It’s Friday and I’m washing my sheets. If you’re reading this and you haven’t washed your sheets in over a month, go wash your sheets right now and then comment below that you did it! We will all triumph together. It’s laundry day my functional depressed friends 👏🏻
“Oh I love roses! I try growing them myself, but they never get very far.”
“Would you like to know the secret to healthy rose bushes,” I asked, knowing that she would not like the answer.
“Do tell!”
Grin. “Blood.”
The customer paused, waiting for me to say that I was kidding. But I wasn’t so it never came. She became nervous.
And before I could explain that blood meal is a common soil fixer and fertilizer, she put her hands up, spun around and said-
“Bye.”
You want to know the secrets to a beautiful garden? You better be prepared for some weird shit.
Well someone felt like being the ominous witch in the small, mysterious shop today.
.
…also, tomatoes like blood too.
My interest in plants extends beyond ‘oh look a pretty flower’ and straight into ‘plants are fucking metal.’
Evidently, you’re supposed to plant garlic in the same places as your roses because the garlic will repel a rose-specific aphid.
So what I’m saying is that between the romantic symbolism of the rose, the bloodmeal in the soil, and the fresh garlic all over the place-
You could really set yourself up for an encounter with some VERY pissed vampires.
Roses really love banana skins, too. Just… stick one in there before you plant a rose bush or spronkle around one that’s already in the ground. They’ll adore you.
Mmm… blood banana.
I made tiny ass Home Depot Petunias blossom like magic that they’re nearly overtaking the trellises.
How did I accomplish this?
Once a week I bury a small amount of leftover meat in the soil.
My morning glories loved the crap out of the charred chicken bones I gave them. They’re already an enthusiastic plant, but the blooms I had this year were extraordinary.
@thebibliosphere Well, if you ever get your allergies under some semblance of more control and want to get on Demon Rose’s good side, I guess
They also like fish too.
For anyone curious about why plants love blood and meat and bone and ash;
When looking at fertilizer, you’ll often see 3 numbers on the package somewhere, arranged like 10-10-10 or 30-5-10.
This is called the NPK ratio. It stands for N – Nitrogen, P – Phosphorus – K – Potassium.
The numbers are ‘Ratio of Nutrients’ – the percentage the product contains by volume, of each element.
NPK, and then some other elements classified as ‘micronutrients’ are what plants need to grow. High Nitrogen encourages fast plant growth, High Potassium encourages big blooms, and Phosphorus helps the plants breathe and store energy for later. Calcium and Magnesum are two of the larger micronutrient needs. Calcium is used to make sturdy cell walls, and Magnesium is is required for photosynthesis.
Blood and Bone and Ash all have fairly slow releases of their nutrients, so it’ll benefit the plant for a long time afterward. Meat is a bit faster release, but generally won’t burn the plants with too much nitrogen.
When bone is ground up, it’s 4-12-0 – Plus a bunch of Calcium.
When blood breaks down it offers a lot of Nitrogen. 12-0-0 –
Wood ash breaks down into primarily Potassium. 0-0-5
Meat aka Fish Emulsion (Aka several fish that have been put through a blender) is really high in nitrogen and is fast-release – 5-2-2
Dried Seaweed (like the kind you use for sushi) is loaded with other micro-nutrients that plants love.
Bat guano aka poop is 10-3-1 – Very good for rapid, lush growth.
Pretty much every greenhouse, especially if they’re leaning toward organic, will have blood and meat and bone and ash (and seaweed and animal poop lol) as a staple fertilizers.
Conclusion: Plants are goth af. A vampire who has excess blood, bodies, and bats just laying around will have a VERY lush and healthy garden.
I’m honestly not the best person to ask cause I’m only really just now starting to come to terms with this myself. I kinda thought I might have ADHD for the last year after some lovely, kind people pulled me aside here on tumblr and made me aware of it, (whilst telling me to stop beating myself up) and then my new therapist did some evaluation things with me and kinda went “hrrrmmmm yeeeeeah, that’s pretty much adult ADHD textbook” and the wave of relief that washed over me was immense.
I am not in fact a lazy and horrendous fuck up. Huzzah!
Some of the things I have been doing in the last year, has been breaking things down into smaller chunks to make them more manageable. So if doing the dishes seems overwhelming, I will set myself to goal of washing as many dishes as I can in the time it takes for the kettle to boil. Which is ten minutes with my kettle. And what I have typically found is that I can clear most, if not all of the dishes in that time frame, so what my brain automatically dismisses as “impossible task, hours of intensive work”, only actually becomes like, a real, measurable thing. And that measure of my time is 10 minutes. And 10 minutes is doable. I can plan ahead for 10 minutes…
Same with eating. I really struggle to feed myself because my food is so bland and restricted, but I have to do it. So I will set myself the goal of “in the time it takes for you to make food, sit down and eat it, we will listen to one (1) podcast” and usually by the time the podcast is over, I will have managed to have accomplished my goal.
Doesn’t always work mind you when something throws me for an absolute loop (like waking up sick today) but it helps. Like I had legitimately failed to eat today because my brain was like “need food but we need to make food first” and I couldn’t get over that initial hurdle of how much effort it was going to take, but eventually I geared myself up enough to put a podcast on and just Did The Thing.
Another thing I find helpful is counting down from 5. If getting up to do something is overwhelming me, I will attempt to count down from 5, because it forces me to make the decision. If I fail to get up, I have to count down from 5 again, and if I am still failing, I will change the goal from “I will get up and do laundry” to “I will get up and dust that shelf over there”. So long as I break the white noise of static in my head and do something that’s all I’m really concerned with these days.
vanhalenofficial 