that they can be blue, pink, or purple based primarily on the pH of the soil. A free science experiment in every plant.

Omg this is so cool I didn’t know this! I wonder if I can do this experiment with students

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I'm gonna cry I was watching a bumblebee feeding at this flower and at the exact moment I took a picture a second bee just bodyslammed the first one off😭

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this website lets you listen to the sounds of all different forests around the world 

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hey what the fuck

what is this lemon cartomancy bullshit

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Tatiana Chernykh, Pot of Wildflowers, 2021.

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the problem with yard work is that once I start I go into Gethenian dothe and don’t stop until I’m done. if I don’t put on gardening gloves before I so much as touch a weed then I won’t be able to stop later and will lose half the skin on my hands. which I need for gay sex.

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My mom left an eviction notice for the carpenter bees burrowing into our porch

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Apricot jumpscare

I came home from a trip on Sunday to find my driveway, patio, flowerbeds, and car speckled with rapidly expiring orange spheroids.

This is a precisely annual occurrence. In late June, I have a trip; in late June, the apricot tree yields; ergo, during that trip there is, I presume, a brief window when the apricots are ripe but the tree has not yet seen fit to fling them across every nearby surface. But I once again have missed the window, so the apricot race has started and I am already behind. Each must be hunted down, picked up, washed, cut up, and packed into the freezer, before it rots, or is run over by a car and smears itself into our driveway, or worse yet, hangs out on top of the car for several hours and then, when you least expect it, rolls off the car and into traffic. I still have a voice recording from S this time last year:

It’s like the ticking time bomb of the produce world. It’s like in Stardew Valley when all your ancient fruit wine comes due at once, and you have to rush to sell it all the same day, except this isn’t downstream of my objectively deranged playstyle, it’s just how fruit trees work. It’s like if an Easter egg hunt assigned you chores afterward.

Yesterday’s take was twenty seven apricots; I filled a gallon ziploc. Today I netted twelve. This does not include the four or more apricots a day we eat out of hand.

The tree is somehow still full, bulging ominously with fruits.

Blenheim apricot season is upon us. God help us all.

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while literally every other plant in my garden has been Struggling---given that the weather has been cold and rainy for most all of May---the cilantro took this opportunity to bust out like crazy. So we're making cilantro pesto because dehydrators cost too much and at least I can freeze the pesto.

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Superweeds — that is, weeds that have evolved characteristics that make them more difficult to control as a result of repeatedly using the same management tactic — are rapidly overtaking American commodity farms, and Palmer amaranth is their king. Scientists have identified a population of Palmer amaranth that can tolerate being sprayed with six different herbicides (though not all at once), and they continue to discover new resistances. By now, it’s clear that weeds are evolving faster than companies are developing new weed killers: Just six years ago, in response to the onset of resistance to its marquee product, Roundup (active ingredient: glyphosate), Monsanto began selling a new generation of genetically modified seeds bred to resist both glyphosate and dicamba. By 2020, scientists had confirmed the existence of dicamba-resistant Palmer amaranth. The agribusiness giant took a decade to develop that product line. The weeds caught up in five years.

For a generation, Roundup worked as a one-size-fits-all approach to controlling weeds. But as resistant weeds spread, no better chemical was brought forward to succeed it. Instead, Monsanto placed its bets on an older weed killer, dicamba, that had problems with drifting. Glyphosate, too, has fallen out of favor outside U.S. farming circles because of its possible links to cancer, and Bayer, the company that acquired Monsanto in 2018, announced in July that it would phase the chemical out of U.S. lawn and garden products to avoid future lawsuits after committing up to $9.6 billion to settle about 125,000 claims that the product caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma among users. (Bayer stresses that this change is unrelated to safety considerations.) Glyphosate’s use remains ubiquitous among growers, however. Even though it doesn’t work on all weeds anymore, the alternative — adopting a more integrated approach to weed control — would mean totally rethinking their operations.

A January paper on a Palmer amaranth population shown to resist multiple weed killers put the problem succinctly: “Weed resistance to herbicides, especially multiple-herbicide resistance, poses a serious threat to global food production.” (Herbicide-resistant weeds are generally less of a concern on organic farms, but these make up less than 1 percent of total U.S. acreage.) It’s hard to estimate exactly how much damage has already been wrought by herbicide resistance; the weeds are gaining ground faster than scientists can survey them. But research published in 2016 by the Weed Science Society of America found that uncontrolled weeds could cause tens of billions of dollars of crop losses every year. Bob Hartzler, a retired weed scientist at Iowa State University, estimates that the tipping point when weed killers cease to be effective on some problematic species, including Palmer amaranth, is just five to 10 years away. “There’s general consensus among most weed scientists that the problems we see are just going to continue to accelerate,” he says. “And that’s why we’re sort of pessimistic that we can continue this herbicide-only system.”