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Post by prairiegardens on Sept 28, 2020 21:55:10 GMT -5
I was informed with solemn sincerity that the Covid virus was invented and sent on its way by the Chinese and Russians to cut population around the world. The guy was not happy when I declined to accept his hypothesis and stomped off in a snit but it was worth it if I don't have to talk to him anymore. It's curious when a Canadian doesn't know that there is a new leader for the Conservatives but is claiming insider information re world affairs. Sigh.
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Post by steev on Sept 29, 2020 0:31:15 GMT -5
It is disappointing that people can think that this is a conspiracy, rather than the natural result of overpopulation and resultant intrusion into the environment. Honestly, if this reduces world population, I'm sure that's not bad; I think it has to happen, though I wish people would get their shit together, rather than waiting for Nature to do it for us, which it is doing, dispassionately. We can control ourselves or we WILL be controlled by Nature, to whom we are no more important than were the dinosaurs, nor today's non-human species.
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Post by jocelyn on Sept 29, 2020 13:09:59 GMT -5
I think a prudent person would wear a mask, wash their hands, and eat well....get enough sleep too. I'm making another batch of rosehip jam today, there are lots of yummies with Vitamin C in them, so eat up, grin.
I don't take suppliments, but we do grow a lot of what we eat, and I always have good bloodwork. I'm old, well, not as old as Steve, grin, but old enough that they won't believe me at first when I get my shots updated and they ask what meds I'm on...none. They go down their list, and nope, nope, not that one either, grin....you get the idea. Some might be just good luck with family genetics, but some might be cooking from scratch, and growing some of that. Gardens give both exercise and Vitamin D, plus the good food and a chance to trade seeds with your more local buddies, it's all good.
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Post by steev on Sept 29, 2020 23:57:03 GMT -5
There're fewer people older than me every day, that was an interesting realization, but that's not the problem; there's more younger than are aging out. The question is whether we can control ourselves before we cause irremediable damage to the ecosystem. Other critters, our cousins. also want to live, and we are poorer if they don't survive. Mind you, I don't really reject the idea of soylent green, but I think it's undesirable, if only because it implies collapse of the ecosystem, which would lead to soylent green. Frankly, I'll eat what there is.
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Post by flowerbug on Sept 30, 2020 7:30:21 GMT -5
it is always a bad idea to eat older apex predators if there are toxins that accumulate...
northern pike at just the limit are really good eating, but i don't eat them if they're bigger than that. around here the fish in the rivers are full of agricultural gunk. i don't even bother, i can grow food that is better for me.
as a bit of amusement, yesterday i met someone who doesn't like cooked dry beans, after talking about it i understand their issues, but am i glad i don't have them, especially since i grow so many different kinds.
i am a nomnivore, if it doesn't move fast enough i'll eat it. one nice thing about plants is that they don't move faster than i do...
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Post by steev on Sept 30, 2020 19:51:07 GMT -5
Actually, I think we're in the pre-apocalypse; the beast is yet to come.
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Post by reed on Oct 1, 2020 8:30:41 GMT -5
I think we have moved well past the pre stage. It most certainly has already started and is now accelerating exponentially. When I was born CO2 in the air was at the high end but still within the natural range of the prior million years, now it's more than 30% higher and growing, again exponentially. Oxygen concentration is declining even faster. Also when I was born the Amazon and African rain forests were largely intact, now they more than 50% compromised or already dead. Fresh water fish are more than 50% gone since the 1970s. Insect populations are crashing globally. In North America everything west of the Rocky Mountains is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, five of five years since she moved there my sister has had to hide inside from the smoke at least a full month of each summer. Those fires are not going to stop and they are not going to stop getting bigger, not until all the perennial roots and all the seeds have been killed and nothing is left but noncombustible dust.
With exponential grown something can start out very small and at first seeming grow very slow. It occurs to me the human induced destruction of most if not all life on Earth probably started when they learned how to start a fire. That had little effect but several thousand years later they learned how to forge metals and that went a long way on speeding things up. Then in just a couple thousand rather than several more years they learned to build engines, at first burning coal to fire steam boilers. Then just a few decades for more direct conversion of energy with oil, then gasoline. A few more decades and their filling the sky with jets and heating their swimming pools with nuclear fission.
All the time as they grow in numbers the biosphere is shrinking. Most who have come and gone and most still here have little clue that they are part of the biosphere rather than separate from it.
Anyway, with growth of desolation being exponential we've moved from thousand of years between milestones to centuries, to decades, to years. The middle and end of the apocalypse will take far less time than the beginning did.
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Post by steev on Oct 1, 2020 17:34:14 GMT -5
I agree; that was a pun, best/beast.
