Growing Wild

I'm obsessed with gardening systems that utilize rainwater without the use of barrels or cisterns. My ultimate fav is using bioswales to catch and filter stormwater on the street.

Fun addition: Dams that utilize trees to catch dirt/ stop erosion, and prevent disaster that can come from broken dams.

SUSTAINABLE URBAN DRAINAGE! SUDS!

We need more of them, in the right places!

Also, using these to reduce stormwater loads in storm events, particularly in places with combined stormwater and sewage systems, could/would be helpful at reducing river discharges of raw sewage. (If climate change is factored in at system level cos more rain in less time needs to be accouted for at rhe large scale designs...)

While four leatherback sea turtle nests might not sound like a lot, it's the same number in a single year as were found in total during the ten year span between 2015-2025. The Cape Hatteras National Seashore is also on the north edge of the species' range, so leatherback sea turtle nests are already not very common in the area.

This will be a somewhat brief introductory post to flat reed basket weaving, these two patterns are provided. Below are SOME websites you can buy supplies at:

Basketweaving.com

Peerlessratten.com

Thecountryseat.com

Explore these websites, as you learn basket weaving there's different materials you can learn to use and replace others and these websites will often provide the tools you will need too. You can use dyes or stain for flat reed, I have more experience with dyeing which basically involves boiling the color and then dunking the reeds in it.

Flat reed is literally that, flat reeds. Many flat reeds used are commercial but some traditional ones will be made of splints from trees such as Ash or White Oak. They are soaked in water and then shaped and woven into the craft desired.

Source

These patterns will tell you how you will need to cut your reeds. You will need a water source, preferably a tub of some kind, an awl, measuring tool, and a flat workspace.

Tips:

Do not let your flat reeds stay wet for too long! Let it dry in an open air space when you are not working on it or when it is complete, FLAT REED CAN MOLD.

If you soak flat reed for too long it can become mushy and unusable, at the very least if you soak it for extended periods be careful with how you bend it.

Flat reed tends to (not always) have a 'rough' and 'smooth' side, you want the rough side to be on the inside of your basket.

If you're a flat reed has started to split trim it as close to the split as you can as quickly as you can or it spreads.

Starting is the most difficult part and no basket will look like the end result in the beginning. Getting overwhelmed is normal, come back to it, these are not projects you do in one sitting.

It's a program that would probably need to be organized as a group to help disabled people because of the prep involved, but Matthew 25: Ministries does take clean, label- and residue-free pill bottles to reuse by mail. It could be a decent "let's all go to someone's place or a third space that has hot running water pill bottles to soak and then scrub off/wipe while having a (masked?) socializing session and meal afterwards" monthly or quarterly event to catch up with people and process bottles for mailing without having to take it all on alone. It would also cut down on shipping costs and materials if you send one shipment, reuse a box or bag (taping up a paper bag from a grocery store is a good medium-sized option), and use something like Pirate Ship to find the cheapest postage.

Some city recycling programs do take empty pill bottles specifically, but many don't because they're #5 plastic, and are small enough to fall through sorting machines. A city nearby (sadly not where I live) does specifically say that they take them in the recycling bins on their "Accepted for Recycling" webpage; I just had to go through some webpage trees and then open up some drop-down menus to find it.

The "upcycling" solutions don't really work long-term when you have such a buildup of pill bottles that you're never going to use the dozens or hundreds that you accumulate in a year, but it's possible that local creative reuse stores might take the bottles (clean, no identifying information/residue/etc., brings us back to the "having to clean them party"), but personally I'd see if you can find sewers or knitters who need places to store pins, small thread scraps or notions, stitch markers, etc., and need small containers, or specifically upcycling artists in your area who do higher volume material reclamation.

Pictured: Luis Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat. He's photographed at his house, which has a green roof.

Article

"Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat without overloading electrical grids or spending money on fans and air conditioners. He came across the concept over a decade ago while researching how to make his own home bearable during a particularly scorching summer in Rio.

A method that's been around for thousands of years and that was perfected in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, green roofs weren't uncommon in more affluent neighborhoods when Cassiano first heard about them. But in Rio's more than 1,000 low-income favelas, their high cost and heavy weight meant they weren't even considered a possibility.

