carpoftruth

Think of a time when you've seen a big group of people you don't know. Maybe you enter a new class, or see a crowd at an event, or there's a team of people building or maintaining something. If you don't know them, your brain might just classify them as "the people in the class/event/construction site" and not go further. But obviously, each one of those people has their own personality, inner life, needs, desires, etc, that is occluded by a casual definition of "they're the crowd in this class/event/construction site".

The same kind of thing happens when you look at a green space that you don't know, whether it's a forest, a meadow, a garden, or just a little patch of growth. It's easy for your brain to just think "it's a forest" and not classify any further.

Naming something is an important part of recognizing it and understanding it as a distinct entity. Once you've put a name to something, it's possible to character it as a unique part of the whole. For a plant, naming it helps you understand what it likes, doesn't like, where it grows, what eats it or doesn't, it's morphology and how it varies over the season. Naming doesn't mean understanding but it is a necessary step that allows understanding.

Some dragonriders just want to watch the world Pern.

Shut it down boys, prepping has gone woke

tag yourself, I'm the living room labeled "america's living room"

I've been converting a bunch of grass yard into useful garden/rewild space for about 3.5 years now. I started with about three quarters of an acre of grass and have planted out the majority of that with a mix of native plants, food plants, and wildflowers. The yard space I'm converting was just mowed grass for about 30 years prior with a few mature trees. The soil sucked, with maybe 3-4 inches of soil followed by sand. I have no actual training and not much experience so I wasn't sure how this would go at first, but seeing things popping to life in the 4th spring here has been satisfying. I thought I'd share some bullets here because I feel what I've done has been pretty effective and cheap.

A good resource of what's actually going on in soil is all of Redhawk's soil threads. Soil isn't dirt, it's a whole world in and of itself. Soil is more a process that happens than a substance that you can scoop out and handle. Building soil means encouraging diverse life to occur in the ground. That diversity of life then helps any plants/seeds you grow take off. You want plants to move into a bustling city - that community will make them strong. If you go the other way around and try to just grow plants without good soil, then your plants are showing up in a ghost town and they'll be lonely.

The technique I've used the most for soil growth is dumping huge amounts of woodchips all over the place. I live in a place where there are lots of arborists, so I made friends with a few and asked them to start dumping chips at my place. Arborist woodchips are very good soil food for a few reasons: they include twiggy bits and leaves, so they have way more nitrogen than woodchips from a bulk material store, they are a variety of sizes so they break down at different rates, and they are someone else's waste product so you can get them cheap/free.

• Once you get chips, dump them in places you want soil in thick layers. 12" will smother grass without any cardboard or anything else underneath. 16" is fine but don't do more than that or it prevents oxygen from getting into the soil.

• don't dig woodchips in. This will fuck up your soil chemistry for a year or so and it's also way more work. Cut the grass as much as you can and then just dump the chips on top. 6" tall grass is fine, shorter is better, taller than 6" and you will have a hard time truly smothering grass, so mow/cut if needed first

• bulk woodchips look a bit stupid at first but it will compact and the colours will bleach out to brown and it looks fine within a month.

• About 1' of chips will turn into 1" of soil after 4-5 years.

• The best time of year to lay them down initially is fall/early spring because rain will help get everything soaked and will jumpstart fungus and bugs doing their thing.

• around existing plants, pile chips 6-12" high but make sure they are pulled back from stems/trunks by 6-12". Don't make mulch volcanos around trees, shape them more like a bowl with the tree sticking out of the middle.

• during the first year you can't direct sow anything into chips. After the first year you can (and should). Nitrogen fixers like clover are great to sow because the woodchip bed will be hungry for nitrogen for a year or two after you put it down. If you don't seed anything after the first full year you will get a bunch of random weeds because the soil will be decent by then. It's better to plan to fill the space with whatever you want.

• you can plant vegetable starts into woodchips after the chips are about 6 months old (as long as they've been wet and the decay has kicked off). If you plant perennials, dig the hole deeper than normal to account for woodchip settlement.

• a couple full years after chip placement, you can direct sow anything, not just easy seeds. Well not carrots or things that you want a straight taproot, but most things.

• make mushroom slurry to jumpstart decay and soil building. Collect whatever random mushrooms you can find. Wear gloves if mushrooms in the area can be poisonous to touch. Collect buckets of rainwater/pond water/no chlorinated water (or leave chlorinated water outside for a couple days, or boil/carbon filter water treated with chloramine). Blend mushrooms with rainwater into a grey/brown slurry, dilute into larger buckets, pour mixture over woodchip beds, especially in shady/wetter spots that mushrooms like. Mushrooms that grow wild will take without any fussing about. When they do, keep propagating them elsewhere.

