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balkanradfem · 3 years

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The basics of growing food

So, growing food sounds very intimidating, and in reality, it's something people knew how to do thru all history, and it's made even easier by new methods of 'no till' and 'no dig' garden. I didn't know almost anything about it until 3 years ago, when I got a plot in a community garden and started growing food with no experience. Still it went good! Here's what I learned:

The basics are as simple as 'if you put a seed underground and keep it wet, it's going to come out.' If you start off from that, even if you know nothing else, eventually you will succeed. The additional stuff is done to ensure success. The biggest actual issue of gardening isn't how, but when. When are you supposed to put all the seeds underground to get good harvest? For most of the plants, it can be as simple as 'Spring'. For others, it's very important just when in the spring you plant it.

Let's say you want to start your first garden, you want to plant some onions, lettuce, peas, green beans, tomatoes, peppers and zucchini. All of these can be planted in the spring! But these plants are sorted in 2 categories: Those who can survive a frost, and those who cannot. We call these 'frost hardy' (those who survive the frost) and frost-tender (those plants will die if they're exposed to lower than 0 temperatures). From the ones I listed, onions, lettuce and peas are frost hardy! It means you can plant them very early in spring, such as February and March, and they can be hit with snow and ice and be just fine. They can also be planted in autumn, and they only really start growing in the spring.

Green beans, tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini are frost-tender, meaning you absolutely can't grow them before the chance of freezing temperatures is gone. This is known in gardening as 'the last frost date'. Every area has a different last-frost date, so it's good to google yours to be sure you're planting these when it's safe to do so. For me it's mid-April.

Now, since it's a long time to wait for your plants to grow if you've only planted the seeds in mid April, people have found a way around it by planting the seeds in little containers inside of their house, or in a greenhouse, so they grow in a nice warm place on a windowsill, and are moved out in the ground when it's warm and safe. This is a very fun thing to do as you will have bunch of little plants growing in your home. Important thing to know about it is to use really light and airy soil, not garden soil, (you can use forest soil!) and to make sure you're not over-watering them and you give them as much light as possible.

Soil is another big thing in gardening, the grass grows so easily from it, but you can't exactly plant your seeds into the grass; they will get suffocated. For a long time people have tilled the ground to make it empty of all the weeds and easy to handle; however this isn't healthy for the soil, because it ruins the quality of top-soil, exposes it to sun and wind erosion, and it dries up very easily. Here are some beneficial methods of gardening: mulching and no-dig. Mulching means adding stuff like hay, straw, tree leaves, woodchips, pine needles on top of the soil. You're protecting your soil from sun, wind, erosion, drying out, and if your mulch is thick and dark enough, no weeds will grow in your garden. You are gardening by science.

So what does this mean for you, when you're standing before a patch of grass, thinking of turning it into a garden? You need to do this months before the actual planting, using time to your benefit is the smartest thing a gardener can do. You pick a patch of land and bring in everything you can on top: cut grass, hay, tree leaves you raked or found, straw if you have any, woodchips, anything that will stop the grass from growing. If you really want to build up your soil you can bring in compost too! All that organic material will eventually turn into compost and fertilize your garden as it degrades to soil. It's important to not mix it with the soil, and to only keep it on top of the plants. Mixing it will deplete the soil of nitrogen, and you need nitrogen to grow anything green. If you keep bringing in organic material for years of gardening, and on top of that put some compost as well, in 3-5 years your soil will become so rich and soft you will no longer have to use tools to plant in it.

But, hey, if it's your first time, you don't need to aim for perfection. If you didn't prepare your soil in the fall, whatever! You can still pull the weeds, dig around a little to make some clear soil, and plant your stuff! I've done this last-minute planting and it works just fine. Mulching and adding organic material is only the easiest, most scienc-y way to garden.

The next big thing in gardening is spacing and depth: how far apart should your plants be? And how deep to plant them? For depth, the rule of the thumb is 'twice as deep as the seed is tall'. But I've seen people pull various shit in this area and succeed so do what you want. As of spacing, I would also say, try out what fits for you. It takes a year of gardening to get a sense of just how big the plants get, and what would be ideal spacing for each of them. I decided only on my third year to plant tomatoes VERY far apart, because I realized in this case, one plant will give me more than 8kg tomatoes and it's much less work than planting 3 times as many plants that are close together. Peas seem to like to grow close tho, for some reason. Sometimes you can decide you want a bunch of tiny plants because you'll eat them young, so you don't space them on purpose, people do that with lettuce, leeks, spinach. If you want your plants as big as possible with as much yield as possible, give them half a meter and see what happens.

