My Research Blog

Carbon sequestration as a means of increasing plant yields, suppressing weed growth and increasing plant vigor. I am also breeding plants and trees for drought and disease resistance.

[gemwel]

This is apparently a cattail with three distinct parts to the flowering bit. I got this free from a bird who deposited the seed about 3 years ago now. It grows in a shallow (2-6 inches deep) tub of water and is going to flower this year at last! (Chickens apparently love cattails as well and had to be blocked from access to it or they would feast until it was gone on the roots). It is now doing quite well in my masonry tub water garden.

[gemwel]

BOTANICAL INFORMATION CONSULTANT | Job Details tab | Career Pages

Job Opportunities | WELCOME TO THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES

Botany nerds who want to get paid for answering questions about botany and horticulture all day, the perfect job just opened up. (Sadly, my degree isn't in botany or horticulture).

[leebrontide]

A deadhedge isn’t the most glamorous part of gardening but it’ll beat the hell out of any cute bug hotel you can buy. Plus it covers the ugly chain link fence and gives me a productive use for the mangey non native hedge we cut down for the thorn bed. Turns out renting a wood chipper is wildly expensive even for a couple hours.

As we get more little sticks falling into the yard they can go in here.

I think maybe I can grow a clematis on it?

The end product will be twice as long as this but I gotta wait till pookie puts in more vertical sticks.

[gemwel]

We do this on hillsides to prevent erosion. Lay the sticks perpendicular to the slope so they will catch dirt and make mini-terraces. You can hammer in dead branches (NOT fresh prunings) to keep little sticks in place or put large (6+ inch or 15+ centimeters thick) logs as the base layer, or both. When it rains, the rain has to percolate through the mess of sticks, slowing it down and helping it absorb better into the ground.

[gemwel]

Filling a box with homemade soil. Now to choose the lucky plants that will get to grow in it (the white specks are mostly eggshells). Probably mango seedlings in grow bags as I need to move them from the shallots soon.

[gemwel]

If you buy potatoes or onions and they start to sprout because you kept them too long (or they are too gross or slimy to eat), you can always plant them and get more.

This is from a baby red potato. We got half a kilo of more baby red potatoes instead of tossing it.

This is a sweet onion that sprouted. Lots of onion greens and it is setting seeds that can be used to grow more onions.

These are green onions. The original package went off (the onions were yellow and slimy). So of course they got planted, set seed and now the seed germinated and made more green onions. (The carrots were from a packet of seed, but the taro was from the grocery store and is also edible. Please always cook taro leaves, stems, or roots before eating them.)

[gemwel]

I don't really see anyone posting this style of (visible or invisible depending on thread choice) mending. This applique/blanket stitch is a workhorse, but I also use other needlelace and needleweaving stitches as well.

Basically you whip stitch the rip closed (if large), then stabilize the surrounding fabric with overlapping rows of stitching. (I also hate these pants as the fabric has been ripping like this since they were brand new and eventually they will be covered in repairs).

[rjzimmerman]

There’s No Way the American West Will Have a Normal Summer

This week’s record-breaking heat dome augurs badly for the months to come.

Excerpt from this story from The Atlantic:

Spring is just about here, if you go by its official start date, on the equinox. But in the American West, it feels like we skipped right to summer. A record-smashing heat dome has settled over a huge swath of the United States, from California to Montana and down to Texas. At my house in Colorado Springs, where we are 6,700 feet in elevation, highs could hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit this Saturday. The usual high temperature should be around 55 this time of year. Just outside Phoenix, a baseball spring-training matchup between the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds was rescheduled to 6:05 p.m. Friday, rather than a typical afternoon start time. Highs around Phoenix are expected to hit 106 Friday and Saturday, about 30 degrees above normal for mid-March. We are roasting out here.

This is not normal. Or at least it wasn’t normal in the past. The heat wave is happening because of a bizarrely strong ridge of high pressure in Earth’s atmosphere. The ridge suppresses cloud formation and brings in warmer air. Such atmospheric ridges are more common in the summer, but this one would be unusually intense even for that season. It is the strongest ridge ever observed in March, Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior researcher at the science nonprofit group Climate Central, told me. The group’s researchers have developed a prediction model that assesses how much a warming trend or record high can be attributed to human-caused climate change. According to the model, climate change is making this week’s western high temps five times more likely.