• make aerated compost tea to boost microbial diversity. Mix non chlorinated water per above with some molasses, put a cup or so of healthy forest soil, compost, worm castings into a sock/nylon, aerate 12-48 hours with an aquarium stone, dilute the mixture 10:1 and pour around the drip line/roots of plants, trees, shrubs, veggies. This stuff doesnt last so you have to use it as you make it. By doing this you spread microbial diversity, which helps your soil health a lot.

• this should be higher up, but be mindful of dust/spores when you are shoveling chips out of a big pile. Depending on wood species, time of year, how long they've sat in a pile, wood chip piles can start decaying pretty quick because they'll heat up and bacteria generally likes the warmth. That's mostly good but when you dig into it and there's a whole shit load of dust, that's a sign that you're spreading spores. Either wait til its rainy to move them or wear a n95 mask. Some spores can cause weird respiratory illnesses or worse.

• chips get way heavier after they get soaked, so best to move them soon after they've been dumped unless you want the workout.

All the above is pretty cheap if you're in the right place. I've moved something like 750 yards of chips around here. That will turn into about 75 yards of great soil. Buying that would cost me $7500 or something, plus I got good exercise.

here's some woodchip glam shots, caption follows the picture

damn look at the mycelium here. this is about 8-9 month old chips

this material is mostly about 3 years old with some new stuff chucked on top.

this is the first bed I built about 3.5 years ago. this wasn't 100% woodchips but a lot of it was. it's now really nice looking soil.

pretty typical cutaway in a path. I dumped about a foot of woodchips originally, then added about 6" 2 years ago. making thick layers of woodchips for paths is great for a whole bunch of reasons. they prevent mud, they prevent soil compaction underneath even with mild vehicle use, and paths are a good way to grow soil next to your beds. you put down a bunch of woodchips next to a bed, let it sit a year or so, then rake off the top inch of chips and shovel what's under into your beds. then replace with fresh chips.

mycelium in a pretty new cedar bed. some people talk about allelopathy of cedar inhibiting growth of stuff and maybe it does, but it doesn't seem noticable.

strawberries fucking love these beds. they are excellent groundcover. they spread rapidly, they make delicious berries, and they're hardy. if you want more green/less berry then grow wild species like coastal/woodland strawberries. if you want the berries, buy a 6 pack of plugs from the nursery and wait a year or make friends with literally anyone with a strawberry patch and they'll give you plugs. I started with about 40 that I got from a friend 3 years ago and I don't think I could possibly give enough away to have less strawberry plants now.

wine cap mushrooms are a great thing to grow also. buy or borrow one thing of spawn for $30 or so, put it in fresh woodchips, then propagate them into other woodchip patches by either digging out spawn and spreading it around, or even easier, by picking the mushroom and pulling up some of its 'roots/the stump' and burying the roots/stump a few inches down somewhere else. wine caps are really easy to ID, they're enormous so they're easy to find, they're tasty, and their mycelium is really aggressive at spreading around so it's easy to keep them going.

This interview between the NYT and the author of 'how to blow up a pipeline' includes discussion of the social acceptability of political violence. Unsurprisingly, the NYT person flips out at the idea of property destruction and seems to bounce between 'political violence is never acceptable' and calling David Malm a hypocrite for not blowing up a pipeline during the interview. Evidently this is the kind of political violence the NYT doesn't support, in contrast to the kind of political violence they love (i.e. political violence used by the american state against property and humanity both foreign and domestic).

This is my favourite part of the interview in the spoilers.

this is a real ad that is running

Lentils, rice, onion, lemon, fuck yeah. I love having a bit of pomegranate molasses or pomegranate pips with it too. The mix of spices + lemon really makes the flavour pop, and nutritionwise it combines the heartiness of lentils with the carbs of rice. Cooked raisins are really good too.

The link was just some random recipe so there'd be a photo. Please share mujadara protips if you've got them

This is a good podcast episode about Canada's history with ukrainian nazi immigrants, why they were allowed into Canada, and their role in disrupting the Canadian labour movement and left wing ukrainian diaspora communities. I've read lots of things that allude to these subjects but not much that really goes into the details.

This is a good show in general - their episode about nuking the oil sands was good too. Yes that was an actual plan for bitumen extraction.

My child wanted to watch an animated green lantern series recently so we checked it out. Of course the main character who is the human green lantern is a fighter pilot who does a bunch of sweet fighter pilot flight maneuvers in the opening sequence. I told my child that shows like this often show the military being cool and doing cool stuff, but that in real life what fighter pilots actually do is drop bombs on children. I'm only human, I also enjoy (some) military action movies, but I know it's cotton candy brain poison too.

I hate how many children's shows have pro military pro cop propaganda. How do others talk to their kids about it to inoculate them against brainworms? I usually describe the military and the cops as being like a gang of bullies - they do things to make themselves look cool but really they just exist to hurt people and take their shit.

On my phone I autofill my username/pw, it shows a green 'logged in' bot, but it doesn't actually log in. Desktop is fine

edit: I touched grass and it was not to my liking