#Soil Culture

[whats-in-a-sentence]

SOIL COMPOSITION TEST – IN A JAR

The ideal ratio of the three mineral components of soil is about 40 per cent sand, 40 per cent silt and 20 per cent clay.

Sandy soil can drain nutrients more quickly, as water passes through it faster. Clay soil can be too dense to allow much of the vital air that soil life needs, and can get more waterlogged – though all of that is also dependent on soil life.

To see how your soil stacks up in terms of general sand, silt and clay composition is really easy. All you need is a jar, water and a ruler.

Find a large, tall, straight-sided jar that has a lid; ideally the jar should be about 1 litre (4 cup) capacity. Dig up soil from the patch you want to test, discarding the organic matter (sticks, dead grass and the like) right on the top. You want to test your soil right down to about 20 centimetres (8 inches) below the surface, so dig an evenly deep hole and mix up the soil in a bucket, taking multiple samples if you want to get a broad idea of your garden. As you mix the soil up, discard any rocks or large pieces of organic matter.

Fill your jar about one-third to half full with soil. Add enough water to come about nine-tenths up the side of the jar, leaving enough room to be able to shake it. Add half a teaspoon of dishwashing detergent if you have it, to help separate the soil components. Pop the lid on and shake the jar well for about three minutes.

Leave the jar on a bench, undisturbed, for a day or so. After that time, you'll find that the jar contents will have separated into layers. On the surface of the water will be organic matter. Below that, there should be water, probably discoloured with dissolved organic matter. The next layer down is clay, below that is silt – and below that is sand which, being heavier, should have sunk to the bottom.

Use a ruler to measure the total volume of the sediment, and the depth of each layer of minerals. For instance, if you have a total height of 10 cm (4 inches) of settled soil in the jar, you may find that the silt is 4.5 cm, the clay 1.5 cm, and the sand 4 cm. Convert each of these to a percentage by taking each layer, dividing it by the total height, then multiplying by 100. In my example, 1.5 cm of clay would be 1.5 ÷ 10 × 100 = 15%. So clay would be 15% of my soil.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a fabulous soil pyramid to calculate the type of soil you have from these percentages – see http://tinyurl.com/soilcalc

The jar test is really handy for a quick, free analysis of what your general soil type is like. It's your own personal starting point. But remember, decayed organic matter and invisible life in soil can alter the way these minerals behave, because carbon and soil biology give soil structure, and can make minerals more available to plants. So, just because you don't have the ideal ratio, doesn't mean you can't grow great things. Regardless of ratios, soil life is fundamental, and should be the goal of all growers, no matter what the location.

"Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy" - Matthew Evans

[project-sekai-culture-is]

project sekai culture is making everyone aroace

[dearorpheus]

anna biller’s bluebeard’s castle….. offensively bad. each turn of the page adds insult to injury. maybe the most vapid dialogue and narrative monologue I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading. am sat here questioning what manner of incontrovertible steaming refuse I have with great anticipation brought into my hearth and home? a trojan horse parading as a subversive contribution to the literary barbe bleu canon while secretly harbouring a special agent sent here to ruin my evening and possibly my entire life?

will not be finishing the novel but will be keeping it on my shelf untouched and unloved as a hostile cautionary symbol like a head on a pike

[whitenikes]

I have nothing to say re hockey events of the day that hasn't already been said, except like... I understand the misery and spite, the hatred and frustration completely, but I also think there should be an endeavor to fight harder to change the culture. saying "disappointed but not surprised" nullifies the work many fans were doing to beg the org not to sign that man, and it seems we forget what a large collective of fans can make happen. if we roll over and play dead and not speak up about the disgusting things, shits going to keep happening in worse ways

short version: hockey culture Will change and rectify in our lifetime as long as we fight to Make It change

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Visitors to Burgundy … will sense all around them the history and religion. … They will know that this is hallowed soil: it has been blessed and cajoled and prayed for over the centuries, many of the vineyards being worked by monks for whom wine is not just a drink but a sacrament … Even in this skeptical age, their vine is something more spiritual than vegetal, and their soil more heaven than earth.

- Sir Roger Scruton, I drink therefore I am

Good wine is a ‘somewhere’, not an ‘anywhere’. It is stamped with a place and a year. Rooted, literally. The fancy French word for this is terroir, referring to the way in which environment - soil, geology, even the history of a place - is all responsible for a wine’s character. Terroir is a sense of place in a glass. Roger Scruton often referred to himself as a ‘terroiriste’. And this could describe his political philosophy as much as his philosophy of wine. From 2001 to 2009, Scruton wrote a wine column in the New Statesman, enabling him to smuggle into that otherwise exclusively Left-wing journal, all sorts of reactionary political ideas: about God, about fox-hunting, about beauty, about his love of the countryside.

