I planted 10 tubers last spring in this awkward space between the shed and fence. Things were much more sparse last fall when they bloomed and I could still see the ground 😅 Hopefully the switchgrass blocks their forward march.
Direct link to the Maryland bill passed: https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2021RS/bills/hb/hb0322f.pdf
Over 12 expert-led weekly challenges, transform your lawn into a vibrant ecosystem teeming with life. Discover simple techniques to create habitat that butterflies, birds, and beneficial insects can't resist. Ready to turn your patch of earth into something extraordinary?
Live Kickoff on May 1st @ 12 pm est / 9 am pst
Featuring Doug Tallamy
Renowned Ecologist,
Founder of Homegrown National Park
Sign up for this free challenge at lesslawnmorelife.com
Started working on this area underneath a tree last spring. Common blue violet, eastern columbine and wild geranium make up the groundcover.
I planted Virginia spiderwort too, but the cottontails feasted on them 🐇
And an update on my violet post from last year. They're filling in this area nicely under the elderberry:
60 minutes interviewed the photojournalist Philip Holsinger. He says as much when discussing the pictures of them bound, shaved and wearing all white.
Currently resisting the spring cleaning urge! The grass in the front yard is starting to grow, so it won't be too much longer.
The first on my list is thinning out the orange coneflower to make beds in the backyard. The second is grouping up the late boneset that sprouted in random places.
I live in a city, but I'll share some programs that/organizers who may provide some inspiration:
BMORE Beautiful - provides trash picking kits and helps residents organize cleanups in their neighborhood. They were incredibly friendly, so might be worth reaching out on how to build a similar program in your area
Weed Warriors - trains participants to recognize and remove common invasive plants, provides training for participants on how to organize efforts in their communities
Community gardening - this video is from an animal liberation podcast, but the guest's opening story of being completely ignorant about gardening but doing it anyway is inspiring. The remainder is about their work on food justice and grassroots organizing
Compost collective - this is the podcast of the guest in the previous video. They interview the founder of Baltimore Compost Collective who works with youth in the city
Guerrilla gardening - this is a classic TED Talk. The speaker discusses growing food in a public space and how they successfully fought their city to keep their garden. They also talk about their volunteer gardening group, planting food gardens at homeless shelters
Maryland Food & Abolition Project - may no longer be active, but an interesting idea nonetheless. Their mission was (is?) to partner community gardens with prisons to provide fresh produce
Echoing @poVoq, don't discount seniors! I used to be a case manager for the elderly and many are more interested than people give them credit for.
If nobody got me, I know Chesapeake Bay Watershed got me 🙏 Can I get an amen?
Baltimore City has an adopt-a-lot program, allowing residents to use vacant lots for urban agriculture or community projects. However, as stated in point 3, it can be difficult to keep them going long term:
One farmer, Rich Kolm, said urban farms in Baltimore are playing several critical roles: They are community centers, educational hubs and fresh food producers in food-insecure neighborhoods.
Kolm has overseen three separate farms on adopted land in the city, and now he works as a contractor to those attempting to do the same. Though he commended the city’s low-cost water access service that accompanies lot adoption, he said people may not want to start a farm under the program if the land could be taken away.
“The whole idea of agriculture is that you’re building something,” said Kolm. “The only way to do it well is to make it permanent. But the city’s attitude is that urban agriculture might be a means of raising property values so much so that the agriculture gets kicked off the site.”
Carol J Adams - The Absent Referent
In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I took a literary concept, “the absent referent,” and politicized it by applying it to the overlapping oppressions of women and animals. I explained it this way:
“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the ‘moo;’ or ‘cluck’ or ‘baa’ away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referents in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.”
“There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally absent because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people’s experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else.”
The above map doesn't include fishing, it's showing land use. This shows fishing:
Here is another one about land animals:
Same, had one inserted over a decade ago. No one said anything about pain medication. Drove myself home and felt every imperfection in the road. About a week of severe cramping.
Went for the follow up and the gyno adjusted its position without warning. When I cried out, she told me the pain would subside in a few days. It didn't, so I got it removed a month later.
Glad to see the tides are changing 🙌