That is, until Cassiano decided to team up with a civil engineer who was looking at green roofs as part of his doctoral thesis to figure out a way to make them both safe and affordable for favela residents. Over the next 10 years, his nonprofit was born and green roofs started popping up around the Parque Arará community, on everything from homes and day care centers, to bus stops and food trucks.

When Gomes da Silva heard the story of Teto Verde Favela, he decided then and there that he wanted his home to be the group's next project, not just to cool his own home, but to spread the word to his neighbors about how green roofs could benefit their community and others like it.

Pictured: Jessica Tapre repairs a green roof in a bus stop in Benfica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Relief for a heat island

Like many low-income urban communities, Parque Arará is considered a heat island, an area without greenery that is more likely to suffer from extreme heat. A 2015 study from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro showed a 36-degree difference in land surface temperatures between the city's warmest neighborhoods and nearby vegetated areas. It also found that land surface temperatures in Rio's heat islands had increased by 3 degrees over the previous decade.

That kind of extreme heat can weigh heavily on human health, causing increased rates of dehydration and heat stroke; exacerbating chronic health conditions, like respiratory disorders; impacting brain function; and, ultimately, leading to death.

But with green roofs, less heat is absorbed than with other low-cost roofing materials common in favelas, such as asbestos tiles and corrugated steel sheets, which conduct extreme heat. The sustainable infrastructure also allows for evapotranspiration, a process in which plant roots absorb water and release it as vapor through their leaves, cooling the air in a similar way as sweating does for humans.

The plant-covered roofs can also dampen noise pollution, improve building energy efficiency, prevent flooding by reducing storm water runoff and ease anxiety.

"Just being able to see the greenery is good for mental health," says Marcelo Kozmhinsky, an agronomic engineer in Recife who specializes in sustainable landscaping. "Green roofs have so many positive effects on overall well-being and can be built to so many different specifications. There really are endless possibilities.""

Pictured: Summer heat has been known to melt water tanks during the summer in Rio, which runs from December to March. Pictured is the water tank at Luis Cassiano's house. He covered the tank with bidim, a lightweight material conducive for plantings that will keep things cool.

A lightweight solution

But the several layers required for traditional green roofs — each with its own purpose, like insulation or drainage — can make them quite heavy.

For favelas like Parque Arará, that can be a problem.

"When the elite build, they plan," says Cassiano. "They already consider putting green roofs on new buildings, and old buildings are built to code. But not in the favela. Everything here is low-cost and goes up any way it can."

Without the oversight of engineers or architects, and made with everything from wood scraps and daub, to bricks and cinder blocks, construction in favelas can't necessarily bear the weight of all the layers of a conventional green roof.

That's where the bidim comes in. Lightweight and conducive to plant growth — the roofs are hydroponic, so no soil is needed — it was the perfect material to make green roofs possible in Parque Arará. (Cassiano reiterates that safety comes first with any green roof he helps build. An engineer or architect is always consulted before Teto Verde Favela starts a project.)

And it was cheap. Because of the bidim and the vinyl sheets used as waterproof screening (as opposed to the traditional asphalt blanket), Cassiano's green roofs cost just 5 Brazilian reais, or $1, per square foot. A conventional green roof can cost as much as 53 Brazilian reais, or $11, for the same amount of space.

"It's about making something that has such important health and social benefits possible for everyone," says Ananda Stroke, an environmental engineering student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who volunteers with Teto Verde Favela. "Everyone deserves to have access to green roofs, especially people who live in heat islands. They're the ones who need them the most." ...

It hasn't been long since Cassiano and the volunteers helped put the green roof on his house, but he can already feel the difference. It's similar, says Gomes da Silva, to the green roof-covered moto-taxi stand where he sometimes waits for a ride.

"It used to be unbearable when it was really hot out," he says. "But now it's cool enough that I can relax. Now I can breathe again."

