We’re about to waste our morning on a long trek north to get groceries, thanks to our local grocery store being a filthy pestilential breeding ground for disease, so I’m going to be gone for a few hours. I’ll leave you with a few views of the strip of native plants growing outside our sun room window, which Mary calls the Father’s Day Garden, because she planted it for me last year. It’s doing well!
It looks so good that I think we should dig up the whole lawn and let it flourish like this. Lawn mowers are the tools of the devil, you know.
Sometimes I think that lawnmowers are the reason why people think grass is boring. Maybe it wouldn’t be so boring if people didn’t insist on cutting it down the moment it tries doing anything interesting.
The mildly deranged penguin can’t immediately identify any of those cheese plants, except for the seemingly-little “insect” in the centre of the last image. She says that is probably the 3D shadow of a 4D Pecorino (albeit which variety is hard to tell from the shadow). As the shadow seems fully-formed (i.e., the cheese is mature), and assuming the actual cheese plant is of typical size for a mature specimen, she estimates it’s around a parsec away. Since the shadow is illuminated, the cheese is probably firing its thrusters, but it’s hard to tell if its the main engines (in which case the cheese is moving away) or the retro-engines (in which case the cheese is approaching).
She says the last time a fully-mature space-faring 4D Pecorino cheese approached Earth, edible bits fell from the sky. Immanuel Velikovsky blamed Venus, much to the annoyance of the actual Venusian cheeses.
Just curious. In the hopper.jpg, what are the little blobs at the bifurcation on the right-hand branch? Insect eggs? (The hopper’s eggs?)
@René
It looks to me like it could be a cluster of insects, sucking on the sap of the plant.
@LykeX: Aphids (crossed my mind also). Thanks.
Most of the lawns in my Bay Area suburban neighborhood have been replaced with flower gardens of native plants with minimal water requirements. The county water company even subsidizes your conversion. I kept my lawn mower just to laugh at it when I see it in the garage.
In my area, the season has been conducive to dandelions–my backyard is a half-acre field of lovely yellow flowers peppering an expanse of otherwise dormant grass. The insects are thriving, by extension so too the spiders. Because our uppity HOA keeps tabs on indicators that lawnmowers are run often and regularly, my front yard is the polar opposite, looking like something out of The Joneses.
Death to HOAs.
I’m guessing there may be a spider or two (million) in that garden.
@7 What are HOAs? I would hazard a guess ,Housing ,something ,Assoc .
I can resist… resist… I can… can… can resist… resist the urge to… to… scream JUST FECKING GOOGLE IT! (Ah, much better.)
Wildflower? Okay, Skylark from 1972….
davidc1 (#9) –
“Home Owners Associations” are white people siccing cops on white people.
Lawns are not good things, so you should get rid of yours if you can.
davidc1 @9: If you’re tired of living in a neighbourhood with any sort of personality, get an HOA.
HOA is one of those specifically American evils that left me completely befuddled when I learned about them.
“Dig up the whole lawn”…Chauncey, the gardener in my life, would approve. Let nature have its way. Bring in the natives. You’ll probably get more bugs and more birds. It’s amazing the transformation at our house in two years.
Nice flowers! I especially like the echinacea in the 2nd picture. (I’m more interested in plants than in animals most of the time.)
Grasshoppers lay their eggs in the fall.
Also meant to say in the soil.
I’d guess aphids.
Firstly, fuck the HOA. They’re the neighborhood compliance Nazis whose job it is to ensure that everyone goosesteps to the same drumbeat. Freedom of expression? First Amendment? Never heard of ’em, ( see #11 and #12 ). Secondly, what johnk @6 is describing is also known as a “pocket prairie”. Basically, it entails replacing a grassed or bare-dirt area with a section of native plants, which of course vary by location. It’s much better for the soil and the environment, and reduces runoff by at least ten percent. It also reduces chemical use such as fertilizers and insecticides, and spiders love it! Apparently, they gained popularity in the Houston area as a means to reduce flooding from heavy rains such as they had in the last hurricane. More info on Google and “Science News” magazine.
Charly
You and me both. America, land of the free, where your neighbours can tell you what colour to paint your house. We used to have stupid local ordinances that severely restricted stuff, like which way your roof was allowed to point or forbidding you to add 30 cm to your house so the attic could be turned into an additional bedroom because that would interfere with the “look of the estate”, but most of them got thrown out and never to the level of “you must only use this exact tone of beige”.
Oh, and your neighbours can demand that you keep the property in shape, but only to a certain level.
+++
Lawns are evil and the only reason they don’t qualify as supreme evil is because idiot invented gravel “gardens”. Just stop mowing it and grasses and herbs will naturally accumulate. Dandelion is a wonderful plant, you know?
Just let the grass grow
Rather than raking up the pine needles in our front yard (we have 3 very large blue spruces), we just leave them where they are. The yard is great–it smells just like a pine forest on a lazy, sunny Sunday afternoon, and we filched some granite from a nearby state park to make a stepping stone path to the front door. Some years ago, a guy from TruGreen came by when I happened to be outside, and said, “You know, all those pine needles will kill your grass.” I said, “Yeah, that’s the idea.” Stunned silence.
We live on an acre in a rural subdivision. Half of our acre is meadow and wildflowers and trees. Pollinators- bees, hummingbird moths and hummingbirds hang out for hours every day. We have a resident fox, snakes, voles, and birds, birds birds. In the winter it’s so cool to see the fox making giant leaps when he’s hunting. Deer and elk come through and we have a giant elk antler that was kindly left in the yard.
Some of the newer residents have complained but it was all ok’d by the HOA when we moved in. It’s their loss by not emulating us.
Gotta admit I haven’t made an effort to check out the spiders.
We have gone natives and just low maintenance stuff to a great degree. Pollinator paradise.