Christopher Weeks

I hate the perennial runner grasses that constantly invade my garden beds. I'd love for this thread to show me that I'm wrong and chart a path for living in harmony with them, but I'm starting out with a murderous bias against them. (Grain-bearing grasses, I love!)

Noting for myself: 13.7kg of elderberries is 10,000 Calories.

The one I know about is in northern California (Ft. Bragg).


Picture from: https://www.californiabeaches.com/beach/glass-beach/

That's fascinating. I have always just let the seeds grow, so I don't have any personal first-hand experience to call on -- but the extension trials seem to indicate that it loses less than 50% of the annual harvest (some of which isn't actually fewer/lighter stalks, it's just more fibrous and yucky).

EFN is out of stock: https://store.experimentalfarmnetwork.org/products/whitten-kenaf but you could write to them and ask about it or just get on the 'notify me when it's back' list.

Thom Bri wrote:Birds are the main seed predator in my area, raccoons and deer less a problem, rodents hardly at all. If I leave the corn ears uncovered, birds will destroy at least half. They peck the husks open and eat the grain in the milk to dough stage. Then insects and mold get in and the whole ear is wasted. I either wrap the ears with large leaves, or put plastic drink bottles over them once pollination is done.

Crows started doing this to my corn five years ago so I started feeding peanuts to bluejays and cultivated their presence at my place. They don't let the crows hang around anymore and they don't bother the corn (yet).

We also make nixtamal (though we have all the gadgets) -- almost weekly. We regularly make tortillas, sopes, chochoyotes, and tamales. I've done it with Cal and with wood ash. It's an extra step, for sure, but it's light work.

It seems like all of the above is about the bad side of applications, which is interesting. I'll go the other way.

When you're writing a web-application, you have to contend with an uncontrolled intermediary -- the browser. Browsers implement web standards differently from one another and so the author of the application can't count on a particular behavior. They have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make the software adapt to a range of possibilities. When they write an application, that's all gone. There is still the device's operating system -- changes to which can pull the rug out from under application authors but it's much less of a wild-west situation to contend with. So the application authors are able to tightly customize and control your user experience and make things (hopefully) more functional and performant.

I don't write software for mobile devices, but I do write both web and Windows applications and I vastly prefer to write Windows apps for the level of control and ease of debugging it affords. And my work is all internal to an electronics factory so I don't even have to contend with a million challenges that public-facing web development does.

I install apps when I value what they give me. I run Discord on my phone, but on my PC I just use the web interface. If some news website wants me to install their application, I don't do that -- they're just looking to hook more strongly into my life and I don't want that. But I'm not particularly worried about the spyware that a lot of people are.

First harvest seemed like an ass-load but it was only 797g of greens. There are also a few roots and rosettes, I’ll have to figure out what to do with them.