#tiny vetch

[ayanos-pl]

スズメノエンドウ（4月8日）

[my-blooming-darling]

I needed buttercups for my book AND I FOUND SOME TODAY 😭😭😭

[schwazombie]

Honestly think buying a hydrangea for my porch was one of the best ideas I've had. Between that and the cornflowers it's blue and pink all over. Can't wait for the gladiolas to bloom. The purple is going to be great

[mini-leafster]

Weeds grow. Weeds fill. Weeds repair. Those tiny dandelions you forgot to pull grow vetch and Velcro. By the time you notice I bet you there are baby pines where you forgot to look. Bees, lizards, birds, and even all sorts of bugs are there. It was dead once. You made it dead didn't you? Yet it's back. The lawn did nothing and your weed pulling did nothing. Even the concrete is buckling with life now.

HUSH.

[ethereal-forest-furry]

vetch!!! (Vicia sativa) (starring: one single wonderfully tiny ant)

vetch is an annual plant that grows in disturbed soil pretty much everywhere on earth OKAY HERES THE COOL PART it fertilizes the soil!!!

every plant needs loads of nitrogen its like The most important nutrient partly bc its one of the only ones that can just wash away with water even in healthy soil and also bc its in like Every Single Molecule in their entire body

and nitrogen is 70% of the air!!! but in the air it exists as two atoms stuck together and the plants cannot munch on that theyre picky okay. but some kinds of bacteria (and also lightning strikes??? which is so cool i love that) can split the atoms apart and put them in a form that the plants LOVE to eat - thats how nitrogen ends up in the soil, when those bacteria die.

but thats not rlly enough on its own 0.0 so some plants (like vetch, my bestie) pretty much just invented farming. like they have little nodes on their roots where they keep the bacteria safe and feed them and take care of them so they can grow and make so much nitrogen that they can give plenty to the plant - and then when the plant dies the soil is fertilized with loads of new nitrogen :3

plants that do this are called nitrogen fixers and they usually thrive in awful degraded soil with no nutrients where nothing else can grow- bc they can just eat from the fucking atmosphere!!!!! theyre SO important for building and feeding soil

vetch is rlly good at doing this so farmers like to plant big fields of it as fertilizer for whatever they plant next. u can do the same thing in a small garden with beans and peas if you leave them in the garden after they die, or plant nitrogen fixing trees and shrubs like redbuds and goumi berries so you can use cuttings from them to feed the soil!!! also clovers i love clovers sm

btw vetch is very much edible do go eat some. never tried it personally but lots of ppl have for thousands of years soooo yeah

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

I saw someone talking about "I appreciate the ecological benefits of a diversified lawn, but I live in tick country and high grass is a Very Bad Idea," and it made me wonder what lawns were like in their area. Mowing itself does not kill weeds! And even if they were talking about letting the non-grass plants get big enough to flower so the pollinators can actually benefit from them, there are plenty of fun plants that are either naturally low-growing (I'm defining "low-growing" as "shorter than a pulled-up crew sock") or can be mowed down to that height without injuring them.

This list will focus on the temperate zone because that's the only place I've lived.

Sweet alyssum: this is a garden flower, so you probably shouldn't expect it to stand up to too much foot traffic, but I have seen it in lawn mixes. It's a cute, obliging hardy annual adapted to a variety of temperate climates, smells good, self-sows, and is attracted to pollinators.

Wild violets/Johnny-Jump-Ups: Yuri flowers! Many species of cute little pansy-shaped things found all over the temperate regions of Eurasia and the Americas. Adapted to a wide variety of biomes, although many of them like some shade. Some are edible and I haven't heard of any that are dangerously poisonous, but look up your specific species before you start chomping.

Clover: Red clover is pretty and useful but probably too rangy if you need to keep your lawn below the top of your socks. White clover and hop clover (the tiny yellow ones) are more compact. Bees love it.