More subjectively, this heat dome is “otherworldly,” “genuinely startling,” and “absurd,” depending on which meteorologist you ask. The spread of March temperatures on Colorado’s Front Range is typically wide, but not so wide that the Denver metro area should be expecting highs in the 80s—even inching up to 90. March is also, famously, the state’s snowiest month. Peak snowpack usually falls around April 9. This year, we passed peak snowpack a couple of weeks ago, and the heat wave means that by mid-April, much of the snow will probably be gone for the season.

This is not just our problem, or Arizona’s; the whole West is baking right now. In Nevada, a state whose name literally means “snowy,” Great Basin National Park will see temperatures in the 70s. From March 4 to March 16 in California, the snowpack melted at 1 percent a day on average, according to the state’s Department of Water Resources. Peak snowpack in the state probably happened in mid-February, about 40 days before the typical peak.

Snowpack is vital for water in the West, serving as a savings account for summer water needs; the heat wave will flush that account empty. My favorite Colorado ski area, which reaches 11,952 feet in elevation at its summit, could see high temperatures of 55 degrees over the weekend, for instance. The snow will turn to slush and melt fast, and streams will be high and turbid; one of the threats from this heat wave is actually hypothermia, for people who find themselves (intentionally or otherwise) in rushing, snow-fed rivers.

But then the rivers and lakes filled by melting snow will run dry, months sooner than they should. Lake Powell and Lake Mead will drop, maybe by a lot. The parched ground throughout western states will become a tinderbox. Already, communities in the Denver metro area have declared Stage 1 drought, and others are considering the same, which means restrictions on water use. Governor Jared Polis activated the state drought task force on Tuesday, often a harbinger of statewide-drought declaration. Again, let me punctuate that this is happening in the middle of March.

[realcleverscience]

The True Scale of our Garbage

Insightful but also a bit depressing. A few tech innovations that will help:

Biodegradable plastics. That would take care of some of the hardest parts of the problem.

Automated trash sorting. This will make recycling a LOT easier, which is important bc it not only means less trash, but literally converting trash to raw materials with value.

Advanced chemical recycling. This will make sorting less of an issue and may help us recycle back into purer materials with more use and value

Cleanup systems like the Ocean Cleanup's which focus on waste reduction in oceans and seas.

Clean energy. Plastic is cheap bc it's basically a wasteproduct from oil and gas. As the planet moves off those energy sources, petroleum plastics will become more expensive and therefore less economical.

So there's lots of options for tackling this issue - but it also requires public demand that fuels the r&d and legal requirements for these types of changes.

[gemwel]

Yes, but processing trash into soil carbon is about to become a reality. I think getting rid of landfills and changing how we think of trash is a lot more sustainable than just reducing/recycling plastic. (Plus you can get biofuels as a byproduct of the soil carbon synthesis process and solid carbon sequestration).

Soil made from food waste as California mandates putting food waste into the organic waste container, which is just nasty. Processing it into soil dramatically reduces flies and odors compared to putting it out for collection. Plus you can never have enough soil. 🤣

I know the person who is trying to get a permit to commercialize this in California. But the existing industries that benefit from the status quo definitely has more money and routinely claim that this is impossible and make it impossible to get funding for this type of research.

(You can actually pull recycling other than paper out at the end of the process as the soil synthesis primarily works on organics).

[solar-sunnyside-up]

I feel like yall don't know bout earthships??

An earthship is a building that's built out of recycled materials (glass bottles, old tires, cans, etc..) and mostly Cob walls with solarpanels, wind turbines, greenhouses, and large water capture system to ensure all you need within the walls. All these components help regulate the temp for both plants and you creating a proper oasis from all of itnall

Here's a good dissection of one to give you an idea

The most famous one, and one of the first ones ever made back in the 1970s by a small off grid group working together is The Phoenix which was built as the model for how cool these guys could be its now a place you can take tours or rent-

But now there is so many different styles and cool ideas for it! Now some of these are merely concepts

But you can adapt them to any weather for your particular light/weather/energy conditions.

The main thing about Earthships is typically they are illegal to build as the US government considers them waste sites due to the materials their built out of.

[gemwel]

If you want something better, that can actually meet building codes:

Sadly, it appears to no longer be doing actual engineering research. But there are still buildings.

This is why we need engineering PhDs and not influencers: to take cool ideas and make them functional and structurally sound. I think Antoni Gaudi also did similar designs from an architectural background, but more above ground from what I have seen pictures of.

