Eino Kenttä

I'll echo what others have said, that doing the best you can is good enough, and good enough is good. I'm also thinking that at the moment, there's a whole lot of tools and resources going to waste because it's cheaper (counted in money) to make a new one of whatever-it-is. If you use these things, you're not adding to the destruction, you're using part of a waste stream for the benefit of you and others. It seems to me that, other than food and possibly clothes, there's enough of everything right now to last all of humanity for a few generations, with reuse, repair and some ingenious repurposing and recycling. (How many axes can you make from one old steel pylon for a high-voltage power line?) After that, who knows, but if we try to chart a "perfect" course for the rest of humanity's existence, we'll just drive ourselves mad, at no benefit to ourselves or the world. I think we need to live in the now, do the best we can, take things as they come, and accept that we can't solve every problem for the future. After all, we need to leave the people living 300 years from now something to figure out!

On another note, I personally don't really see how metal (particularly iron) would be impossible to recycle indefinitely, at least in principle. It's a chemical element, it doesn't get destroyed or irretrievably lost. Even if we only think about what's practical and the immediate sources of useable iron, there are actually some that replenish themselves quite rapidly. I'm thinking about bog ore and other deposits built up by iron-oxidizing bacteria. These have been used sustainably in the past. Most farmers in Scandinavia back in the day did at least part of their own metalwork, starting from bog ore. The only reason it's not considered a viable source of iron at present is the sheer, massive scale of iron usage.

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:What I wanted to say was: why all 'staples' together in one bed? I think a polyculture can have one staple together with some other vegetables. Maybe a combination of leafy vegetable, root vegetable, fruit vegetable, edible flower together in one bed?

Eventually, that would be great. Maximum diversity is probably the way to go. However, so far our growing space is limited, so I'd like to see how well the staples grow either together or on a rotation. Other vegetables can be included gradually, one by one, to see how well they fit in with the rest. Also, the creeping bellflower is very multi-purpose. Other than the roots, it's one of the best cooked leafy greens I know, and this year I tried the young flowering stalks before the buds develop. It was very nice raw (unlike the leaves, which have a slightly "prickly" texture until cooked).

Please let us know how your potato/bellflower co-growing goes, if you try it!

If it's some sort of digestive issue, it might be worth a try to get her to eat a bit of crushed charcoal. You might need to mix it into something tastier.

Otherwise, for whatever it's worth... The only time I've (possibly) cured a chicken of anything was years ago when my parents kept a few. One of the hens died from some sort of infectious disease, with symptoms a bit like flu - sneezing, unwillingness to eat or move, some mucus-ish looking stuff leaking from the beak, etc. Then shortly after, another one caught it and it got worse quite quickly. I thought I might as well try something, and fed the chicken a strong decoction of Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium) roots, which contains berberine. She recovered shortly after.

In all honesty, I have no idea if what I did made the difference. Maybe she'd have recovered regardless. Since we had no way of knowing what the actual disease was, and it only killed one chicken, maybe it wasn't generally lethal. Two is a very small sample size. At least, the experiment indicates that Oregon grape isn't immediately lethal to chickens...

Same here. Deep ocean it is. We really know very little about what's down there; they say we know way more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the deep seas.

Our piece of land is a narrow-ish strip, roughly 1,200m long, running more or less in a north-south direction. The lowest point (lake shore, southern end) is about 18m above sea level. The highest point (above the treeline, nearly to the top of the mountain ridge) is at 300m above sea level. So yeah, quite steep. Not an uniform slope by any means, some patches are flatter, though calling any of it "flat" would be lying. (I'm reminded of that thing from one of Terry Pratchett's books: "The only flat places are the tops of tables and some people's heads.") The steepest parts I wouldn't want to try climbing without a tether.

There are upsides and downsides to the slope (pun sort of intended). Since it's south facing, I imagine it improves the microclimate quite a bit. Also, it ensures that our copious amounts of rain water drain away without issues. On the downside, building things is a hassle even on the flattest patches, and of course transporting things up-slope is heavy.

Ac Baker wrote:
What do we think about this new study of solanine content in potatoes in various states?

“Solanine thresholds for acute toxicity are consistently misapplied in home kitchens. We’ve measured over 1,200 retail and pantry-sourced potatoes since 2022—and fewer than 0.7% exceeded 10 mg/100 g, the level at which we recommend caution. Most ‘sprouted’ potatoes tested were well below 2 mg/100 g—even with 2 cm sprouts.”
— Dr. Lena Cho, Toxicologist & Lead Author, FDA-Collaborative Potato Safety Study (2024–2026)

https://commercialtoolry.com/food/you-ve-been-wasting-potatoes-sprouts-aren-t-toxic-2026-guide

That's interesting! Personally, though, it's not so much the possibility of getting poisoned that makes me cautious with green potatoes, but rather that I bloody hate the taste of solanine. I just can't stand it, and it seems like my threshold for detecting it is lower than other people's. Don't know if that means my threshold for poisoning is also lower than average, but it doesn't really matter, since my body won't let me consider potatoes food if they're even just a little bit solanine-y. I tend to trust my body.

I generally prefer not peeling, but I think a case can be made for it if the potatoes are on the verge of turning green. Most of the solanine is in or just under the skin of the potato, so peeling (and maybe cutting away a bit more than the skin) might sometimes turn a horrid-tasting, somewhat toxic, spoiled vegetable into usable starch. Of course, that also removes most of the nutrients, but you would've lost those anyway if you had to throw the whole thing.

Ramsons (Allium ursinum) is a nice one. It's basically the European equivalent of the North American ramps. We planted some in our forest last year, dug up from my mom's giant feral patch. They seem really happy so far, and we dared harvest a few leaves in June. That made for a very tasty salad!

Christopher Weeks wrote:Yeah, one of my goals here is to step up my invasive horticulture skills by creating multiple long approach-grafts between these pseudolulo and tomato plants to see if I can force organelle transfer across the graft boundary and develop something weird. Anything that was obviously different would be interesting enough to justify the experiment even if it wasn't really desirable.

You might not have to settle for organelles only. If you could convince the graft union callus tissue to produce some vegetative buds, there's a chance that some of them might be effectively allopolyploid hybrids, by transfer of the entire nuclear genome from a cell of one species to a cell of the other. Here is a study where they did exactly that, though there was some tissue culture and genetic messing-around involved in this case. They do hypothesize that this might happen in nature, though, and that it might be a route to speciation by effectively hybridizing quite distantly related species.

Those are some cool and brutal-looking nightshades!

If you do want to build a trellis, rather than go with Nancy's spiral pruning idea, this thread has lots of really nice designs to be inspired by.