#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.

[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.

[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 👍

[camels-pen]

very important thing that is not at all important, but if it weren't for the fact that usopp literally shares a VA with inuyasha, i would've absolutely made him and sanji switch places. dogboy usopp is cute as hell but we all know who the real dogboy is in that relationship. also like. in terms of the story and the characters themselves. yknow. yknow.

[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

[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.

[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 😔

[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.

[reasonsforhope]

"In 2021, scientists in Guelph, Ontario set out to accomplish something that had never been done before: open a lab specifically designed for raising bumble bees in captivity. 

Now, three years later, the scientists at the Bumble Bee Conservation Lab are celebrating a huge milestone. Over the course of 2024, they successfully pulled off what was once deemed impossible and raised a generation of yellow-banded bumble bees. 

The Bumble Bee Conservation Lab, which operates under the nonprofit Wildlife Preservation Canada, is the culmination of a decade-long mission to save the bee species, which is listed as endangered under the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation...

Although the efforts have been in motion for over a decade, the lab itself is a recent development that has rapidly accelerated conservation efforts. 

For bee scientists, the urgency was necessary. 

“We could see the major declines happening rapidly in Canada’s native bumble bees and knew we had to act, not just talk about the problem, but do something practical and immediate,” Woolaver said. 

Yellow-banded bumble bees, which live in southern Canada and across a huge swatch of the United States, were once a common species.

However, like many other bee species, their populations declined sharply in the mid-1990s from a litany of threats, including pathogens, pesticides, and dramatic habitat loss. 

Since the turn of the century, scientists have plunged in to give bees a helping hand. But it was only in the last decade that Woolaver and his team “identified a major gap” in bumble bee conservation and set out to solve it. 

“No one knew how to breed threatened species in captivity,” he explained. “This is critically important if assurance populations are needed to keep a species from going extinct and to assist with future reintroductions.”

To start their experiment, scientists hand-selected wild queen bees throughout Ontario and brought them to the temperature-controlled lab, where they were “treated like queens” and fed tiny balls of nectar and pollen. 

Then, with the help of Ontario’s African Lion Safari theme park, the queens were brought out to small, outdoor enclosures and paired with other bees with the hope that mating would occur. 

For some pairs, they had to play around with different environments to “set the mood,” swapping out spacious flight cages for cozier colony boxes. 

And it worked. 

“The two biggest success stories of 2024 were that we successfully bred our focal species, yellow-banded bumble bees, through their entire lifecycle for the first time,” Woolaver said. 

“[And] the first successful overwintering of yellow-banded bumble bees last winter allowed us to establish our first lab generation, doubling our mating successes and significantly increasing the number of young queens for overwintering to wake early spring and start their own colonies for future generations and future reintroductions.”

Although the first-of-its-kind experiment required careful planning, consideration, resources, and a decade of research, Woolaver hopes that their efforts inspire others to help bees in backyards across North America. 

“Be aware that our native bumble bees really are in serious decline,” Woolaver noted, “so when cottagers see bumble bees pollinating plants in their gardens, they really are seeing something special.”"

-via GoodGoodGood, December 9, 2024

[icewindandboringhorror]

Other Misc. Rambling Thoughts on the topic:

(~ !!!!!!!!! if you're just reblogging this post for the Poll section, please reblog the original post without this addition* lol. ~)

(*not that there's anything super personal or weird about the addition, just that it's meant to be kind of casual Side Commentary, not really part of the Main Point Of The Poll, so it would feel kind of weird for it to be emphasized by being included in reblogs unless the reblogs were explicitly about the side commentary, etc..... if that makes sense.. ANYWAY!)

It's neat to read the written descriptions that people are mentioning in the tags, since it's almost like I can see or conceptualize the idea as well, but it's just.. I'm not SEEING it.

Like for example: I can imagine a vase, it's a muted mint green and slightly translucent, elaborate golden birds sprawled down the side in streaks of thin rough watery paint, the base material shimmers gently in the light, there's a small chip where it's cracked on the handle, etc, etc. .. But as I'm thinking about this I see literally nothing.

It seems like perhaps some people can visualize an object first, and THEN describe what they see. But I sort of work backwards. I am building the object in my mind, I can never see it, but it's a collection of concepts. Rather than visualizing all details as a whole at once, I am adding each detail one by one, building onto the IDEA of the thing.

The vase doesn't have a crack on the handle because I just automatically visualized a vase with a crack. It was more that I cognitively understand the concept of a vase, what they tend to be made out of, how they tend to look and feel, the properties they have. So based purely on that knowledge, I can imagine "a chip is something that a vase could have, it would look this way and behave this way" - more like... I'm constructing a bullet point Fact List about the object rather than seeing it.

So if you tell me to imagine an object, I can, in a way, imagine that object in great detail, but it's just.. I'm not SEEING those details, more just knowing it's qualities in a purely conceptual way. Sometimes in the tags when people are like "yeah I can see the skin of the apple, texture, little dots on the surface" it's like… I can imagine that too, I can know it's there, but just with no visual attached.

