Nursery Natives

05/26/2026

September 19th📍Rising Silo Brewery 🍐🎶

05/25/2026

Behold! New River Day is just around the corner 🚣

05/14/2026

Celebrate the outstanding restaurants of Radford (and the people behind them) with deals, specials, and limited releases!!!

🗓️ Friday, October 2nd - Sunday, October 11th

📚 Supporting Access to Community College Education (ACCE) of Radford

📣 Participating restaurants TBA soon!

05/14/2026

Dragonflies have a strike rate of 90%!!!

Both are in your yard right now. Both eat mosquitoes. Both have been flying since before flowering plants existed. Most people have never learned the difference.

One rule works every time.

If it lands and holds its wings straight out to the sides — flat, like an airplane — it's a dragonfly. If it lands and folds its wings together above its back — upright, like a closed book — it's a damselfly.

That's the entire identification.

🌿 Dragonflies are larger, bulkier, and faster. They're aerial predators — they catch prey in mid-flight using their legs as a basket. Their strike rate is among the highest of any predator studied. They don't wait for food. They chase it down.

Damselflies are thinner, more delicate, and slower. They perch on stems near water and wait. They eat smaller insects — gnats, midges, small mosquitoes.

Both have been doing this for hundreds of millions of years. The body plan hasn't needed to change.

🪰 What they tell you about your yard:

- If you see dragonflies patrolling, your yard has a healthy insect population — they only stay where there's enough prey to hunt
- If you see damselflies perching near a water feature, the water quality is good. They're sensitive to pollution and won't breed in degraded water
- Both species eat mosquitoes at every life stage — the larvae eat mosquito larvae in water, the adults eat adults in the air

Next time one lands near you, watch the wings. The answer takes one second 🌱

05/13/2026

05/11/2026

The U.S. Forest Service isn’t managing forests anymore. It’s running a timber operation and poisoning everything else to do it.

A yearlong investigation by Mother Jones found that the Forest Service and private logging companies are systematically spraying thousands of acres of national forest with glyphosate (Roundup) to kill off native shrubs and wildflowers that compete with commercially valuable trees like Douglas firs and sugar pines.

After wildfires, forests naturally rebound with diverse vegetation and wildlife. What’s replacing that recovery is rows of industrial saplings surrounded by silence. No insects, birds, or flowers. It’s just dead zones.

Glyphosate application in California’s forests has quintupled over the last two decades in one year 266,000 pounds were sprayed a record. The World Health Organization classifies glyphosate as a carcinogen. The Forest Service is using it at industrial scale, on public land, to benefit private timber interests.

This is what “multiple use management” looks like when timber wins every time. Ecological health, wildlife habitat, native plant communities all of it gets written off as competition.

12/22/2025

Support your local farmers, producers, and food stores by paying them a visit and sharing with friends!

12/17/2025

Food waste recycling and community compost facilities, like Star City Compost are hugely beneficial. Support there being more in Virginia’s future by adding your name below.

Greetings Friends - The Commonwealth is reviewing their solid waste management plan and after reviewing it, there are some serious gaps in how it can support composters in the state. I believe I am the only person to have started a permitted food waste composting facility within the last 3 years. The reason being there is way too much red tape and little support from the powers that be to see community composters begin operations.

With the editing support from Maureen McGonagle, I have made a series of recommendations to add to the plan. If you'd like t read those and sign onto endorse those changes, please click the link below and sign on:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6FS0terqJpgzfnLmahNmCTGXudwJth7rPmzzsP5PHpg-uMw/viewform?usp=header

11/27/2025

When Allison Adelle Hedge Coke wrote her poem “America, I Sing Back,” she considered each word a note in a larger song about the nation. “I thought about America singing. That’s why this poem is a song -- a voice calling for reclamation.”