Also: Throw in some early blooming things like snowdrops or crocus - the bees will love them! They’ll be gone mid-May, leaves and all. A lot of people only plant summer flowers and nothing for spring and autumn, so keeping pollinators fed and happy during those seasons is super important!
You can make insect hotels too! Just bundle up some reeds and twigs of varying sizes, paired with some loose straw pads and wood with holes of varying sizes drilled in. Those will help insects keep warm and snug over winter!
For those in the Mid and Eastern US, Prairie Moon is my favorite native seed supplier. Their free catalogs are beautiful, inspirational, and hold a wealth of information. Oh and their prices are very reasonable.
Here’s a few awesome easy-to-grow native plants to consider:
Aquilegia canadensis aka Eastern Columbine. - relatively-short lived perennial but it reseeds well. This plant gives zero fucks and will grow almost anywhere - sun, shade, whatever.
Sometimes called Celandine poppy or woodland poppy. Stylophorum diphyllum. Also short lived but reseeds well.
Phlox divaricata aka Woodland Phlox. It comes in varying shades of bluish lavender. Unlike creeping phlox, this one has tall skinny stems.
These all bloom in the spring.
Worth reblogging! Not true about the columbine being easy to grow, though, at least for me. I kept planting it and it kept dying until I just started growing it in containers.
Vitamin E acetate is basically grease, said Michelle Francl, a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr College. Its molecular structure means that “you have to heat it up pretty hot” for it to vaporize. Its boiling point is 363 degrees Fahrenheit, which is well above the 212 degree F boiling point for water, and nearly four times higher than normal human body temperature.
Once the oil is heated hot enough to vaporize, it can potentially decompose and “now you’re breathing in who-knows-what,” Francl said.
When that vapor cools down in the lungs, it returns to its original state at that temperature and pressure, she said, which means “it has now coated the inside of your lungs with that oil,” she said.
It’s beginning to look a lot like springtime in the PNW which means one of my favorite plants, Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica) is starting to emerge! The young leaves of Nettle can be eaten like any other leafy green, with the proper preparation!
Many people think you can’t use this plant for anything because of the stinging hairs that cover the stem and leaves. Luckily for us there are a couple ways to surpass this, because it’s a delicious food and holds medicine as well!
Smashing. Carefully pick a leaf, fold it up as small as you can and smash all the hairs. Smash it some more, better to be safe than sorry. Now you can eat it fresh in the field!
Heat. This neutralizes the sting! (I’ll talk about different forms of heat below)
Drying. When dried, the hairs no longer sting but they can act like slivers and be irritating.
First things first, find a nettle patch. You want this to be away from roadways, somewhere you know people don’t spray it with insecticide and somewhere that it’s okay to harvest from! In an ideal world this would be a place you could return to throughout the spring and summer. When in doubt, ask around (friends and family)! A lot of folks have it growing in their yard and won’t do a thing with them.
Some things you may want to bring with for harvesting:
Leather gloves/gardening gloves. You typically only need them on one hand.
Clippers/scissors. Use your non-dominate, gloved hand to hold the plant and the clippers to cut it.
A basket or paper bag to place the nettles in.
Next, onto harvesting etiquette:
Like I said before, make sure it’s okay to harvest in that area and that they haven’t been exposed to any unwanted chemicals.
Try to avoid trampling any fragile plants, including the nettles.
Ask permission (from the plants) and listen to your gut feeling for the answer.
Harvest what you need and will use.
Leave the biggest, healthiest plants.
Harvest with gratitude and respect.
The general rule is 1 in 20 for harvesting, but with my method it can be more like 5-8 in 20, this method actually promotes growth and can produce a more robust patch of nettle!
[Photo source] Looking at the plant, the leaves come out opposite of one another, in sets. You want the top 2-3 sets of leaves, using your judgement. You want the newest growth and to leave the majority of the plant intact. In the picture above, I would clip the stem right above the leaves making the Y shape. Doing this promotes new growth and you can alternate which plants you do this with, making a sustainable patch. You can harvest the nettles from the time they emerge from the ground to when they flower in late summer. Many believe that nettles form chemicals that aren’t good for your system after this time, and whether or not this is true - the leaves usually get tougher and the hairs sting worse. I don’t harvest nettles after they flower.
How to prepare the nettle:
I like to separate the leaves from the main stem, and chop the stem up into smaller bits so it cooks better. This is where those gloves come in handy! Once you’ve done that, release any insect friends you accidentally brought inside, then rinse the nettle. Now it’s ready to cook!
What to make?
Soup! I loveeee nettle soup, and you can add nettles to any soup that you would add greens to. Here’s a version for example. Boil potatoes, add carrots, onions and celery and let it cook until soft. When it is almost finished, dump in the nettle in batches and stir until it’s fully wilted into the soup. Bam! Nettle soup.
Boil, steam or saute them just like you would any other greens!!
Nettle chips. I’ve been wanting to make nettle chips, similar to kale chips, but haven’t given it a try yet!
Drying for teas. The best method I’ve found is prepping them like I mentioned above, drying them with a towel and putting them in a brown paper bag. Give the bag a shake every couple of days and make sure the leaves are getting rotated. Keep it someplace warm. After a while, they’ll be dry and good to go!
There’s lots more recipes online, and I encourage you to get creative!
The rapid and dangerous decline of the insect population in the United States — often called an “insect apocalypse” by scientists — has largely been driven by an increase in the toxicity of U.S. agriculture caused by the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS One.
The study found that American agriculture has become 48 times more toxic to insects over the past 25 years and pinned 92 percent of the toxicity increase on neonicotinoids, which were banned by the European Union last year due to the threat they pose to bees and other pollinators.
Kendra Klein, Ph.D., study co-author and senior staff scientist at Friends of the Earth, said the U.S. must follow Europe’s lead and ban the toxic pesticides before it is too late.
“It is alarming that U.S. agriculture has become so much more toxic to insect life in the past two decades,” Klein said in a statement. “We need to phase out neonicotinoid pesticides to protect bees and other insects that are critical to biodiversity and the farms that feed us.”
“Congress must pass the Saving America’s Pollinators Act to ban neonicotinoids,” Klein added. “In addition, we need to rapidly shift our food system away from dependence on harmful pesticides and toward organic farming methods that work with nature rather than against it.”
On this day, 6 September 1921, workers at Cork Harbour declared a Soviet in protest at the refusal of Cork Harbour Board to increase wages. They took over the Harbour Board’s offices, hoisted a red flag, and declared a Soviet. Their plan was to collect dues from shipping agents directly. The Labour Minister intervened and the Soviet was ended through negotiation within hours. However, a contemporary article in the Irish Times observed “Short-lived as was this outbreak of Irish Bolshevism, it was highly ominous. To-day Irish Labour is permeated with a spirit of revolt against all the principles and conventions of ordered society. The country’s lawless state in recent months is partly responsible for this sinister development, and the wild teachings of the Russian Revolution have fallen on willing ears. It is small consolation for thoughtful Irishmen that the first experiments in practical Communism - like this affair at Cork and like the seizure of Messrs. Cleeve’s premises at Bruree - have collapsed in a few days or hours. Their real significance lies in the temper and aspirations which they reveal.” This is a short history: https://libcom.org/history/cork-harbour-strikehttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1204211243097357/?type=3
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
