plant and ecosystems nerd

All round, though, it doesn't look good for Farage. It was a sham one-party election, so he can't play the "See? No one cares about my multimillion pound bribes, they still voted me in" card he was banking on. His only competition was a bin, and the bin actually did well. Meanwhile, as Goats says, he's now subject to the enquiry he tried to avoid.

He played a strategy that was supposed to be win-win, but the other major parties totally hamstrung it. And, credit where credit's due, the idea for the others to not stand this time was an absolutely genius move that, in fact, came from the static TV screen of a brain that belongs to, of all people, Kemi fucking Badenoch. Stopped clocks and that.

As the California pipevine plant was displaced from San Francisco by urban sprawl, the California pipevine swallowtail, which relies on the pipevine plant to feed its caterpillars, also disappeared. That is, until a biologist named Tim Wong made it his mission to repopuplate the species in his own backyard.

Armed only with a cutting of California pipevine from the San Francisco Botanical Garden, Tim created a screened in butterfly enclosure in his backyard and began to reproduce California pipevines.

As new butterflies were born, Tim would donate them to the San Francisco Botanical Gardens where their pipevine host plant could still be found.

“At first he brought them in by the hundreds. Now he brings them in by the thousands every few months.”

While most of us don’t have the power to create habitat for endangered rhinos or tigers, anyone with a little bit of outdoor space can help create habitat for endangered insects!

You can:

-plant a pollinator garden with native nectar-producing plants

-plant host plants of local butterfly species

-leave piles of fallen leaves or sticks in your yard as habitat for native bees

-avoid using pesticides (or use them as sparingly as possible) around your home and yard

This is not true for IGM (intersex genital mutilation) victims. When i say intersex infants and children are being mutilated, i am not disparaging bottom surgery- i mean that the intersex ""corrective"" surgeries performed against our will do not meet the same standards. They aren't something we choose, they're forced on us. Victims of IGM are often left with chronic pain, issues with genital function and sensation, poor aesthetic outcomes, and scarring (which affects both the visual appearance AND can cause functional issues). These surgeries are completely unnecessary and done largely at the doctor's discretion, often without the knowledge of parents (either because they were not told or they were fooled), and the victim is almost always deeply unhappy (and often dysphoric) as a result. Doctors get to decide to mutilate us, lie to our families, and then also mistreat and abuse us for the rest of our lives. Further, outside of the surgical procedures, growing up intersex means routinely going through violating and invasive "inspections" of your genitals by doctors. I can recall having doctors, nurses, and volunteers demand to see my genitals as a young child, touching and examining them without my consent- same for my breasts once i hit puberty. Just about every intersex person i know can say the same. It's routine and constant medical and sexual abuse from medical professionals.

There was a sign at the car park, described the coastal turf plant communities that are supposed to grow on the clifftops along the south coast of NZ, and explaining how they're largely unbothered by sheep-grazing because they grow so close to the ground. If that's the case, they need to get more sheep in, because almost the entire reserve was engulfed by knee-high introduced pasture grasses.

One of the threatened coastal turf species the sign said to look out for is this one, but the only place I found any growing was underneath the wind-pruned Monterey Cypress around the former lighthouse keeper's house site.

Probably extinct on the North Island. In the South Island known from Oamaru south to the Foveaux Strait. Surprisingly, it seems to do BETTER where humans go stomping around, to the point it was once a weed in Oamaru, but has vanished in areas where carparks and paths that were once used to access the coast have since been removed.

The flowers are tiny and lack petals.

Here's some pictures of my plants i took recently

I've gotten some really interesting insights on how the soil seed bank works, and how plant populations work when surrounded by lawn or frequently mowed/disturbed area.

Essentially it seems the plant population in the small area you have tried to diversify has to reach a critical mass to where it can produce enough seeds that it can get a foothold in surrounding dense plant populations (e.g. of lawn grass)

Diversity of genetics also might affect seed set and thus ability to spread.

AKA morrel. Another WA endemic mallee eucalypt, admired for its silver foliage and ludicrously enormous flowers.

In the wild it grows in sand in the Kwongan heathland northwards from Perth.

