Anthony Powell

greg mosser wrote:oh, we’ll open one up and check, but i suspect it’s actually a decorative but inedible gourd. they’re really tiny.

Our local UK supermarket sells 'Munchkin' edible pumpkins, orange ones size of a man's fist.
I grew some of the seeds, only managed immature fruit before slugs started taking too much interest; cooked what I could rescue. Still here!

Here's my way of talking about CO2:
I've two bottles, gravy browning in water, one 280ppm, other 430ppm. The difference is visible. They're equivalent to CO2 in the atmosphere, pre-Industrial Revolution and now. While the gravy browning is absorbing light, the CO2 absorbs infra-red. What there was pre-Industrial was enough, the difference is already causing chaos. It's idiocy, but we're still adding to it. Totally insane that we're adding more than the year before, every year!
To get a grip on it, we need to move away from economic growth and improving standards of living, both based on fatness of wallets. It works by innovation, seeking more cost efficient ways to extract from holes in the ground, make stuff, sell it and dump in other holes. More and more, faster and faster... can Nature cope?
We need to move to Quality of Life, measured by smiles - sharing, caring, mending, living with nature.

To replicate my bottles, take 4 x 1 litre bottles. 14 grams of gravy browning in the first, 21.5 (impossible on scales measuring no fractions of grams, so 22 g) in the second. Make up to a litre with water. From each pour 20 grams into the third and fourth bottles, and fiil to 1 litre. The result is qualitative, not measurably accurate. The first two are equivalent to half the air above our heads, the latter two to looking through about 100 metres of air.

Around here in Cheshire, UK we have many small-fruited pears, called Hazel pears, or Hessle pears. They're very quick to ripen. It's known they were sent by rail for dying uniforms during the World Wars.
I don't know whether that's an option for unripe pears.

M Ljin wrote:My yam (Chinese) is four years old and has not spread. They seem to be very resilient and blend right in with the bindweed, which they resemble. They are climbing up a small willow tree. I have eaten a few aerial tubers raw and they are good—they very much resemble Bolboschoenus fluviatilis in flavor.

Is Bulboschoenus aka Scirpus fluviatilis? as detailed here - https://pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Scirpus+fluviatilis

I suspect mine are Dioscorea polystachia, obtained from a friend, who possibly got his from RealSeeds in Pembrokeshire, UK. A lot of their leaves are opposite, and the bulbils are tiny.
My tubers are planted individually in rose pots - tall plant pots. They're kept indoors in that state, I start watering in spring to encourage growth - but they'd probably start anyway. I'm aware slugs like them, so I'll only put them out when there's a good length on (raspberry canes are useful for climbing)).
Summer quarters are on an old dustbin of good compost. It's got a small hole 6 to 8 inches up - in a wet summer I've had the water table up to the surface without that. The yams send their roots down into the compost, no further than the water table (that'll be right at the bottom this dry year). Tops grow into a hazel, I introduce them to hanging twigs (less chance of snail attack).
In autumn I lift the pots and protect from frost. Then tip the bin and harvest the roots, dry them off and store in a plastic bag with my spuds. But first I check the pots - some will have given their all to the root in the bin, and there's no root in the pot. So I ensure there is a length of root in the pot for next year.
Hardiness: there was one year I was late harvesting, and freezing weather had arrived. Mush in the pots. Mush in the bin - until right at the bottom, some unfrosted root. In the ground the frost wouldn't have penetrated so deep, and I may have had a root breaking from deep. But, as others have said, extracting this root is no joke! Deep, brittle and thicker at the bottom. Someone cross it with carrot...

I store my tubers for eating in a plastic bag alongside my potatoes, in a cool kitchen cupboard. I found my last one sprouting about a month ago (in July), so potted it up. It's probably Dioscorea polystachya, obtained from a friend  who probably got it from Real Seeds in Wales (RealSeeds). It produces a few sub-pea size aerial tubers, I haven't seen flowers.
My technique: start the tubers in tall pots, after frost place well-sprouted plants on a bin of potting compost located under a tree with handy dangling bits to give them a start into the canopy. Slugs like them, so give them nothing to climb up. Before really cold weather starts, lift them: what's in the bin is profit, we hope; what's in the pots is for next year. So check there is tuber in there - it may have given its all to dive deep, in which case put some tuber in. The pots and tubers for eating come indoors. I don't start watering until Spring.

Jill Dyer wrote:Nettles seem to grow everywhere - especially when not required . . .
Compacted soil seems to attract the growth of moss, but I don't know of any uses for that - perhaps others do?  Other than that, guessing I'm lucky with my soil.

Nettles are noted for indicating a rich soil.
I recall an ecology field trip - a sloping field on limestone. Grasses and various flowers. In the middle, a patch of nettles: they were around a flush (like a weak spring), so added nutrition.

Ian Tolhurst's farm (Tolhurst Organics) has reportedly increased its soil fertility. Lots of ramial woodchip and no-dig, while harvesting organic fruit and veg.

Plant trees and they'll dig down and raise the good minerals. Mix with some nitrogen fixers.

As for first crop, learn about local forageable wild plants. Wild chamomile (Matricaria recutita) makes a good tea, came up well on our sandy allotment.

Kris Holstrom wrote:I helped start composting at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Compost/trash/recycling where it was once just trash/recycling.  The festival has 10,000 people attend each day for four days! A few years after I started (first with just the food vendors), the festival used compostable plastic cups. The whole process from training volunteers (who tried to train festival goers) to getting it all back to our farm and making compost out of it was quite a learning experience.

Smaller gatherings of eco-campaigners aim to collect theit excrement, directly dropped into wheelie bins, and trucked off to a nearby farm.
While researching, I did an internet search for 'mobile sewage'. Results unhelpful, but I did learn of a few people reporting visiting sewage treatment works. Peering over the wall at smelly, dark waters, mobile phones dropped out of breast pockets!

My dad had an old unsprung mattress, many decades ago, he buried in a flower bed in spring before planting it up with annuals.
The flowers were growing nicely, so too were yellow strands twining up the stems, sucking their sap. He was on his knees pulling them off his plants.
The mattress must have been filled with flax, complete with seeds of flax dodder, long dormant.