I planted some wildflower seeds a while back, and this was the first one to open. (A lot of others look like they are about to.) So I guess this is the first flower I have ever raised from a seed.
I go outside to look at or water my plants about once a day, which is significantly more time than I have spent in the presence of fellow anthropoids in the past month.
I’ve been working on rehabbing our pear tree after some asshole topped it and then neglected it. I aggressively it earlier this year and took so much down that I was worried that I hurt it. Now that spring here it seems quite happy!
There’s a bunch of uprights in the crown that should go but I don’t have the heart because the local hummingbirds love them and I absolutely love things that can hover
Speaking of things that can hover today I saw MY FAVORITE POLLINATOR
This is a bee fly! I think they’re fucking adorable! It’s like someone gave a fly a shitty description of a bee so it could make a bee costume to blend in with the cool kids. BUT they’re extremely agile fliers and can HOVER so they’re already the coolest
Also the strawberries have started to flower! A fresh strawberry still warm from the sun is one of the best things about summer, I’m really looking forward to them
The raspberries are starting to bud too! I did a much better job of thinning and trellising them this year (I hope), looks like all that work is bearing fruit 
I love this post and the bee fly is really awesome, and i have to be honest and say that I really hit reply so I could say
aftercare is very important, everyone
i do now! there’s a spot in the side yard for me if i can keep this alive
i got it from my neighbor im already cross contaminated with
One of the cucumber sprouts that I mentioned above has become a sprawling plant in my little garden spot. It even has a good-sized cucumber now. (Cubivore toy included for scale.)
This is the same milkweed plant that I posted a photo of earlier, being skeletonized by a caterpillar. (It had almost no leaves for a while but grew back and looks healthy now.)
First ripe tomato. It’s much smaller than it looks in this photo. It’s wet because it’s been stormy here all day.
Lettuce aphids. They are not wet because I took this photo a few days ago.
are you gonna get ladybugs or mantises to protect your plants
I’ve had some in my Amazon wish list for many years, just because I thought it was funny that they were available. But now that I potentially have a use for them they are no longer in stock. (There are other sources but they cost like $50 and these ones were cheap.)
At least you can still order uranium ore. But not Tuscan whole milk.
Yesssss the raspberries are starting to blossom and IT’S BEE TIME
Ya boy apis mellifera
And bombus melanopygus, the black butted bumble bee
Inspired by a picture that made me reconsider things, I repurposed my old GameCube that was ruined several years ago but that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away.
somewhere, Miyamoto feels a sudden inexplicable compulsion to greenlight Pikmin 2099…
There’s a really sad palm-tree thingy in my office that is just barely clinging to life I feel bad for it but also I would never have picked a plant like that for myself
My garden has been a bit neglected BUT the siberian irises I got from a friend who’s a landscaper whose client didn’t want them anymore, and which I just let sit unplanted for like a week, have come back 1.75 years later feeling great
My alliums on the other hand had like… 1 decent week and are now basically done
I have a small patch I grow vegetables on
Spring onions
baby Potatoes coming up
not shown: the capsicums seedlings recently replanted behind the onions (slugs hate onions) & the sunflowers at each end
there’s also this wisteria I’m trying to recondition after being choked by clematis for years but I’m terrified of pruning it
one time a few years ago after finishing stardew valley i decided:
“i will become a farmer”
i had a back yard, so i planted a bunch of tomatoes and rigged up stuff for them to climb up, and cucumbers, and some other stuff, and sweet potatoes
the sun burnt them all up and everything died, so after a while i pulled it all up, and took it all down, etc., so I could mow the yard easier,
just mowed right over everything multiple times over the course of a few months, but them sweet potatoes didn’t care, they were still alive and i could tell their rich bounty swelled beneath our feet
so one day i dug them up and there were like 6 huge ones, real huge, i mean: big. so I says to myself: I will give them to my crystal vegan barefoot ground energy brother.
but i did eat one myself.
next time he was over, “come with me for treasure” and revealed them to him and he’s all “that’s cool i guess, do you know the heavy metal content of your soil have you tested it? etc., no thanks”
lucky bastard having a mature wisteria
I mentioned earlier in this thread that I brought a small cactus to work.
If you keep up with SB plant news, you might know that I left the cactus there unattended for months until I was directed to return to the office this week. When I dropped off some computer equipment that I had taken home the day before my return to the office, a building maintenance manager told me that he had watered my cactus once for me.
On a side note, I was impressed that my coworker addressed me by name. Everyone knows his name because he has a very visible job, but I would have thought I was just a random person in a cubicle to him. We have talked occasionally and we’ve worked for the same company for a long time, but I was still a little surprised.
I think the only real hardship the cactus had to endure was a lack of light, which is reflected in the growth of some of the pads. (The lights would have turned on only when someone walked through the area, which probably was not often.) Additionally, a few of the pads were drooping. But it also had a lot of new growth.
I brought the cactus home and removed the drooping pads. But I left the elongated ones because they are an important part of the plant’s history. I plan to grow each pad that I removed into a new plant, and I guess maybe give them away. If you lived closer I could give one to you, person reading this entire post in a thread that you probably open only when you’ve exhausted all of the more interesting threads but crave more SB content.
I’m using the same technique I’ve used successfully on larger but similar cacti: make a clean cut and then place the pad in a window for a few days to “heal” before planting it half-buried in a dirt, sand, and gravel mixture.
