weedRampage

Cars kill hundreds of thousands every year and maim millions more but nobody would contemplate trying to eradicate them. Nuclear technology has much to offer for the future. Almost every country except Australia has dozens of these things. Australia just supplies the fuel. Now there's hypocrisy in motion. We are not going back to the caves any time soon so we better just close the gap between theoretical safety and actual fact.

Call me simple but my mind works on a cause and effect basis. When someone hammers in a nail we see an easy to understand chain of events. When a super conducting magnet pulls a hammer out of some ones hand from across the room I cannot see any intervening hands or actors to make this happen. When the magnet can do this endlessly without any expenditure of energy we have good cause to doubt every law of thermodynamics. This is not a bad thing. It is wonderfull to be amazed by the world you live in. The best aspect of spirituality is an open acknowledgement of the limits of the human mind. I have no problem with the fairy story that there is an entity, an all wise benefactor, that is capable of helping us. In my experience lack of humility is a crippling trait that takes down many good people.

"If you only respond to one thing, I'd like you to provide a quote and source of a physicist who claims to know everything." It is not the style of science academics to loudly proclaim that they know everything but to politely avoid discussing things that would indicate that they know very little. "Real" physics academics are beyond a parody of themselves. Khaki shorts, knee high beige socks, leather sandals and bad hairdos. There is a nerd universe out there and it consumes billions of dollars of government and industry money. They even have their own prime time TV show. God help us if this group of aggresively ignorant retards end up gaining political power.

This is not just "anyone". This is someone who is compelling me to swallow the idea that the whole universe popped out of a wormhole. Modern physics is a totally empirical science. It has many good models of "what" happens but no good explanations for "why" it happens. There is no explanation for gravity, magnetism or electrostatics. There is however an endless repeating of the "universe appeared out of nowhere" and the "heat death of the universe" stories. So if you have a group of people who are fundamentally ignorant on the basic precepts who claim to know everything you have a quasi-religious canon suppressing alternative views. How different is this from the people that arrested Galileo for following the work of Copernicus. Copernicus started out studying Canon Law. Below is a list of people also well versed in Canon Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_scientist-clerics

4 Strammonium seeds chewed well before sleep.

I did try for a long time growing desert plants in mix that was what I imagined to be close to identical to their native setting. With the right pH and low organic content. Getting the pH close to neutral is a good idea but cutting out the organic content in a pot deprives you of a very usefull buffer. A pot environment will always be significantly different to in the ground.

Charcoal has a high internal surface area available for nutrient and water exchange. It is an ideal ingredient for any potting mix.

I went to a catholic school but was baptised a lutheran. The 20th century saw a concerted effort to extinguish christianity from western society. Why? I think atheists are easier to control. Surely the antithesis of religion is communism, but ironically communism grew out of radical puritanical christianity. Whether you admit it or not your mental sphere is colonised by some holy canon or another. Modern physics is a blatant attempt to limit the minds perception of the infinite universe. It is cheap and cheesey religion with a jellyfish in a wheelchair as the supreme deity. Most of the relevance of christianity has been watered down and obscured. When I read about Steve Job's zen buddhism I did feel inspired because it seems he found some tangible framework of beliefs and values that helped him to have a better life and reach out to so many people. Would anybody have a smart phone if it were not for zen?

it grows on the catchment of the lower murray river. west victoria, south west nsw and eastern sa.

Everywhere more than 100 miles inland and with an annual rainfall of less than 800mm has an alkaline and saline soil. Mountain soils have greater water infiltration but also higher evaporation rates so often end up as saline as a flat desert. Saline includes sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, bicarbonate, sulfate and choride. Osmosis does not discriminate for cations, anions or even sugar.

This spring I'm going to water the ephedra with 0.25% saline once a week because for a six year old plant it hasn't grown that much. Same goes for the loph even though it looks good and has flowered continuously for the last two years. Every spring all the desert plants get a small amount of coarsely powdered lime stone.

Well for herbs I would stay right away from valerian. I don't know who valerian works for but for me its like a mild sedative/ freaky dark dream herb. A herbal mix that works every time is whole chammomile boiled in half half water and milk. The milk makes it a lot stronger.