Fertilization is another big thing in gardening; if you add a lot of compost and mulch your garden consistently, you won't need a lot more; however there's a cool free trick you can do (if you're not currently sick): you can mix your urine with 10x water, and water your plants with that. And I really mean mix it with 10x water! Plants can get very fried by it and start to wilt if they're bombed with too much fertilizer at once! There are rules for this: use it when you want your plants to grow a lot of greenery, not if you want them to flower or produce fruit. This fertilizer is rich in nitrogen, and nitrogen inspires plants to grow more leaves! If you wanna fertilize them later in their growth, put a lot of nettle plants in a big container with water, leave it in the sun for 10 days; when it starts to smell real bad, it's ready. (you can also do this with comfrey). Also dilute it with 10x water! Don't use these fertilizers on bean or pea plants, or any legume, they don't like it.

Now I've given you so much info at once, you're probably struggling to take it all in, so here's a good youtube channel where I learned all I know: Roots and Refuge. If you watch this lady garden for long enough, she will tell you all of the secrets.

I remember being a first time gardener overwhelmed with worry; what if I fail, what if nothing grows, what if I kill all the plants, what if I have a black thumb, what if the plants die because I am stupid, what if I put all of this work in and get nothing, what if people make fun of me, what if I run into problems I won't be able to solve. Here are some of the answers to these!

A part of what you grow will DEFINITELY DIE. I can guarantee it, it happens to everyone, every single garden in the world has had plants die, sometimes for no reason at all, but in no case will EVERYTHING die. We all count on a part of our plants dying, becoming slug food, not doing well in general, and we always plant 30% more than we absolutely need. Even if you are personally responsible for killing the plants, the plants will not hold it against you! Plants appreciate you spreading their seed regardless of success, they understand that by trying multiple times you will eventually succeed and they absolutely want you to learn thru occasional failure. The answer is again to plant a lot, and it never ever happened that nothing came out of it. Most often, it's not going to be your fault at all. Sometimes the year will be good for tomatoes and carrots, and bad for peas. It's all okay! Because you just planted extra peas, and you'll get more tomatoes than you expected to have.

If you have the desire to plant food, you do not have a black thumb; the green thumb is in the heart that yearns to grow. You're not stupid if your plants die, plants die for everyone. And people are likely to come at you with million advice; listen to no one, try everything yourself. If they make fun of you, they're gonna look real stupid when you have home-grown food. Any problem you might run into while gardening is google-able! Or you can join a page of gardeners and they'll be happy to identify the issue.

The real main issue with gardening are slugs and bug-type pests, and that is a problem for another day because all I know to do is to yeet those away by hand and shake my finger very sternly at them. Hope this helps!

#growing food #food growing basics #gardening #diy #planting food #plants #home grown food #garden

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savrenim · 3 years

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Hello, do you know how I could learn math please ? I suspect I have dyscalculia and I always massively struggled with this class. I don’t have to do it anymore but I’m ashamed of being so bad I don’t even know my multiplication tables. Thank you and have a nice day.

It's super cool to hear that you want to learn math! But the thing is, I'm really not the best person to ask this question. I am not training to be a teacher. I had a single semester of TA training that met once a week for an hour before being thrown into a limited about of TAing, and overall am training to become a research professor that if I don't make it in academia will go into private or government research. And we have no training on how to teach students who are not neurotypical, other than "anyone who brings a note from the disability services office, you follow to the letter the accommodations outlined on the note, but otherwise you hold every student to the same standard".

And honestly, I don't want to be a teacher. I'm pretty good at teaching. I enjoy it enough that my ideal job does actively include some teaching load, and I'm happy about that, and do prefer 'professor' to a job as a researcher in a different sector who does not do teaching (although part of that has to do with publication guidelines and expectations, not just teaching). But the thing is, there are people out there who love teaching. There are people out there who are training to be teaching professors. There are people out there who are getting a Masters in Education alongside their degree in math, because they want to be teachers. I do not want to be a teacher. I want to be a researcher. I do not have any of that training. I have not done any of that work. That is not my field.