I guess rather than SEEING something and going ''ah. I know what this looks like because I have seen it''. I more just skip that visual step entirely and go ''I know what this looks like, I just randomly have a list of information about the concept in my mind.'' etc. Maybe similar to how sometimes in dreams, even though a house may look completely different and be in an entirely fake 'dreamlike' environment, you just somehow KNOW intuitively that it's meant to be your childhood home or something. Even when it looks nothing like it in reality. There's a built-in base knowledge of the properties or information of some things within a dreaming mind, etc.

--

This also makes me wonder about like.. how storytelling and myth is so important to cultures all across time. Or how this could tie also into concepts of religion.. etc. etc. If so many people really can kind of conjure these vivid images in their mind, then maybe that's part of why certain things are so meaningful to them? Like a "religious experience" being something you can actually really SEE/feel/lingering with you in your head, rather than just abstract words on a page, detached purely theoretical ideas, etc... hmmm

.

Plus also just for average emotional stuff too, even outside of broader cultural conceptual attachments..

Like, I don't think there's a direct 1 to 1 link (obviously not all people with mental illnesses that significantly reduce their emotional or expressive capacity also MUST have aphantasia or vice versa), but it's interesting as someone who DOES also have a much more lessened emotional range/pretty flat affect/etc. etc. to think like.. Maybe I WOULD be more emotional, in a way, if I could have these vivid experiences..?

Perhaps memories would hold deeper significance if they could really stay with me vividly. Or storytelling would evoke more of a deep emotional reaction to me if I could really picture and feel the things that are going on. If things were more TANGIBLE in my brain, rather than always merely conceptual highly abstracted ideas.

Kind of like, it's probably easier to get over the death of a pet or something, if after not seeing them for an hour you already don't remember what they looked like (beyond just a vague fact list of traits), and you have no vivid memories or mental reminders of them (beyond just factual information stores). COGNTIVIELY you can appreciate the idea of their absence, of course, you still miss them, but there's just no remaining visceral sensory ties. A very "out of sight, out of mind" sort of thing in terms of attachments, memories, emotions, etc. Maybe certain things are easier to "get over", when you're not having constant mental sensory reminders that occasionally rekindle your feelings about the event or etc.??

(like for example, maybe someone could remain angry about an argument longer if they could vividly replay it in their head over and over again. VS just like.. 'Yes I can factually recall the fact I had an argument, and I do have knowledge stored about what precisely was said, but any sort of sensory data such as sights/smells/feelings, etc. from the actual moment of the event are long gone and can never be conjured again in my mind." etc.)

Which again, I think lessened emotional permanence and image permanence in the mind are NOT inherently linked, can all be caused by different things for different people. And, since I can't visualize anything in my head, maybe I'm misunderstanding how it happens and the effect it may have on stuff like remembering things you miss or replaying arguments, etc. etc. But it's still a little interesting to think about, if they could influence each other to some degree.... :0c --

Lastly, It's also weird because I'm actually pretty good at estimating distance and spaces? I can quickly assemble furniture without an instruction manual, pretty easily have a concept of how much space a chair may take up in a room, how two mechanical parts might fit together - BUT, I am literally not actually visualizing anything. I cannot see 3D objects in my mind at ALL. It's like.. just based on the pure List Of Facts About Things Which I Have Observed.. I can intuitively go "oh this works like this/this is this size" just because.. I know it's that size. I don't have to see anything to know..?

But then on the other hand, I'm terrible at directions without a map (I guess because a 3d outdoor environment has WAY more complexity than like.. "Will this square fit into another square?"etc. lol ).

BUT, I also draw/sculpt/etc. entirely without references, and seem to do mostly okay at that..? Like.. I can't even remember the last time I actually used a reference or looked at anything whilst drawing. It's all muscle memory, and me just adjusting as I go until something "looks right" on paper, I never have a set image in my head (or external reference) before hand.. Hrmm....

AND.. I used to say that I had a photographic memory when I was younger, which I know NOW is not true (I always thought it was just an expression, not that people could literally see things in a photographic way). But what I was describing is, I do often associate information with imagery, just... without imagery....

Like "Oh, I know that I took my medicine earlier today because I have a distinct memory, a snapshot of a moment in time, of me rattling the pill bottle in my hands as I looked up at a stop sign while in the back seat of a car". When I say this, I can't ACTUALLY see/feel/hear a pill bottle, or vividly picture a stop sign, but it's more just a factual recall, of. Even though I don't see these things, I know they happened, the information of them happening (me hearing a sound and also looking at a stop sign at the same time) has been stored in my brain as a memory, a collection of linked facts. --

As for other senses, I cannot taste or feel anything in my head AT ALL.. wild that some people mention that. I mean, again, I can have a purely factual recall as if reading a textbook, knowing the information of 'X item typically has X texture, therefore I can imagine what it may be like to feel it' or 'X usually has this taste' etc. - but I can never actually experience those senses in any capacity in my mind alone. I would say audio is my strongest mental sense (maybe a 2.5 or 3 (if it were translated onto the above scale where 1 is most vivid and 5 is nothing)), then visual (4.5 at most, usually 5), and then taste and smell and such are just complete 5, absolutely nothing, I didn't even know people could experience taste or feeling just in their mind alone.. lol...

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[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.