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Post by flowerbug on Oct 2, 2020 10:00:04 GMT -5
while i do think the biosphere is having some issues from humans being jerks, i don't consider the fires in the west to be as dire as you paint them @reedy. what i think we're seeing is just the normal process of burning off fuel after fires have been suppressed for way too many years.
you can't support much of a fire with just a few bits of seeds here or there or many of the other things you write - there has to be a critical mass of fuel for fire to start and spread much the same way that diseases won't spread easily if there aren't too many people in proximity. thin the fuel out or burn it once in a while (or better yet harvest it and bury it as a way to sequester carbon - in a semi-arid place i would take quite a long time to decay).
if you're not going to graze a grassland once in a while you need to burn it to get the standing dead material back down to the soil. unfortunately it does release carbon dioxide when burned so the really best approach is managed grazing and knocking back brush before it builds up and becomes a fire hazard.
but certainly we do need to be treating the planet much better than we are already and future generations will have a tougher time if we keep destroying the basic carrying capacity of the ecosphere (which is what happens when diversity of species is decreased). the basic process of harvesting energy from the sun by the ecosphere is going to be directly proportional to the number of species which can inhabit the various niches. remove species and less energy is captured and then available.
the agricultural practices of not having fields always covered is just one way that currently points out how ignorant people are about this stuff. once the harvest is done around here many thousands of acres of dirt are just left bare for months at a time (soaking up heat, blowing away on the wind, not being protected from the rains or encouraging worms and other soil creatures, etc.). even some small cover crop could go a long ways towards improving things, but few do it. that along with all the sprays are to me fairly criminal behaviors.
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Post by reed on Oct 4, 2020 7:34:28 GMT -5
OK
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Post by nkline on Oct 4, 2020 20:36:26 GMT -5
It cost money to put a cover crop on, then it will need killed the following spring, which also cost money and if you end up in a drought year it will typically hurt your yield. I would like to find a good option for winter grazing, that would grow at cold temperatures and provide some protein to my cows. I would seed it in October, any suggestions are welcome, we get to about -20f but if it could survive until at least -10 that would be great. I am planning on doing a test run with some January king cabbages, though I cannot make cheap cabbage seed to scale it up, or can I???Any suggestions for other plants? most brassicas are high protein.
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Post by xdrix on Oct 4, 2020 23:29:24 GMT -5
It very cold. a winter peas is able to resisted up to -20°C
(-4°F) sometimes more.personaly we use the mustard but i don't know if she would resisted at this cold or a precocious radish before the real freez.
If the winter is dry, you can try the wild rucola ( diplotaxis tenuifolia). I don't know if she could resisted up to -20°F but for me she can resisted at of extreme climate. I have grow this plant in greenhouse and she resisted at a delta of 25°C 45°F between the morning and the afternoon without problems for exemple (-10°C 14°F the morning and 15°C 59°F the afternoon).
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Post by steev on Oct 5, 2020 21:23:18 GMT -5
In Cali, we get a lot of grasses which dry by June, with no rain until late October, at the earliest, but lightning can start in July; once the rains start, these grasses get knocked down and decay.
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Post by prairiegardens on Oct 9, 2020 15:22:52 GMT -5
It cost money to put a cover crop on, then it will need killed the following spring, which also cost money and if you end up in a drought year it will typically hurt your yield. I would like to find a good option for winter grazing, that would grow at cold temperatures and provide some protein to my cows. I would seed it in October, any suggestions are welcome, we get to about -20f but if it could survive until at least -10 that would be great. I am planning on doing a test run with some January king cabbages, though I cannot make cheap cabbage seed to scale it up, or can I???Any suggestions for other plants? most brassicas are high protein. May I suggest you check out Greg Judy who has or had a bunch of stuff on You Tube, including a keynote address to a farmers group. He runs cattle I believe in Iowa and organizes his cattle and pastures so that he doesn't even put up hay anymore, he pastures all year around. Management is more hands on than tossing a whack of cattle into a half section for the summer and then going to collect them in the fall to sort and sell or move them home though...not that I am suggesting you do that but it's certainly common practice here. His practices are based on the info from Allan Savory's work. I've read in a couple of Farmers or Cattlemen magazines some farmers in Sask are extremely pleased with their results following Savory's practices but I don't know if any have tried pasturing through the winter here. as far as cover crops, um...maybe read what Steve Solomon has to say about them, it's quite interesting and informative. Perhaps what you are using for a cover crop could be different, or if you use a cover crop that winterkills it will still protect the soil from wind and weather erosion, and provide material to build your soil, and not need to be killed come spring. I would suggest you consider kale, cows love it, it's easy to fence with electric wire to feed as planned, and I believe it's hardier than most other plants including other brassicas. If you are running dairy cattle it WILL taint the milk unless it's only fed for about an hour directly after milking, in which case the taste reverts to what it usually is by the time the next milking is due. People used to feed all sorts of things to stock, potatoes, squash, Lutz beets etc but all of those need to be chopped to prevent choking, so somewhat labor intensive. |
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Post by xdrix on Oct 9, 2020 17:22:54 GMT -5
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