That's awesome! Our town does a tax exemption if you're growing food a la a "homestead" exemption. If you're able and willing, the admins just added "Betterment and Praxis" as a community and details of your city's program may help others to bring similar to where they live.
Very much so, yes! We've removed most of the invasives from our property and the majority of plants we grow are native to our bioregion. Last year we grew a few hundred black chokeberries (Aronia melanocarpa) in an air prune box, and practiced some assisted migration growing Shepherdia canadensis in another. This year we're growing Carolina Allspice (Calycanthus floridus), Northern Bay (Myrica pensylvanica), and a few varieties of Viburnum to boot!
Hah I was thinking relative to the spike that is the blackouts and the frontpage crashing but I can see your perspective on this. Fwiw I am hoping that Beehaw can continue to build itself into a nice space for even more folks who'd like to join us all and contribute.
LJ is the GOAT for sure, I remember loading the redditsync test beta when I had the original HTC with a trackball (it's lived in the same spot on every device ever since then to this day). I hope he does focus on Lemmy - I'd pay for his efforts all over again. Still, despite the minor inconveniences I'm finding adopting this new set of servers and building out my personalized feeds I'm finding the Jerboa app a similar enough reading experience that it's not jarring.
Y'all are doing a great job! If you decide to do a "health report" of the servers after things quiet a bit I think it would be an interesting discussion and good way for the community to think about any steps that should be addressed before July 1st, especially with better information based on the usage that's occurring.
so long as we get a nice place for a little while on the internet and spread some joy and positivity I think that's more than worth it.
This right here, and how often I see messages like it from folks like you and @alyaza just reinforces the happiness with my decision to be here.
Congratulations getting clean and finding a new passion! It's definitely worth checking in with your extension office to see if there are any plant sales that the state nursery does, and to get information about gardening events in your area.
I'm a big proponent of planting lots of species fairly densely in perennial gardens, so a fruit tree might have a few berry bushes planted around it along with some tall herbaceous individuals and runners all around and between them all. When you do move things out of their pots, try to correct any circling or girdling root issues. Treesaregood.org has some really great resources for maintaining your trees as well.
Think about what you'd like in the areas long term, and what you can do in the short term to move those spaces towards your goals. One thing we did early in was get a giant printout of our property and move scale pieces of paper to represent different things like annual gardens, a greenhouse, orchard/food forest space, a chicken coop, and the like. Obviously those can be whatever aspects you'd like to have where you are. Once you know what the longest-term areas and buildings are, what can you do to grow things while prepping those spaces for their long term? Can you use grow bags or temporary raised beds where your bushes will go later, just to get rid of the grass underneath so your new berry patch is easier to establish? Can you set up a small composting system in between the gardens and house so you can make use of scraps from the kitchen and the gardens without needing to make extra trips?
Play around with ideas on paper with your partner, discuss what might be an issue and might be beneficial, and try a small scale experiment to test the placement before going whole hog. Having those plants in pots seems like a good opportunity to try out a few different designs before digging them in and practice some iterative designing.
I may or may not have a tray of some Plectranthus amboinicus that has a different common name on each plant... Cuban oregano, Mexican mint, Spanish thyme, Indian borage, Caribbean oregano, broadleaf thyme, and all the same plants!
Nasturtium, Rhododendron, and Tradescantia are commonly used in our neck of the woods too. I sometimes wonder what the driver of that parlance is.
We've been able to harvest fruits off of the new runners from our established plants in their first year. Strawberries only produce reliably for a few years, so a two year wait will reduce the yields and increase management time dramatically.
Which varieties are you growing?
I think clover can be a good addition when a property is severely lacking in flowering plants, but would encourage you to broaden even further. Where we are, Viola spp., Prunella vulgaris, and Fragaria virginiana are also used to help fill in the green space for our pup to play fetch in while providing forage for our local pollinators.