Nema

Some libraries have free seed programs. Connect locally. Now.

If you are in the US, you have access to your state (and county) Cooperative Extension Service! This is a taxpayer funded program all across the nation. They exist to help gardeners garden better, farmers to farm better, homemakers to homemake better, 4H, and a host of other things. Quality depends on how well they are funded by the government. If yours is kind of crappy check out neighboring states with similar climates. Some still give out old, outdated info.

They have a ton of free information online and some even offer free or low cost classes. This is usually out of a land grant university in your state.

This matters b/c gardening has a HUGE local component. What works best in California is not what works best in Vermont, won't be planted at the same time, some types of plants and even down to the cultivars of the plants will do better in some situations and not in others.

For example:

planting calendar for Western North Carolina vegetables and herbs

Texas A&M page with a bunch of organic gardening resources in PDF form

Online Growing Groceries Classes 2025 with the King county (Seattle I think??) Master Gardeners - $8 per class each class is 1.5 hours long. Master Gardeners are trained volunteers who assist the Extension Service.

Midwest Blueberry Production Guide (PDF) - this is REALLY good I have it on my desk at work.

An online 4 hr beekeeping course from the Univ of Oklahoma for only $20

An online 10 hour poultry course from Penn State for only ~$50 - Penn State has a lot of really good online written resources on small time animal husbandry for free too.

UGA's National Center for Home Preservation - Did you know that the internet is full of terrifyingly unsafe food preservation info? Here's an excellent and free science-based resource for preserving your harvests on things you find on a great sale at the store.

Univ of Arizona extension event calendar of things they have going on all over the state.

Most classes used to be in person, but since the lock downs many of them are online.

If anyone needs any help with this, I'm happy to help, just let me know what state you're in and what kind of info you're looking for.

“That’s right.”

“At the request of a princess.”

“Right again.”

“And you, who will be leading the expedition, are also a princess.”

“You’re very perceptive.”

“How big is your royal family, again?“

“We don’t have one.”

“But–“

“We overthrew our monarchy centuries ago, but we kept most of the titles around. The rank of ‘princess’ is held by the directors in charge of various civil service branches.“

“Huh. And the princess we’re rescuing today is in charge of…?”

“Public sanitation.”

“The Lord of Death’s Dominion kidnapped your public sanitation director?”

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

All people have a tendency to be unconsciously biased toward seeing trans women as untrustworthy, unsafe, lacking vulnerability, the problem to be solved rather than a person to be taken care of. And this is not less true in trans and queer and feminist communities. It’s just more unconscious, and more propped up with social justice, feminism, queer lib, leftist, and anti-oppression beliefs. This book is talking about this in context to a physical public situation of harassment, but this is true of social conflicts too, including on social media, in friend groups, in all kinds of situations. The unconscious bias also gets taken advantage of by people who know what they’re doing and hide behind that bias to make their mistreatment of transfems seem reasonable—again, often supported with social justice and anti-oppression rhetoric. TERFs aren’t the only people who do this! It felt so incredible to see this spelled out in print, plain as day, an actual book calling out a real thing I’ve experience more times than I can count, that all transfems I know go through, and that I still feel crazy for seeing because there’s so much gaslighting about it. You know how when you KNOW something is real, but you feel defensive about that knowledge, like you have to be ready to hold onto it, and then you see something confirming that knowledge for you in no uncertain terms and it feels like “wow maybe I wasn’t crazy all this time!” That’s how I felt seeing this.

EVEN PARENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENCOURAGE RESPONSIBLE READING/VIEWING BEHAVIOR. NOT filter everything ahead of time for their kid.

When my kiddo was 5, his pediatrician was asking him the usual Well Child Visit questions (“What are your favorite foods? What do you do to get your body moving? Do you know what to do if you get lost in a public place?” Etc.) and she asked, “What do you do if you see something on TV that scares or upsets you?”

I piped up like, “Oh, he doesn’t watch TV without one of us in the room,” which was true at the time and is still largely true now. She said, “Yes, but that won’t always be the case, so make sure you’re talking to him about what to do if he sees something that upsets him.”

So we started talking to him about that, and the answer is simple: “Turn it off or leave the room, and talk to someone you trust about what you saw and what you’re feeling.”

The answer is NOT “Ask your parents to make sure you never see anything upsetting again,” because that’s just not possible — and ultimately that would be doing the kid a disservice, since sooner or later he’s going to be out in the world where we can’t control what he watches or reads. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to make sure he’s watching/reading age-appropriate stuff, it just means that’s not the only safeguard he has — and that’s a good thing.

So yes, content creators aren’t your parents and aren’t responsible for making sure you never see anything you don’t like — but also, your own parents should have taught you what to do when that happens. So if they didn’t, take it from me, your internet mom:

Turn it off.

Walk away.

Talk to someone you trust about how you’re feeling.

“What did you say?”

“I killed her sister”

“Medusa offered to help me save my mom if i turned on the two of you”

“And what’d you say?”

“I cut off her head”

To explain: West Saxon and Anglian are both dialects of Old English. West Saxon was the politically dominant dialect, but Anglian was the more popular spoken dialect. So a lot of Old English texts are written in West Saxon, but what we know as Middle English and Modern English descended more from Anglian because it was spoken by more people.

So grey (the Anglian word) shows up when authors are describing everyday stuff. Like in this sentence describing a grey beard from Holy Boke Gratia Dei: "The hed of Petir is a brood face with mech her on his berd and that is of grey colour be twix whit and blak."

Any Middle English text you read, you'll find Anglian grey is the word the author prefers to describe everyday things. Grey wool, grey feathers, grey stones, grey horses.

By contrast, gray (the West Saxon word) shows up when authors are describing the qualities of light.

A gleaming gray sword, a deep gray lake, a misty gray morning, cold gray marble, sad gray eyes. Like in this sentence from The Siege of Jerusalem: "They glowes of graie steel that were with gold hemmyd." More often than not, gray describes an impermanent or glimmering quality of light.

There's even an instance where a Middle English author uses both, and you can see how one spelling is more about the quality of light while the other is more about the color of the animal: "The cerkyl or the roundel off the eye ys sumtyme graye lyke the ey off a catte, sumtyme blak grey lyke the eyn off doggys."

("The circle or round of the eye is sometimes gray like the eye of a cat, sometimes black-grey like the eyes of dogs.")