Vetch: There are hundreds of vetches out there, some of them way too big for our purposes, so we'll focus on the little weedy ones. These guys are members of the bean family (closely related to lentils and fava beans) with pretty sweet-pea-like flowers in a variety of colors. The most common variety where I live is fuchsia, but there's also a tiny species with pink and cream flowers. Being legumes, they're nitrogen-fixers.

Speedwell: Several species of low-growing plants of the genus Veronica with little blue flowers. Add some variety to your lawn's color palette.

Prunella/Purple Dead-Nettle: These are technically two different plants from two different genera, but apparently the plant I've known since childhood as Prunella looks more like Purple Dead-Nettle? Well, neither of them are toxic, so there's no great practical hazard to mixing them up. These are members of the mint family (but don't smell minty), modestly attractive in an herby kind of way, hardy and adaptable but easier to weed out of where you don't want them than mint proper tends to be.

Mint: Mint can get a bit gangly, but once it's well-established it doesn't mind being mowed - and it does smell wonderful after being cut or trampled! Potentially invasive.

Wild strawberries: If the wild strawberries native to your area reliably bear fruit, congratulations! Mine do not. But they're picturesque little plants anyway.

Chickweed: A sprawling plant with long gangly stems and tiny white flowers. Edible, and one of the traditional seven herbs in Japanese New Year congee.

Oxalis: Cute little shamrock-looking plants (although they're more closely related to starfruit than clover). Wild specimens can have green or dark red foliage. There are cultivated varieties with more spectacular flowers.

English daisies: tiny little daisies. The wild variety has white single flowers with yellow centers, but I've seen the cultivars (bigger fluffier flowers in various shades of pink as well as white) also do well in a lawn.

Buttercups: buttercups like wet feet, and add a cheery touch to any particularly moist or poorly drained parts of your yard. Some of the wild species are potentially invasive, so keep an eye on them for possible unseemly expansionist tendencies.

All these plants will give your lawn a picturesque charm, feed the butterflies and bees, and (hopefully) camoflage the dandelions and plantain.

[twistedthistlehomestead]

I walk around our property looking at the different “weeds” growing. I’m new to learning about herbalism so I use an app to find out what a lot of things are. But I also do research to make sure the app is telling me correctly.

These are some of the plants that the app says we have here:

Thistle

Curly Dock

Carolina Geranium

Hairy Buttercup

Spiny Sowthistle

Common Vetch

Lesser Swinecress

Horse weed

Pennsylvania Everlasting

Chinese Bushclover

Groundseltree

Japanese Honeysuckle

Sticky Chickweed

Prickly Lettuce

Tiny Bluet

Corn Salad

Birdeye Speedwell

Wild Garlic

Purple Dead-nettle

Dandelion

Creeping Buttercup

Henbit Deadnettle

Roundleaf Greenbrier

Evening Primrose

Blue Mistflower

Purple False Foxglove

Broomsedge Bluestem

Wrinkledleaf Goldenrod

Pasture Thistle

Virginia Creeper

Trumpet Vine

White Heath Aster

White Clover

Large leaf Pennywort

American Pokeweed

Dogfennel

But it seems like every day there’s something new popping up.

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 25

Summer Solstice I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late. —Stacie Cassarino

[monkeybusiness23-dc]

A skipper butterfly on a crown vetch flower in my back yard. I found it as I was working in the garden this afternoon. Both the butterfly and skipper are tiny, but I like the photo. (My photo.)

[shawnparell]

The Summer Solstice

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it’s you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

[bethestaryouareradio]

Fields of Dreams

“When the primal forces of nature tell you to do something, the prudent thing is not to quibble over details.”

~ From the movie, Field of Dreams

Is there anyone who doesn’t marvel over the sight of a fabulous field of flowers?  As a plantaholic, I swoon each spring when the promise of a kaleidoscope of flora burst from the ground. Alas!  This year my swooning turned into sweating.

