It’s not just that the leaves will break down on their own (and enrich the soil while they’re at it!). During the winter, all sorts of insects use leaf litter for shelter, and they’re the first food available to larvae in early spring. Leaves also insulate the plants under them during the winter, which is important if you’re in an area prone to frost heaving.
One of the best thing you can do for native pollinators in your area is Leave the Leaves!
My mom stopped raking her leaves when she found out about this but her neighbor used his leaf blower to clear out her yard the first year she decided to try. So she started posting a Leave the Leaves sign in the yard each year with an explanation about why it’s good and two winters later only one house still rakes their lawn each year.
We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the biodiversity in the neighborhood since. We have birds that we haven’t seen since we moved into the city from living rurally and those birds are starting to nest in the trees and gardens in spring. The swallows and bats are back at night. The single woodpecker we would only occasionally see visits daily and even has a friend that has joined it. We have more squirrels and rabbits and shockingly fewer moles and voles. We heard an owl outside last fall.
i feel like there’s a rich vein of SOME kind of ore to mine with regards to the romantic woes of visibly “freakish” and inhuman superheros, especially in silver age comics. like, because of the comics code, the writers could not in-universe admit that some people are really kinky and would absolutely nut in an instant if a gigantic alligator man or a living rock monster or a ten foot tall woman who’s on fire gave them a little smooch on the head. like maybe most people in the 70s and 80s had no idea this was the case, either!
but so you end up with these romantic plot lines where some poor freakish superhero with a heart of gold and the skin of, i don’t know, a bunch of octopi, is miserable because they’ll never find true love, except for a totally normal woman has the power to see their inner heart (which is normal) and fall in love with them for that (normally). villains can sometimes be like ‘yeah this chick is super into the fact that i’m an eight foot tall deathbot, we’re both evil like that’ but ben grimm can’t get a date! even blind women are a little concerned that he’s literally made out of rocks. it never works out because the writers either can’t imagine or can’t admit that no matter the freak, there’s a bigger, hornier freak who’s praying for a chance to shoot their shot.
i don’t know. it’s just interesting. obviously modern comics can acknowledge a lot more sexual variance than the stuff from fifty years ago, but it’s just kinda neat to consider the bizarre limitations a heteronormative paradigm enforces on a population of very strange characters.
and also i feel like in real life ben grimm’s DMs would be full of incredibly horny geologists going PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE all day long.
At A GIRL AND HER FED, Clarice is, as always, ready to commit the sloshy red crimes.
Also! Over on my Patreon, the wedding bonus comic has updated for $5+ supporters! Come for the familial abuse, stay for the (lack of) stabbings.
ALT
(And because this is tumblr I’m frontloading the replies: the off-panel character speaking is an absolute bitch who doesn’t care about facts and only cares that she herself is the center of attention. She’s also the main character’s estranged mother. It’s most definitely not an accurate representation of ADHD but it is an accurate synopsis of the kind of childhood the main character, who has struggled with severe ADHD her entire life, experienced.)