[plantnerderyallday]

It didn't get cold enough for the blueberries to lose their leaves this year. Which is, you know, a first. To my recollection. I think they'll still flower, because blueberries need around a thousand hours between freezing and 45f/7c, and we certainly got that. Just not, you know, below 25f/-4c like in a normal winter.

It does make we wonder about how agriculture is going to change and adapt and migrate. How are people going to change and adapt and migrate.

[fairhairedkings]

if you like crafting and also free things, might i suggest the antique pattern library?

it’s a not for profit that’s gathering books, patterns, and other materials related to crafting that are out of copyright (or getting permission from copyright holders in some cases) in order to share them online. they scan items, clean them up, then make everything available for free!

free things are great, especially when you’re just starting to get into something. like oh, i’m supposed to spend money on this hobby i just picked up 20 minutes ago???

the first time i ended up on the site, i seriously spent hours just trawling through everything. there’s the usual suspects like knitting, crochet, embroidery, but there’s also woodwork, calligraphy, and books on things like how to mount and frame pictures. with cross stitch patterns, they also make modern charts with the dmc colour codes available.

links to their webbed site and instagram:

https://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/

https://www.instagram.com/theantiquepatternlibrary/

behold, a glorious cat cross stitch pattern (link goes to antique pattern library page):

[image id: Multicolour charted cross stitch design of a cat sitting on a red pillow with tassels, holding a green ball]

[covid-safer-hotties]

How long is an N95 mask effective? How can you tell it is time for a new one?

Thomas Talhelm's answer: I’ve seen several people say masks only last a day or two, such as this person who emailed me about the question.

Saved in our archive

[gemwel]

This confirms my experience in early 2020, when I had to reuse the same set of N95 masks from March to July of 2020. Wildfire smoke or just general cleaning/sweeping/dust is what kills masks quickly, not prolonged indoor use.

[headspace-hotel]

There is a lot of information out there about weaving, crocheting and knitting, but relatively little about spinning.

Which is a shame, since spinning is really where the "resource provided by the earth" tangibly becomes "object with a use."

Aspects of spinning, such as the amount of twist and the length of the fibers, are impactful upon the thread or yarn created, but lots of fiber crafters don't get to directly play with those variables...

It is so strange how textile production is so utterly dominated by very few fibers, when so many are possible. Industry keeps coming up with new ways to transform bamboo or something into fibers, which is all well and good, but we have yet to run out of easily usable natural fibers that have worked for thousands of years.

Dogbane—Apocyonum cannabinum—was called "Indian hemp" because it was used by Native Americans for ropes, cords and textiles. It's incredibly strong, soft, and easy to collect large amounts of it. But hardly anybody uses it.

[bookwyrmbran]

As far as yarn construction (twist, fiber staple, ply, draw, etc) goes, may I recommend the Spinner's Book of Yarn Designs (Sarah Anderson) and Yarnitecture (Jillian Moreno)? @dirtypuzzle mentioned SpinOff and Fibershed in the comments and those are great magazines and ways to find local groups as well. I've read some great articles on prepping and spinning flax, hemp, cotton, and silk on there in addition to the more popular fleece/fur/hair fibers.

For those especially I can't over-recommend the Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook or the Field Guide to Fleece (Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius.) An awful lot of excellent fiber breeds and species are now unknown, under-used, and in danger of going extinct; Shave 'Em to Save 'Em and the Livestock Conservancy in general are good resources for finding local people working with those. There's a chiengora (dog wool) group on Ravelry that's great, too, and lots of easily searchable info on raising silkworms at home and spinning from hankies.

There really is a dearth of information easily available on most plant fibers, I too would love to see more of it for like... almost everything, really. At a guess, most potentials get ignored at an institutional level because they're a pain to grow and process in bulk, which in turn means there's little if any data on how they stand up to modern washing and drying and detergents. Bast fibers tend to be a pain to prep as an interested individual (and often smelly!) and can be hard on the hands while spinning, especially those with extra long fibers. Even so a lot of people would spin old/new/ignored plants if they didn't have to process raw plant into spinnable fiber. I suspect that and not knowing which plants might be good options are the biggest obstacles to at least hobbyist experimentation.

[dirtypuzzle]

Here's a blog post where someone attempts to process and spin milkweed stalks. Keep in mind, milkweed stalks produce a bast fiber whereas milkweed fluff can also be spun but makes a brittle yarn by itself and is often mixed with wool or cotton, though I would assume you could process the stalks and then spin the floss into the fiber from the stalks. Spin Off talks about it here. Milkweed also sustains monarch butterflies, which have been having a rough time. You might have some skin reactions when handling milkweed though, so keep an eye.

