The harm was to our for-profit healthcare system's bottom line.

It was GLORIOUS!! More of this, all day every day.

Community college is just fine. Fuck these sellouts for being complicit.

Yes, been working on this for four years now.

We are swimming in robins here, and I love them as they eat ticks. So many bees, cardinals, hummingbirds, finches of all types, etc. I miss juncos, though. The crows are more feral here, too, they don't hang in the yard, but we do get grackles!

Bonus comment - it's going to be a lot of trial and error. I'm rehoming a couple of things that are too big for my yard and every other year, once you see what a plant is going to do when it's at full growth, there might be some rearranging. Four years, and I see what's working and I run with it.

3/3 Search online for a native plant nursery in your area. They are becoming more popular, too. There are also online nurseries that will ship plants and seeds. The important part is knowing what to start with and tracking that it's appropriate to your area.

2/3 Wild Ones is a national native plant group, they have chapters in a lot of places. You can see if there's one in her area.
wildones.org

And/also - search around online and see what comes up, there might be a non-Wild Ones group for the area. There's a lot of groups!

1/3 Doug Tallamy is pretty much the national expert - there are books and multitudes of podcasts with him.
homegrownnationalpark.org

I have enough tomatoes to go around. They're a beneficial pollinator, so we can work through it. Plus, the birds in our yard do a dynamite job of cleaning out the garden from harmful bugs.

That's great, but those butterfly bushes aren't a native plant and aren't [as] beneficial. They might have nectar, but they don't do anything else and can become invasive, displacing the plants that do support the whole lifecycles.

All of our insurance - home, auto, etc - has gone up. Our car insurance doubled and our home insurance is 1.5 times what it waa last year. And it's not just the $, it's the labor everyone has to put in to shopnaround, to economize, to navigate all of these systems every day.

My brain is hyperactive one day, mush the next. Hpeful then depressed. Inspired then appalled. And on and on. I just want to garden and live quietly, but nope.

Our car insurance doubled and our homeowners insurance went up 1.5x what it was last year. This is bullshit.

See today's post... 😄

😄 That is an annual cicada larvae's exoskeleton. Though big and creepy looking, they are great big harmless blobs of flying protein with no bitey or stingy parts. They sing pretty, aerate the soil, and feed the birbs and wasps.