Wine, for Scruton, was never just about the taste, never a merely aesthetic sensation. Indeed, he was extremely sniffy about all those ‘blind tastings’ — the ones where we delight when an expert fails to spot the difference between plonk and Premiere Cru. They miss the point, says Scruton. Blind tasting, he explained, is like blind kissing — not a good way to distinguish, for example, between someone who is sexy and someone who is not. Indeed, if the experiment on Love Island is anything to go by, it’s not even a good way to distinguish who your own girlfriend is.

That’s because sexual chemistry, like wine, is a great deal more than some momentary sensation on the lips. It’s a great deal more than a message sent by taste receptors to the brain. It is all about the terroir. And this is not just a comment about wine but about aesthetic experience in general. When we encounter a work of art, we bring a whole hinterland of knowledge that makes sense of that specific experience and gives it its character as art. Music is more than a vibration of the air and its reception by the ear and the brain. So too with wine and taste.

But scientists often get very sniffy about terroir. They think it’s some quasi-spiritual rubbish that has been invented by snotty French vineyards to give them a commercial edge. Writing in Decanter magazine, the geologist Professor Alex Maltman challenged the very idea that geology has any particular contribution to a wine’s taste. “Vines and wine,” he wrote, “are not made from matter drawn from the ground, but almost wholly of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, abstracted from water and the air.”

Scruton wrote about wine very differently - not because he disagreed about the science but because he understood aesthetics very differently. He bemoaned the way in which aesthetic experience had come to be seen as something separable and distinct from questions of the good, or the true, or of politics or indeed anything else. That’s why his wine column ranged so far and wide. Beauty, for example, an idea that lies at the centre of Scruton’s philosophy, is as much a moral as it is an aesthetic phenomenon. There is no wall between them.

His writing about wine could be a bit sentimental maybe. But what is going on in his love affair with Burgundy is as much about Scruton’s politics of place, his conservatism. At the centre of his political thought, was the idea of loyalty to place and to those with whom you share space as being of supreme value. This contains a sense of solidarity with the land – hence his thoroughgoing environmentalism — but also to the history of a place and its spirituality. And here we bump into what is most potentially dangerous about Scruton’s thought. Soil and sacrificial blood are, after all, ideas beloved by fascists.

But it is important to emphasise that he never thought the nation state should be celebrated in terms of race or creed. For him, it was a commitment to place, and the shared and common institutions, customs and traditions that make a place what it is.

Moreover,  Scruton’s conservatism wasn’t aggressive. Wine, when drunk properly, relaxes people and introduces conviviality. People fight over oil, he once remarked, but not over wine. As he once put it about wine-growing in the Lebanon, “Invade the producer and you lose the product; trade with him peacefully and you are supplied from year to year.” Indeed, “Hezbollah don’t occupy the Beqaa because of Chateau Musar – if they did, peace would quickly come to southern Lebanon.”

Wine, and indeed terroir-ism, was, for him, the product of, and encouragement towards, peace and civility. What he had in mind here was more the wine of the Greek symposium than that guzzled in quantity by the boorish drunk. His idea of heaven was that of domestic home-loving contentment, with friends sitting around the table drinking wine, sharing ideas. There is nothing remotely fascist about this.

[soilthesimpletruth]

This is not a hobby.

This is my life.

[leohtttbriar]

diet culture is evil and people who feel the need to grow their own produce to stop the government from giving them Bad Chemicals in their mcdonald’s meals are genuinely idiots and any and all rhetoric about the purity of certain diets because they return humans to their ancient past is stupid and ultimately fascistic.

underneath all that though. being able to appreciate the flavors of simple foods in their most unprocessed state is important. i think a lot of people really do walk around in a primarily unconnected state to the natural world and think very little of the consequences of their plastic-wrapped treats and how this lack of intimacy with both agriculture and their own bodies and the agriculture of their bodies—and the way their own bodies are reflections of climates and worlds and natural histories long gone but are still built into our matter—can be somewhat harmful to any of their higher-mind, cerebral action/reactions to the world. touch grass, sure. eat a tomato with nothing on it. there’s a vulnerability i think in letting food be what it is. takis and twinkies don’t exactly afford that sort of vulnerability. and all the little creatures in your biome that are both Other and Self really like the complex fibers of cabbage. and that can be a good thing to acknowledge every once in while. or often.