Fibershed did a spotlight on dogbane, nettle, and milkweed in comparison to hemp and flax. They talk specifically about Native American techniques and current cultivation of all three, particularly dogbane, and ways to spin yarn and make rope. They aren't super in-depth about processing the fibers, but it seems like it's because they have more tutorials/guides on other pages. Bast fibers all have a similar retting->drying->scutching->hackling->spinning (you also have to ripple flax at the beginning) process, generally speaking.

Of course, flax is a really accessible plant fiber to spin yourself! You can plant it yourself, buy unprocessed flax (locally or online), or buy processed but unspun flax. If you're interested in the whole process, this book is the flax bible: Linen: From Flax Seed to Woven Cloth by Linda Heinrich. There are a lot of youtubers who go through it all, too.

If you're interested in kudzu, then may I suggest Oigawa Kudzu-fu Studio! They're located in Japan, but they have helpfully created an English website, too, where they go over making kudzu-fu (Japanese name for the cloth from kudzu). And if you ever find yourself going to Japan, you can take a class from them.

On Oigawa Studio's info page, they also mention that they work with ramie (plant in the nettle family), linden tree (basswood), and wisteria, so do with that what you will. I assume a lot of those resources are in Japanese.

Finally, hemp. Laws around if and how you can plant hemp, even for personal non-THC uses, vary wildly from state to state and country to country, so do your research. I'm not super familiar with it, and in my state I literally can't grow any of it at all without applying for a permit, so it's not really worth it for me.

[headspace-hotel]

I've seen a lot of these online resources! They're great starting points. I've also done quite a bit of work with spinning various fibers. I actually made a yarn out of entirely milkweed fluff, though it was too fragile to be very useful for anything, it was a fun learning experience and I'm sure it would work great blended with other fibers.

This is my personal experience with dogbane:

I tried retting, but instead of making the fibers easier to separate from the cuticle, it seemed to make them even harder to clean off. What little Ive been able to read about Native American practices of prep suggests that there was no retting process at all, the fibers were cleaned by scraping.

This was roughly what I came to on my own. I have a sickle-shaped chip of reddish chert/quartz, about as long as my palm, and I just pull the fibers against it so the dry flakes of cuticle come off.

My other tools are: a cheap grill brush, the kind with metal bristles, a hair brush with the stiffest hard plastic bristles I could find, and a round rock I took from some decorative landscaping. The grill brush is for combing out the fibers and for using with the hairbrush to agitate the fibers like carding wool. The round rock is for beating the fibers while they're wet and twisted into a tight bundle, which helps them separate into finer threads. Right now I am experimenting with whether boiling the fibers helps any part of the process, and it's inconclusive so far.

A couple reasons why dogbane might be hard to market as a fiber include: the plant while alive is toxic to humans and animals including dogs, as the name suggest, and secondly, the fibers are orange.

I don't know if the color is genetic or caused by growing conditions, since I have gathered some fibers that are a blond color or even nearly white, but most of the dogbane plants i've professed have had orange fibers, ranging all the way into a deep copper shade.

The colors are honestly really beautiful, but I imagine dyeing the dogbane other colors might be difficult.

[dr-dendritic-trees]

I would actually suspect one of the reasons these resources are scarce is a really boring one.

In my experience, from talking to other spinners, very few spinners like processing fibre. Most people would prefer to buy it ready to spin, if given the option, and since its a hobby, they have the option. But only if they buy commonly used commercially viable fibres (which tend to be wool and silk and a little bit of flax.

People who really want to do the full process are actually very rare and you will probably be very popular in fibrecrafting spaces if you are publicly interested in doing it.

One (1) guy showed up to our weaving guild and mentioned in passing that he enjoyed processing wool and suddenly he was the most popular person in the room. It was very striking.

One the other hand while you're absolutely right that historically there's been a premium placed on white fibre, there is a rapidly growing interest in naturally coloured fibres so that coppery dogbane I've seen in your photos is probably increasingly appealing right now.

[headspace-hotel]

Wait really?

Processing and spinning fibers is like the cocaine of fidget toys. I can't get enough of it. I've legitimately been late to class because I couldn't peel myself away from my fibers

[tumorhead]

I am a big fan of Sally Pointer's Youtube channel. She does historical + PREhistorical(!!!) crafts (European cultures mostly), including wild-foraged fibercraft. She studies artifacts and does recreations. Something about using techniques from the Neolithic and such gives me feelings....also I definitely wanna make some cordage from plants I've got growing....it doesn't look hard just tedious.

