🜬

I love her, she's great. Her recipes are friendly for both physical and/or intellectual disabilities. And her 5-year-old helps her cook. 🥰

Link to her YouTube channel:

18k Gold, Coral, Peridot and Diamond Radishes Brooch by René Boivin, Circa 1985

You do not understand

Most modern Ag operations don’t even have a proper A-Horizon. They’re too busy turning the earth every time they replant. The A-horizon is the Black Gold that makes Soil Soil. It’s a structurally complex soil horizon that must be built in place by the interactions of Plants and Fungi and Insects. It is The Thing that soaks up rain and holds onto it for plants. The A-Horizon is The Thing that builds up when you let a field sit fallow. The act of tilling creates fecundity by breaking up the A-horizon. On a really good Organic no-till farm you might find an A-horizon between 3-6 inches.

His A-horizon was 4 feet deep. 50 inches.

I-

I have no context. His farm was covered in a living skin thick enough for a child to stand in.

Gives me hope for what we could accomplish if we got our collective heads on straight, you know? Like. This was one guy. A brilliant man, who knew what he was up to, but. The thing about brilliant ideas is they can be shared.

Humus, or Humic Compounds, are a cryptic and poorly understood set of organic substances. As the final metabolic result of once-living things being digested first by macroscopic organisms, and then by microorganisms, they resist most forms of analysis, and have cryptic structures. A few that we have managed to isolate and study are the Humic & Fulvic Acids.

Humus has a number of remarkable tendencies. It is capable of retaining water far better than any raw mineral clay; it also retains electrically charged clay granules, which themselves retain mineral ions, all of which is essential to make a soil a high-quality resource for Plants to grow in.

A composter is a box that contains an environment that is conducive to the production of Humus, but the best way to produce it is in-place, by laying layers of organic material down over an unbroken earth and growing things out of that. The interaction of the plants rooting, the fungus weaving itself through everything, the bacteria and archaea metabolizing as they do, and inorganic weathering forces all combine to gradually build up the microscopic equivalent of a complex megastructure capable of retaining far more water, and containing far more nutrients, than any inorganic substrate.

This stuff is black gold. This is the stuff that determines whether or not a plot of land is going to be “productive.” The knowledge of how to make it, how to care for it, is an essential piece of wisdom that our civilization needs to remember.

Fortunately, folks seem to have the right response:

Farmers are more important to the continuity of civilization than administrators, no matter what the elitists say. This knowledge is important.

The constant presence of misinformation in media accessible to children paired with the twofold issue of hands-off intelligent scientific adults and hands-on bigoted willfully ignorant religious adults has become a sinkhole of illiteracy and persistent ignorance that permeates every other quadrant of the human experience, not to mention the experience of other life forms helpless stop Earth's biggest extinction perpetuators.

Illiteracy to the point of generational stupidity makes itself more and more apparent with each successive generation of humans and is observed growing by the mile daily on this echo chamber of an information sinkhole you people call a blogging platform.

I am saying this as someone who is old and pilots a flesh vessel that grew up with Animorphs as it first came out. So the 'nostalgia' sobbing and scapegoating does not work on me. I respect Applegate for many reasons, but as a writer for children you are obligated to rectify these oversights.

Now I will weigh in as a writer. If you are going for the unreliable narrator angle and are, once again... choosing children as your target audience, you need to be a bit proactive in communicating this-- you can do so organically using other characters and the ways that they interact with the narrative. It's not an easy issue to traverse in the best of circumstances, but these days with the state of media literacy I fear we are at the point that you need flashing neon signs because the average adult (especially on Tumblr) consistently fails at recognizing the unreliable narrator literary trope in some of the most mainstream media imaginable.

Since it's watermelon season!

Studies show that babies are not afraid of snakes

1. There’s a tradeoff between how much nutrients can be in a single seed and how many seeds you can make. On one end is the double coconut, the largest seed in the world weighing as much as a small child but each double coconut palm tree makes relatively few seeds per individual per season. OR. Make a fuckton of seed that individually cost very little to make. A lot of your small nonwoody plants chose this option, grasses, dandelions, any little weeds usually.

2. But there’s a limit to how far you can push this.

3. And by god orchids crossed it.

4. Orchid seeds are so fucking small they don’t have the energy stores to fucking germinate.

5. Orchid seeds are so small that they only consist of a few cells that haven’t decided who’s going to be roots or leaves yet.

