u/birdcil

I have my first garden ever and I'm still figuring things out. We have one big garden bed that has very sandy, well-drained soil and gets full sun. We have milkweed, catmint, peonies and a few other plants in there, but there's way too much bare soil between plants. Spotted spurge and green carpetweed has started taking over the bare soil, but I need to get rid of it when the heat wave lets up because I know they'll start strangling out the other plants.

I can't decide whether it would be better to plant a living ground cover between the plants, or to use wood chips. I've seen people suggest creeping phlox or wild ginger among others. Here are my main concerns for both.

Living ground cover: I don't know if it's something in our soil or the weather, but EVERYTHING in my yard has blight or some kind of fungal disease. Our peonies have blight and powdery mildew. Our cucumber plant is getting weird fungal spots on its leaves. I'm fighting early blight on our tomatoes, and our lilacs are RIDDLED with blight. I'm worried that more plants to cover the bare soil would provide a breeding ground for the fungus.

Wood chips: just a general pain in the rear to deal with them getting kicked out of the garden by squirrels when mowing, and having to move them aside can be kind of a pain. Does it make it harder for plants to self seed?

I thought about using mulched leaves for cover, but that brings up the fungus worry again. We left the leaves last fall for the fireflies (and we finally had some this year omg!!) and then mulched a bunch for our garden beds, amended it into the soil, but I'm concerned with doing that again this year if it means everything is gonna get fungus again.

I've been getting into insect pinning and have been having a hard time finding good shadowboxes or domes to display my insects. I mostly have butterflies and moths that I want to display. I have a few antique pinned ones collected, and have no clue if those have UV protection... either way they stay out of direct sunlight.

I'm wondering how necessary it is to have specialized UV protected glass or acrylic? I can't find many decorative frames at a somewhat affordable price with the UV protection, let alone any domes or museum-esque display cases. Will they fade drastically even if not in direct sunlight?

I was recently told by my physical therapist that I am hypermobile, which I've suspected for a while but have never been actually assessed for. I have chronic costochondritis so I'm no stranger to chest pain, but I've been getting this weird pain in my ribs for years now and I'm wondering if it's a hypermobility thing. I've brought it up with my doctor but she just kinda shrugged it off as another chronic pain quirk since I've had a full work-up and my heart is all good.

It's always on the left side, and it either happens randomly or will happen after I sit leaning to that side or laying on my left side for too long. There's no pops or cracks that precede it, I'll just take a deep-ish breath and it'll suddenly feel like a tugging/stabbing/aching pain along my left middle rib. Usually it extends to the front and back, and it gets worse each time I breathe in or flex my ribcage. It feels like something is out of place and needs to pop or crack, like if I could just twist right or breathe past the point of the stabbing pain I could get it to "pop back in place", but I can never quite get it to that point.

Twisting or trying to stretch doesn't hurt but also doesn't help, but I'm unable to lay on my left side or back at all when it happens. The closest thing I could compare it to is the way precordial catch feels, but it's in a completely different spot, is more painful, and lasts way longer.

It usually fades with time and never actually pops or cracks, but it can last like 12+ hours and once it's gone it's still kind of sore for a while after. It's woken me up out of my sleep before. Anyone experience something similar?