The Revolutionary Garden

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/853128

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So it's almost July 4 so everyone in the US is gearing up for firework day. Plenty people have already had premature firings of fireworks in late June. Even in Canada we have our national day on July 1 and even though you're technically not even allowed to shoot fireworks in many major Canadian cities anymore, people still do and still do it days in advance. And it's not like celebrating with fireworks is a Anglo-North American thing either, pretty sure every country does it.

But here is why I don't think they should be used, and I will attempt to convince you as well.

I think the most obvious problem is noise pollution. Everyone, myself included, has been trying to comfort their dog whenever some asshole decides to unexpectedly shoot one off on June 27. It's generally doable to take your dog to a more remote area on the day of so they don't hear it, designated firework quiet zones in the city are a godsend for this, but do you expect us to go take our dogs away for a week before the actual day? It obviously affects cats and other pets too. As well as young humans, you might have a couple of those in your house as well. And mitigations by moving oneself away from the noise can't help the wildlife in the area, who are even more severely affected. The fast and erratic nature of firework sounds makes it very difficult to ignore. Wildlife can sometimes adapt to ambient human-caused noises like cars on a road, but basically no animal with hearing can tune out fireworks, not even humans. Sources are in the dropdown below, (pop the DOIs into SciHub to read them for free, I usually try to link free papers to begin with but it seems that everything on this subject is pay per view):

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Second and perhaps the biggest issue is pollution. Fireworks are explosives, and as such use a lot of highly reactive chemicals to get the energy needed to fly high up into the air and release a ton of light for all to see. Highly reactive chemicals, especially ones not commonly found in nature and therefore organisms have fewer or no defenses against them, are generally very harmful to both human and ecological health. The unexploded fuel along with bits of plastic and paper casings get thrown everywhere in the vicinity of the firing site, and if you do it at a park with a lot of natural greenspace and wildlife, that's even worse. These pollutants are extremely long-lasting in the environment and get washed into groundwater, rivers and lakes, and eventually the ocean, not really decomposing in any amount of time relevant to human life, just dispersing and becoming less concentrated. Not to mention the smoke and fumes become air pollution and can spike the particulate concentration in an urban area. Same with the metal salts that give fireworks their brilliant colours, they don't really burn up and just fall to the ground or float around in the air. Metallic pollution is also extremely harmful to the environment. Not going to go too far into the ecology or biochemistry behind this, but here are some scholarly sources if you're interested. Sources are in the dropdown:

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The other major ecological impact, and the one that's been memed to death, is the risk of wildfires. Climate change is making summers hotter in dryer in many places, including the US and Canada. And might I remind you that July is indeed the summer in this part of the world. Along with mismanagement of forests and refusal to use controlled burns to reduce the risk of a massive, out of control wildfire, the risk of a single stray spark falling back down burning down entire forest ranges is not out of the realm of possibilities, nor is it unheard of. We've all heard the news reports about gender reveal forest fires and most people seemed to take it as a joke and not as the ecological and humanitarian disaster that a massive unquenchable forest fire actually is. When every year we get thousands of pictures of forest fires rolling through towns and making them look like Dante's Inferno, maybe we should be more careful about what incendiary devices we use. Sources are again in the dropdown:

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Good news is that this is not an unfamiliar issue. Fireworks are already being restricted or banned all around the world. China invented fireworks and they have deep cultural legacies and symbolism, and is extremely important to many people during certain holidays (speaking as a Chinese person), and even they are getting more and more restrictive with it especially in urban areas. I too will miss the sight of fireworks lighting up the sky during lunar new year, but I genuinely believe the ecological impacts outweigh the benefits. Fireworks are pretty, but so is ivory. If its only job is to look pretty and is extremely harmful otherwise, that's no excuse to keep it around.

Up until a few weeks ago, our spring had been pretty cool so I put off getting my okra seeds started. Then I forgot about it and now I worry that I am too late to plant some okra! I've never grown it before but I know they are sun and heat lovers. I should have enough of that, but I worry that since it can take 3 months for them to fruit I've missed out on peak growing time.

I'm still going to try, but is there anything I should do to help speed it along? I'm soaking the seeds right now. I've seen that some people scrap the outer shell with sandpaper, anyone have experience doing this? I plan to plant these in deep 5 gal buckets so I can ensure they can always be in the sunniest spot. Any other ideas?!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/638597

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This question is asked with surprising frequency. We were all taught in school to "turn that tap off and don't waste water!" Also, the recent regulatory mandates of low-flow toilets and showers which a lot of people seem to hate for some reason. Inevitably the question is raised: "Wait, if all the water on Earth is bound in the water cycle and just goes around the world in perpetuity, why does it matter?" It may seem to many here like a stupid question or a troll if someone asks this, but I think at least some of the people asking this is asking genuinely. In school, I was never given a satisfactory answer for this, it was all vague and oversimplified, and it wasn't until I studied environmental science in university that I understood fully why that is still wasting water. So, I'm about to explain it as thoroughly as I can while keeping it as layman friendly as I can:

First of all, before even considering water: if you keep the tap on, you're wasting energy and other chemicals. Energy because tap water is pumped, and since water is really heavy, a lot of a city's energy goes into keeping the water lines pressurized. Chemicals because tap water is treated, quite intensively in many places, including chlorination, fluoridation, and the addition of certain minerals to do things like combat pipe corrosion. All of those things are resources that need to be extracted from natural sources, refined, and injected into the water, which also takes energy. In some places like parts of California and the Middle East, you might be getting your tap water from a reverse osmosis plant, which is a technological marvel and can produce clean freshwater from sea water or even sewage, but also takes a metric ass load of energy. Finally, if you're running the sink tap or the shower, you're running warm water, which obviously takes energy to heat. And unless you're on 100% renewable electricity and your water heater is electric or heat pump based, municipal tap water has a pretty high carbon footprint. The water heater alone is one of the biggest energy users in a residential home.

