#experiments with wild plants

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

Well, so far the experiment with young dog-strangling vine shoots is successful: I fried up three until tender and crispy and ate them. They taste like asparagus, and so far no adverse reactions. It's been almost three hours. I'll know for sure by the morning. That won't mean they're perfectly safe cooked if there's no reaction! It will only mean that the young shoots are safe cooked and consumed in small amounts. I'll have to try with increasing amounts until I either get a reaction or I get to a fairly large helping. Whichever comes first. If that's successful, it will still only mean that the young shoots are safe cooked, but that's good enough for me, especially if boiling in a change of water isn't required.

[reallyghostlypost]

How many farmers here would post their progress on the internet?

And how many would post the really weird stuff they encounter on it? Like livestreaming a trip to the mines or something.

[dramatic-dolphin]

nothing is more encouraging than when you're looking up if a wild plant is edible and sources in one language are like "we call it 'salad herb' :) just take the leaves and put them in your salad raw! we've been doing it for generations!" while sources in a different language are like "every plant in this family is poisonous as hell. if you eat a single leaf then god help you" thanks guys 👍

[triaelf9]

absolutely fascinating, that post I make about ppl who make it their life's goal to be miserable to other ppl online reaching the point where it slipped out of orbit and just made a mad dash through a lot of random folks ahah. Very much a microcosm of the internet for sure.

I was specifically referencing the ppl connected to the g@ter movements b/c they all seem to have a very specific playbook, (cant forget that they know everything about art and game making and journalism and film making despite never doing anything in it, and of course the bonus transphobia/racism/etc) but also it was kinda me thinking about like...just make sure you branch out? like find joy in things that isn't just hurting other people? You don't have to be nice to everyone, you don't even have to not be a hater but like...knocking off the personal attacks that the fascists use could be cool, and like, I dunno, make sure you smile at something else that isn't telling artists they should become obsolete b/c they can do something you can't? or like, turn some very well deserved anger to things that need it and affect the real world we all live in & maybe make some change? I dunno, it IS open ended, so I guess death of the author is bound to happen like most meme-y things lol

I just didn't expect it to go anywhere to be honest ahaha. I do appreciate that is speaks to most folks in the way I hoped it would, and I hope everyone has their potted plant they can enjoy, whatever form it may take lol

[acr3ss-the-cosmos]

There's something to be said about how Rainsoar Lake (and the forested mountains surrounding it) holds such special meaning to Jiaoqiu. He had spent the majority of his youth strolling along its shores, swimming within its cool waters, and foraging the wild plants and herbs that flourished there. Though the IPC's influence had spread far and wide across the Yaoqing, the small villages dotted around the delve's natural landscape have largely maintained their rural way of life, living off the land and making their living by buying and selling the yields from their harvests.

Since becoming Feixiao's healer and counselor, Jiaoqiu began residing within the ship's central delve, but he still takes time to visit Rainsoar Lake every once in a while to collect ingredients for his prescriptions and to travel down the mountain pass that leads to his childhood village, where his beautifully aging mother still lives. Her husband, Jiaoqiu's father, passed away from illness when their son was on the cusp of adolescence, but her pale gold eyes still twinkle with mirth whenever she sees her boy walk through the front door.

[thepileofclothesonyourdesk]

As someone who grew up on a farm in a shitty small rural town i cant help but laugh when city queers dream of moving to the country side

Not only do they underestimate how openly judgmental and queerphobic people are out here (everyone is in everyone's business), (I've been called slurs from pickup trucks full of hicks driving by)

but city people rarely understand what they're getting into by moving to the middle of no where

Stores close at 5 and on Sundays and holidays, there is 1 Walmart within half an hour drive and it will never have the specific thing you're looking for, a lot of roads aren't paved (i can spot someone who's never driven on a gravel road from a mile away), the weather is more intense and the clean up from storms takes longer, you will probably lose power at least once a year, the internet is shitty, there is no public transit, all of the franchises are run by like 3 high schoolers (2 of which are stoned) so don't expect quality, There is nothing fun to do around here, there's also just a lot of resources that aren't available

I get that cottage core is a popular aesthetic in queer culture, but living in a rural area is not an aesthetic

[whatacartouchebag]

Enjoy my ridiculous one and a half foot, very determined son.

