A thread on planting
Things to plant.
What to put in the ground, and why it matters which.
The single most consequential thing you can do for your patch is also the slowest. You plant something, and then you wait. The waiting is part of the practice.
These notes are about that part — the choosing of plants. Which ones earn the space they take. Which ones do real biological work, and which ones are mostly decoration. Which ones the ecosystem here was built around long before any of us got here, and which ones arrived more recently with their tags still on.
We don't recommend brands and we don't tell you what to buy. We try to help you understand what to look for — and what the difference actually is between the plant that feeds five hundred species and the one that feeds none.
Start here
What's actually in the packet you grabbed at the hardware store. And what to plant instead.
Read the full note →More in this thread
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No yard? Three things you can still do from a kitchen window.
A patch is not the same thing as a yard. Apartments and balconies count too.
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Leave the leaves
The single highest-leverage thing you can do for your patch costs nothing and takes no time. You stop doing something.
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The myth of the tidy yard
Why an immaculately mowed lawn is a 20th-century invention with a strange history, and why most things alive prefer a little disorder.