Mycoremediation of Weapons: Shrooms that Eat Explosives?

Hell yeah. Via Subtopia, one of the most interesting blogs I found this year:

"Basically, Robert Triggs patented some little mushies that like to eat bombs for breakfast. I call it a kind of fungoidal bomb-hacking, or harvesting an atomic landscape metabolism with a secret empire of nuke-hungry shrooms. A different type of seeding for the apocalypse.

Anyway, perhaps this defusing technique should apply to bombing ranges and test sites, too, or other spoilt landscapes where regular blasts pummel the earth, or hold vast swaths of it hostage.

I mean, until we figure out a wholly new approach to managing weapons and their waste, in the mean time we could be, instead, producing this stuff more responsibly. Like self-destructing landmines, self-cannibalizing bombshells, or auto-bioremediating warheads. Green grenades. It may sound ridiculous, but at the very least, environmental-friendly ordnance that cleans up after itself."



ALSO EXCELLENT AND RELEVANT: "Where Truces and Cease-Fires Grow on Trees"

Tree Wishes

I found the Forestry Library Databases, today, and I wanted to post it for people who were interested in urban forestry topics. It looks pretty nice. The list of topics is impressive, including histories, plans, and statistical information. You can order books and documents through interlibrary loan or you can buy hard or electronic copies from them.

In the same vein but with more flash and less inventory is TreeLink.
From the site:

Trees are a key indicator species of a healthy urban environment, but most communities are struggling to keep up with growth and essential services, and lack funds for trees. So we (TreeLink) use technology to help. Our goal is longterm impact in cities and towns, where the great majority of people live.

You can do a state-by-state search to find community tree details (treetails?) in your area.

I like trees.

BookMooch Plug

Firstly, if you aren't on this site, yet, I think you should stop wasting time. It's a good thing. If you want to understand and take advantage of the following, you will have to do it.

BookMooch got involved with some authors and Eco-Libris for a cross-promotional deal for Earth Day. For each day until that special trashpicking extravaganza, a different author (rather, their publishers) will offer five copies of one of their books to the site's community. In summary, five moochers will have made available to them a free book every day for the next week. Today's title was a trendy little children's book about Santa coming to terms with global warming.

Yeah. I don't know what to think of it, either. But, hey, free book.

Also, I was looking over the Africa reforestation post by Justin and it suddenly reminded me of Afrigadget, which I learned about almost a year ago but I figured would have been BoingBoing'ed to death by now, like a Steampunk Warren Ellis robot, so I was hesitant to give this blog's few, faithful readers sloppy seconds. Now, I see those wily third-world-watchers have gotten a sharper image and were picked up by the BBC for some PRI broadcasts, last month. I have got to pay more attention. Afrigadget is really one of the more inspiring things on the Internet. When DIY isn't just a fashionable hobby, when it's a way of life, that gets my attention. A lot of these people are poorer than me by a nearly immeasurable factor and yet they seem to revel in their survival instincts, making heavy use of those first and best heirloom technologies, their hands and feet.

The soil is warm and I have a fridge full of seeds. I'm even starting to see some moss. Stay with me, here. I might have something to show you.

Weeded-out

Plants used to stop graffiti artists.

Huh.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing for GG? It seems like it's just using one tag against another.

The Tammany Hall bosses should be so lucky.

Food Library

As I was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I paused on the chapter about Spring planting and seed heritage. It got me thinking that if what large corporate entities like Monsanto want is to literally own life-forms and monopolize evolution, then someone who uses any effectively public domain heirloom seeds as a means of bypassing their control is technically a socialist-anarchist. Your stash of last season's Amish pie squash is like a copy of the Little Red Book, in terms of how it is viewed by established agro-industries. The more varieties you have, the more dangerous you are, you see.

