Great way to help local wildlife if you only choose local plants that butterflies and other critters like.
I really don’t understand gardening. I see gardeners agonize about soil structure, acidity and so on, and taking so much care and things still don’t grow. But just randomly throw these balls and they’ll be ok?
People very often want to grow something that isn’t normally grows there. In this case there will be problems.
But if you want to grow something endemic, sometimes you need to do literally nothingIf you use a lot of different seeds and throw around a lot of them something will grow
I took that approach planting flowers in an area of my backyard. My first thought was trying to figure out hours of sunlight and how moist the soil was in that area, then I figured fuck it. I got a bag of native wildflower mix (for bees and butterflies) and tossed that shit everywhere. If it’s meant to grow in the conditions it lands on, it will. Worked awesome!
Depends on what you’re growing.
If what you’re doing is native to the area and fairly-robust and the conditions in the planting area are in line with what it wants in the wild, then yeah, probably pretty easy.
But…say you’re trying to grow manzanita. That only naturally grows after a fire, so you may need to artificially fiddle with the seeds to do stuff to try to produce enough of the same conditions to get the seed to sprout (simulating fire, simulating winter, etc).
Also depends on your goal. If you just want a plant, plant will come. If you want the prettiest, strongest plant in the neighborhood, you can nerd out about the conditions to an almost fractal-like level of detail.
There was a Reddit post about the author’s mother-in-law (iirc) who watered her indoors plant like once a week and moved it to the window for an hour of sunlight on the same schedule. The plant was pretty damn big. Same plant requires precise care from other people.
(Though it must be noted that plants don’t need sunlight, as they do just fine with electric light.)
Imagine getting hold of some poppy seeds and setting up the HOA council members as a heroin ring.
Papaver somniferum is the species you want and it’s easily available online since the seed don’t contain morphine. In case anyone was curious!
Be the change you want to see in the world.