With the twelve atmospheric rivers and continued rain through May, the ground is also bursting with unwanted weeds of every sort…bindweed, choke weed, thistle, dayflowers, vetch, black medic, wild cutleaf geranium, dock, fleabane, spurge, ragweed, cudweed, euphorbia, poisonous hemlock, unidentifiable thugs, and a plethora of grasses blown in from the hills.

Yes, I know. A weed is just a plant growing where it is not wanted. Yet many of these unwelcome invaders are pernicious, poisonous, prickly, and painful. For the past two months, I have spent every free moment living the advice from the film and doing the prudent thing caused by the primal forces of nature…digging and pulling up the roots of these assailants. I practice the no-dig method to maintain my fields and borders. The less the soil is turned, the fewer weeds will sprout, or so the research indicates. Last spring, I added innumerable yards of nutrient-rich soil and covered it with equal amounts of mulch. In the fall, I scattered seeds of nasturtium, nigella, seafoam statice (also known as sea lavender in the Limonium species), and calendula, as well as rhizomes of various bearded iris and corms of common cornflag. Climbing roses adorn the fence. Everything sprouted as anticipated, but the winds and the birds brought these uninvited visitors who happily took up residence in the lush environment.

When the broadleaf wild cutleaf geranium is small, it is quite beautiful with tiny pink flowers and bright lime green leaves. It is also very fragrant. As this cranesbill matures with its red stems it spreads two or more feet wrapping around neighboring flower stems, making weeding more difficult. The leaf structure mingles with the nigella often resulting in more love-in-the-mist being eradicated than is wanted. Bindweed, with flowers that mimic morning glory, twines to the top of any plant, adding to the difficulty of clearing it from the orchard. Many of the grasses that self-seeded from the surrounding hillsides would be interesting in a container as a stand-alone display, but infiltrated into the centers of my flowers hinder the graceful arches of color.

Allergy season is ferocious this year. My eyes are consistently red and irritated and despite taking an antihistamine, I sneeze while weeding. According to a 2021 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America, an academic journal, between 1990 and 2018, the North American pollen season lengthened 20 days with 20% more pollen. Warming temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are cited as causing increased pollen production. Trees, grass, and weeds are causing this sniffling, stuffiness, coughing, congestion, and itching. Hopefully, these seasonal allergies will be alleviated by late June.

As I write this, I’m taking a break from my weeding work. Tomorrow I’ll be back wearing my coveralls, hat, sunglasses, apron, boots, and gloves for another round of freeing my fields of dreams from the primal forces of nature. Slowly and joyfully, I am witnessing the glistening glory of my efforts.

Happy Gardening. Happy Growing.

Cynthia Brian’s June Digging Deep Gardening Tips

CLEAN patio furniture with a thorough scrubbing of lounge chairs and cushions.

MAINTAIN your weeding schedule. Be vigilant pulling weeds as soon as they appear as they zap nutrients and water from plants. Make certain to get the roots.

ECHO colors when you plant. Even if you plant different plants of form and texture, to capture the exuberance and energy of flow, plant swaths of the same color in opposing areas.

PRUNE lilacs after blooming to encourage more blooms next year. Lilacs can be pruned by 1/3 for optimal flowering.

LIFT your mood by designing a refuge area amongst your favorite plants with a bench or chair where you can relax, recharge, and feel protected. Throughout my landscape, I have created areas to sit, rest, and appreciate the natural beauty.

PLANT pumpkins now for a Halloween harvest. This is also a perfect opportunity to get your corn, eggplant, beets, and cucumbers started.

SUCCESSION plant your greens every three weeks including lettuce and arugula as well as root vegetables like carrots, radishes, and turnips.

SOW seeds of basil, cilantro, chives, and parsley for a summer season of savory spices.

CHECK your drip irrigation systems as well as any sprinkler heads.

WATER only once or twice a week, early in the morning when the plants will absorb the most or later in the evening.

