I’ve had onion starts in the ground about two weeks, growing yellow and Texas sweets this year. About to transplant cantaloupe, watermelon, and eggplants outside!
Edit cause all y’all are talking about perennials, my Fuyu persimmon is leafing out and my Mexican plum is covered in white flowers and buzzing with native insects!
I’ll preface this with I’m by no means a professional soil scientist, but I am an avid gardener. The best type of soil for your purpose depends on a ton of variables. Are you adding to existing soil? Are you planting in-ground, in a pot, or a raised bed? How much moisture do you need to retain? What type of soil is best suited for the specific plants you’re planting? What pH do they need to thrive?
If you’re planting a standard vegetable garden, you’ll probably go with a compost-rich loamy soil. If I were to dig a hole in my clay yard and fill it with that kind of soil though, it’d form a “bowl” and drain poorly, leading to root rot. I use raised beds to avoid this problem.
If you want to get wonky, the native soil where I live is ustert vertisol. You can learn about the different soil categories here. Here’s a map of general soil order locations in the US. You can even check out the USDA’s Web Soil Survey and map out your address to see what soil formation you’re on.
Since the standard unit of electricity delivery is kWh, this notation makes way more sense to the average person than 2 TWh
The one in CA doesn’t have any salt storage, I think it was built before that tech had been flushed out
One particularly grim side effect of the plant’s construction is that birds, attracted to the insects gathering at the top of the towers, are incinerated as they pass through the beams of concentrated sunlight. According to estimates, this results in some 6,000 deaths every year.
Geez, maybe develop some kind of screen or something
CO2 emissions from energy use and cement production fell by 1% in the second quarter. When combined with a sharp 6.5% increase in January-February and a monthly decline in March, there was a 1.3% rise in CO2 emissions across the first half of the year, compared with the same period in 2023.
Get yourself some thornless blackberries, there are few thorns that will cause more damage to your body.
Playing the long game, plant some trees that will eventually give you afternoon shade!
Search “aluminum awnings” and you’ll get a ton of results like these
In recorded history, California’s only had one hurricane to ever make landfall, in 1858
My family’s there too, and I grew up there, and I couldn’t disagree more. “70-90mph gusts” cause serious damage to trees, homes, and power lines, but they’re highly localized, and so the damage is easy to repair. Houston just experienced 60-70mph sustained winds with gusts up to 90 and a number of tornadoes across the entire metro for like 2+ hours, which caused destruction several orders of magnitude greater than what you’re comparing it to. All that is to say Centerpoint Energy definitely got caught with their pants down, which had the outage dragging on for a lot of their customers
I know it’s in vogue to criticize “the Texas grid,” but there was only one incident that involved the actual grid supply and demand, which was the snowstorm in 2021. The only other outages that have happened were localized outages due to mechanical damage to power lines, eg from ice or hurricane-force winds. How long it’s taken Centerpoint Energy to get all those lines back up is certainly something to criticize, but it also has nothing to do with the Texas grid." And there have been no rolling blackouts due to heat, despite the implication in that Vice headline
There are a ton of early flowering native trees. Mexican plum, Mexican buckeye, Eastern redbud, Texas persimmon, and Texas mountain laurel are some that bloom in Feb-Mar in my area. We also have a bunch of salvias that take off in bloom really early. I bet you have a lot more native early flowering plants around you than you think!
Our native lupine is the Texas bluebonnet, and I’ve been propagating some from seed over several generations now. Like most pod-producing plants, you can tell when the seeds are fully ready when they rattle around in the pod when you shake it. Ours are one of the first blooms of the year, really hitting in mid-March or so, and are done blooming by mid to late April. I pulled up all the dead plants a while ago after I harvested and spread the seeds for next year. Kind of jealous yours are just now going to seed
1 is a no-brainer.
2: Artificial lighting will confuse lightning bugs or prevent them from mating, since females need to see that fancy swoopy-light dance to find a mate. When they don’t mate, you lose out on the next generation.
3: I’ve had success in my yard because I’ve carved garden beds out in my lawn where I’ve planted a lot of different native plants, and I try to only minimally disturb the beds throughout the year, so lightning bug larvae have free reign in the leaf litter in fall and winter
That house seems to be ~450 sq ft, that seem right?
Works for me, but you have to tap on the city you want to see for the data to be displayed
Coffee grounds aren’t very good fertilizer, they still need to decompose. Better to mix them in your compost pile and wait til the compost is finished to use it.
Regarding acidity, like the other guy said, used grounds aren’t very acidic. But ultimately, the pH question is going to depend on lots of factors, including the pH of your existing soil and the optimum pH of the plants you’re growing. Sometimes you want to add acidic amendments. Where I live, there’s so much calcium carbonate in the soil, no amount of acidic compost would even make a dent in the pH
While I’ve largely given up on the invasive species fight, I still think it’s important to not plant virulently invasive plants. Jerusalem artichoke is one of those plants that’ll take over your whole garden and beyond, and you probably shouldn’t plant it in-ground in an area where it’s invasive. Even native plants can sometimes be the wrong thing to plant if they’re not in the right place. I’m dealive with some willow-leaf aster that’s native to my area that I just can’t eliminate from a raised bed. I thought it’d look pretty in there, but turns out it sends up shoots everywhere and the tiniest bit of root creates a new plant
All that said, I’ve been planting things native to hotter and dryer areas to the south and west of where I live. I also look around at invasive species and realize the fight is hopeless. Chinabarry, ligustrum, and paper mulberry are everywhere, crowding out our native oaks. I did a volunteer project where we cleared ligustrum from a creek bed, and two years later it’s all back, new growth from seed. The manpower required to stop it is not realistic for most places.