Realms of Compost

Like not to sound overly radical and idealistic, but maybe we don't have to use fossil-fuel-burning heavy machinery to maintain countless acres of unused land in a state scalped and exterminated of native plant life. maybe we can, like, limit our use of the pollution machine that makes land useless and barren.

maybe all the brilliant scientists of our highly advanced technological society can think of something we could possibly do with land other than "make it useless and barren using the pollution machine." Maybe somewhere in the world, someone is brilliant and visionary enough to imagine a society where "making it useless and barren using the pollution machine" is a slightly less common use of land resources

roadside or other area that needs to be kept relatively low? short native grasses and flowers. there's a billion of them.

Awkward leftover land next to a building? trees. if there's plumbing or power lines to worry about? more native grasses and flowers. pollinator gardens. Or grow fiber plants that can be harvested yearly and turned into fabric/baskets/mats/whatever. If the soil doesn't have anything toxic in it, you could grow food plants. Grow sunflowers, they're allelopathic and keep the weeds down. Walking paths. Solar panels. Walking paths with solar panels. Put solar panels above your parking lot while you're at it. Did i mention Arundinaria gigantea.

Carl, rustling excitedly: a new leaf!

This, I think, might be a flower spike.

Compare it to his normal branch leaf buds

Carl are you starting to bloom???

Vegetable Patch II - Fiona Willis

British , b. 1953 -

Seriously

My plants are attracting HUGE amounts of flies, ants, wasps, and moths, and when I identify them and look them up there is no information! Especially flies, wow. They're so diverse, there's SO many different kinds. I'm getting a ton of bee-mimic flies and hover flies.

Wikipedia says hover fly larvae eat aphids while the adults are pollinators. That means they are beneficial in two ways at once! But most of the Wikipedia pages for species are only one sentence, if they exist at all. Likewise here's the wiki page for the most common bee mimic fly where I am. It's one sentence!

If you only pay attention to butterflies and bees, and plant the plants that are the best for butterflies and bees, you would maybe neglect keystone plants that support the largest amount of other insects. And these insects are like, a massive proportion of the bugs in a healthy ecosystem. And birds and mammals need bugs for food! A lot of birds are mostly insectivorous, and anyways, an unbalanced diet of all bird seed can't be healthy even for the omnivorous birds. They need to eat a variety of foods!

Not to mention that larvae are necessary for feeding baby birds!

(blink, blink)