I went looking for heirloom seed suppliers on the Internets and I was amazed at how many I found. I honestly expected to find just a few but it has apparently turned into quite a cottage industry. I don't know how many are really just subsidiary fronts for Big Bad (except Seeds of Change, which M&M's/Mars bought out several years ago) but, really, stolen genes taste just as good as bought genes, if not just a little sweeter. For you purists, I found this, a forum thread which trails on for a bit but hosts some interesting links for the high-wire acrobatics stunt that is green consumerism.

The granddaddy of them all is Seed Savers Exchange. I remember first hearing about them in a David Suzuki special for public television. They seem legit and their catalog is like some bizarre cross of the X-Men comics and gardening. Some of those fruits are just fucking strange, like the peppers. And I always thought huckleberries were a myth created to generate awe and appreciation of the wild, like werewolves and sustainable investment.

Heritage Harvest Seed is a smaller operation than SoC or SSE but it still offers some beautiful varieties of beans and cabbages. I wish they had more pictures, though. I'm gonna git you, Zucca.

Hell, here's the list I'm using. I could just keep sticking up links for a while but I'm not here to be a switchboard operator. And I realize that this tacit endorsement of buying seeds does seem to contradict another post I did, earlier. That's very true. I'm not going to resolve it, either. The point is, even if you have no intention of or ability to feed yourself by growing things, you can still engage in the genetic equivalent of rescuing the library of Alexandria by growing these lovely, antique plants for the simple sake of keeping them alive. Even if they aren't tasty or nice-looking, every one of them that makes it to fruition is another chance that life will somehow survive the serious beating that techno-capitalism is administering to the world.

Hello - Worms

Hi.
I'm new here.
My name is Peter.
About myself?
I'm Big.
I charge into this wall.
Leave my impression.
I turn and charge into another.
Again my impression.
I rest.
Got to find a way out.
Got to make sense of it all.

I'm a middle class socialist who longs for classlessness.
A university professor who can see through the layers of BS.
Slightly out of step.
The only view that makes sense is astronomical,
when atoms no longer interact.
The local view only confuses me.
How can we live without regard
to the soil,
to the water,
to the air,
to our planet?
How can we live without regard to each other?

I have some ideas to share and I hope to do that here.
They're not great, but down-to-earth tidbits.
I hope to give and to take, to vent and to dream.

But no more of this.

Let me first tell you about my pets:

The Worms

They live quietly underneath me, in my basement, wiggling and winding their way through my scraps. Recycling quantities of waste. Turning it back into soil. Even as I type this they are eating, sleeping, making wormy love in the thousands. I started with a hundred purchased one cold January day years ago in a bait shop. Rescued from a cold impalement.

When I sat out in the sunshine last summer sorting the worms from the humus, I thought of the 20 pound plastic encased soil I used to purchase at the garden center. This humus was so much richer. So full of life.

I like to recycle and reuse. We have but a finite number of atoms. As civilization progresses, infinity moves farther and farther from us. My great grandfather, in the late 1800's, burned the Minnesota prairie to the east of his farm and for weeks the glow from the fire could be seen in the night sky as it burnt the open prairies. Now the world is much smaller. We are packed together. There is still a farm where my great grandfather lived, but it is not alone. As we have less, we must be more careful with it.

I had (and have) a big compost bin. But the winters were rough. We would trudge through the snow to pile potato peelings on a frozen heap. The bin began to overflow. There has got to be a better way. And so this project started in the cold of January with a frozen compost bin.

It's called vermicomposting. Composting with worms is one of the easiest, most fulfilling projects that you'll do. You don't need expensive equipment. You don't need space, you can do this in a small apartment. And it is not really time consuming.

Go get a container that you can use for keeping moderately wet materials in. It can be relatively small (like a gallon container) depending on what you have and your space requirements. Worms are easy to transfer to bigger containers or divide into multiple small containers; so don't worry about it, just get started.

Put some holes near the bottom of the container to let out extra water. Don't worry. The worms are not going to escape, they like it where they are. Now half-fill the containers with shredded paper that has been soaked wet and squeezed to remove excess water, and then loosened up a little so that a worm could craw through.

