The fall air is absolutely glorious today, and I’m gonna get the last of these bareroot plants in the ground OR DIE TRYING
Today I’m planting bloodroot, Virginia spring beauty, rue anemone, and American lily-of-the-valley. (Yes, we have a native lily-of-the-valley! It is not as aggressive and a bit weirder looking.)
Of course, what it likes is “moist, well-drained soil.” I swear to god, if I was going to make a garden drinking game, the Liver Killer Edition would be “Take a shot every time a plant wants moist well-drained soil.”
And now the bloodroot. Which I bought five of because there was a bloodroot sale. And which likes full shade and…you guessed it…moist, well-drained soil.

*takes a shot of ginger beer*
Damn, they put seven good roots in the bag and two little scraps. Apparently they had a LOT of bloodroot.
(Most of the good mom ‘n pop nurseries I work with will toss in extras on bareroot, since the plants only cost them a little but being remembered as “those nice people who gave me seven bloodroots for the price of five” is priceless.)
Oh hot damn, Rue Anemone only needs full shade. It would also like sandy soil but can tolerate dry soil. You got it, little friend!
And finally, Claytonia virginica, Spring Beauty, which I’ve killed twice and now am giving its third and final run. This is supposed to be an aggressive spready wildflower, which is probably why I’ve murdered it repeatedly.
It likes rich, moist soil in full shade. Okay. It can have the bare murder spot under the fig tree.

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More from @UrsulaV

24 Oct
I have been playing around with #Townscaper, a neat little building...toy? game? thingy?...which recently ported to mobile, and spent probably too much time thinking about these odd little towns on the water, which meant that eventually a little weird fan comic came out. 1/11 Image
2/11 Image
3/11 Image
Read 12 tweets
24 Oct
I do in fact read everything on ebook, as my eyesight’s not what it was, but I do NOT want bookstores to get whalloped. Also, kid books are gonna be hit just as hard.
There are currently no good cheap e-readers that fill the niche of print for small children. I’ve been saying one’s probably a few years off since like 2010. I’ve been wrong every time.
And kids NEED books. For adults, it’s an annoyance, an emotional loss, a hit to our well-being. Kids, though, have windows of language acquisition, and they very much have windows where you can convince them that reading is not an instrument of torture.
Read 5 tweets
24 Oct
I would like to say that I have just spent far more time this morning than is helpful trying to pinpoint the exact breed of Foghorn Leghorn, and have come to several conclusions.
1. He is definitely not a Rhode Island Red, as Wikipedia claimed. Our Lorge Rooster is a RIR and they are a dark red. ImageImage
2. Nor is he a white leghorn, a solid white breed. Note lack of colored tail and hackle feathers. Image
Read 15 tweets
9 Sep
WHO WANTS TO HEAR THE SAGA OF ME ATTEMPTING TO ARRANGE A REAL ESTATE TRANSACTION DURING AN PANDEMIC?

Of course you do. Buckle up.
So my mom is getting up there in years and will eventually want to move to be closer to me. She was thinking that she’d like to move sometime after my kid brother finishes college.
Great, we can do that. I contact my local real estate agent and am like “we have a couple years, this is NOT urgent, this is what I’m looking for, if something happens to cross your desk, let me know.”

This was back in…oh, December of 2019? Ish?
Read 51 tweets
9 Sep
It’s gonna sound weird, but what really brought this home to me was hatching chicks from eggs. Chickens externalize everything, and lots of eggs just don’t hatch at all, or get far enough along that it looks like something’s happening, but it stops.
And a fair number of chicks get as far as hatching, then keel over because something is wrong internally. You really see the numbers game in action when there’s eighteen or twenty eggs from under the hen and you get maybe six that survive.
But since women obviously aren’t hens, every chance is emotionally fraught, and hardly anybody is thinking “an embryo developing is an enormously complicated system with all kinds of room for glitches,” because that’s just not how most of us think!

Anyway.
Read 5 tweets
9 Sep
The comic quite rightly does not mention size, which is absolutely variable by region and can be very hard to tell from a distance, (though my usual mnemonic is “if you ask if it’s a raven, it’s a crow, if you ask if it’s a small plane, it’s a raven.”)
Also, the size thing only works on the Common Raven! You go south and get a Chihuahuan Raven in the mix and it’s big, but not THAT big, and you end up going “fuck, crow or raven, can I get it to hold a banana for scale?”
And we had a huge problem—or rather, I had a huge problem, as the primary birder—in China because the Thick-Billed Crow has (surprise) a very thick bill and is only a smidge smaller than a Common Raven (23” vs 25”) and we were in an area of range overlap.
Read 4 tweets

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