Try sleeping less, really sleep is over rated. Wake up early and make sure you get sunlight on your skin first thing in the morning to set your hormonal clock. If you are having trouble sleeping don't stress just relax in bed and make sure you get up early the next day and have a full day. Try reading calculus or physics at bedtime, sends me right off in no time at all. Gentle excercise. Mental excercise. There should be no problem missing one nights sleep every week. The idea that you absolutely need x hours sleep every night probably causes more sleepless nights than any other factor.

Every plant wants pretty much the same things, neutral pH, a steady water supply, sunshine. Their strategies for achieving these things are tailored to their environment so their apparent "requirements" are radically different. I think you can be pretty sure that this plant will not grow successfully with coastal sweet rainwater at any watering regimen. If you are lucky enough to live where the water is naturally saline, which would include the tablelands, western slopes, western plains and south australia or even USDA Zone 7a Arid, you have a water source that is close to ideal.

I have started a whole batch of seeds this winter and they are doing ok so far. That is always how they start out. The mix is just a standard potting mix. I started out watering every second day with 2500 ppm table salt. That is one teaspoon in two litres. The seeds have germinated strongly and look healthy but the surface of the soil started looking salty and the seedlings got the pretty phosphorous deficiency colors (purple and orange) from too much chloride. I stopped the salt for a while and gave them a single feed of dilute urine for phosphorous. It is hard to replicate the growing conditions of an arid saline soil because the level of salt is tiny but very significant in terms of maintaining the correct osmotic water potential. A desert soil is watered from above with small amounts of fresh water and a much larger reserve of saline water supplies moisture from below. The low salt level in the surface soil is a product of the activity of plants and algae and fungus. Deserts have biocrusts which are like a bluegreen algae / fungus skin on the soil that doubtless is essential to maintaining the correct growing conditions. I have put some coarsely powdered limestone on the surface of the pots so water on the surface will at least be saturated with calcium carbonate. Lime has a very low solubility so it will persist in the soil for a while. Most of the osmotic potential of a soil will be due to sodium chloride/sulfate/carbonate because of the much higher solubility of these salts. Its a juggling act but I will keep you all posted and put up pictures soon. All of this applies to any desert plant by the way. Lophs, Ephedra ect. Though none of those seem quite as hard to grow as Peganum. Probably one teaspoon of table salt in ten litres would work well.

It really depends on how much heavy metal your dogs eat. A food source with even a low level will eventually sterilise a garden permanently. Commercial chicken feed usually has an organoarsenic antibiotic in it. Non organic chicken carcasses will have a low but significant level of arsenic in them. Economic constraints mean that it is probably better to bin your dog poo or use it on non edible plants like trees.

If you want to use activated charcoal to improve a soil then yes you should do it. There is really no reason not to. This spring I will spread the entire contents of my barrel of accumulated fireplace ash on my gardens, including a large amount of charcoal. The old school method of producing large amounts of charcoal was to make a large, hemispherical mound of several layers of one foot lengths of wood stacked ends up. The mound was covered in a layer of dirt and a fire was lit on top. The heat causes hydrocarbons, acetic acid, pyridine, phenol, cresols etc to gas off leaving mostly pure carbon. To get the carbon a bit closer to pure the charcoal is cleaned, crushed and again heated in the absence of air. When it is at a high temperature a small amount of air is allowed to pass through and burn off the remaining hydrocarbons to leave a purer carbon with a high porosity and internal surface area for adsorbtion/ desorbtion and catalytic activity. If you want to farm biologically there is a large amount of traditional knowledge and good soil science to help you on your way.

Yes like I said I totally agree that it improves the growing potential of the soil in a lasting way but in an artificial way. The soil and the communities of plants, fungi, bacteria, collembola, nematodes, acari and algae are a living thing that is not something you can put in a bag. Every aspect of our biosphere was intentionally created by some organism or another. If the stromatolites had not created our atmosphere of oxygen the air would be full of heavy metal hydrides and most things would mutate and die before they had a chance to evolve any structures of use. Organisms everywhere are battling unbelievable odds to create the right balance of clean air and water and micronutrient availability. The soil is from 5-10% Iron but Iron availability is the limiting factor in all biological systems. A fungus creates a large complex molecule just to capture a single atom of Iron. The solubility of iron is so low that it reminds me of the recipe for homeopathics, one atom/molecule in a sphere the size of the orbit of Jupiter. What I am saying here is that all of the things that biochar does are done better by biological systems for free. If you farm without utilizing the biological system then you will just have a dead, energy and inputs hungry system. There is a lot of big money going into researching the potential of biochar and I am glad to say that the science has prevailed. Even carbon sequestration in farmland, which was being pushed by the big corporate farmers of the U.S. and australia, was knocked back at Kyoto because everyone saw it for what it was, an attempt by these companies to turn any future carbon credits scheme into their own slush fund. When oil is finally too expensive to carry on the wasteful madness of the past century then the monster companies that have grown around it will start to die. I wouldn't expect them to go without a fight though.

