u/Hot_Difficulty6799

Howdy y'all.

I live in suburban New Jersey.

I was hiking the other day at High Point. This is as high as you can get in New Jersey, if you catch my drift.

When I got home, I had a drink of corn liquor from a mason jar, and started feeling sentimental.

>Wish that I was on ol' Rocky Top
Down in the Tennessee hills
Ain't no smoggy smoke on Rocky Top
Ain't no internet bills

I took another drink, and hatched a plan.

I was going to build a mountain top in my back yard, and grow native plants there.

Since this was to be an ecological restoration, and no mere native plant garden, I started with a soil analysis.

Chatfield series -- coarse-loamy, mixed, superactive, mesic Lithic Dystrudepts.

That is, a thin layer of gravelly soil over bedrock.

I recreated this by digging up a ten foot square plot, between my Big Green Egg and the storage shed, and topped it with a layer of gravel.

Since you'd have to be drunk to believe that a thin layer of gravel over very deep clay loam is just like very thin soil over bedrock, I took a big drink from the mason jar.

Next I ordered plants from Prairie Moon: big bluestem, prairie dropseed, prairie pussytoes, prairie milkweed, purple prairie clover, and prairie blazing star.

Now I can hear the more snobbish of you objecting that I appear to be confusing suburban New Jersey with Nebraska, or falling for Prairie Moon's business model of selling prairie romanticism to coastal professionals.

But I am not building a pretend prairie in my back yard, no different than any other native plant gardener in New Jersey.

Mine has gravel, and therefore is a mountain top.

>Corn won't grow at all on Rocky Top
Dirt's too rocky by far
That's why all the folks on Rocky Top
Get their corn from a jar

>I've had years of cramped-up city life
Trapped like a duck in a pen
All I know is it's a pity life
Can't be simple again

Here's the song Rocky Top, on Hee Haw. I like the overalls they are wearing. That show was so down-home authentic. I bet the musicians showed up at the studio dressed like that.

I've ordered some overalls, on Amazon. I'm going to wear them when I weed my mountain.

I was curating my wishlist of native plants at Prairie Moon, when I clicked on a "Range Map" tab.

This showed a BONAP map of native status for a plant, by county, and by state.

BONAP is not primarily aimed at native plant gardeners.

Native plants do not stop at political boundaries, but the responsibilities of ecologists and land managers do.

In the United States political system, funding, conservation grants, land management mandates, and such, are largely administered and restricted by county or state lines.

Highlighting native plant status, by county and state, makes total sense, and is actually essential, for the primary BONAP audience of professional experts, who fundamentally need to care about political boundary lines to do their jobs.

Native plants do not care about political boundaries, like county, or state. Marking by state and county makes no ecological sense. BONAP is stupid.

My online seed distributor has two separate web pages, one selling wildflower seed mixes, and the other selling native wildflower seed mixes.

I mistakenly bought a seed mix from the wildflower page, when I wanted a native wildflower seed mix instead.

Can I sue them for taking advantage of the fact that I don't read too good?

I've noticed that a lot of native plant enthusiasts have this same reading disability. We hallucinate the word "native," where it doesn't exist.

Maybe it could be a class action?

I mean, when the seed mixes that are marketed as wildflower seed mixes, are wildflower seed mixes, and the seed mixes that are marketed as native wildflower seed mixes, are native wildflower seed mixes, that's fraudulent, right?