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  1. different clue

    header: garden report . . .

    I have just gotten back from a vacation. I set my garden up as best I could before I went. Upon return, I see the still-alive parts have survived and grown some.

    I let a burdock keep growing instead of calling it a weed and killing it. It was already bigger than the average burdock and is now way bigger. Next year I expect its reproductive flower-seed stalk to also be way bigger than normal, and I will trim and groom it for ornamental gardenscape effect. That’s why I let it keep growing.

    The hickory cane corn I finally got planted by late June after several chipmunk delays
    has all long-since tasseled, most of it has silked, and most of the silkers have begun setting ears. A few of the ears have visibly grown since my departure. It is now a race between the corn maturing some ears before the first kill-freeze or the first kill-freeze killing every ear before maturity. If any ears reach total replantable seed-viability before kill-freeze, those plants’ seed will have been selected for surviving a much shorter than normal and proper growing season.

    It would be nice to plant that corn on time some day to see what it can do with that kind of basic care and consideration.

    I also had planted 8 smallish potatoes and got back 22 medium to medium-large potatoes. Not a professional yield, but seriously encouraging to a beginner.

  2. mago

    @ different clue, burdock root is edible, and is even considered medicinal. You need to dig it up when it’s young though.
    Potatoes are great because you just need to stick them in the earth and they multiply. Of course I live in a place where potatoes thrive.
    Store your harvest in a cool dark place. You can save some for next year’s planting as well if you want.

  3. sbt42

    It’s good to hear a garden update here. 🙂

    Ever hear of sunchokes, AKA “Jerusalem Artichokes?” They grow massively in even terrible soil. Their calorie content is impressive. Preparing them can be a bit of a chore, though if you have access to fresh water you can soak them prior to roasting (my personal favourite), cook them in low-and-slow heat, add them to soups and stews, etc. Like potatoes, sunchokes can keep in the soil. You just dig ’em out when you want to prep them for a meal (provided they’re not frozen too deep down there).

    If you do start eating sunchokes, I suggest a slow transition to adding them to your diet, otherwise you’ll learn why their other nickname is “fartichokes.”

  4. different clue

    @mago,

    Thanks for that. I may buy some burdock root ( gobo) if/when it shows up at the co-op.
    By now I am so committed to that relatively huge burdock plant getting even relatively huger that I would certainly leave its particular root in place just to see how big the seed stalk gets next year.

    I do indeed have my potatoes in an old onion-mesh bag hanging in the little electric panel closet. The potatoes I planted to begin with to get these were potatoes which had not yet sprouted in storage while the other potatoes were sprouting all around them. So I planted them just in case they were genetically programmed to last longer in storage than all those other potatoes were. The few which I damaged in digging them up are the few I will eat. I will try storing all the others in hopes of keeping them viably alive for planting till next garden season.

    I gather you are living somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, basically. And if on or near the coast, that is indeed a great place to grow potatoes. Since potatoes began as an Andean mountain crop, other Andean mountain crops which also produce underground food-storage organs might also grow well in your area. I stumble apond
    an interesting website from someone who grows and replicates and sells small amounts of roots-tubers-rhyzomes-corms-etc. from some unique Andean potato varieties and also from some of the other Andean nations rootcetera crops. It features some of the crops I have read about in Lost Crops of the Incas.
    https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/1398/lost-crops-of-the-incas-little-known-plants-of-the

    Here is the website for it.
    https://www.cultivariable.com/

  5. Chuck Mire

    Coffeeology:

    https://www.alieward.com/ologies/coffeeology

    When did coffee get into our mouths? Who’s right when it comes to the best coffee? What’s the most ethical way to enjoy it? What about the cats that eat the beans? How will climate change affect your morning coffee? Peter Giuliano is the executive director of the Coffee Science Foundation explains folk stories behind coffee, what makes beans taste the way they do, why cold brew and nitro feel like rocket fuel, shade-grown coffee, roasting chemistry, flimflam, atmospheric pressure, dead espresso, and the best way to brew it, in his opinion. Also: why it tastes better outside – for some of us.

    Listen: (1:32:55), Or Read the transcript .

  6. mago

    @different clue, quinoa is another Incan high altitude crop that grows in these parts.
    Wishing you all the best with your garden endeavors.

  7. Dan Kelly

    It’s much easier to fool somene than to convince them that they’ve been fooled

    ‘There are no secrets that shouldn’t be published,” Mr. Young said. He doesn’t believe that Cryptome or WikiLeaks has published risky secrets. “Only low-grade stuff like what WikiLeaks does, but they just exaggerate it.”

    His dream leaks: The IAEA, the Red Cross, tax authorities, banks and the Vatican. “Go down the list of all the sacred cows and say, ‘Open them up.’ That stuff will come someday but not easily and it will be fought over fiercely…’

    https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-deep-state-is-scared/#comment-153954

    —————————–

    ‘That stuff’ will ‘come someday’ but ‘not easily’ and it ‘will be fought over fiercely…’

    Do you see what they do? This tells us absolutely nothing.