PROPAGATE azaleas, carnations, fuchsias, and hydrangeas by taking cuttings and planting in rich soil.

DEADHEAD spent rose petals weekly to encourage continuous blossoms. Roses are spectacular this year. Keep them healthy and blooming.

MULCH your entire garden with at least three inches of material to help retain moisture, keep the soil cooler, and prevent drought related problems throughout the upcoming hot months.

BRIGHTEN patios, porches, and balconies with containers of colorful Bowles mauve (wallflower), petunias, or sweet William flowers.

PS: Don’t forget the Be the Star You Are!® Shoe Drive. Shoes may be dropped off through June 30 at https://5aspace.com/, 455 Moraga Rd. #F, Moraga or www.TeamHoogs.com, 629 Moraga Road (next to 7/11), Moraga. For more information, visit https://www.bethestaryouare.org/shoedrive

Photos and more: https://www.lamorindaweekly.com/archive/issue1708/Digging-Deep-with-Goddess-Gardener-Cynthia-Brian-Fields-of-Dreams.html

Substack: https://cynthiabrian.substack.com/p/fields-of-dreams

Press Pass: https://blog.voiceamerica.com/2023/06/08/flower-fields/

Raised in the vineyards of Napa County, Cynthia Brian is a New York Times best-selling author, actor, radio personality, speaker, media and writing coach as well as the Founder and Executive Director of Be the Star You Are!® 501 c3. Tune into Cynthia’s StarStyle® Radio Broadcast at www.StarStyleRadio.com. Her newest children’s picture book, No Barnyard Bullies, from the series, Stella Bella’s Barnyard Adventures is available now at https://www.CynthiaBrian.com/online-store. Hire Cynthia for writing projects, garden consults, and inspirational lectures. Cynthia@GoddessGardener.com  http://www.GoddessGardener.com

[come-outside]

everything’s blooming on the field and it’s really lovely (-: not much to say about it, i just love spring!

here is some dewberry, common vetch, red clover with lamb’s-tongue/hoary plantain, field buttercup, a photo of a LOT of cow parsley along the western border, and herb robert!

and here we’ve got a puppy, some red clover, some kidneyvetch in the second photo, and two types of trefoil!

The ones with the big, yellow flowers are bird’s foot trefoil, and the patch with tiny yellow flowers is lesser trefoil! i have several photos on the blog already of these pre-bloom. it’s so exciting to see them in full bloom!

these flowers are very hardy and very common throughout britain, enough to be considered a “weed” by many despite how beautiful and cheerful they are. same story as with a lot of british native grassland flowers, unfortunately!

[ayanos-pl]

Wyka siewna (Vicia sativa) i wyka drobnokwiatowa (Vicia hirsuta)

Vicia sativa, known as the common vetch, garden vetch, tare or simply vetch and Vicia hirsuta (hairy tare, hairy vetch, tiny vetch)

【庭】カラスノエンドウ（ヤハズエンドウ）とスズメノエンドウが咲いている。

[inthecityofgoodabode]

May 2022: Gray Day With No Rain

The leafcutter bees like our golden jasmine for their nests: 

Metamorphosis in progress: 

Mourning dove fledgling in our garden: 

These two have been coming back in this pot annually:  

Our chaste tree dropped seed & made this baby: 

Yep, we have slugs: 

[apoemaday]

Summer Solstice

by Stacie Cassarino

I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late.

[mosylufanfic]

Cassian, Andor, and Community

So I want to talk about a Cassian headcanon that I’ve been holding since the movie came out: the romantic, melancholy idea of the solitary spy, who walks alone except for his seven-foot-tall snarkmaster droid friend, until Jyn Erso comes along.

Which I’m starting to think is 100% wrong.

In the first three episodes of Andor, we’ve seen the two communities where he spent his childhood and young adulthood. We’ve also seen that Cassian is unquestionably a part of those communities, not someone standing outside them in lonely solitude.