I love boring my husband by watching videos about making string.

[gemwel]

A really good way to determine what kind of fiber a plant will produce is to smash the plant (with a rubber mallet) or pick it apart (with your fingers) and see what kind of fibers you see.

Here, we can get long fibers from common mallow and short fibers from the local stinging nettles (which don't really have long fibers). The palm trees also have interesting short and long fibers, but they seem to be fragile and prone to breaking. Most plants have fibers in the outer layer of the stems/branches that can often be picked off. There is also a (mostly inactive) plant fiber group on Tumblr.

For extracting plant fibers, rubber mallets and/or a pasta machine are good for the hitting/squishing needed to start the process. Then there is retting (rotting in water/dew, usually for 7-14 days), cleaning (you can make sodium carbonate from baking soda for this or use dish soap/laundry soap), then maybe more hitting/squishing followed by combing (you can use actual hair combs for long fibers or dog combs for short fibers) before spinning.

Some fibers (like cotton) can be spun directly from the plant. But once you start looking for fibers, you will find them everywhere as they are usually essential to plant structural integrity.

As a bonus, plant fibers usually work better for clothes in hot areas.

Lots of interesting resources in the thread above I will need to check out, but definitely things are biased towards wool spinning at present (my local shop just looked at me strange when I asked about tools for plant fibers and suggested wool stuff).

Finally, processing plant fibers can make a huge, potentially stinky mess, so it is often best to do the initial steps outside.

[rederiswrites]

Hi Red,

What sort of containers do you use for potting up seedlings? My husband is a bit concerned about plastic 4” pots, because microplastic. He’s also concerned about paper cups as they are lined with stuff, not actually wax, but like BPAs ? I don’t really have money or desire to buy tons of ceramic pots. Is there something I’m missing? This is my first opportunity to get a garden going in like 20 years, so I very well could be missing something. Thanks

__

Dammit, I accidentally hit post without saying anything. Okay so!

I reuse plastic seedling trays. I also save and use yogurt/sour cream/etc containers. Some are just regular ones and they fall apart over time, but others are made to be reusable and a bit sturdier. The way they break doesn't really lend itself to creating microplastics, at least not in use. Obviously in the landfill they're as bad as anything. But in use, they'll split along a seam or tear, and become useless that way, rather than shedding parts. I feel pretty fine with using the sturdier ones. I think I got mine from Epic Gardening.

Another method that I've not done because it requires a fairly costly up front investment for the tool is making soil blocks. Basically you use a metal press to form blocks of specially mixed soil that holds together well enough to use on their own. Looks like this:

If you search for soil blocks, you'll find plenty of information.

There exist pots made out of pressed peat or other biodegradable materials (including cow manure), which you will even find at big box stores, but I am not much of a fan of those. They tend to wick water out of the soil and require much more attention to watering than plastic cells do, for one thing. For another, when you put them in the ground, they do still inhibit the roots for a while before they completely break down, especially if any part of the pot sticks up above soil level, because then the pot will dry out rather than breaking down.

Similarly, you can buy what are called peat pellets. In the store, they look like this:

And when you soak them in water, they expand to look like this:

The fine outer layer you can see is supposedly a biodegradable fabric.

I like peat pellets alright, but they're harder to pot up from if you want to grow, say, tomatoes bigger than they can get in these. They are kinda fun, though, ngl.

People also use cardboard egg cartons, and I've done that, but personally I don't think they provide enough growth space for most plants. Can't beat the price, though.

New idea on the block is seed snails, where you roll up soil in a plastic jelly roll kinda thing. People are mostly using waste plastic for this, like that sheet foam things get shipped in, or used plastic bags. I'll probably cut up feed bags for mine It looks like this:

People are liking them because you can start a lot of seeds in a small space, and yet the roots can grow deeply. I'm interested to try this method for things you want a lot of but don't need to get big before you plant them outside, like onion seedlings.

[gemwel]

You can also use empty metal food cans as pots, just be sure to punch a drain hole at the bottom with an ice pick/awl or drill the hole. Then, when your seedlings are planted, you can turn them in for cash at your local recycling center if you don't have storage space.

