i just find the idea of starting gardening so damn intimidating and i really, really have to do something to better my environment with what i have, like, find a way to help out the wildlife, but this is so intimidating and i'm so bad at ongoing projects that i really don't know how far i can reasonably expect myself to get.
look at the sky.
taste me, as the food and drink Alice found almost said. she was cast unto a stormshorn sunderedsea. you too will fall beneath my waves in time.
profile pic by moiwool (nonbinary color edit by me)
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in reply to @lookatthesky's post:
Hey I know you probably know this, but just in case:
- You don't have to do everything at once, you can pick one corner of your garden and start there until you have more time/energy/resources to do a larger area
- That one corner is already making a difference. A single plant will be a source of food for some of your native pollinators. which means that a couple of native birds will be able to eat those too, etc.
- Native plants want to grow in their native area, they're generally easier to handle than exotic ornamental plants that aren't native to your area
- You don't have to do it alone! See if the local botanical garden, arboretum, nature preserves, or conservation orgs. have resources for people that want to do native plant gardening.
- You can also look up local Facebook groups for native plant gardeners (yeah I know, ew, but facebook seems to be the place for location-based groups to organize themselves)
If it wasnt about helping wildlife id had said do some hydroponixs because its easier >.<
hydroponics doesnt have like any of the things that i find interesting about plants becuase of how it's like, a sterilized, isolated environment that doesn't resemble the ecologies they exist as parts of whatsoever. being a part of a system as multifaceted as an ecology is for sure incredibly difficult, but also i increasingly need to feel that interconnectedness to the world that's been around long before we were here and that'll be here long after we're gone. called by some (crime pays but botany doesnt specifically) the "real real world".
Yeah i feel ya, im just so bad at gardening i just wanna cultivate something that'll survive
yeah tahts another thing, if i can pass a few basic hurdles natives should be easier? they're kinda used to surviving on their own in the climate so just a little bit of care can make a lot of difference.
Ive been trying for years and i just keep killing everything i touch and i feel bad >.<
My hydroponic tomato and avocado are my first successes and i actually never need to do anything to them
My mission is different anyhow, its to grow food year round, and im certain you will succeed at your mission too ^,.,^
Well... Food and medicines
for awhile i wanted to do that too. i still sort of do, at least as a side goal. the problem is that our culture is very accustomed to crops from far away lands that won't really do well in a lot of our areas. the hope is to get to a point where I'm growing some locally-adapted cultivars of these culturally salient foods, but ultimately paving the way for future generations to transition to food that coevolved with everyone else that lives around them.
also, permaculture, which seems like one of the better frameworks for this sort of thing, has some problems. it begins to understand ecology, but at the same time if you look into a lot of what permaculturists say, they... don't really believe invasives are a problem (despite them being one of the leading causes of extinctions). i also think permaculture feels a little too human centric, which again, it's actually less human centric than most gardening, it's just that it doesn't go far enough imo.
i don't know, i haven't read her stuff, but to be clear permaculture still absolutely does have valuable lessons to offer. it's just a mindfulness thing. what i said might mostly reflect the subset of permaculture i've seen.
The ruth stout method is basically to vover the grow bed with hay or straw to act as insulation to keep in water, regulate temperature, control invasives, and act as natural fertilizer. It helps a ton sith root veggies like potatos and alliums
I like the idea of getting food to acclimate to hydroponics to grow faster and fuller, to be able to, in a crisis, make lots of food and seeds for soil planting, to make a little food factory i guess~