Recycled Roots & Leaves

26/08/2026

WOW! Let's fill the world with trees this size. Imagine the biodiversity and carbon catching!

In Brazil, a single genetic mutation created a cashew tree so massive it resembles an entire forest. Rather than growing upward, its heavy branches bend outward until they touch the sand, sprouting new roots that form secondary trunks. Covering roughly 8,400 square meters—about the size of a football field—this solitary organism operates as a self-cloning network. Surprisingly, it remains fully active today, producing over 60,000 fruit apples and cashews every single year.

11/07/2026

Perspective is everything 💚

11/07/2026

Small choices can make your garden a safe place for wildlife 🌿
A water dish, fallen leaves, hollow stems, seed heads, native flowers, and small brush piles can help bees, birds, butterflies, and beneficial insects thrive right in your backyard.

05/07/2026

Leave one muddy spot. Your yard is spotless, your borders are sharp, and your butterflies are quietly going without something water can't give them.

Watch a sunny puddle's edge in July. If swallowtails or sulphurs are crowded on the wet ground with their wings up, they aren't drinking the way you'd think. They're mining it.

It's called puddling. Damp soil holds salts and minerals — sodium especially — that flowers don't provide. Nectar is sugar. It runs the engine. The minerals are what a male butterfly needs to make healthy s***m and pass nutrients to the female when he mates. A flowerbed without a damp patch is a kitchen with no salt.

It's mostly males you'll see, sometimes a dozen at once on the same wet inch of dirt.

🌿 The setup:

Shallow saucer or tub lid filled with sand or plain soil.

Pour in water until it's wet mud, not a pool — they land on the mud, not the water.

Sunny, sheltered spot near flowers. Keep it damp through the hot weeks.

Or do even less — stop tidying one low corner where the hose drips and let it stay muddy on purpose.

Nectar is the meal. The mud is the medicine 🌱 create image in warm natural vintage colour pallette

04/07/2026

yes....rod

18/06/2026

Great guide for indoor plants

When To Repot Your Plants 🪴🌿

15/06/2026

Stop waiting for those first zucchini flowers to set fruit. Half of them never will — and that is normal.

A zucchini plant opens its male flowers first, often a week to ten days before the females appear. Early on the plant is all male blooms: pollen ready, nothing to pollinate. People panic, overwater, and overfeed a plant that is simply on schedule.

Tell them apart in a second. The female flower has a tiny zucchini already swelling at its base. The male is a plain stalk. Once both are open on the same morning, pollination happens — by bees, or by a quick swipe of a male bloom into a female.

If females open but the fruit yellows and rots at the tip, that is a pollination miss, not a disease. Hand-pollinate at 9am, before the blooms close for the day.

No fruit yet is not failure. It is the plant waiting for its other half.

14/06/2026

Set these up in your garden for our little creatures

Pollinators need water as much as they need flowers — and a smooth-sided bowl filled with water is not a drinking station, it is a trap. 🌿

Four installations that work, all free or nearly so.

Terracotta saucer with pebbles or marbles — fill a shallow terracotta saucer with clean river pebbles or glass marbles and add water just below the surface of the stones. Bees and butterflies land on the pebbles and drink between them. The texture gives them a foothold. Smooth bowls with no landing point are the most common mistake — the insect falls in and cannot get out.

Natural sponge in a shallow dish — a natural sponge soaked in a flat container releases water by capillary action. Particularly useful for smaller pollinators: solitary bees, hoverflies, and mining bees (Andrena species) that cannot safely use a standard drinking station.

Rough-barked branch leaning at 30–45 degrees into a glass jar of water — acts as an entry and exit ramp for butterflies including red admirals and commas. The rough bark gives them grip. A smooth twig or plastic tube in the same position offers nothing. Particularly useful if your garden regularly has butterflies visiting in late summer.

Damp sand or moist soil in a shallow saucer — native solitary bees (red mason bee, Osmia bicornis; Andrena species) often prefer to drink from damp ground rather than open water. A saucer of moist river sand mimics a mud puddle — where many wild bees drink and absorb minerals.

Maintenance for all four: refresh the water every two days to prevent mosquito larvae developing in standing water. No sugar, no honey, no colourants — plain tap water at room temperature. Place in shade or partial shade to slow evaporation. 🌱

09/06/2026

I LOVE SWEET POTATOES!

A sweet potato doesn't grow the way a regular potato does. You don't cut it. You don't bury it. You grow plants off its skin and pull them away 🍠

Set a sweet potato in warmth and moisture and it does something strange — leafy shoots push straight out of the tuber's surface. Each of those shoots is a "slip," a whole future plant. Let them reach six inches to a foot, twist them off, and stand them in a cup of water. Roots appear in days. One tuber gives you a handful of rooted slips, sometimes many more.

Here's the part that trips people up: this is a warm-season crop, the opposite of everything else in the spring garden. Sweet potato slips are frost-tender and sulk in cold ground. You wait until well after your last frost — soil at sixty-plus degrees, warm nights — before they go out. Rush them into cool spring soil and they rot.

🌿 How to grow from slips:
- Sprout a whole sweet potato in a warm, bright spot until shoots reach six inches to a foot
- Twist each slip off the tuber and stand the bottom half in water; roots form within a few days
- Wait to transplant until three to four weeks after your last frost, once the soil has warmed to at least sixty degrees
- Plant each rooted slip four to six inches deep with the leaves above ground, about a foot apart in loose soil — the buried nodes become the storage roots

🌱 One thing to watch for:
- Get them out of the ground before the first hard frost in fall. Frost damage runs downward from the vines into the roots, so if the tops get hit, dig right away

One sweet potato on a warm windowsill is a whole bed waiting to happen — just don't let it touch cold soil 🍠

15/05/2026

This is from the US but is still relevant here in Australia. It has merit and gives you some idea of some of the practices that occurs in the horticultural industry