remember being little and thinking dandelions were fun or a pretty color or something and every adult in an 80 mile radius wouldn’t let you say that without screaming ITS A WEED
also like:
dandelions are edible, easy to grow, and are rich in vitamins a, c, k, beta-carotene, calcium, iron, manganese, and potassium
dandelions can be made into wine, tea, soft drinks, and a coffee substitute
they are used in herbal remedies to treat liver and digestive problems and as a diuretic
they’re good for bees!
they make good companion plants for various herbs and tomatoes; their long taproot helps bring up nutrients in the soil and they release ethylene gas which ripens fruit
dandelions secrete latex which means they can be used to make natural rubber
they make great flower crowns
Why ARE they considered a weed? They’re a good flower? Who decided they were bad? =(
You can also make beautiful jelly from the blossoms!
They’re considered weeds because they were a poor person resource and not having them was a status symbol.
Let’s back up.
In Europe dating back to the 1500’s and even earlier, you could only have immaculate manicured lawns if you had just pots of money and were able to own land. So, rich nobility had swaths of land, and they demonstrated their wealth and power by hiring people to physically cut the grass and keep their gardens and dig weeds out of the turf by hand. It was a demonstration of money and power. It said “I can afford to have eight people employed full time just to dig things that aren’t grass out of my grass. I can afford to have all of this land doing nothing. It’s not producing food. People don’t farm it or live on it. I can afford to just grow grass, and have someone tend to that wholly useless crop.”
Fast forward a few hundred years. Europeans come to America. Many of them are from the poorer classes in Europe. Many have never owned land before, and now all of a sudden they can (because they stole it from the Native Americans but that’s a whole other rant.)
Now, at first you see little cottage gardens like the lower classes in Europe always had around their homes; places where they grew food and herbs and kept chickens or other livestock. Dandelions were welcome here; they were eaten and brewed into wine and used for medicine, just as they’d been for centuries.
But then people start making a little money, and we have the whole phenomenon of people who can demonstrate that they are Moving Up In The World by buying all of their food and medicine, just like the old landed gentry back in the Old Country. So they do. What goes in the place of those cottage gardens? Why, the same thing that went in the place of productive land back in the Earl of Chatsworth’s front lawn; a lawn.
So. Dandelions were a symbol. They were a throwback to the old days. They were a sign that you were somehow less prosperous than your neighbors, or lazier. (A Mortal Sin in America.) But, many Americans work, and can’t afford to hire a gardener just to grub dandelions out of the yard with a trowel all day.
Enter the lawn care industry, which began to market a dizzying array of poisons and fertilizers aimed at making your lawn a sterile moonscape where only grass grew with minimum effort from the homeowner. This continues to this day and is a multibillion dollar industry that has huge negative impacts on the environment and human health, but we can’t seem to shake that old ideal of a manicured lawn.
We pour water on deserts and poison on native wildflowers to attain it. We expose our children to poisons. We poison pollinators and pets. The days where we recognized a well kept lawn as a symbol of aristocratic leisure are gone, but we’ve been successfully fed a lie that some dandelions and chickweed are Bad by the lawn care industry in their ads for decades. They, obviously, want to keep it going because they’re making fat $$$$$$$ off of us.
THAT’S why dandelions are viewed as weeds.
Also yeah dandelions are really good for bees, and beloved by native bees and honeybees alike. So please, leave them blooming!! You can support bees and do your bit to smash capitalistic exploitation of the working class and the environment all in one go!
Lawns are terrible things, a redundant status symbol (‘I don’t need to grow food on my land’ is no longer a proud boast), boring verging on ugly and vastly consuming of water and labour. Let the dandelions grow!
I can’t believe dandelions suffered classism.
Oh my god IM SO SHOOK I ALWAYS LOVED DANDELIONS AND GOT SO EXCITED TO LET THEM GET SO TALL AND LOVE THEM TO DEATH. TIME TO MAKE MY YARD A GODDAMN BOTANY EXPERIMENT
Classism is killing the bees.
Please remember that dandelions and honey bees are both not native to the Americas. While yes, that is very important, dandelions don’t offer ecosystems here much else besides some nectar as the latex in their leaves and stems make them unpalatable to most animals. Many native plants, on the other hand, offer food and shelter to a variety of species.
