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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 18th, 2024

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  • All the things I do for fun and hobbies I would do a lot more. Which would likely be the following:

    • Exercise (running in the warm months and skiing in the cold)
    • TTRPGs (I might move from 1 day of the week into two, and assuming everyone else has the same deal play in-person instead of digitally)
    • Reading (books and more books)

    But mostly I would work on living the permaculture / herbalism fantasy.

    • Do a lot more herbal formulation and
    • Maybe open the small apothecary to sell things at Art fairs and other makers markets.
    • Turn my urban yard into a full food forest to help grow some of my own food, and herbs. (I want to have an urban oasis of edible trees, bushes and other useful plants)
    • Volunteer more a local prairie restoration group that I have worked with in the past
    • Finally spend some time gorilla gardening on open lots and sides of alleyways around my neighborhood to spread the plant love.



  • I guess my advice was much more specific to traditional “weeds” which are annuals/ biannual / short lived perennials which thrive in disturbed land and in gardens. Bamboo is woody and might not full under that category. These traditionally “weeds” would be plants like creeping bellflower, motherwort, pigweed, plantains, dock, etc. which are human focused plants who only really thrive around human intervention. Plants like these are ubiquitous around humans (in our gardens and lawns) but can’t penetrated less disturbed areas or at later stages of succession. These are our traditional garden weeds which have a long history of use as food sources and medicinal uses with human cultures. If anyone is interested in learning more I would recommend Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants which does a great overview of weeds and their spread.

    Those plant that get fully invasive outside of human contact like Purple loosestrife, Tree of Heaven or other invasive noxious weeds are a different story. These are typically garden escapes, have a longer lifecycle and can outcompete and dominates landscapes. I think bamboo might fall closer to this than traditional weeds.

    P.S. added the book to my to read list





  • I know there are certain legal situations where an official marriage changes who has certain rights, but aren’t those same rights available if you make other legally-official decisions E.G. a will or trusts, etc?

    This is not the case. Marriage gives you a lot of specific rights that can be covered by other legal documents but never together and marriage will override it. This is one of the main goals for giving gay marriage is all of the legal benefits of marriage which are expansive and complete. (This is of course in the USA this is not the case in other locations.)

    There was a few legal pushes to separate these legal benefits from marriage into different legal rights that can be granted piecemeal. If you are intersted I would read The Other Significant Others which talks about people who prioritize friendships over marriage and how they interact with their “other significant other” which includes the legal discussions.


  • I think an important thing to understand when talking about plant populations is to understand how they compete against each other. all kind of understand how animals compete because its dramatic with claws, fangs, speed and eating. They also compete more subtle with birthing rates, eating all the food faster than others but they are behaviors we can see. Each animal has it own ecological niche which they thrive

    Since plants cannot move (mostly true) they compete against animals and other plants in other ways. They use chemicals to poison others, alter the soil for their own needs or attempt to shade out other plants. They also compete in a different timescale than animals. They may only grow for a few months of the year before anything else grows or have a super short reproductive cycle and flower multiple times per year or play the long game and invest into woody structure to grow taller and live longer than other plants. These are their own niches which include everything about temperature (both highs, lows, days at certain temperatures etc.), soil conditions, nearby plants, animals to help or hurt them and timeframes. These are plant’s niches. This means a plant community is never static. It is driven by a process called Ecological Succession

    The things about garden and yards is that we don’t have a stable or natural ecosystem which means they are more unstable. We artificially keep it in a early stage of succession with mowing, fertilizers and pulling of weeds. This leaves plenty of open niches for things like bamboo to exploit. That is why pulling or poisoning of weeds just keep coming back since nothing is there to stop it from filling that niche again. So something like bamboo is almost impossible to remove without something else to outcompetes it in its niche. If we did nothing the bamboo would likely take over most of the grass and garden but eventually (in timeframes of years or decades) something else would eventually take it over or others would fill in around it. Usually plants growing creates additional niches alongside it. The succession would take over and alter the ecosystem.

    This means that for something like bamboo we should attempt to control it in our garden setting with rhimozone barriers so it doesn’t run wild. Having things like native perennials or other perennials around it should outcompete any newer sprouts can help as well. Moreover, if you have weeds in your garden they will always be there unless you have something else already there. Any bare soil is just open ground for volunteer plants (a.k.a weeds) to take over to fill the empty niche. So to remove something you might not want you need to both pull it and have something else to replace it.




  • I am pretty sure your best bet to get something that is roses scented but is non-toxic would be creating a tincture vegetable glycerin with roses. Take dried rose pedals and let them sit in the sun for 4-6 weeks immersed in vegetable glycerin which should impart roses smells and other rose components into the vegetable glycerin. I haven’t done it myself but it is suppose to do some extractions of the compounds.

    You will be extracting the essential oils and all other compounds from the rose pedals into the glycerin but in lower concentrations than a pure essential oil. (Also depending on the essential oil will have a broader range of compounds depending on how they made it)