Fucked Up Cutlery

Benny, queer, butch, they/them, 30’s, UK based, musician, climber, gamer. Obsessed with plants, disgusted by late stage capitalism.

[huariqueje]

Cardoons in a Kentish Garden - Ruth Stage , 2020.

British , b. 1969 -

Egg tempera and handmade gesso on panel , 56 x 64 cm

[requiem-on-water]

[papertrailprints-blog]

Carrie Lingscheit, “Falling Cat”, Monoprint, 15" x 5.5", Available here.

[zyzscribbles]

Important question

[awkwardbirdsdreaming]

Okay but I think these two are onto something

[verbrannt74]

Test subject

(no bird was harmed)

[eco-situationism]

[tamvmat]

Oh I think I deleted it by accident..

My meme-ish poster about executive dysfunction, or "The Sits" as we call it in our house. This is to share my experiences with exec. dysfunction, everyone's a little different ☺️

[corrodedparadox]

You can draw whatever you want forever

Prints

[kap-wa]

Old Growth by Mitch Epstein (2021–2023)

[theleoisallinthemind]

Seen on Santiago Island, Cape Verde by Kristin Bethge

[egberts]

yiké

just don’t do that

[bbeelzemon]

i just spent entirely too long on this

[i-cant-think-of-anything-to-say]

hunting down tumblr posts i see on pinterest part 1193

[no-one-offical]

‎

[gardeningwithpina]

Why waste the rain?

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.

[aleeowl]

Also:

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...)

Plus using constructed wetlands to retain these discharges and treat them before rivers too!

[theprofessional-amateur]

I love a good Very Specific Resource. Here are the links to my posts about resources carefully crafted to share a specific bit of history (updated as needed)

How Fast Was the Mail - Interactive map that giving mail delivery info in the US 1882-1908, also general railroad network information

Streaming Music from Around the World - No algorithms, lots of options, amazing music nerds helping you discover more music.

Professor Shoelace - everything you ever needed to know about shoelaces

Commercial Pattern Archive - over 50,000 scanned sewing patterns dating back to the 1850s

Public Domain Image Archive - thousands of images from various repositories no longer under copyright

Medieval Murder Maps - interactive maps of murder and accidents in medieval London, York, and Oxford

Travel in Times - plan travel routes in England and Wales in various centuries

The Quilt Index - a digital repository of quilts, makers, and their stories

Louis Armstrong Archives - Some highlights from the archives and how to access the full collection from home!

RSN Stitch Bank - hundreds of sewing and embroidery stitches, their uses, their structure, how to make them, and history!

Archive of 80s mixtapes - a whole lot of tapes from the 80s and also tapes of background music from Kmart in the 80s and 90s

Feast Afrique - What started as an exploration and celebration of West African culinary heritage has since expanded to include history, language, culture, and customs of West Africa and the African diaspora.

Letterform Archive - Thousands of high quality images celebrating graphic design, calligraphy, and typography. The beauty of letters!

Historic Menu Collection - Over 17,000 historic menus, 1.3 million historic dishes transcribed. Historic popularity and price range, map it, and more.

Palestinian Embroidery - Digital archives dedicated to the preservation of Palestinian embroidery. Over 1,000+ free patterns

Black Craftseople Digital Archive - enhancing knowledge of Black crafts people (both free and enslaved) and the objects they produced.

Georgian Lady's Magazine Embroidery Patterns - Free embroidery patterns from 1770-1819

The Dutch Textile Trade Project - History and trade of textiles in the 17th and 18th centuries. Fabric types, images, data on trade.

Estonian Knitting - Bog knits! History! Techniques!

[kuttithevangu]

Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato

[w1zrad]

For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.

[cricketcat9]

There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼‍♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼

[i-just-like-commenting]

It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:

And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:

These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

August should be in Autumn. Fucking ridiculous that it isn't.

[white-flutterby]

I mean it’s winter here (southern hemisphere) but I agree, August is and Autumn month like spiritually, emotionally

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

In fairness this winter does feel like autumn. Some of the trees still haven't dropped their leaves because the climate is fucked.

[helloyesthisistheoperator]

Northern hemisphere here - I’ve seen them drop what feels like later and later the last couple years, but some not at all???? Yipes, that is deeply fucked alright

[omtai]

Nothing makes you think My One Precious Life. My One Precious Life Is Slipping Away And There’s Nothing I Can Do About It. quite like working a job does

[useless-catalanfacts]

The castellers of Vilafranca (Penedès, Catalonia) for Sant Miquel holiday in Vilafranca.

Castellers (meaning "castle builders") are groups of people who do the Catalan tradition of buildings castells ("castles" or human towers). There are many different structures for the castell, with different difficulties. Towns, city neighbourhoods, universities, and others have their own group, which everyone interested can join. They are seen as an icon of Catalan culture, representing the values of teamwork, inclusion, effort, and the resistance of Catalan culture.

They rehearse and then perform in the streets on the day of festa major (Catalan traditional holiday that each town holds on the day of their patron saint) or diades castelleres when groups from other towns also come to build their castells. Each group wears their shirt with a different colour, and fans can recognize all of them, like football fans do. They climb to the sound of a band of gralles (wind instrument very typical of traditional Catalan festive music, very loud to be played on the streets) which play the characteristic castells song, which the castellers use to coordinate the speed.

Photos by David Baell posted by Castellers de Vilafranca.

[northerlygale-deactivated202307]

[throwitonthepile]

[sporifluorous]

Dave Brandt was so much more than a meme. He partnered with universities to experiment with and expand soil conservation and cover crop techniques, worked to educate other farmers through worldwide conventions and direct mentorship, founded the Soil Health Academy, and was called the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of soil health" by the chief of the USDA's conservation department.

There is no healthy planet without healthy ag practices, and this guy was a legend.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

The A-horizon on his farm was 4 feet deep

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.

50 inches. The mind reels.

[improvrich]

This is so much more impressive than I can understand and comprehend and I would love to know more about A horizon

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Do you love the color of the Soil?

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.

Exactly