So if you are going to deliberately plant wildflowers, skip the dandelions and go for native flowers in your area. You’ll help the bees and so much more! Check with your state’s Native Plant Society or Master Gardeners to find what to plant where you are. Who knows? You might plant something that a very rare animal needs!
Cute little animals are under the misinformed impression that looking cuter and fluffier will make you want to touch them less.
[Image Description: A cartoon of a person’s hand reaching toward a small parrot who is puffed up with mantled wings. The parrot’s speech bubble says, “Don’t touch me! I’m big!”
A dating service where matching is based on people’s search history exists. You’re a serial killer. You go on a date with a writer.
Serial Killer: metaphorically, if you were to kill someone, how would you do it?
Writer: Air shot between the toes, it’ll look like a heart attack.
Serial Killer who is obviously in love already: *sucks in a breath* ok
Writer: how long would it take to die if you were to potentially stab someone in the guts
Serial killer: anywhere from 2 to 30 minutes
Writer, already bringing a ring out: *shaking* thanks
A++ addition
Writer: *shows the serial killer the murder scene they’re writing* babe, i’m not sure if this would actually work?
Serial killer: *kisses writer on the forehead and leaves, comes back later, a suspicious scent of blood coming off them* it works baby, you’re doing great
I LOVE THIS
Oh no, murder comedy is my jam
I love this, I love all of this, but quick question, does the author know? Like are they aware that their significant other is a serial killer or do they just think that they have a morbid sense of humor? It’d be even funnier if the author had no fucking clue, like how Aurthur Conan Doyle was apparently stupidly gullible, and on top of it they’re a horror or crime novelist. Like the serial killer works at a butcher shop or something so it’s completely normal for them to come home smelling like blood, no murders going on here, no sirey. Just my darling coming back home from a long day at work.
Now fast forward a bit and the author has managed to get their first book published, with loving support from the serial killer who helped them fine tune all the murder scenes, and it’s a big hit. Enough so that a detective with the local police department has noticed some disturbing similarities to several active cases, including details that were never released to the press. Obviously he brings this up to his superior and convinces him that there’s something to the theory, but it’s all circumstantial right now. He stakes out the author’s home and is super convinced that the author is the murderer, but they don’t seem to do anything??? Like they literally are at the house all day, that’s it. Most they do is leave for groceries.
So you get this dynamic of the serial killer mining the author for creative murder schemes, the author being lovingly encouraged by the serial killer, and finally the detective who is just so sure that the author is the killer and that if he sticks it out long enough he’ll FINALLY have proof.
Oh boy!! It’s a fucking mystery?? A spooky scary mystery!! Better get fucking Sherlock Holmes on this one! It’s a big fucking mystery, with no obvious answer!
This is not a Sherlock Holmes mystery. This is a Scooby-Doo mystery, where the villain is an old white guy pulling a real estate / inheritance scam.
And this is why we used to make cars out of STEEL instead of FIBERGLASS! Sure, fiberglass is a lot lighter in weight and hence a hell of a lot better for gas mileage. But you hit anything at more than 20 mph and the entire body explodes off the fucking thing, and now you’re spending more to repair the car than it’s worth because you need a entire front end, read end, or side panel. They can’t just take the damaged section off, beat it out with a hammer, sand it, and repaint it.
Everything is made with the idea of it being easier to replace than to maintain, aka planned obsolescence. Thanks, capitalism
You guys are obscenely, dangerously wrong.
It’s not planned obsolescence, it’s physics.
Modern cars crumple to absorb and distribute the forces of impact in an accident in an effort to protect the occupants. When cars didn’t have those crumple zones, the occupants, being the soft, squishy things they were, took those forces and were mangled or killed in horrible ways. Also, those older cars took hidden damage that often went unnoticed and made them very dangerous to drive. IT’s really easy to hide a twisted frame when all you need to do to make the car look okay is a bit of sanding and paint.
I recently watched a TV show where a small sedan was run over by the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. Run. Over. They had to unwrap the crumpled ball of a car from the undercarriage of that trailer. Guess what? The driver suffered only minor injuries because the car collapsed in exactly the way it was designed to so that she, in the very strong frame surrounding the passenger compartment, was protected.
And no, don’t thank capitalism for these modern cars. Thank Ralph Nader and countless other safety activists who worked tirelessly to make car manufacturers accountable for the safety of the people who drove their cars.
2009 Chevy Malibu vs 1959 Bel Air an excellent visual example of how these advances literally!! keep you alive!
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