carpoftruth

I've been converting a bunch of grass yard into useful garden/rewild space for about 3.5 years now. I started with about three quarters of an acre of grass and have planted out the majority of that with a mix of native plants, food plants, and wildflowers. The yard space I'm converting was just mowed grass for about 30 years prior with a few mature trees. The soil sucked, with maybe 3-4 inches of soil followed by sand. I have no actual training and not much experience so I wasn't sure how this would go at first, but seeing things popping to life in the 4th spring here has been satisfying. I thought I'd share some bullets here because I feel what I've done has been pretty effective and cheap.

A good resource of what's actually going on in soil is all of Redhawk's soil threads. Soil isn't dirt, it's a whole world in and of itself. Soil is more a process that happens than a substance that you can scoop out and handle. Building soil means encouraging diverse life to occur in the ground. That diversity of life then helps any plants/seeds you grow take off. You want plants to move into a bustling city - that community will make them strong. If you go the other way around and try to just grow plants without good soil, then your plants are showing up in a ghost town and they'll be lonely.

The technique I've used the most for soil growth is dumping huge amounts of woodchips all over the place. I live in a place where there are lots of arborists, so I made friends with a few and asked them to start dumping chips at my place. Arborist woodchips are very good soil food for a few reasons: they include twiggy bits and leaves, so they have way more nitrogen than woodchips from a bulk material store, they are a variety of sizes so they break down at different rates, and they are someone else's waste product so you can get them cheap/free.

• Once you get chips, dump them in places you want soil in thick layers. 12" will smother grass without any cardboard or anything else underneath. 16" is fine but don't do more than that or it prevents oxygen from getting into the soil.

• don't dig woodchips in. This will fuck up your soil chemistry for a year or so and it's also way more work. Cut the grass as much as you can and then just dump the chips on top. 6" tall grass is fine, shorter is better, taller than 6" and you will have a hard time truly smothering grass, so mow/cut if needed first

• bulk woodchips look a bit stupid at first but it will compact and the colours will bleach out to brown and it looks fine within a month.

• About 1' of chips will turn into 1" of soil after 4-5 years.

• The best time of year to lay them down initially is fall/early spring because rain will help get everything soaked and will jumpstart fungus and bugs doing their thing.

• around existing plants, pile chips 6-12" high but make sure they are pulled back from stems/trunks by 6-12". Don't make mulch volcanos around trees, shape them more like a bowl with the tree sticking out of the middle.

• during the first year you can't direct sow anything into chips. After the first year you can (and should). Nitrogen fixers like clover are great to sow because the woodchip bed will be hungry for nitrogen for a year or two after you put it down. If you don't seed anything after the first full year you will get a bunch of random weeds because the soil will be decent by then. It's better to plan to fill the space with whatever you want.

• you can plant vegetable starts into woodchips after the chips are about 6 months old (as long as they've been wet and the decay has kicked off). If you plant perennials, dig the hole deeper than normal to account for woodchip settlement.

• a couple full years after chip placement, you can direct sow anything, not just easy seeds. Well not carrots or things that you want a straight taproot, but most things.

• make mushroom slurry to jumpstart decay and soil building. Collect whatever random mushrooms you can find. Wear gloves if mushrooms in the area can be poisonous to touch. Collect buckets of rainwater/pond water/no chlorinated water (or leave chlorinated water outside for a couple days, or boil/carbon filter water treated with chloramine). Blend mushrooms with rainwater into a grey/brown slurry, dilute into larger buckets, pour mixture over woodchip beds, especially in shady/wetter spots that mushrooms like. Mushrooms that grow wild will take without any fussing about. When they do, keep propagating them elsewhere.

• make aerated compost tea to boost microbial diversity. Mix non chlorinated water per above with some molasses, put a cup or so of healthy forest soil, compost, worm castings into a sock/nylon, aerate 12-48 hours with an aquarium stone, dilute the mixture 10:1 and pour around the drip line/roots of plants, trees, shrubs, veggies. This stuff doesnt last so you have to use it as you make it. By doing this you spread microbial diversity, which helps your soil health a lot.

• this should be higher up, but be mindful of dust/spores when you are shoveling chips out of a big pile. Depending on wood species, time of year, how long they've sat in a pile, wood chip piles can start decaying pretty quick because they'll heat up and bacteria generally likes the warmth. That's mostly good but when you dig into it and there's a whole shit load of dust, that's a sign that you're spreading spores. Either wait til its rainy to move them or wear a n95 mask. Some spores can cause weird respiratory illnesses or worse.

• chips get way heavier after they get soaked, so best to move them soon after they've been dumped unless you want the workout.

All the above is pretty cheap if you're in the right place. I've moved something like 750 yards of chips around here. That will turn into about 75 yards of great soil. Buying that would cost me $7500 or something, plus I got good exercise.

here's some woodchip glam shots, caption follows the picture

damn look at the mycelium here. this is about 8-9 month old chips

this material is mostly about 3 years old with some new stuff chucked on top.

this is the first bed I built about 3.5 years ago. this wasn't 100% woodchips but a lot of it was. it's now really nice looking soil.

pretty typical cutaway in a path. I dumped about a foot of woodchips originally, then added about 6" 2 years ago. making thick layers of woodchips for paths is great for a whole bunch of reasons. they prevent mud, they prevent soil compaction underneath even with mild vehicle use, and paths are a good way to grow soil next to your beds. you put down a bunch of woodchips next to a bed, let it sit a year or so, then rake off the top inch of chips and shovel what's under into your beds. then replace with fresh chips.

mycelium in a pretty new cedar bed. some people talk about allelopathy of cedar inhibiting growth of stuff and maybe it does, but it doesn't seem noticable.