On Kenari, it’s a tiny band of what seems to be mostly teens and children, living in the forest on a lakeshore. This is a situation where there’s no such thing as a solitary survivalist. You have to depend on each other to survive. Yes, Kassa stops to look at the pit mine where, presumably, his parents and all the other adults died in the mining disaster. Yes, he stays behind to explore the downed ship. So you could go “okay, this is little Kassa striking out on his own as he always will.”

However, if you wind back a little, he doesn’t go off on his own to investigate the downed ship, but instead worms his way into the circle of bigger kids setting off, saying “me too, I’m here too, I’m old enough.” He is trying to establish himself as one of the group that explores when there are older, stronger kids hanging back. And when one of the oldest boys tries to stop him, he waits until the girl in charge steps in for him.

Even while he’s pushing to create a place for himself, he understands clearly how his little society works, who’s in charge, who says go and who says stay. He knows this isn’t his call, not in the place he currently occupies in their power structure.

And he also has a little sister that he takes care of and stops to reassure even as he’s rushing off to join the bigger kids. He isn’t a solitary kid. He’s connected to this community.

Let’s move to Ferrix.

This is a bigger but no less insular community, and he is no longer an skinny boy but a young man firmly rooted among his peers. He knows everybody and has for the past eleven years, and they know him. He knows that Brasso will back him up on the ridiculous, overly-convoluted lie he spins, knows it so well that he doesn’t say, “what if you say this” or “tell them this.” In a piece of glorious writing, he tells the lie as Brasso is going to say it.

When Nurchi tries to intimidate him, he knows exactly the buttons to push (”Vetch? Are you that hard up for money you’re working for this guy?”) to slide out of it without more than an exasperated look from Nurchi. He knows what to say to charm the guard at the shipyard, who is also exasperated (”this is the last time, I mean it”) but how many times has there been a “last time” before?

He knows Bix is like 99% done with his nonsense but there’s still that one percent that means she might be able to find him a buyer. (Of course, he doesn’t seem to know or care that Bix has Rebellion contacts, may even be a Rebel herself, but that’s a meta for another time.)

Again, he understands how the people around him work, and he’s shifted from finding his own place in that structure to using his established place as a base from which lever others.

“But mosy,” you say, “what about the movie? Surely the Cassian we see in the movie is a lonely, lonely spy who trusts and depends on nobody but himself and also his seven-foot-tall snarkmaster droid friend?”

The movie, right, the movie.

I could talk about Tivik, or Jedha, or Draven, and how all those moments and scenes depend on relationships with others. But actually I want to talk about the moment in the Yavin hangar when he turns up with enough manpower to run a mission to Scarif.

Jyn was coming out of the Council meeting, which Cassian either skipped altogether or ducked out of. Allowing for as much arguing back and forth as Jyn probably could have stood for, let’s say a couple of hours.

In that time, Cassian was able to gather up a squad of people who not only have the skills that Jyn needs for the mission to Scarif, but also are of the mindset that would take on a unsanctioned rogue almost-certainly suicide mission. It’s a big base, and it’s not like Cassian could have sent out a space email blast. He had to find all these people quickly and quietly.

Which means he had them in mind already. He knew who was getting frustrated with the Council’s inaction, he knew who had the skills they needed, he knew who would agree to this.

Sure, maybe a few of them tapped a friend. Could be some of them were listening in on the disastrous Council meeting. But most of them came on board because Cassian asked. Because it was Cassian doing the asking.

He’s part of this community too, the community of the Rebellion and of the particularly dirty-handed section of assassins, saboteurs, and spies that he gathers up and presents to Jyn as her squad. And once again, for the last time, he used his place within that community to get what he needed.

Now. This is all based on the movie and on the first three episodes of the show. The rest of this season and next could render all this so much hot air on the internet. But . . . 

Don’t you want to be part of something?

Cassian Andor does, and he is.