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My only complaint about turning my lawn into a wildflower and curated garden is a rabbit like to chomp our asters before they can bloom.
He only ate one and cut down the others and left their buds to decay in the soil.
We do have other asters in the back that are now so strong he can’t do that.
Also one more good thing about the biodiversity thing: everything in my garden is massive this year, and it’s been growing so quickly. The soil is definitely thriving.
Rabbits love clover and all legumes actually. So if you got dutch white clover in your lawn they will go for that first. They will be enough to discourage most eating of garden plants. They avoid everything except my sunflower which they have been eating while they are low. Or at least something is.
I have white clover but they still go for the asters. There’s no clover in the front though.
I also have a groundhog who I think also eats the plants, maybe he’s involved.
I think it’s just the asters are new and relatively low, the established ones in the back don’t get eaten anymore.
Me planting in my garden meant to feed wildlife:
I’ve made peace with it.
Plants are rabbit food, if they die they die and new plants get added.
Looking at the health of the whole garden / ecosystem has made me very zen. Especially when pulling things I don’t want or have too much of. I’ve been trying up transfer some to abandoned areas for things that aren’t common. They usually die but they were going to die when I pulled them anyhow.
My husband laughed at me for pulling weeds and throwing them in the yard, but they ARE the “lawn”, I don’t care if they grow out there, just want to advantage the flowers and food plants in the defined spaces.
I always mow in anything I have pulled into the yard
I think sunflower seeds are just so delicious they get eaten by everything. Squirrels, birds, who knows what all. I can get sunflowers, but this patch of about a dozen sunflowers this year came from about 60 seeds.
I love sunflowers. Though the sunflower has the same issue of sucking the ground dry of the nutrients, you will need to keep rotating the place, otherwise it will take everything from the ground to the state that nothing will grow there for years.
Yeah I rotate everything, usually would put them in the front garden since they are showy, this year in the veg garden because it’s so hot in the summer they give some shade to the rest of the stuff. It’s a mess right now, the butternut squash got attacked so bad I think it has to be removed in a plastic bag. And something is attacking the sprawling watermelon plants too, but those seem to be surviving.
I get it. I have been doing packets of seeds to get one or two even when I press into the soil.
I get sprouts and then those get chomped. Everyone loves Sunflowers
i prob don’t need to tell you this but remember to leave the dead plants where they are so that the nutrients can go back into the ground, also seeds
Plus those dead plants create micorhabitats for decomposers like fungi and bacteria that break everything down into plant-available nutrients while building soil structure.
partridge chicken
They always make my day when I find them. Where I live there’s a lot of abandoned land with good biodiversity (because nobody is around to fuck it up!) and you can hear their broken-fax-machine calls during mating time and then later in the year you might be lucky and find mum and chicks running along some path.
Stormlight fan snickering intensifies
Biodiversity requires manual scything? They can’t use a combine?
Not gonna work on a commercial farm if harvesting costs more than the crop is worth.
I mean, yes, it kind of does. Combine harvesters cut and flatten everything in a field, and kill any animals unfortunate enough to be in their path, which isn’t great for biodiversity.
In modern industrial agriculture, pesticides and poisons and traps kill other plants and animals anyway, so it’s not as relevant.
If you want biodiversity in a ryegrass field, the way this meme shows, you need perennial companion plants and an insect and small animal ecology. So you have to use less destructive forms of harvesting to avoid killing everything in the field.
I don’t know if there are less destructive mechanical harvesting processes available, but showing workers with scythes is a good shorthand to get the point across.
So biodiversity is wholly incompatible with running a profitable farm?
Absolutely not.
There are plenty of ways to encourage biodiversity in agriculture other then what this meme shows.
It used to be, for example, that big fields like this would be harvested by machines but surrounded by hedgerows, which were left uncultivated, serving as wind breaks and as habitat for many beneficial insects and animals.
That’s not possible in modern industrial agriculture, because Roundup and other herbicides and pesticides are too toxic - for corn or soybeans, for instance, they plant varieties immune to glyphosate and then dump so much glyphosate on the fields that everything else dies..
But organic farming techniques that don’t soak the soil in poisons can easily leave uncultivated space for the bugs and the birds - and even benefit from it, by, for example, planting native flowers that attract pollinators to the crops, or plants that provide habitat for insect predators that eat the bugs that would eat the crops. Or so on or so forth.
That being said, I think it’s likely the farm in this meme wouldn’t be profitable given current food prices.
But food in the United States is as cheap as it is because industrial agriculture (ie the poison spraying folks) is heavily subsidized by the US government and fueled by deliveries of oil and fertilizer and chemicals from a vast global supply chain.
And it’s not impossible that will change.
Well, the thing is, if you’ve got a whole bunch of biodiversity and you cut down a small patch in the middle of it, where you grow your monoculture and use your big machines and whatnot, that’s when this fuck-biodiversity approach is rather profitable.
But if you scale that up, if a whole bunch of farmers kill biodiversity in the same region, this will obliterate profitability. You need biodiversity for:
- pollination
- enriching the soil (we have no industrial process for creating humus; it’s mostly just earthworms doing their thing)
- pest control (birds and whatnot can eat your pests, if they settle nearby; they won’t settle nearby, if there’s no food for half the year because you’ve killed everything else)
- resilience against pests and climate variations (if your harvest consists out of multiple different plants, then some of them failing from pests or droughts etc. is much less of a problem)
I’m probably forgetting more aspects, and we probably don’t yet know all aspects either. But ultimately, plants have evolved to exist in rich biodiversity. It isn’t just some moral thing to do, to keep that intact. Plants will falter without biodiversity, no matter how much fertilizer and pesticide you pour onto them.
It’s agriculture, there’s always profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brandt_(farmer)
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Brandt experimented with different combinations and species of cover crops, such as radishes and sunflowers, to improve crop yield and improve soil quality. As a result of these cover crops, Brandt was able to cut back on commercial nitrogen additives, which also saved money. Additionally, Brandt saw less mold and blight and fewer insects among his crops, to the point that he was able to reduce or stop using fungicide, herbicide, and insecticide on parts of the farm.
It’s agriculture, there’s always profit.
And there’s where I stopped reading. Farming is not an easy business to make money at. How is anyone going to pay for the cost of hand harvesting rye grass?
yep absolutely no hand-harvested crops, just unheard of, nobody makes any money farming those
High value crops like fruit, sure.
Cheap grain crops, you’re outta your mind.
Seems like a bitch to separate though
Fuck lawns.
partridge chicken