I have also seen toilet paper and paper towel tubes used as pots and there are tools to make paper pots (usually from newspaper). If you have cardboard boxes, they could also be used as pots. Paper pots/egg cartons can decompose faster than the seedlings mature, at least for me. If you use paper containers, assume the bottom will be gone at planting time and there will be soil everywhere (but you can easily tear the container off and add to your compost, avoiding the issues with the container wicking moisture away from your seedlings after planting).

[wachinyeya]

Cherry Crops Kept Safe from Diseases Thanks to Tiny Kestrel Falcons in Michigan

By keeping rodents and small fruit-eating birds out of the orchards, kestrels were found to be an effective means of pest control.

By Andy Corbley -Jan 27, 2026

A study run by Michigan State University in the state’s upper peninsula has discovered that encouraging American kestrels to nest in cherry orchards also reduces the presence of food-borne illnesses that can be passed via the fruit to consumers.

By keeping rodents—but particularly small, fruit-eating birds out of the orchards, kestrels were found to be an effective means of pest control.

“Kestrels are not very expensive to bring into orchards, but they work pretty well,” said Olivia Smith, lead study author and assistant professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. “And people just like kestrels a lot, so I think it’s an attractive strategy.”

The hypothesis of Smith and her colleagues was that by keeping fruit-eating birds away, fewer avian pathogens would reach the shelves of the grocery store. This proved largely correct, as kestrel-guarded orchards showed an 81% decrease in instances of crop damage, including missing fruit and fruit with bite marks, and a 66% decrease in bird droppings on the fruit trees.

“I’ve noticed a difference having the kestrels around, hovering over the spring crops,” Brad Thatcher, a farmer based in Washington state who has housed kestrels in the fruit and vegetable areas on April Joy Farm for over 13 years, told Inside Climate News. “There’s very little fecal damage from small songbirds at that time of year versus the fall.”

There are no shortage of problems for cherry and fruit farmers these days, from wild weather swings to labor shortages. Perching birds are just one more issue to deal with, and they’re quite the issue, causing some $85 million in losses every year among major growing states like Michigan and California.

Growers attempt to prevent the fruit loss in a variety of ways, including chemical repellents, lethal shooting, trapping, hanging nets over their trees, visual and auditory scare tactics, and even deforesting the area surrounding the orchard.

Not only were the kestrels found to be more effective at keeping the birds away, but the detectable levels of Campylobacter, the most common foodborne pathogen spread by bird feces, were lower on branches in orchards with kestrel nest boxes (0.97% compared to around 10%).

On Michigan Cherry Farms, Small Falcons Are Improving Food Safety - Inside Climate News

Kestrels are already abundant on local cherry farms, but a new study suggests their presence might lower the risk of food-borne illnesses ca

Falcons reduce pre-harvest food safety risks and crop damage from wild birds

[botaniqueer]

I was looking at resources on food gardening– particularly regarding planting dates since I'm trying to figure out what I want to sow for fall and winter harvests, and I found this cool document from Washington State University that goes into a lot of specifics, though I haven't gone through it completely yet

Right now I'm grabbed by this chart on page four that goes into the difference in quality of your home grown stuff vs. supermarket stuff.

As a gardening and hobby biologist I love growing plants but also gardening in itself isn't radical (too individualized still and folks including other leftists overestimate how much food their gardens will cover of their food needs) and for it to be radical it growing food would have to be on the level of communities and society itself (which where I am would mean Land Back and restoring the food forests), BUT it is fun and satisfying to know when we're able to grow stuff ourselves it ends up being better that what you could find at a Fred Meyer for a lot of things.

I also know the reason the things there aren't as good are because of the logistics of making sure the food is able to ship well and stay fresh and not rot in the shelves, which is why when something is able to grow nearby we're able to pursue more unique stuff that wouldn't be easily shippable.

It's also an easy-to-access planting chart as well!

Other things I see right now are different types of garden and guides to root depths (which helps with intercropping).

[gemwel]

There are also so many foods you will never find in the grocery and can only access by growing them. So many people focus on what they are familiar with from the grocery store when growing your own food gives you access to a much greater variety of food. Add in a basic ability to water bath (boiling pot of water) can (high acid fruits) and dehydrate/freeze foods (veggies and fruit unsafe for water bath canning) and you may not even need to go to the grocery anymore for fruits and veggies.

[gemwel]

Even the weeds can be beautiful and serene. These came from a neighbor's tree and are extremely hard to get rid of (even cutting them to the ground, they will resprout). But it was lovely sitting under them before cutting them down yet again and they make lovely mulch.