That being said, I have a few recommendations, I guess?

—First and foremost, look for dyscalculia support groups and dyscalculia resources. They're going to have the specifics for "how do you handle math with dyscalculia", because they are the ones dealing with that actual problem.

—Secondly, especially if you don't have the limits of not having to do math in a classroom environment, flat-out don't force yourself to do anything that's the sort of arithmetic that's difficult for you. We have calculators for a reason. wolframalpha.com exists and is Truly The Best, it can do derivatives, complex integration, certainly a bunch of stuff through multivariable calc. By the time you're studying even quasi-advanced math, you aren't doing calculations. Period end. You're doing logic and concepts and a computer is doing the nitty-gritty. So I'd check out some abstract math, and see if that's something that just directly comes more naturally for you. I have a soft spot in my heart for the book 'Proofs and Fundamentals' by Ethan Bloch, and if that's something that appeals to you, looking for higher level mathematical reasoning topics where "we assume you know how to do all these calculations" actually means "we assume that you are plugging these calculations into a computer and having them do it for you." A lot of higher math isn't working with numbers themselves, it's proving either broad statements about functions/numbers that hold in generality for entire classes of things, or working with things that flat-out are not numbers and have different properties. So dipping your toes into that: if you like formal proofs/formal mathematical reasoning, is functional analysis something that makes more sense when you're not working with individual functions? What about linear algebra? Abstract algebra? Category theory? etc. The reason I'd recommend some sort of proofs of logic course material first is because that's the background to any of these topics the way that arithmetic and precalc are the background to any calc sequence, but mathematical reasoning is very different from mathematical calculation.

—Honestly, especially if you're just trying to be familiar as a hobby with various cool things in math, and don't have an actual direct goal in Learning Math besides "this seems super cool and I want to know more", there are a bunch of youtube channels that explain math concepts with the expectation of a lay audience, so serious higher math but no calculations. Veritasium in general is a channel that I trust, one of my favorite of their math videos is Math Has A Fatal Flaw (https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo) but if you like this that channel in general has some good math videos. I'm unfortunately not on youtube a lot so I'm not sure what other channels are Very Good For Math, but I'm pretty sure that there are a bunch of other math channels out there that folks either recommend in the comments or youtube's algorithm will probably recommend, if it's not a trusted channel I'd recommend googling some of their claims afterwards bc anyone can put any bullshit on youtube for clickbait but Veritasium is a pretty good place to start, and math videos are a pretty good place to learn math concepts without doing math calculations.

#I'm sorry I don't have more for you anon but I'm really not a teacher #but flat-out math has very very little to do with calculations when it's higher math #I haven't used my multiplication tables for anything but like. tip calculation. in a while #there's a joke I hear a lot of folks use when they make a silly calculation error of 'I'm a mathematician; I can't add'#which tbh is sometimes a big mood #look for concepts and see if they appeal to you the calculations bit are annoying hoops we make everyone jump through

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no-longer-an-alley-cat · 5 years

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‘“Asexual” Isn’t Who I Am’: The Politics of Asexuality

by Matt Dawson, Susie Scott, and Liz McDonnell

Comedic commentary that might verge on insightful by me.

Join me as I try and fucking deal with this particular hangup I have

Arright, so basically these folks are reacting to other folks who say that asexuality is the fucking cats pajamas and is going to do everything from redefining relationships to destroying neoliberalism.

Basically, they’re saying that this is telling asexual people how they ought to be, and not actually looking at what it is and how asexual people actually are. In fact, they think asexual people are a very diverse bunch and you can’t make general claims about their politicalness. Which is fair.

Anyway, they’re going to look at the politics of asexual people, and they’re doing this in an interesting way where they are committed to studying the world from the participant’s perspective. This is interesting because, generally speaking, it is impossible for a researcher to entirely remove themselves from an interpretation, because they’re human, and that’s not how humans work. It’s particularly interesting if this means they’re just going to take their participant’s word as gospel, because folks have this nasty habit of lying to researchers.