[sskk-manifesto]

Atsushi's back in the game!!! ۶( ˆ o ˆ )

[twig---verginix]

I've been meaning to go back and watch this stretch of the anime forever but I like thinking about how (pretty sure) the Battle Frontier is technically considered a part of Kanto and under their jurisdiction instead of Hoenn's.... game-wise, that also feels kind of right to me.

Because then we have the Sevii Islands, which just feel.... very un-Kanto-like. Very off and otherworldly, very post-game, very edge of the world. I'm choosing to believe that Emerald's Battle Frontier is closer to Kanto and the Sevii Islands are closer to Hoenn. I just like the symmetry of that. Stretching to the very edge of your region, the boundaries of where you're able to go

[anemonecoronaria]

My music taste is so jumbled that whenever somebody asks me what I listen to i’m like wow nothing

[project-sekai-culture-is]

project sekai culture is tap tap tap flick tap tap tap

[jonathantaylor]

So...

[shadowfromthestarlight]

sorry, it will never stop being mind-boggling to me that we've taken food that our ancestors thrived on and made it unhealthy over the past 150 years

[chaelinsbitch]

Lowkey watching fancams from any concert ever that takes place in korea makes me feel kind of insane bc like why are all the girlies in the crowd so quiet. Why are you watching the entire show through your phone. Live a little

[kuroki---kaze]

Windaria's Unlimited :: Wielder of the Golden Gun

⋆୨𖤓୧⋆ The wielder of the Infernal Father's gun, would be the one who places his heart within this beast and survives. A grand champion that would rise above the rest to take his seat as War God of Windaria, known only through legend as Asher.

As time passed, the Windarian people came to find that one such soul - the black blood - Fekete Szél - was Asher incarnate. With his heart placed within the gun, he was accepted as it's chosen wielder by the God within, the Infernal Father - Bahamut. The gun itself is grafted into Kaze's body by way of his right arm, that gets reconstructed when the Magun is thawed. As long as the vial that contains his heart remains undamaged, Kaze himself can never die. He is effectively immortal as the only beings that can damage the vial are one White Cloud, his Unlimited counterpart and Chaos itself.

This gun grants it's wielder the ability to access the Soil Spiral in a way that normal Soil Sages cannot. It gives it's commander the ability to combine varying colors of Soil Bullets to summon a variable army of Soil Spirits.

Pictured: Phoenix, Typhoon, Ixion, Shiva, Atmos, Meteor Master, Ifrit, Odin (there's more.)

A Soil Spirit's power is generally unmatched in most cases and delivers a devastated blow to whatever foe unleashes them on.

You can see Kaze summon here:

In order to summon a spirit, Kaze uses different combinations of colors of Soil and Soil Poetry by way of describing the Soil being used.

(Please remember Soil is not dirt but instead it is the crystallization of a passed on Soul. Every Soul in the Universe is either comprised of one of two elemental building blocks and they are Soil and Mist. Most things possess a Soul of Soil therefore their soul carries that color hue.)

But the ability to call forth an army of Soil Spirits is not the only thing the Magun is capable of. Kaze is a skilled Soil Sage and as such can control powerful magics. He can command Soil to do many things but one of the other abilities the Magun possesses is spellcasting.

Different color combinations will result in a Soil Spirit, but what if he were to use the same. For example, we'll use Fire Red.

If Kaze were to fire a single Fire Red from the Magun it would cast a spell.

1 Fire Red = Fire

2 Fire Red = Fira

3 Fire Red = Firaga

It works like this for most spells in the terms of general spellcasting. The more of the same type of Soil he uses, the stronger the spell. Kaze can fast cast with the Magun and fire off as many spells as he has the ammo for. Further more, being as connected to the Soil Spiral as he is, he can manifest bullets into form whenever he needs them.

This is why Windarian Religion dictated that whoever was accepted by the Infernal Father's Golden Gun would become a War God. Just as Kumo can use the Maken telepathically because of his connection to it, Kaze can manifest ammunition for the Magun at will and fast cast with it as long as he has the right combination and he doesn't over tax his heart.

Because just like the the Maken is Kumo's soul, the Magun is Kaze's heart. Both weapons are the Unlimited's very lives and as long as they remain undamaged they are nigh unstoppable forces of nature.

[poptartmochi]

in this house we love greek gods that preside over one specific thing and have fuckall to do for the rest of eternity <3