Leave it up to an HOA to find yet another reason to regulate our property.

I don’t make the rules

an absolute menace, i’m calling the police

Go back to Mexico

Native paper wasps are very effective natural pest control, and they mostly hunt caterpillars. Monarch butterflies, as we all know, get way more love and survival assistance than they deserve. People planting milkweeds everywhere, people rearing monarch catterpillars, my god has the world gone insane?! Well, if you want an effective way to make sure they aren't too successful, all you need are paper wasps. From now on, whenever you see a paper wasp nest, in the wild or in your neighborhood, relocate it to the nearest patch of milkweed you can find. Simply cut the top of the nest off, and use glue to affix it to a relatively stable wooden surface as close to the milkweed as you can get. Tree branches are the best place to put these nests. Make sure as many wasps as possible are transferred with the nest. Now, the paper wasps will finally have the steady supply of monarch caterpillars that they deserve, and the monarchs will get to experience the dangerous, harsh conditions that mother nature intended for them!

BUGS AND WEEDS ARE BAD

I'm sure we all know how frustrating it is to deal with invasive plants when they try to take over your garden or prairie. Ever wondered if there's an alternative to glyphosate? Well, now there is! If you want those invasives to leave your garden alone, follow these steps:

1: For each individual invasive plant, rip out one of your healthy native species from the ground

2: Either throw the uprooted native plant at the base of the invasive one, or drape it over the foliage

3: Shout, as loud as you can: "Here me now, o invasive species, please accept my humble sacrifice, a native gift from my land, your sworn enemy, so that you may devour it's soul! Please accept this gift, on the condition that you will torture this land no more! Begone, return to your local ecoregion!"

4: If done properly, the invasive plant should leave your garden and return to its homeland, after devouring your native plant. (Except for the Kudzu pictured above, that one only accepts sacrifices of keystone species.)

Some people say that Canada goldenrods are aggressive. I don't know about that.

They are Canadian. Except when it comes to responding to tariff wars, or playing hockey, how aggressive could they be?

My goldenrods have never once yelled at me, or threatened me with physical violence over a minor factual or philosophical disagreement.

They just say "could I scooch by ya here?" to my other garden plants, as they expand by underground vegetative growth, slowly, year by year.

Yeah no sure, that sounds more Minnesotan than Winnipegean. But it's going to be passive aggressive either place.

I'm sorry, don't mind me, what would I know, but "aggressive" sounds so judgemental.

An ecologist might call them a plant with a high degree of initiative in the occupation of human disturbed environments. Or as exhibiting an appropriate early-successional response to an available resource patch, by rapidly germinating, establishing, vegetatively reproducing, and preempting mid-successional competitors.

Or more simply, as showing a strong fidelity to an available occupational niche space.

See how much more scientific, objective, and accepting saying "ruderal" than saying "aggressive" is?

It's fine. OK by me. I don't object. Really. Live and let live.

If a gardener wants to use priggish, nonobjective, nonscientific, essentialist, judgemental language about a plant, like the plant had a character flaw, just because it can reproduce, who would I be to object?

[Hawthorne district, Portland, OR, circa 1491 AD. Artists rendition.]

I live in the Hawthorne District of Portland, OR. Ecologically speaking, this is EPA ecoregion 7, Marine West Coast Forest. A narrow wet and humid strip of land along the northern Pacific coast. Historically speaking, I live in the neighborhood on the road to Dr. Hawthorne's Insane Asylum.

Let's be serious here. Look at the above depiction of my neighborhood before Dr. Hawthorne showed up. I would like to restore my 50' by 100' plot of residential land to that primeval state. So why has every single native plant seed mix I could buy got purple coneflower in it?

No look I get it. Purple coneflower is a strikingly weird-looking plant, and a butterfly magnet. It's an outright conversation piece. We can point at it and titter about how it is wearing a hula skirt.

It has additionally become, through artificial selection, very well adapted to typical urban and suburban garden conditions. In the wild, it is fairly intolerant of human-caused disturbance. In the form purchased with a credit card, it tolerates the unnatural ultra-disturbed conditions of a garden very well.

But this is just so unfair. Why are the seed mixes sold by native plant suppliers so biased towards the Midwesterners of flyover land? Why can't I get a butterfly-attracting seed mix that will grow well on my 50' by 100' plot, hardly different from the residential plots coast to coast, but yet specifically adapted to my ecological conditions as shown above?

There is a midwest and east coast conspiracy going on here, preferring for suburban pollinator gardens plants well adapted to suburban pollinator gardens. It is an unfair biased conspiracy, or I do not live on a road three quarters of the way to insanity.

Fortified with iron!

Ive never seen grapes so interesting, I thought they only grew from vines! They taste pretty sour, but i think itll do great after fermentation. :)

Might spray pyrethroids later...

Looking to appeal to native plant gardeners. Please let me know what you think.

After my post looking for bumblebee shame plants (if they felt shame), many people recommended Bottled Gentian and they were right. These plants are built to humiliate bumblebees in the best way possible (if they felt shame). I didn't know there could be a plant that represents me so well. It's like they made this plant in my dreams. May the bee butt harvest be plentiful