mk30

Another lesson from the plants: you can be a little scrawny, a little damaged, have big chunks taken out of you, but you can still hold a giant droplet of life-giving water, and you're still living and growing 💚

#plants #gardening #hawaii #taro #kalo #CPTSD #recovery

My Jade vine is flowering for the 2nd time this year 🥰

Every time I pass it, I can't help but smile.

#hawaii #flowers #bloomscrolling

My jade vine is blooming 🥰

I'm happy I planted it next to my house so that I get to see it all the time.

#plants #flowers #bloomscrolling #hawaii #gardening

Cabin-building progress: there's a floor! https://youtube.com/shorts/V1fA_nbQTbQ

#offgrid #hawaii

Lovely bract and flowers of a blue turmeric (sometimes also called black turmeric). In pic 2, you can see the inside of the rhizome and see the "bluish" part.

#plants #flowers #bloomscrolling #hawaii

friends, don't let anyone tell you that animals are dumb.

this ginormous cane toad found its way into my room and into the cats' water dish - apparently the only little pool of water it could find during a recent dry period.

it started coming back night after night.

at one point, i put on my garden gloves, put it in a bucket, and dumped it in my azolla pond outside.

the next day, it was back.

i put the cats' water dish up on a table next to my bed (these toads don't really hop up high).

the next night, i saw it near where the water dish used to be.

that toad was learning, thinking, strategizing, remembering, and being sneaky.

so yea, next time you read some news article that's like "can you believe it?? animals can remember things!!", just shake your head because animals HAVE to be smart and learn and remember where resources are in their environment if they want to survive. and not just resources - where the threats are, etc.

#toad #nature #animals #herps #hawaii

My mom asks me sometimes "don't you get lonely living in the forest?", meanwhile living things spend all day everyday growing into my home space. I couldn't be alone even if I wanted to be! 😅

#plants #offgrid #hawaii

Cabin update: still waiting on the cost estimate and materials price list from the builder, so there's no progress on the cabin.

The weeds were starting to come back in the excavated area that's not covered in rock, so I laid down loads of weed mat: https://youtube.com/shorts/7CXxj_mpAeE

Once the building is all done, and if I have any $ left, I'll bring in soil and mulch and put trees in.

In the meantime, there's plenty of other garden work to do...infinite weeding, vine removal, etc.

I have much greater visibility from the road now, so I plan to plant some bamboo as a privacy screen. (One morning after excavation , I was walking around the excavated area in my sleeping clothes, and there's a neighbor walking their dog, smiling and waving at me, giving me the thumbs up. For someone who's used to living behind a bunch of jungle scrub, the visibility from the road is a bit much!).

I'll keep the uluhe fern, 'ohi'a, and some large bushes that are right up against the road, and plant bamboo right behind it. However, that area is totally overgrown with wedelia vine right now, so I gotta clean all that first. I've learned that there really is no point to plant something in an area that's covered with weeds. The weeds will win.

On the plus side, the rainy season is over so we have a lot more rain-free hours in the day, but on the minus side, it's super hot and very difficult to work in the sun between 10am and 3:30pm. Anyway, the garden won't clean itself, so I better stop complaining and get to it.

#offgrid #homestead #gardening #hawaii

@cthon1c@kolektiva.social @LukefromDC@kolektiva.social I don't believe anything Steve bannon says. I *would* like to know what democrats in power are doing to prepare for election-interfering shenanigans. If history is a guide, they're probably hand-wringing about how powerless they are.