6. And this is great! If you preferred habitat is in trees where the ability to disperse from one treetop to the next and find the right little spot on that tree to survive as a seedling for a few years is really hard. Lots of seed that can float on the wind and find just that spot is great for that.

7. But shit for actually, you know, being alive.

8. But orchids are crafty bastards.

9. Most plants try very hard not to be colonized by fungi, thats usually not good.

10. But orchid seeds just let fungi in.

11. And how the turn tables.

12. Because they just start eating the fungi back.

13. And this is where it gets weird.

14. Orchids are easily in the running for most diverse plant family at nearly 30,000 different species

15. And every single fucking one of them is like this.

16. And worse than that most of them are dependent on a single species of fungus to do this for them, so they produce millions of seeds just so that one might find the one right fungus.

17. And then after that anything can happen.

18. Some orchids are nice and start paying back their hosts onve they get big enough to phtotosynthesize with nice sugars.

19. Some orchids move on to as many as 30 other fungal species throughout their lives.

20. Some complete bastards keep being parasites after they are big enough to photosynthesize on their own. That’s right, a plant that can make its own food is stealing from something that lives on dead leaves.

21. Some orchids just never grow out of it, orchids have turned into permanent parasites more often than any other group of plants because they’re all parasites so becoming a full parasite is nbd.

22. And worse, most of these actually parasitize fungi that are symbiotic with forest trees that supply sugar to the fungi in return for better access to mineral nutrients, effectively making the orchids both parasites on the fungi and the trees, in a sense the whole ecosystem.

23. This leads to one more weird phenomenon. Mutant albino orchids unable to photosynthesize, of species that normally can photosynthesize, are often recorded as being able to reach maturity and flower without issue. because they just keep being parasites instead. Orchids can just. become parasites at will.

It's mushroom season! Here are all the types you will see.

Um

...

All creatures with cells that have the fancy stuff like nucleus and mitochondria are Eukaryotes. That picture is from the Wikipedia page for Eukaryotes.

Long ago there was just the Bacteria and Archaea. Then something weird happened and an Archaean ate a bacterium but the bacterium was not consumed, instead they became friends. By "friends" I mean "permanently merged together into an entirely new kind of life form that can do all kinds of fancy stuff with its cells." This life form is your ancestor and the ancestor of all Eukaryotes.

One of those new, fancy life forms ate a cyanobacteria and made it into chloroplasts. This created the plants.

A few others decided to go multicellular and form tubes out of cells that could wriggle around, and they became animals.

A few decided to also go multicellular and team up into big networks of interconnected thread-like tendrils, and they became fungi.

But most of them just kind of went off and did their own thing, going about their single-celled business, evolving into all kinds of weird stuff without doing anything multicellular. And all of those guys got called protists. Every eukaryote that didn't become multicellular is a protist.

The guys that went multicellular are just a few weirdos in these random corners of the tree of life, but they get all the attention cause we multicellular organisms are kind of self-absorbed (and we had to do some strange things to sand to turn it into lenses to see the single-celled organisms).

If each of those multicellular clades counts as a "kingdom," how many kingdoms do the single-celled guys make? Good luck with that one. We keep finding more of them.

Every time we look at some more pond water, the taxonomists collapse into sobbing again. There are too many ways to be a little guy. Every time there's a cilium or a flagellum somewhere it's not supposed to be, or there's something suspicious going on with microtubules or zoospores or helical structures something, or god forbid two guys get freaky and do another endosymbiosis again, they have to rewrite everything and there's at least two fistfights and one brawl.

Xenophyopores found a cool hack to be unicellular but still get 20 centimeters long—they just have lots and lots of nuclei in their single cell.

They look like this. Of course it is in the ocean where all kinds of freaks are.

Behold, a single celled organism

They really like radioactive isotopes and collect radioactive materials in their bodies at high concentrations.

@ayoungparent Well apparently slime molds are a polyphyletic group (a bunch of unrelated organisms that happened to look similar).

The Myxomycetes are the ones known as plasmodial slime molds and basically they form spores which hatch into single-celled haploid guys (basically like sperm or egg in humans) and when the spores meet each other they become a diploid cell with more and more and more nuclei until they can be one cell several meters in area and several kilograms in weight. Despite being one cell technically and having no brain, they can learn and have some form of intelligence. They are good at designing the most efficient railroad system.

The big green ball I assume you refer to is Valonia ventricosa. It has some complicated structures inside and lots of nuclei to make it work, but it is just one really big cell.

Yeah. It does mitosis and everything like a regular cell.