strawberries fucking love these beds. they are excellent groundcover. they spread rapidly, they make delicious berries, and they're hardy. if you want more green/less berry then grow wild species like coastal/woodland strawberries. if you want the berries, buy a 6 pack of plugs from the nursery and wait a year or make friends with literally anyone with a strawberry patch and they'll give you plugs. I started with about 40 that I got from a friend 3 years ago and I don't think I could possibly give enough away to have less strawberry plants now.

wine cap mushrooms are a great thing to grow also. buy or borrow one thing of spawn for $30 or so, put it in fresh woodchips, then propagate them into other woodchip patches by either digging out spawn and spreading it around, or even easier, by picking the mushroom and pulling up some of its 'roots/the stump' and burying the roots/stump a few inches down somewhere else. wine caps are really easy to ID, they're enormous so they're easy to find, they're tasty, and their mycelium is really aggressive at spreading around so it's easy to keep them going.

This interview between the NYT and the author of 'how to blow up a pipeline' includes discussion of the social acceptability of political violence. Unsurprisingly, the NYT person flips out at the idea of property destruction and seems to bounce between 'political violence is never acceptable' and calling David Malm a hypocrite for not blowing up a pipeline during the interview. Evidently this is the kind of political violence the NYT doesn't support, in contrast to the kind of political violence they love (i.e. political violence used by the american state against property and humanity both foreign and domestic).

This is my favourite part of the interview in the spoilers.

this is a real ad that is running

Warning: polonium grade tech bro , retvrn to trvdition marble statue humping and fascist eugenics in this one. Cringe levels so high that even NYT is dunking on them.

Worth the read in full for all you dunkheads on the comm. Here's a taste:

Internal Praxis documents outline three “persona groups” who will populate the Praxis city. They are “warriors,” who are “muscular” and “clean” and protect society from threats; “priests,” who are “very thin,” and “define the values and beliefs of society”; and “merchants,” who are “portly” and “bearded,” and include venture capitalists and cryptocurrency professionals.

ABANDON GOOD VIBES ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

Lentils, rice, onion, lemon, fuck yeah. I love having a bit of pomegranate molasses or pomegranate pips with it too. The mix of spices + lemon really makes the flavour pop, and nutritionwise it combines the heartiness of lentils with the carbs of rice. Cooked raisins are really good too.

The link was just some random recipe so there'd be a photo. Please share mujadara protips if you've got them

or is it just bean counters optimizing enshittification and monetization of a previously free product? oh its certainly the former

Unproven hypothesis seeks to explain ChatGPT's seemingly new reluctance to do hard work.

In late November, some ChatGPT users began to notice that ChatGPT-4 was becoming more "lazy," reportedly refusing to do some tasks or returning simplified results. Since then, OpenAI has admitted that it's an issue, but the company isn't sure why. The answer may be what some are calling "winter break hypothesis." While unproven, the fact that AI researchers are taking it seriously shows how weird the world of AI language models has become.

On Monday, a developer named Rob Lynch announced on X that he had tested GPT-4 Turbo through the API over the weekend and found shorter completions when the model is fed a December date (4,086 characters) than when fed a May date (4,298 characters). Lynch claimed the results were statistically significant.

This is a good podcast episode about Canada's history with ukrainian nazi immigrants, why they were allowed into Canada, and their role in disrupting the Canadian labour movement and left wing ukrainian diaspora communities. I've read lots of things that allude to these subjects but not much that really goes into the details.

This is a good show in general - their episode about nuking the oil sands was good too. Yes that was an actual plan for bitumen extraction.

I'm part of leadership of a small community group for our part of town. I am seeking advice on how to smuggle principles into a group that is not explicitly communist or anticapitalist but nevertheless is receptive to the concepts.

So far the group is focused on community resiliency in the face of climate change, sustainability, food/skill sharing, social inclusivity (i.e. age, class, LGBT, ethnicity, nationality), and is generally meant to be an alternative to the chud heavy block watch groups on Facebook that just fear monger about teens after dark and property values. The group's politics are not explicitly leftist/anticapitalist but the most active members think naomi klein is great. If it was 2016 I would bet on the group being Bernard brothers. This is a heavily propagandized part of the west so actual political theory is thin on the ground. The membership of the group is likely to grow significantly over time so it is not realistic to put up a hammer and sickle, but nevertheless I want to lay foundational principles that align with anticapitalist/communist values.

For municipal politics reasons, we will open this group up to members from the neighborhood catchment to stake our claim as official reps of this part of town. We are writing our constitution and bylaws now and I want to bake in some antichud deterrents into these documents so it isn't appealing for chuds. In addition I want to frame all our future events and projects with left language, falling short of dictatorship of the proletariat or .

Help me chapo you're my only hope

This song really whips the llama's ass

When the free market

Fundamentalist steps on a roadside bomb

outside Kandahar

Bleeding to death

I swear to Ayn Rand

I'll ask if he needs an invisible hand

I remember panning these guys when they were a grubby skate punk band before I had any idea what a fucking garbage lib I was. They sounded like they were recorded in a bathroom but they were right.

My child wanted to watch an animated green lantern series recently so we checked it out. Of course the main character who is the human green lantern is a fighter pilot who does a bunch of sweet fighter pilot flight maneuvers in the opening sequence. I told my child that shows like this often show the military being cool and doing cool stuff, but that in real life what fighter pilots actually do is drop bombs on children. I'm only human, I also enjoy (some) military action movies, but I know it's cotton candy brain poison too.

I hate how many children's shows have pro military pro cop propaganda. How do others talk to their kids about it to inoculate them against brainworms? I usually describe the military and the cops as being like a gang of bullies - they do things to make themselves look cool but really they just exist to hurt people and take their shit.