Normal conversations in our household, in Spring gardening season:
Brother, Jerry: Do you want my Fall/Winter collection of nail clippings for your gardening stuff?
Me: I sure do. It's another form of calcium.
Brother, Jerry: I'll leave you my jar in the greenhouse.
Me: Excellent. Thank you.
I'm that neighbourhood weirdo who went around my 'hood, with little leaflets, asking for unwanted fish parts/meat bones/coffee grinds donations for my gardening purposes. I have no shame when it comes to trying to source free useful stuff for my gardening efforts.
We wanted large sheets of cardboard to kill weeds and the best source of them is bike shops, who always have a lot of huge empty boxes in a dumpster. The one near us has a locked dumpster but they were happy to have us carry away the cardboard and they let us borrow the key.
@richpuchalsky I blocked a local white saviour woman here, last year, for being a 'Karen' about me/Mom using cardboard to mulch/kill off unwanted weeds/suffocate unwanted lawn grass. She was trying to tell me that all my efforts are killing the environment & telling me to use shit that most poor folks can't afford to buy in large quantities. I informed her that I've worked on multiple small farms that also use cardboard mulching methods because they also can't afford to buy a bunch of shit to deal with larger acreages where there's too many unwanted weeds/old lawn grass. She said, they're all destroying the environment too by using cardboard 🤡 White saviour types like her are condescending as fuck towards POC & small farmers, in general.
STFU, sit the fuck down. Unless you're offering to buy us all the shit you think we should be using - recognize that you have more privileges than most of us who have been doing food security, rewilding & Indigenous planting for decades - without spending a ton of money that we don't have to spend.
#AsianMastodon #POCGardeners #Decolonization #ShutUpKaren #FrugalGardening #POCVoices #WhitePrivilege
The black plastic sheeting that many people use is bad because it produces a lot of microplastics as it breaks down. I've never even heard of "biodegradable landscaping fabric."
We did avoid using the cardboard that has a shiny layer on top of it for better graphics. But brown cardboard? Can't think of a safer gardening material. It's also biodegradable of course.
I asked my partner about this, who knows more than I do.
1) Cardboard glue (to hold the boxes together) uses adhesive, which some people think may sometimes have microplastics but most often is plant-based adhesives these days. Consensus: don't worry about it.
2) We're going to experiment with planting "living mulch", basically a cover crop that you plant your plants within (we're going to use clover).
Ms. Que Banh
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Asta [AMP]
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦
Cassandrich