    Everything will come someday but it’s going to be really really hard and they’re going to fight us on it.

    No fucking shit. Tell us something we don’t know.

    Sure, the Vatican, banlks, NGO’s, BIS, all corporate secrets, all Russian secrets, all Chinese secrets, all Saudi secrets, all Zionist….

    Why aren’t you working diligently on this right now and everyday? Can’t be something in the water you don’t drink.

    And what of Assange? Wouldn’t he have ‘served us’ much better if he had just remained an independent hacker instead of setting up a honeypot?

    Hey guys, send us all your information and we’ll be sure to collate it properly and make sure it gets to the proper place! You can’t do this yourselves, you motherf*ckin’ morons! It all goes through me.

    Contiuning in this ‘conspiratorial’ vein, why did less than ten percent (less than five?) of Snowden’s files ever get published? They are now privatized thanks to left/alt-right HERO Glenn Greenwald doing nothing of substance with them.

    I remember Glenn saying that it would take a lot of time, there are lots of documents to go through.

    Uh-huh. We would epect that, Glenn.

    So why not make it a wonderful open-source project? We could have high school kids all over the country – and world – going through these important docs that outlined the way our privacies were systematically being taken away by the elite’s Pentagon and its government minions.

    Instead, we get an occasional pic of Glenn sitting at his estate in Rio diligently typing away at his computer, working on the infamous Snowden files.

    Did it ever occur to anyone how utterly bizarrre it is to be a ‘civil rights constitutional’ type in one country, and a leftist in another?

    I remember more than one leftist influencer (‘Sabby Sabs’ comes immediately to mind) getting a little perturbed when people were wondering about Glenn. The retort is, ‘Hey, I don’t remember Glenn Greenwald ever saying he was for left poltiics in the US.’

    Uh, exactly, But he was quite left in Brazil, although if you were to dig a little deeper you might find many leftists in Brazil who found him to be nothing more than self-absorbed and disruptive to the organizing and structure-building they were engaged in.

    How has ‘Operation Car Wash’ worked out for ya? It hasn’t helped a needy soul. But Glenn Greenwald is a lot richer.

    So, ultimately Glenn is playing a role. He’s either a master grifter who may as well be an operative at this point, or he is an operative. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t give a fu*k about ‘we the people’ and that is very obvious.

    I mean, who do you know personally who is a fierce libertarian type in one place and a leftist in another? Could you do it yourself? It’s not normal. It’s a lie.

    Citizens United. My god. Wake up people. You have lost the plot entirely and you are so easily deceived by your heroes and experts.

    ————————————

    https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=rhr3TzEknzY

  8. different clue

    @mago,

    Thank you. I do hope to be successful in gardening. Since my space is small, I am resigned to learning what I can about high-density small-space gardening within limits.
    The two directions I can expand are straight down and straight up. Also, are early stage quinoa leaves edible as a boiling-green? Have you tried them to see?

    @sbt42,

    I once ate a whole bunch of sunchokes all at once. I learned why they are also called fartichokes. They would indeed be a good survival-staple crop if one could get one’s body used to them over time. I like potatoes because they are so food-application flexible and if they turn out to be predictably easy for me to grow, I will like them for that reason too.

  9. different clue

    Here’s a little WhitePeopleTwitter in reply to Vance blaming ” immigrants over the border” for his mother’s drug addiction. It isn’t really very important except as a little window into Vance’s character and probable behavior if elected. But it sure is funny.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1full11/this_explains_some_things/

  10. Curt Kastens

    A Pot Porree Cushion
    There is obviously not going to be any kind of energy transition. Humans will burn fossil fuels intil they go extinct.
    Chinese Scientists going back to China from the west means lots of agents of western intell agencies going back to China.
    One can see lots of evidence that the US empire is ini decline. But one can see more evidence that we are witnessing the death throes of a planet. Everyone tells us that the US is trying to stop the rise of China. The US does not have to do that. Climate Change will do it for them. I suspect that what is really happening is Capitalist Canabalism. The war in Eukraine was clearly just as much about hobbeling the EU economy as it was about doing anything to Russia. In ths vein perhaps the reason that the Pentagon is encouraging wars in the mid east and in east Asia is to cause chaos in those regions as well leaving North America as the only region of the world that is not getting bombed by one side or another.
    Yes environmental collapse will destroy the US as well. But they will be able to salute as they sink beneath the waves cheering that they were the last men standing. Though those who have gone over to the other side, like LTC Huber, will know that they are not really human men.
    Finally Iran should use the opportunity that it has to attack not only US bases in Iraq and Syria and the Gulf Region, but to attack US bases in Turkey until Erdo gone gets off his ass.
    Joy Tothe Sworld by 3 Dogs Night

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