So, working through past literature now.

They got a good handle on the different parts of the spectrum though, nice, nice.

And critique essentialism, all to the good.

Then they’re saying that the establishment of asexuality as legitimate relied vision of an asexual person is the ‘gold star’ asexual (yikes yikes yikes) cause that sectioned off some people who you could still intervene with, so the social dominance of sex in society is unchallenged. This negates the ‘radical potential’ of sexuality which is to suggest the FUCKING WILD NOTION that maybe it’s okay for anyone to not want sex. Like, maybe sex could just be a thing, and not a prerequisite of being normal or intimate???

Anyway, the idea that it could suggest this buck wild idea basically spawned a bunch of articles expecting asexuality to pretty much fix everything wrong with society. We’re questioning mainstream culture, we’re rethinking intimacy, we’re desexualising identity, we’re radical (in the political sense of the word) just by existing. Also just “fundamentally anarchist” because we reclaim agency over our body by not wanting to have sex? Dunno about that one, but I might be down for an A tattoo in ace colours.

But our three musketeers say these are a bunch of claims just pulled out of a collective ass, there’s not data whatsoever. Also, all that stuff talks about ‘asexuality’ like it’s some distinct entity (like how folks talk about capitalism but good) and not a thing that people have. So there’s no discussion of how other aspects of people have (race, gender, class, disability etc) interact with asexuality. And of course they do, people are people.

And they want to see some real resistance, alright? Some proper political action and mobalisation, not just thinking radically. Or, I guess, living in a way that resists norms? Or maybe that counts as taking a political position. I guess we’ll have to wait because now it’s time for METHODOLOGY.

So right off the bat we’re talking qualitative. Interviews and a diary. Data from a study originally looking at asexual identity formation and the construction of intimate relationships, but they figure they had enough to do a little article on the politics of it too. And like they said before, they’re looking at what it is that their participants think they’re doing. They call themselves out a bit, saying that maybe their participants might not know if they’re being political, but I’m gonna add in here that this interview was probably advertised as being about the asexual identity. Folks were asked if they had ‘been an activist in the asexual community or in relation to asexual issues’ sure, but it wasn’t advertised as political so they might not be getting the political peeps!

AND ANOTHER THING (cause we’re into recruitment now), you’re not going to get the people like me. The people who care Very Much about their identity, but are also Very Scared to talk about it with pretty much everyone who hasn’t unlocked like sixth tier trust. And they don’t mention this, even while they’re patting themselves on the back for how many diverse identities they got (never mind that the sample is nearly 74% white, 76% younger than 29, and 54% had a university qualification). People who have the most issues are unlikely to be fitting into those categories, either.

But fuck it, let’s get to the analysis.

How central did the participants consider asexuality to be in their lives? You’ll be fucking astounded to know that it varied!!! Amazing, right? But mainly what they’re looking at is whether folks saw asexuality as a key factor marginalising them. (This is about where I started crying last time, but I’m channeling that into anger to try and keep it together so buckle the fuck up).

Our brave trio admits that they did “””””of course””””” find evidence of discrimination against asexual people, and say that they really don’t want to downplay it, but hey, most of the people they talked to didn’t experience it! They just talked about hearing about it! Like, NO SHIT MOTHERFUCKERS! YOU TALKED TO 50 FUCKING PEOPLE WHO WANTED TO TALK TO YOU! YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO FIND A TREND WITH THAT?? And also let’s not downplay what it can do to a person to hear about how others like them are threatened with rape, huh? Let’s maybe think about the effect of that, huh?

Like, yes, the participants who said that it’s not as bad as the history of oppression that homosexuality has are entirely valid. But the researchers who say multiple times that they don’t want to downplay the effect of discrimination and oppression and then ignore the instances they found in favour of talking about ways it could be worse are NOT.

And then they’re saying that it’s not significant to come out, because it’s ‘a lack’ and they cite a couple of participants who say they don’t come out on a regular basis and here is where we get to crux of my problem with their methodology. Because what they’re doing is they’re taking what these participants said and they’re going, ‘oh, yup, that must be why.’ And that’s all well and good, but if some rando I barely knew asked me why I didn’t come out to all an sundry I might also say something along the lines of ‘oh, well, you know, it’s not a huge deal, it’s not something the public needs to know.’ But Reader, it is a huge deal, at least for me. I’m fucking terrified of coming out to people. People LIE. We lie all the time, we tell people what we think they want to hear, and that means that there could very well be a reason I’m reading what these people said and hearing echoes of the tired old aphobic discourse.

