I edited this in after you posted. Right now I’ve got California Poppies, Black Sage seedlings and Coyote Mint seedlings. There’s an epilobium species growing here that might be native and edible or non-native and poisonous (I’m an experienced and cautions forager; seems like epilobiums can be kinda bastards to tell apart, so I’m not going to proceed further there), and red clover. I’m looking into getting some Nodding Needlegrass, Three-awn grass, and some Triteleia spp. I was looking at Owl Clover, but it’s parasitic on grasses, and I don’t to piss off the neighborhood by setting off an epidemic of parasitic owl clover (my power level isn’t quite that high yet). I’ve also scattered some nettle-leaf hyssop seeds, but I seem to be coming up zeroes on that front. Now, my neighbor is a heavy irrigator and always floods my side yard after years of asking them to manage it better. Nothing grows there but mud or water-loving non-native grasses, so I got my hands on some cattail seeds (and dill and fennel) and scattered them in there. I’m curious to see if I can get some cattails going.
fennel is great for spots you expect to flood. lots watery spots in CA have fennel, and it’s a unique regional anisette flavor nobody can ever put their finger on. great for salads and tomato sauces.
you could also try putting in a water break, or doing the owl clover just so your neighbor has nothing to water. fix the problem.
Lmao, I’m hoping I might get a reaction when swamp plants start coming up on their side of the fence. At any rate, cattails are such a dead useful plant, if I get a good crop of them (or better, a mix of them and dill/fennel), I won’t be too mad at the neighbor.
It’s taken years of small, persistent effort, and it’s an ongoing process. One day, I aspire to become a forest spirit that randomly terrorizes too-well-manicured suburbs and gets featured in creepypastas. Anyone can do it, it just takes time, interest, a bit of applied effort, and some luck. If you find an already experienced botany nerd in your area, you can really give yourself a boost, but YouTube U is a pretty decent substitute. There’s lots of good books that your local library can help you get a hold of too!
shadow libraries are great for making yourself backups, if you rely on books for anything! having a permenant digital copy of your fav plant books in with your usual stuff is really useful. any good books on local california species and ecologies you would recommend? I haven’t been on libgen for a while.
One that I’m really enjoying (though it’s kind of a tome) is “Tending The Wild” by M. Kat Anderson. It goes into the interdependent relationships the native Americans had with the local flora and fauna and how the arrival of European settlement blew that ecology right out of the airlock. There’s a lot of really good information both about the horrors of colonialism and genocide as well as the ways that various native species were used and cultivated.
The Horrors are pretty pedestrian to me at this point, but functional knowledge on the way various cultures, especially by region, nurtured and maintained the superabundance of the pre-columbian americas would be pretty fucking amazing to read. there’s a modern less geographically specific re-discovery of the concept ‘the philosophy of social ecology’ by the guy whose inter-human-political philosophy largely inspired the not-a-state in what was NE syria whose name escapes me at present.
Idk, man, I thought I knew it well enough, but it shook me a few times. One of the things that still haunts me is how the native Americans had this entire cultivated relationship with the ecology here, and the Europeans just wandered in and went “pfft look at these dumb layabouts not cutting down trees, plowing fields, and killing everything that moves when God left it here for them to exploit” and proceeded to perform what amounted to not just regular genocide, but also ecological and cultural genocide by completely transforming the ecology of California.
Also, re: hyper abundance. There’s some evidence that suggests that the hyper-abundance encountered by European settlers was actually the result of the collapse of agrarian societies across the continent. De Soto describes organized, settled, agrarian societies when he first encounters the native Americans. 100 years of smallpox later, and the English find what amounts to hunter-gatherer bands. It’s entirely possible that a breathtaking depopulation occurred across the American continents that basically resulted in what you’d see when you functionally eradicate the apex predator from a given ecology.
I edited this in after you posted. Right now I’ve got California Poppies, Black Sage seedlings and Coyote Mint seedlings. There’s an epilobium species growing here that might be native and edible or non-native and poisonous (I’m an experienced and cautions forager; seems like epilobiums can be kinda bastards to tell apart, so I’m not going to proceed further there), and red clover. I’m looking into getting some Nodding Needlegrass, Three-awn grass, and some Triteleia spp. I was looking at Owl Clover, but it’s parasitic on grasses, and I don’t to piss off the neighborhood by setting off an epidemic of parasitic owl clover (my power level isn’t quite that high yet). I’ve also scattered some nettle-leaf hyssop seeds, but I seem to be coming up zeroes on that front. Now, my neighbor is a heavy irrigator and always floods my side yard after years of asking them to manage it better. Nothing grows there but mud or water-loving non-native grasses, so I got my hands on some cattail seeds (and dill and fennel) and scattered them in there. I’m curious to see if I can get some cattails going.
fennel is great for spots you expect to flood. lots watery spots in CA have fennel, and it’s a unique regional anisette flavor nobody can ever put their finger on. great for salads and tomato sauces.
you could also try putting in a water break, or doing the owl clover just so your neighbor has nothing to water. fix the problem.
Lmao, I’m hoping I might get a reaction when swamp plants start coming up on their side of the fence. At any rate, cattails are such a dead useful plant, if I get a good crop of them (or better, a mix of them and dill/fennel), I won’t be too mad at the neighbor.
your life is so much more botanically interesting than mine.
It’s taken years of small, persistent effort, and it’s an ongoing process. One day, I aspire to become a forest spirit that randomly terrorizes too-well-manicured suburbs and gets featured in creepypastas. Anyone can do it, it just takes time, interest, a bit of applied effort, and some luck. If you find an already experienced botany nerd in your area, you can really give yourself a boost, but YouTube U is a pretty decent substitute. There’s lots of good books that your local library can help you get a hold of too!
shadow libraries are great for making yourself backups, if you rely on books for anything! having a permenant digital copy of your fav plant books in with your usual stuff is really useful. any good books on local california species and ecologies you would recommend? I haven’t been on libgen for a while.
One that I’m really enjoying (though it’s kind of a tome) is “Tending The Wild” by M. Kat Anderson. It goes into the interdependent relationships the native Americans had with the local flora and fauna and how the arrival of European settlement blew that ecology right out of the airlock. There’s a lot of really good information both about the horrors of colonialism and genocide as well as the ways that various native species were used and cultivated.
The Horrors are pretty pedestrian to me at this point, but functional knowledge on the way various cultures, especially by region, nurtured and maintained the superabundance of the pre-columbian americas would be pretty fucking amazing to read. there’s a modern less geographically specific re-discovery of the concept ‘the philosophy of social ecology’ by the guy whose inter-human-political philosophy largely inspired the not-a-state in what was NE syria whose name escapes me at present.
Idk, man, I thought I knew it well enough, but it shook me a few times. One of the things that still haunts me is how the native Americans had this entire cultivated relationship with the ecology here, and the Europeans just wandered in and went “pfft look at these dumb layabouts not cutting down trees, plowing fields, and killing everything that moves when God left it here for them to exploit” and proceeded to perform what amounted to not just regular genocide, but also ecological and cultural genocide by completely transforming the ecology of California.
Also, re: hyper abundance. There’s some evidence that suggests that the hyper-abundance encountered by European settlers was actually the result of the collapse of agrarian societies across the continent. De Soto describes organized, settled, agrarian societies when he first encounters the native Americans. 100 years of smallpox later, and the English find what amounts to hunter-gatherer bands. It’s entirely possible that a breathtaking depopulation occurred across the American continents that basically resulted in what you’d see when you functionally eradicate the apex predator from a given ecology.