to close off: heres a photo of the ivy (also ridiculously leafy again, just weeks after trimming) and a Fat Ass Bee that i couldnt find anywhere else to fit in SO fucking glad its gonna be lower-maintenance again 💛💙

and finally, because its been for EVER since i made an actual update about the INTENTIONALLY CULTIVATED GARDEN: LOOK AT HOW RIDICULOUSLY TALL AND BUSHY THE BASIL AND CATNIP HAVE GOTTEN!!!! it feels like they just SPRUNG UP in the last week and we're making spaghetti!! i get to taste the basil!!!!!

other things have started flowering and bearing fruit, too: here's a not-holly not-mistletoe not-tomato (please help lol), some baby crabapples (i thought it was a cherry tree based on the flowers), and A FUCKING HELICOPTER SEED ON THE MAPLE IM ALREADY GONNA BE A GRANDMA..........

and!! we've looped back around to "you never know what beauty you might find", to top it all off, because it turns out these smelly ass linden eating ass beetles might?? be pollinators themselves?? they fly, and they were CONSTANTLY hanging around the stalk plants that JUST STARTED FLOWERING, so!!!

i was managing them manually while waiting for netting to come in today, and after wrestling with it for a while (and buying wood to use as a tentpole. because it turned out it was not pre-assembled) and scavenging some lawn flags to use as bones so as to not smush her She Is Finally Safe. I Hope

the one upside of having to deal with them at times i otherwise wouldnt (theyre least active in the early morning and late evening, when the sun is low enough for things to cool down) (hello 97 degree heat wave. btw.) is that i got to FINALLY get photos of some OTHER bugs while *they* were inactive

okay. update. i have been at war with beetles for A WEEK AND A HALF STRAIGHT. YOU. MOTHERFUCKER. LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE WROUGHT ON MY POOR LINDEN. *FORTY PERCENT* OF THE TREE LOOKS LIKE THIS. that right there, best we can tell, is a popillia japonica! you will notice in other photos it EATS EVERYTHING

really cool thing: i read that you should snip the stalk right above a new branch point where they split into two, because two branches would grow from that spot, and i want these to be nice and leafy i expected them to grow from the stump, not TWO NEW ASS BRANCH POINTS look how symmetrical!! 💛💙

short update today: look how fucking TALL AND BUSHY these are all getting!!! thats two or three catnip plants growing all on top of each other, but thats ONE BASIL and ONE ROSEMARY. holy MOLY

every time i called erin to get her opinion, she noticed something that even *I* hadnt, with my face in the flowers all afternoon. she noticed a ladybug, and that the purple creepers were about to bear seeds (they look like pea pods) two kinds of bee and a wasp all drinking from the same flowers...

the trimmed flowers are drying in bunches on the bare trellis they smell. Planty? only a LITTLE like flowers, but not quite like cut grass i might think of something to do with them as decoration heres a closer view of a type of flower i hadnt noticed before, now that it has more room to breathe

so, after un-crowding the flowers and making a bit of a hole in the center around the trunk of the tree itself, i figured that was good enough. i tried to leave some of the shorter tall leafy bastards so the beetles could keep chilling there, but even so, i could thatch a roof with all this

my initial guideline was "im just gonna cut everything but the flowers", because most of the reason i wanted to leave these growing was for the sake of the pollinators, but that was complicated when i saw even the Tall Greens were home to all sorts of beetles

among the casualties were the blowjob brothers here, which i was really fond of because if you look closely they were the EXACT same plant just copied and pasted next to each other. it was kinda crazy, they branched in all the same places and in the same numbers

okay, today was a bit of a long one, but after having to mow the lawn i figured itd also be good to trim the wildflowers and other plants growing around the maple, both for aesthetic reasons and because i wasnt sure whether having Any shade would be good for the tree, so heres a before and after

#persona3 #p3r

last thing: the WAVE of grasshoppers that flies away from you whenever you just Walk through the grass this isnt the half of them either!! most had jumped away by the time i was standing here between these and the pollinators on the wildflowers, theres just life Everywhere. god 💛💙

from the planter boxes!! some of the basil plants are tall enough (and the catnip has BEEN tall enough) that im seeing about trimming them right above a branch to see if i can get them to grow bushier which MEANS!! THE FIRST TRIMMIIIIIINGS

but im REALLY glad i let it get this tall, because you can see its also starting to flower at the top!! very very excited to see how that turns out, ive honestly never seen a plant like this in my life

theres also this thing!! we straight up dont know what it is <3 ive really been fascinated watching this thing get taller, you can see the top is a really dense bundle of what i thought were ALL baby leaves, and they unfurled pair by pair as it grew

i dunno if this is a midwest thing, but it turns out Non-Lawn-Sod grass will just turn into fucking wheat if you let it this is the biggest grass-type thing (the taller grass and small woody-stemmed plants frame the shed very nicely) but you see little brown stalks all over really

more updates!! its straight up been a while since i mowed the lawn (this is on purpose) and we have lots of lovely little sights happening as a result these were some of my favorite pictures that i took!! some tall bitches growing next to the linden, and just a CARPET of flowers across the yard

me when i fucking GET you.

AND!!! he was on the other side of the street but it's crazy we see a BUNNY before the catnip attracts any actual cats

we also have had some visitors!! i noticed way fewer holes in the leaves, and i think i can tell why that is a STURDY looking web, which is crazy, because i've only been away from the garden like five days, and that's cause three of those five were SUPER rainy. girl works fast bonus Spider 2

a closer look at the difference, and A CLOSE-UP OF HOW THE CHERRY IS LITERALLY GROWING THROUGH THE BRANCHES OF THE OTHER ONE. it's fucking yuri. one took the other out and now they're starting fresh. together. bonus blessed ass spotlight for their gay asses

Beautiful News: i mentioned earlier that the maple and linden were to replace trees that fell in a storm, and one of those trees was a cherry that had to be chopped because it was badly damaged by the one that came out of the ground roots-and-all you can see the sprouts here! they look healthy

no updates on the rosemary other than a withered branch that needs pruning, and the basil is growing slower by comparison in tree news, Bad First: the linden has some cracks in it? we cant tell if the orange here is just the wood underneath or some kind of fungus

alright so!! turns out those really tall plants i THOUGHT were catnip were not catnip. they were some other fuckass thing but now that i got rid of em and they're not shading out the real catnip, those fuckers got TALL !!! i think this is where im supposed to trim the tips so they grow wider too?