It’s more economical and is fun besides — I can’t remember where I first heard this recipe, but it was over a decade ago, and it’s still the best one I know of. If you’re doing lots of starts (as in hundreds), this is much more economical than buying bags of potting mix. This is what we’re using…

It’s not about drawing a line — I posted an article on social media about a scientists who believe that mushrooms “talk” to each other. Fascinating stuff. In response, someone made this comment to my post: “my son and I were talking about this today… so now that plants, trees, fungi, animals, and so forth all talk…

“Man does not live on tomatoes alone,” to coin a phrase — I originally posted this essay in July, 2019, in response to massive flooding in the US Midwest that had the potential to affect food supplies. I am re-posting it now because food shortages could result from the war in the Ukraine. As in 2019, I am seeing suggestions on social…

In pursuit of an approach based less on ideology and more on real world dynamics In 1912, Albert Thellung (1881–1928), a Swiss botanist, was one in a long line of people who proposed a taxonomy to differentiate various types of native and non-native plants, and though his system never caught…

It’s BS coming from the Catholic Church, and BS coming from the left — During my Catholic upbringing, one the main messages hammered into my head was, “You’re not good enough.” That’s some cruel sh!t to inflict on a child, and believe you me, the toxic legacy stuck with me for decades. Only in the last year, did I finally transcend that nonsense (which…

There doesn’t seem to be any “here” here — I talked to my biological parents on the phone tonight, and they’re a good barometer of what a particular segment of normal, mainstream people are thinking. They’re Democratic voters who get their news exclusively from corporate media, and never go near anything alternative. Their idea of what’s going on in…

Seeing eye to eye on everything has never been an expectation, or even a wish — In Real Life, I have — and have always had — a wide variety of friends and acquaintances with different lifestyles and views. Seeing eye to eye on everything has never been an expectation, or even a wish. I focus on those qualities of the person that I most appreciate…

“The first casualty of war is truth” — War offers us an intense if perverse spiritual experience with its myth-making drama of life lived at the extremes of human experience. America has always been susceptible to this kind of religious fervor particularly when we need to forget all of our deep internal divisions and our failure to address…

Any level of nuclear conflict will be horrific The fear of nuclear war has been reawakened, and for good reason. I’ve heard a few commentators refer to the idea that such an event could kill “all life on earth.” While that’s an exaggeration (at the very least some microfauna would…