Now add the worms. I got mine at a bait shop. You can do that also or you can order them from an Internet distributor. You probably can't use the worms that you find on your lawn, these species mostly have different feeding patterns, requiring food to decay partially before eating it, and need more room. You want red worms. You can start with 50 to 200 worms, depending on your setup.

Dump your worms in on top of the shredded paper. Give them some fruits or veggies to eat. Cover with a little more damp shredded paper and cover with a lid to prevent dehydration. The first night or so leave the container somewhere where it can drain the excess water out. Then just feed it when they look like they need it. The worms will gradually increase to keep up with your output, but may need more containers.

Now after a few months, you will discover a transformation. The paper and table scraps will become a dark moist rich soil - well just humus really, suitable for seed bombs. And mixing with depleted soil will give it the mineral content to be true soil, rich and ready for a new life cycle. When it's time to make room you have a chance to go through this new humus, sorting out the worms (and their eggs) and enjoying the richness they've created.

But it is most important to get started now. You may have problems; fruit flies and other flies often find a home in your little ecosystem, but sitting it outside during the summer and using netting or ingenuity helps. Of course the Internet has a lot of info on the subject. Start with the vermicompost article at Wikipedia. Then branch out. It is a step that is so simple, yet so fulfilling.

The rest of this story is of a dark nature. If you are not one of the intrepid, you should stop reading, ending with thoughts of wormy love.

As I'm not of such strong stuff (and a vegetarian), this is not first hand knowledge. But after seeing thousands of worms overpopulate their wormy world, one wonders how one can alleviate their overpopulation problem. Remove a few hundred (or measure by the pound, if it makes you feel better). Wash them off and put them in dampened corn meal. They must purge themselves of grit and compost, stuffing themselves with something more palatable to you. This process takes a couple of days and you may want to replace the corn meal. You end up with some very fine protein, I'm told. You can read more on this subject in the book The Worm Book by Loren Nancarrow and Janet Hogan Taylor. Yum?

Tape Source

Just something floating in the breeze, today. The sound of sap dripping into the bucket is like the metronome of Spring. One, two, three, go.

Jeff Cox of HGTV shows us how to make a seed tape, courtesy of the DIY Network. It's a simple idea that can keep you in the spirit without requiring that you actually be able to plant anything. You can set them in their precious, perfect row, stash them, and then roll them out as the ground warms up. I haven't thought of any significant possibilities this might grant to a graffitist but for a guerilla gardener, it could certainly shave some time off of what's necessary to plant and run. You could keep them in a baggie and tear open a strip of earth with your heel to dig out a planting row. Then, drop a seedstrip in and cover it up with the other shoe/filthy hobbit-foot. The whole thing, if you became well-practiced, might only take a few seconds and could be done before anyone realizes what you are doing. That will be important. There is also some similar information about preparation on This Garden Is Illegal but I found Cox's stuff first. TGII's technique is vegan, however, for those purists out there.

Also, I got a book in the mail, written by the genii at Rodale, which claims to contain many valid and interesting details of gardening and growing shit from the turn of the previous century (no, the other one). There are some fun anecdotes and nicknames for things we, as technocrats, have culturally reabsorbed in a completely different way. It's really amazing how many "weeds" people ate, even among the culinary elite. Among the more bizarre factoids I read about was the successful grafting of tomato scions to potato stock. They're both Solanaceae, as best I can recall, so I'm not thinking it's incredulous. However, I've never, ever heard of this before. I know it works with drupes and apple trees but it just seems like a risky maneuver for edible annuals. Plus, both plants are geared to produce completely different vegetables, though they are both technically seed parts, as potatoes almost always must be regrown from tuber pieces in order to recover viability. That would seem to indicate that they would not interfere in one another's affairs, in terms of reproduction. It's hard saying, not knowing. If I get a chance, I'll try it for myself.


This is an equation representing my hypothesis about the results. I know you all love Paint.