Not saying that is what’s going on, just raising the possibility which they have yet to do.

Yeah, yeah, see here, heteroromantic asexual talking about how they realise their privilege and can pass as straight. Sound familiar? Maybe that is their experience. Maybe it’s what they think the interview wants to be their experience. WHO’S TO SAY?

Yeah, so they conclude that maybe asexuality isn’t very central in their participant’s lives, and we get the title quote of “asexual isn’t who I am. This is just what I am, not who I am as a person.” Which is interesting, because I was just reading another article where gay men said the same thing.

But they say this quotation shows that asexual can be a description of actions one doesn’t take rather than an aspect of a person which creates marginalisation and UM WHAT? You could just as easily say that ‘this is just what I am’ shows a deeper claiming of identity, making it a physical aspect of you which could actually lead to marginalisation. Hey, maybe the context of the quote makes it clear. Don’t know, though, BECAUSE THEY DON’T GIVE ANY.

And now we’re moving on to activism, which I don’t expect to make me as angry, but we’ll see. (Editor’s note: It did.)

Yeah, so there’s more of the drawing the line between how people would like recognition of asexuality and the activism necessary for the wider LGBT community, which, again, valid. But they say that this means that the people who say this feel less need to confront forms of discrimination, when the selfsame participant they are discussing explicitly outlined a need for better education.

APPARENTLY there was no suggestion that the educatory action people engaged in linked to a wider question of social change which, I mean, sure, had you not already called yourself out on participants maybe not being politically conscious I might allow. But you did, and what’s more, I bet you didn’t even fucking ask them if they saw it as social change. And since when was education not social change? How are folks supposed to know that it’s okay not to want sex if you don’t TELL THEM THROUGH THE EDUCATION SYSTEM???

And then they have the nerve the fucking audacity to say that while it is “of course” admirable, it doesn’t show a desire to challenge a social system. EDUCATION IS A SOCIAL SYSTEM, YOU ABSOLUTE WALNUTS.

Now, online activity

This is mainly about people’s attitudes to AVEN which I don’t really know anything about, but it’s people talking about how it feels to find a label and answers, which is some much needed wholesomeness. And I feel like people’s opinions on a particular organisation or website to use for community are much more valid to take at face value. Much less interpretation going on.

LGBT groups/politics. Oh dear.

“The relations between our participants and LGBT groups were complex and multifaceted” oh, I bet they were.

Again, they found more people talking about hearing others excluded rather than seeing them excluded themselves. Kinda idea that the political standpoints might be different, but they don’t really dwell on that, they just head on through to really ram home the idea that asexual people are all different and might not hold inherently queer political perspectives.

And finally, finally, the conclusion. People are different, political literature is wrong, asexuality is not a fucking cure all. Now, they outline a couple of responses to their argument that folks might take.

One: the idea that by being asexual, people have the potential to question society. They say this takes people out of their context, and that their way of looking at human action is better.

Two: a radical politics that hopes to transcend sexual society is the best/only way for asexuality to get social acceptance, never mind what the experiences of the participants say. They don’t want to say whether this is true or not, but say that sociologists should distinguish between arguing for the things they like and arguing that those things are what a certain group should do.

And now for my own conclusion. I know I have issues. I am very ‘sensitive’ around this topic. And, just to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically radical in being asexual, either. I think it might inspire a person to take a radical bent on life, but that’s up to an individual.

But these folks, these silly sausages, in their eagerness to disagree with everyone fell over themselves to gleefully stab each other in the foot. They took an extremely shallow look at their data, not interrogating why people might be telling them these things at all. Additionally, they clearly didn’t want to find much evidence of social activism, and one can’t help but wonder if that is why their definition was so crushingly tight that it didn’t.

They got to an answer I agree with, but boy howdy did they make a mess doing it.

#i'm gonna have to write a proper review on this #i sunk so much time in

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