Planty of the Hamchuks

The roof is intact on the stone church, the trees are kept clipped. The trees are intentionally planted, there's some extremely non-native conifers in the landscape.

My biggest pattern to date, Nature's Journey! It was so fun to do all of these little motifs for this pattern 🌿

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

Interesting and affordable. 1979 Pyramid house in Magalia, CA has 3bds, 1ba, 2,340sqft, $125k, but it does need some work.

It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.

Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!”

Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”

Absurdity.

That’s what our criminal justice system is doing. All the time.

Rethink it. I’m begging you, rethink it. Think about it from the ground up: why do we even use prisons? Why? What do we solve? What have the police ever prevented from happening? When you called them, did things get better or worse? Why do we tolerate this?

Been watching a thing going down in the nearby city - homeless man that stalks and chases lone women, or young women. Small women. Sometimes he exposes himself to them. Most don't report it, and past charges have amounted to nothing (people blame the DA). It finally started to get into the news (story from 2022, from 2026). More and more people getting training and starting to arm themselves with bear spray, guns. Then in July he assaulted a lone woman, grabbing her by the neck in broad daylight. He's currently got a misdemeanor charge. He can't pay the $3000 bond and people are celebrating that at least he's off the streets - for now.

Rumor is that he is developmentally disabled, which is why he's never been found competent to stand trial. He is also black, and is stalking women in 2 neighborhoods - one is a predominantly white, wealthy neighborhood and the other is downtown. He has quickly become the face of the homeless here and I'm watching, in real time, people switch from 'we should be compassionate to the less fortunate' to 'GET ARMED SHOOT FIRST we all know the DA is too lenient to do anything anyway'.

Obviously, it's horrible for all the victims (over 70 spoke up back in 2022 I'm sure there's many more now), and all future victims he may have. It's terrible that this has been going on for years. Many women feel like no one cares about their safety, like they're community sacrifices since clearly their safety isn't as important as his freedom. Women scared to leave their houses, or walk alone in a very nice part of town. People are upset that the maximum sentence won't put him away for life.

Lascaux Cave, Montignac, Dordogne region, France,

Lascaux Cave is famous for its exceptionally well-preserved Palaeolithic paintings.

The cave, discovered in 1940, features over 600 painted and drawn figures, primarily animals like horses, deer, and bison, as well as nearly 1,500 engravings. 

She's one of the thousands of environmental scientists fired by the current regime, with a history in international diplomacy, running on a ecological justice platform. On making sure the environment is protected and the most vulnerable be first protected. She could name those vulnerable populations without mincing words of flinching. She loves landback and mass transit and helping voters vote.

She's going to win this big chunk of midwestexburbia.

And, again, she was key in her area at ICE resistance. This has become next to a prerequisite for running in Minnesota, now.

I want you to think about that.

Resistance to a federal agency as a key prerequisite to holding state office. We keep seeing it. People want to know- people ask- when we and our neighbors were in danger, what did you do about it?

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.

A lot of blackberries and raspberries have a thing where first year canes are called primocane and just do vegetative growth, usually making a long, branchless cane/vine. This vine/cane grows as much as it can its first summer, goes dormant for the winter, and then produces fruit the second year.

In the second year, when it's flowering, it's called floricane, and will produce side branches where the flowers and fruits grow. Most people cut floricanes down after they're done fruiting and have browned down for the winter, because they usually won't produce again.

"A couple of years ago I had a very special morning on Shetland where some wonderful people came together to show me Shetland ponies in their traditional working gear. Klibbers are the wooden contraption that sits on the horses’s back and people could then hang their loaded baskets, nets etc with the material you want carried. Here the pony is loaded with peat (but they would have carried all manner of things such as seaweed). Peat is used as a fuel to burn as there are very few trees. It is heavy stuff and people would have had to travel many miles to the peat bank and bring it home. Having a pony meant you could carry more peat and save time in multiple journeys.

Despite making this post in August, this post spikes in brief periods throughout the year, depending on when folks like to start.

Reading all the cool costume projects people are working on

Electric Rickshaws are Taking Off in India

As EVs spread in some other parts of the world, smaller vehicles like motorbikes or three-wheeled rickshaws are taking off in India. This is especially important given the high levels of air pollution in many Indian cities.

The shift is being driven primarily by cost as electric vehicles become cheaper and the cost of oil less predictable. About 70% of three-wheeled vehicles sold in India in 2025 were electric.