gardening

Had to keep this beauty intact. Boioioing boner penis joke. Dick and nuts.

Nutty goodness from the forest floor. I will make a black truffle and morel risotto this week with my bounty.

Weirdly, it smelled strongly of cucumbers when it was fresh. Removed the pore surface, sliced into strips and sautéed it in butter. 10/10 texture, 3/10 taste. Crispy on the outside and meaty on the inside, tender but firmer than button mushrooms. Some pieces tasted fine like a normal mushroom but others had an unwelcome sort of aromatic wood/chemically flavor.

I cooked more than just the two in the picture - it could be that the larger (therefore older) ones had the strong taste, or possibly the type of tree that a few of them came from imparted a flavor.

Probably won't go out of my way for them in the future but if I was backpacking for a night or two and came across some I'd for sure cook em up.

good job you cute little shit, keep going!

(this is my first homebrew DWC hydroponic setup, so far so good)

This is where the swans like to swim.

Here's the parking lot.

Do you want to exchange some LNG for yuan?

I never saw those birds before.

These bushes are new.

This is the parking lot.

It's a whole lil place in there. You could kick back on an anther and still have plenty of room for company.

I made simple syrup with the flowers and used it for a color-changing Tom Collins. The pigment of the flowers reacts with acid and changes from dark purple/blue to bright pink. It has a nice flavor too though it's pretty subtle.

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David Lee Hoffman has spent 50 years building a composting compound where waste – whether grey water from the kitchen or sanitation – is cleaned by worms, plants, and filters, then reused in the personal garden.

Water flows through ponds, moats, and even a boat (which hides a 30-foot column that taps into groundwater), and everything is powered by solar, using a series of 12-volt pumps.

Most of Hoffman’s system isn’t legal, according to his local county (Marin, California), and Hoffman has spent decades fighting the local government.

On the day we arrived at his worm-topia, he’d been told he had just one more day to evacuate the 2-acre sanctuary he calls “The Last Resort.” One of his supporters (he has many helping him raise money for his legal battle) opened the door for us and turned out to be Oscar-nominated director Martin Brest (Scent of a Woman, Meet Joe Black, Midnight Run) who recently penned a letter to the county calling The Last Resort “an environmental laboratory that has perfected systems that—among other invaluable achievements—have turned it into one that uses only 10-20% of the water of comparable properties, even while maintaining an extensive organic vegetable garden.”

For Hoffman, “water is life,” not just because he wants clean water to grow his own food but also to create the teas (the Phoenix collection of rare, artisanal teas) that help support his lifestyle (he opens up his property every Saturday for tea tasting). He doesn’t believe in waste “until it’s wasted” and lives by the principles: “Water is precious, soil is sacred, shit is a resource.”

His bedroom is a shack the size of a bed built from wood salvaged from a pencil factory. He has plans to place it directly on top of a tea fermentation room to capture the waste heat via piping to warm up his bedroom.

One of my coworkers asked if it would be possible for me to 3D print some hydroponic gardening supplies, and I was like hell yeah, so I looked into it. I showed him a couple designs and we settled on building this thing. I'm definitely going to make one for myself as well. (I think an NFT design would be better, but I don't have the space for one and he preferred the tower design).

The whole point of 3D printing the thing is to reduce costs (apparently you can buy shit like this, but it's hella expensive). However, net pots are dirt cheap and it would be really cool to buy them instead of 3D printing them. The catch is, this design uses rather deep pots, and even Lord Bezos is not making them easy to find.

I haven't started printing anything yet (waiting for larger diameter nozzles in the mail) so I have some time to modify the parts, but I was wondering if anybody knows about garden suppliers which carry stuff like this. Specifically, I'm looking for rather deep net pots which are about 53mm / 2" in diameter (easy to find) but 93mm / 4" deep (not so easy to find).

I can print them if I need to, but it will literally take days.

Also, if any more experienced gardeners have any thoughts / concerns / recommendations about this design, I'd be delighted to hear them.

hoeing really is a good time! the ground was absolutely choked with vines and rocks and such so it took forever but i finally got it mostly cleared, leveled, and mixed with certified dirt owl-free poops. i have no idea what i'm doing, even at this early stage, but i am v excited

now to stare at it for the next few months until it does something

More pics. I have no idea what I'm doing so will be accepting tips. The medium is roughly 1-1-1 of clay based cat litter, jiffy mix, and perlite, little bit of crushed limestone and vermiculite.

This seems too good to be true.

This article is about corporate seed control and Venezuela's internal response to foster seed exchange in country to avoid entrapment by agribusiness interests. One interesting perspective relates to seedbanks:

Seeds are still saved in Western countries like Canada, but they tend to be treated as artifacts, isolated in research centres called “genebanks” which are designed to preserve the seeds for decades. While genebanks may save the seeds from extinction, they are generally not concerned with reintegrating the seeds into their natural environment, a move which would threaten the profit margins of the large agribusiness corporations with which the Canadian state has historically allied itself. As Chassé writes: “This means that the naturally democratic act of seed saving has been replaced by a reliance on large research centres that store seeds far from the communities and landscapes that created the plant.”

The alternative approach to industrial seedbanking is maintaining diverse and healthy ecosystems that continually create seed.

Genebanks store thousands of plant varieties, but most of these were created by anonymous farmers and peasants. This crop diversity now often benefits industry. Around the world, small producers have struggled to remain competitive against industrial farms that invest heavily in increasing production and minimizing costs. These monolithic operations are always searching for new crop variants, hybrids that produce more while resisting the spectrum of diseases that are created by relentless monocropping. These desirable traits that favour commerce are often extracted from the ‘heritage’ varieties that were created by centuries of small farmers. As Michael Taussig acerbically observed, “seeds banks are booty, relics of despoliation.”

For all you North hemisphere folks looking into the bleakness of winter I present my garden. I'm not a photographer but I started with some pictures of my Dill and Cilantro because I've never had them go so well (they call it coriander down under even though the rest of the world understands that coriander is just the seed) And then I just kept snapping pictures.

First of the herb garden. Then the corn/beans/pumpkin patch. Then the carrots and parsnip (you aren't supposed to plant them together but whatever) The potatoes (they look way better in that picture than real life) My first Rose. A weird colored Nasturtium and the flower wall below our glass house. Another Nasturtium, some carnations, Calendula and clover, sages and salvias. (the purple sage smells like bubble hash and makes me want to get high) Some Cherries, strawberries and then the garlic that is almost done curing.