(he’s getting planted soon, don’t worry)

[picnicbask3t]

I have these subject ocs from 2019/2020 that i wanna redesign bcz I actually find some of their concepts p cool 😭😭

[yellowheartz]

Tiktokers out there having the most wildest family lore out there while my family lore has all the sweetest and most beautiful poetic shit ever.

[fingertipsmp3]

The other thing that’s happened is I got sent the wrong deodorant so now I either have to contact customer service, or spend three months smelling like apple and cinnamon (which I didn’t even know was a scent they offered)

[aacetrainer]

Screaming.....crying.......frothing at the mouth;; the way life consistently thrives with positive reinforcement is hitting hard tonight boys

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

Eating the Spring Shoots of Dog-Strangling Vine--An Experiment

**WARNING** Every member of the milkweed family is poisonous. Some members, including all milkweeds (Asclepias) are edible after cooking, though some need more thorough cooking than others. Beginning foragers should absolutely not try this. More experienced foragers do so at their own risk.

Invasive species are everywhere. They differ from naturalized non-native plants in that they negatively impact the environment outside their native range. Dandelions, for example are not invasive in many places despite their numbers. But dog-strangling vine (Vincetoxicum) most certainly is. Its roots release a chemical in the ground that is poisonous to other plants and it's just close enough to the milkweeds to fool the monarch butterflies into laying their eggs on them, but the hatchlings then starve because they can't eat them. Garlic mustard is another invasive plant in North America and it also releases chemicals in the soil, but it's a perfectly edible plant and could in theory be eaten out of existence. Pity the same isn't true of dog-strangling vine--or is it?

The dogbanes (Apocynum) are another genus in the milkweed family and are known to be much more poisonous than milkweeds typically are (again, some are more poisonous than others). Yet there are edible uses for hemp dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum). It just happens to involve more preparation than, say, common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca).

I'm unaware of anyone dying from consuming dog-strangling vine, unlike lily-of-the-valley, yet another invasive species, which has killed people. In fact I couldn't find evidence of anyone eating it at all. I'm sure I can't have been the first to try, but if it's ever been recorded that information is not easily accessible.

I've read a lot about preparation of poisonous plants into edible vegetables and what I found in common is that young shoots seem to be the safest and generally you boil them (some in several changes of water). Pokeweed, for example, is deadly poisonous but for the young shoots in spring before the stems turn red. In that stage you can cook and eat them, and they used to be harvested fairly regularly and canned and sold in grocery stores.

So my plan was that I would try just a little to start and see if I got sick or had any worrying symptoms and work my way up. This is what I started with:

Just three little shoots from the garden. I fried them up until tender and crispy, at which point they also smelled quite nice, kind of a mix of asparagus and spinach, where before they had an unpleasant chemical smell. The taste was quite nice too. A sweet asparagus flavour. No symptoms after waiting a week.

That gave me some confidence because frying is considerably less thorough than boiling is and yet no adverse reaction. So the next step was to try a handful:

Since these were somewhat older I had to cut the ends off some of them, as you would asparagus. Cooked them longer and on higher heat, just in case. Also threw in some daisy buds. Same asparagus spinach smell, same sweet asparagus flavour. And again, no symptoms.

I waited a little over a week and then it was time for the final stage:

This time I did boil them, since I didn't want to play fuck around and find out *that* much. I then fried them up with some mushrooms I'd collected that day and then I mixed it all into some Annie's pasta, along with fresh invasive onions from the ravine. The final result was enough for three meals' worth, so I had a third for dinner, more for lunch the next day, and the rest for lunch the following day. It's now over 24 hours since yesterday's lunch. No symptoms.

This doesn't make it generally edible. I am a data point of one. What I can say is that, at least for some people this plant can be consumed young if cooked thoroughly with no short-term ill effects. Note that some people are able to eat the poisonous mushroom species of the Agaricus genus with no symptoms. They're still poisonous mushrooms.

The point is it's promising! I have shown it is *possible*. If other brave people who exercise appropriate caution eventually have similar results then, well, anecdata becomes data. :)

For my part I will definitely be adding this plant to my mental list of spring vegetables that require thorough cooking.