1) Grant you the experiences to speak on of everyone in that class

2) Unlearn the toxic rhetoric you were raised with

3) Keep you from enacting lateral violence or continuing to oppress others

When being inundated with attacks, restrictions on rights, and loss of opportunities it becomes harder than ever to acknowledge what things DID go right for you, what aspects of your life were and still are easier or benefitted from a specific privilege, areas where you are not the most at risk. It feels counter to the very real risk and loss you Are facing! Especially if you've always had aspects of it affecting your experiences and opportunities before you ever came out (ie being bullied for not acting your gender Correctly long before realizing you're not cis). It brings out the angry, scared child screaming "how can you say I had these chances, when I've been through-" - something made worse by the flattening of oppression and minority status to that of solely Attacker or Victim, either one who has everything against them or who's never experienced a real problem in their life.

It provokes a knee-jerk response to point out and generalize other minorities who've fallen for the very same trap - that it is easier to choose someone else to hate and blame, and hide behind your own shit experiences in defense of doing so, rather than do the work of unlearning the hate and the blame to move towards solidarity and a solution. Then there's the pull to compare, to say who has it better or worse, even within your own community. And if only the true victim can be believed, can be relieved of consequence for their actions and words due to what they've been through, you must be one of the ones who's had it WORST - and those who are even a little bit different than you must have an opposite experience.

But that is not reality. The reality is, that no matter how valid your pain and rage and fear, it does not excuse your actions or words from consequence. It does not do the work of unlearning what you were raised with, or listening and learning the experiences of those being affected by oppression in similar and different ways. It does not remove you from rehearsing the very same attacks and disbelief and marginalization that were inflicted on you.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

A previous gardener told my client that 'sometimes raspberries just fade away'. Uh, no. Raspberries are survivors. They will survive neglect, forming thickets over the years, just doing their own thing and slowly spreading. If you want the best fruit yield, you will want to give them a lot of fertility and irrigate properly, but no, they don't 'fade away'.

This gardener also made the choice to cut the canes, floricane and primocane both, down to two feet tall. Just below the bottom wire on the trellis. This is infuriating to someone like me who cares a bit too much about plants for a number of reasons:

1. Reduces fruit yield. Even cutting them back to 6 feet reduces yield, much less to 2 feet!

2. The new growth does reach above the wire, obviously, but it's a lot weaker than the over wintered cane, so if I tie by that, it's liable to rip off the branch entirely.

3. They are now extremely branched and much more crowding is going on knee to waist height. Annoying to pick at that level, and there's less light and airflow. This means less photosynthesis per cane and a greater risk of disease.

4. They left the spent floricanes! Bah.

5. It is my considered opinion that you should prune and tie canes at the same time. Like, even just from an efficiency standpoint. If prev gardener had done this, they might have noticed after the first cane that they were creating a problem.

6. They didn't even remove the canes that were too far away from the trellis.

7. If you did think they were weak and fading away, then why in the good green world would you prune away three quarters of their mass?

Ah. Between 3 & 7 I just realized why prev gardener thinks raspberries just fade away sometimes. Don't prune them like this.

I feel like I shouldn't leave without saying what I do so here:

1. Grow in a row with a trellis consisting of two sturdy posts and a wire strung at 5 feet/150cm ish.

2. In the fall, after they have dropped their leaves, cut out the canes that overwintered last year and fruited in the summer. These would be good to use in a bug hotel or deadhedge.

3. Tie any canes that are within a foot of the trellis at their base to the wire. Use a square knot around the canes so it can't sinch down:

4. Once it's tied at the wire, arch the tip over and tie that down too, so it's not flopping all over the place. You can shorten it a bit if you want. This is a simplified drawing to give you the idea of what I mean:

5. Dig up any canes that are too far to reasonably tie to the trellis, and either give them away or replant them closer if there's space. Or make a new row.

6. Mulch over the winter, and then feed with rich compost in the spring. Cover that with a layer of mulch.

7. If you're in a dry summer area, you will get a much better harvest by irrigating. One good strategy is a soaker hose run under a layer of mulch.

So overbearing raspberries are raspberries that were developed to fruit on the primocane (aka, the cane that came out of the ground that spring). If you don't cut them all the way to the ground in the fall, they'll also fruit on the floricanes (the canes that came up, grew through summer, and went dormant for winter to wake up again in the spring).

However, the whole point of them is that since they fruit the first year, you can mow them down in the fall after they've dropped their leaves and not have to bother with trellising them.