But what about wasting water? The Bill Nye episode you watched in 1st grade didn't say wasting energy associated with water infrastructure, it directly said you were wasting WATER. How can that be if the water cycle exists? Well, it is true that water circulates around the Earth, the supply of fresh, drinkable water is highly limited. Most people get their tap water from one of a few naturally occurring places: aquifers and ground water, rivers and streams, lakes, watersheds, snow melt, or some combination of these. However, these have a limited water throughput. With rivers and streams it's the easiest to see, they flow at a certain rate, and you can't exactly increase it when you need more. But it's the same with all of the natural sources of freshwater, you're limited by the rate of precipitation in the area and some other factors like runoff and infiltration rate. Aquifers, lakes and watersheds can act as a reservoir and buffer periodic spikes in water uptake, but even then, how fast they replenish is still ultimately limited by how much water falls on the surrounding area, and if your overall usage exceeds the throughput of that freshwater system, you're going to have a real bad time. And with climate change, we're experiencing more droughts and less even precipitation over a year, so it's actively getting worse.

Another huge problem for many places is seasonal water scarcity, for example, here in the Pacific Northwest. We get a ton of rain all winter long, more water than the relatively few cities can ever use, but only so much of it is stored in the ecosystem, so when the summer drought hits, we start running out of water and have to impose strict restrictions like no watering your lawn (don't get me started on how much of an environmental disaster the Western concept of grass lawns are).

Finally, adding to this, is the ecological consequences of running a freshwater system dry. Many places rely on the natural ecosystem to filter and purify the water before it's taken up into the municipal water system. For example, if your watershed is in a dense old growth forest, the roots of the trees and other plants act as a water treatment system all by themselves, and you don't have to treat the water manually as intensively, saving those aforementioned resources and energy. But, plants need water too, and if you deplete the watershed, you risk degrading or even collapsing the ecosystem that was doing your water treatment, which, you know, is bad.

So yeah, even with the water cycle, you're wasting water by leaving the tap on. In the same way you waste food by not eating it even if it decomposes into compost.

Cat climbed up on the counter and tried to mess em up.

I want to start an indoor and outdoor garden. Planting season is coming up.

I'm also having decent success germinating some rice.

I'm somewhat regretting my choice to buy pinto and black bean 'seeds'.

Also I've been making trips up into the hills to dig up naturally occurring clay and that sort of thing and carry it down in my big backpack.

Maybe I can try and make some dirt out of that.... I already went to home depot to get some garden fertilizer, but I prob need to get some high nitrogen stuff in bulk.

Thread: https://social.rebellion.global/@ScientistRebellion/108969031862762356

These are the bamboos I dug up from the neighborhood. I planted them in a pot. And I hope to get some affordable wood stock from these.

Also yesterday when me and dad were hiking I took a branch of manzanita which I prepared by shaving and planting with rooting hormone and fertilizer. If that goes well I will share.

Here, nearly everything is shared. There are two community electric cars - donated by the Erssons who no longer have a private car-, shared bicycles (and bike trailers), an extensive fruit orchard, berry and grape patches, and a considerable community garden space. Photovoltaics provide about two-thirds of the energy consumed by the complex. [...] Rents here are lower than the Portland average because the Erssons want Kailash to be accessible to all income levels. There’s a 300-person waitlist, but Ole hopes others will follow their example.

"If you look at it from an economic perspective no business would want a complex landscape like this because it's way too much maintenance, but what you have to do is turn the maintenance over to the residents, and then they do it: they get joy; it's an antidepressant; it's a way of creating food; it's a way of creating community; so you have to do it in a certain way, but it's definitely a lot more work than the typical grass and shrub landscape for sure."

I have been really into the aspect of growing potatoes in buckets for multiple reasons: For one it seems cheap enough; Secondly the nature of being able to have buckets as a mobilized garden could be great in so many areas. Don’t have the time or energy to cultivate your soil? Bucket. Live in the city surrounded by pavement? Bucket. Are you a renter who can’t grow plants or you don’t even know if you can live there next month, so investing in gardening would be pointless? Bucket. Ever accidentally killed a prominent figure, so you spend your life on the run, moving from country to country never knowing the simple life you once lived but still want to follow your childhood dream of gardening? Bucket.

It seems to be that for one pound of potatoes, you’ll get 7 lbs back. It being a root plant, watch its moisture. Cut a chived(?) potato in half and put charcoal on the wound so it doesn’t rot. What’s y’alls take on this.

I've tested this out over concrete slabs and over nutrient-starved sand. As long as your bed of mulch and good growing material is thick enough you can grow just about anything. Though, even with the modified method where you add bagged dirt on top of the mulch, I found it difficult to grow anything with short roots.

We finally found a bigger apartment we can afford and have a second bedroom we'd like to use for some of our pastimes like sewing and whatnot. I'd like to start growing some vegetables and maybe fruit as well if possible. Does anyone have any experience with indoor growing with hydroponics or anything? Cheap setups? where do we start?

P.s. The African Violet is named Celery. If anyone has recommendations for names for the seedlings, that’d be great. I have two basils and three (maybe four) eggplants.

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