[jeonqkooks]

Please ignore the bad anon I miss obs but we get it, you have other things to do

99.9% of my readers in general are so so lovely and wonderful and i could not ask for a better community and i love being here with you all, but there’s always gotta be a couple bad seeds here and there i guess 😔

[aeide-thea]

i’d probably find a whole service of these (‘flora’ by esteri tomula for arabia of finland, produced 1979-81) to be overwhelming, tbh, but seeing this pic on its own was rapturous love at first sight 🌸🌱🌼

[bruciemilf]

Every time the batkids get into legal trouble (damaged property fighting a villain, entitled old ladies being mad they didn’t get saved first, Damian sueing a classmate for proprietary rights over an OC he drew in class, the ONLY person they want to be represented by is Harvey.

Sure, TEHNICALLY he can’t practice anymore, but this is Gotham, and the law system is made of tangled wires. If you pull the right one, you’re in the clear.

The hardest plaintiff is Jason, by far. Ironically enough, he has the simplest cases.

“Okay, so, HOLD ON— I have to TELL you to get out of the way when Bane throws an ENTIRE truck your way? If you can’t dodge death, it deserves to have you, period.”

“Lady, I’m not going to save your weird ass dog/frog hybrid science experiment , — who BIT me, by the way, — over an entire bank full of PEOPLE.”

“Oh im sorry I forgot to pay for the overpriced 12 dollar latte while RUNNING FROM WILD MANEATING PLANTS. “

Harvey, pouring a violent amount of vodka in his coffee: your honor, my client just needs a nap probably

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

i think i could design a better death arena for children than those hunger games amateurs.

the whole premise of the games is all pageantry. every year you get a crop of 24 candidates around whom the entire state media apparatus dedicates an entire year to building celebrity narratives. this candidate is the younger sibling of last year's winner - these candidates are young lovers forced to compete - he's smart - she's fast - root for them, care about them, watch them, form opinions on them, bet on them. and then they stick them all in an arena to kill each other, which is a great entertainment premise, except that they make the arenas themselves really boring and generic. ooo, they're in...a forest.

it's not even an interestingly designed forest. imagine if the game designers treated their arena like an actual video game designer treats level design. discrete zones with multiple paths between each room, creative use of lighting to guide players to points of interest, points of interest scattered across the map, discoverable resources hidden to encourage exploration. instead they just have a generic outdoors location and if you get too close to the edge they throw a random fireball at you.

the 75th games are especially bad about this. the arena is laid out radially into 12 wedges, and each hour one wedge becomes especially dangerous in a 12-hour loop. as a mechanic, this is genius. it forces everyone to keep moving, making "survival by hiding" an engaging and tense viewing experience instead of someone sitting in a tree for three days. plus, it encourages players to return to the center of the arena, where travel time between wedges is short, which creates a high-value zone for players to regularly return to and conflict over. in other words, it's a mechanic which incentives players to adopt dramatic, dynamic, exciting behaviors which are entertaining to watch (not to mention it communicates geography to the audience well). but it only incentives those behaviors if the players understand what's happening, and they go out of their way not to tell the players anything! when they figure out what's going on, the showrunners spin the arena to disorient the players, like they're intentionally trying to get them to just. randomly wander the jungle instead.

this isn't even to mention how often they create undramatic, boring deaths. they plant poison berries around the arena. they supply no fresh water and no way to get it. they roll poison clouds over sleeping victims. these happen to work out in the books themselves but you have to imagine that extremely often these just result in players dying unexciting deaths.

the cardinal sin though, of course, is that nothing is done to personalize the arena for the crop of contestants that year. if i'm designing the 75th hunger games and two of my most beloved contestants famously had to cancel their wedding because of a return to the games, i would OBVIOUSLY give them a trail of, i don't know, wild game which conveniently leads directly past a well defended wedding chapel. will they hole up there for a while? hold a mock ceremony for themselves? do or receive ironic violence here? stare wistfully and move on? any of it is better television than getting attacked by generic attack monkeys. you should have a dozen of these things on the map for every single candidate. but the game makers are more interested in doing the same thing every other game has done than in telling a compelling story.

it makes me second guess enjoying the children's murder arenas at all.