(okay so this is gonna be a long post bc i took and then TAed a class partially about mosses so anybody who doesnt want a moss crash course should start scrolling now)

formally mosses are the only things in the taxonomic division Bryophyta. informally you’ll hear people refer to mosses as well as liverworts (Marchantiophyta) and hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) as ‘bryophytes’, because for a long time the three were all lumped into that division together, and people got used to using the term ‘bryophyte’ interchangeably with ‘nonvascular plant’. 

that term, ‘nonvascular’, is the big distinguisher for these three. basically these plants are very, very ancient lineages, as in liverworts are suspected to be the first plants to crawl out of the primordial ooze, and they don’t have proper, distinguishable vascular tissues (xylem and phloem are the main ones in all vascular ‘higher’ plants that forms the other 99% of the plant kingdom). they have primitive vascular tissues, but they’re not hefty enough to do much in terms of moving water through the plant. their ancestors weren’t able to get very far from the shore of the sea/away from a water source, because they needed to stay wet and depended on water for reproduction. while the latter is still true, modern mosses can be very well adapted to dry areas, and some are able to completely desiccate themselves and go dormant for long periods of time before being revived with the next rain. 

out of this triad of Old Lads, mosses and (leafy) liverworts look the most similar and get mixed up the most (there are ‘leafy’ liverworts and ‘thalloid’ liverworts. thalloid liverworts are wack and do not look like mosses at all). the differences between them are incredibly minute, but (leafy!!) liverworts, to be crude about it, are kind of proto-mosses with simpler physiologies. a common signifier is that leafy liverworts almost never have a costa (a single vein running down the middle of each leaf) and instead have completely smooth leaves, whereas costas are common in mosses. other differences are infuriatingly consequential (’oh, but see this liverwort has a costa but it’s still a liverwort, don’t ask questions’) and honestly i have no idea who decided which plants were leafy liverworts and which plants were mosses, but that’s just me.

i should mention also that mosses, like liverworts, are split into two major groups based on their growth forms: ‘acrocarpous’ mosses are mosses who’s stalks stand straight up, and ‘pleurocarpous’ mosses are mosses who’s stalks crawl along the ground. acrocarpous mosses won’t have branching stalks, whereas pleurocarpous mosses can. an example of an acrocarpous moss is on the left, an example of a pleurocarpous moss is on the right:

mosses do not flower. they reproduce by spores. liverworts and hornworts also reproduce by spores, not flowers. it’s easy to forget that ferns, which are like, THE original Old Lads, are actually younger than these lineages and are considered vascular plants for having more advanced xylems and phloems, and flowers didn’t come for several hundred million years after them. mosses reproduce by producing male and female reproductive organs on the parent plant, with sperm and eggs being produced in each, respectively. the sperm can swim, and fertilize the female eggs, which then sprout while still on the plant into stalks (seta) with capsules on the end. these capsules are full of spores, and when the plant is ready the tip falls off and lets the spores catch the breeze, and hopefully a few will find suitable conditions to sprout into new mosses. the entire cycle looks like this:

okay. habitats. mosses live on such a small scale that it’s best to think of how they live in terms of microhabitats instead of habitats, meaning that like, if you look at a forest from the road, that’s one habitat, but the mosses in that forest are experiencing a ton of microhabitats within that habitat. a moss that grows on the side of the tree will dry out really fast after it rains, so a species that might be more susceptible to overwatering may survive better on a tree trunk than at the base of the tree; both places, although at the same physical location, provide way different conditions and will be favored by different species. 

a moss that grows in a crack on the pavement will probably be absolutely swimming in water when it rains, so it’s probably a species that’s either fine with being submerged (and regularly trampled) or otherwise tolerant of it. a moss growing under a decaying log will have more shelter than others, and will have less airflow and higher humidity. if you’re a moss living on the bark on the side of a stump, and that bark rots enough to one day peel away and fall off, that might be absolutely devastating to you despite only losing like one inch of area, but the newly-exposed rotting hardwood creates a new microhabitat that might be favored by other species. it’s one of those things that you really start to notice once you start thinking about it.

now. i want to end this post with the world’s tallest self-supporting moss. my lichen and bryophyte professor has seen this moss in person and has confirmed it is really just Like That. the moss is the acrocarpus Dawsonia superba, and it’s native to Oceana. the tallest ever found was in Borneo, and was a meter tall. here’s a picture of it by gailtv on iNatrualist, observed december 17th, 2015 in New Zealand:

Chonkers™. now, the largest moss that doesn’t support itself is a pleurocarpous moss-vine, Spiridens reinwardtii, also native to Oceania, which crawls up tree trunks and can grow to a length of 3 meters. here’s one spotted by dantn, also on iNaturalist, observed august 23rd 2006 in northern Indonesia (it’s the one that looks like artificial christmas tree branches. that’s one single moss):