OMG Mr T caught feeding the trolls. To recap the undeniable facts. 1. Aya use was a factor in this sect. 2. Some bent version of christianity was also a factor. What would Jesus say? Something unfeasibly wise. Would Jesus condone using Aya? possibly Child Sacrifice? I don't think so. Monastic Christianity is the foundation of much European intellectual tradition.

That said biochar does increase the water retention and nutrient exchange of a soil and make it more productive. I have just made a decision to be against wholesale adoption of biochar as a solution because..... well because a bag of biochar is claiming to supplant me in my area of expertise. Years of study and practical experience have put me in a position to define what soil structure is, where it comes from, why it is important, and so on. I look forward to there being more of a critical mass of people working to develop the "new agriculture" and I feel like unfettered enthusiasm for bags of stuff is diverting attention and resources from what I personally want to achieve. One of the gems I got from a lecturer was... "Organic farming produces half of the worlds food but its not a viable system" hmmmm... He then goes on to tell the young son of a farmer "Your family will have to sell their farm because there is no way to reverse the decline of your agricultural system." This is the type of wisdom being dished out in the universities. In all of the highly populated areas of the world they have been farming organically for thousands of years. One hundred years of the petroleum miracle has created temporary windfalls for some, environmental destruction for many more, and senseless loss of generational knowledge. It is a process that is still going on, fuelled by an expansion in monetary credit. Rather than bothering to invest time and energy learning the traditional farming practises that are semi organic and sensibly conservative the next generation of farmers are being sold into failure by the chemical companies and the banks. Management is not about throwing truckloads of cash around.

I object to biochar on two grounds. The first objection is that it is just a continuation of current farming practices that seek to utilize the farmland as a hydroponic medium. Hydroponics is a wasteful and polluting form of farming. Any claim that using biochar is restoring the natural system is totally bogus. This is a crude forcing of the land to produce in total disregard of nature. Secondly and most importantly there are those who seek to exploit a bad situation for personal gain. If biochar gains any sort of credibility as a carbon sequestration method then we will be seeing mining companies ploughing coal dust into farmland to claim their carbon credits. The farmland treated thus will be polluted with lead and mercury for ever. A viable biological system produces tonnes of everything with no inputs.

No plant will grow in a salt scald where the saline ground water is close enough to the surface to carry salt upwards as the water evaporates from the soil. The spots where the ground water is deeper or there is enough vegetation to slow evaporation at the soil surface the level of salt is low enough for plants to grow. Salt rains down from the sky in all places blown from the surface of the ocean up into the atmosphere. In arid places where the outflow of this salt is lower than the inflow it accumulates. During ice ages when the level of the ocean drops the intense wind picks up large amounts of carbonates, chlorides and sulfates from the ocean floor and blows them all over the place. There is probably some ideal watering mix using small amounts of salts. Maybe it is worth trying mineral water. One without the bubbles. They usually have a mineral analysis on the bottle.

suggest trying small amounds of lime and/or gypsum and/or table salt plants from arid areas are evolved to cope with high osmotic soil water potentials the complex water extracting strategy means that your seedling is literally capable of shlurping a 747 through a drinking straw the pressures are equal to millions of kilograms per square metre in the absence of the osmotic potential the plants cells swell and rupture some goosefoot family crops like beetroot will give and increased yield with the addition of table salt.

unfortunately with the plant being bred for higher addiction potential , low CBD, it has a lower therapeutic potential. todays pot is an abomination, an evil minion, like a pit bull it reflects the most retrograde aspects of humanity most varieties outside of the west are 'as they always were' there is currently a move in the industry to high cbd varieties hopefully in time to provide the much needed medical assistance for the people who should never have been denied something that could in many instances save their lives like so many powerful things it can destroy or create