fruchtfolge

Though maybe I am just doing a better job paying attention—which certainly counts for something too—and being engaged with the consequences of our behaviour for the environment or maybe it’s the recently adopted legislation and agricultural reforms made to be more sustainable and friendlier for pollinators, while I’ve noticed that crop-rotation and allowing fields to be fallow for a season, recharging the soil by sewing clover or grasses and letting it rest, I don’t think I’ve seen before sections of land, vast swaths of it, wholly given over to wildflowers like I am seeing now.
It isn’t just the margins and shoulders along tractor trails that are teeming with blooms but also deep into the interior of grain crops, thick with cornflowers (Cyanus segetum, Kornblume—considered endangered due to over-use of pesticides), poppies (Papaver rhoeas, Mohnblume), baby’s breath (Gypsophila paniculata, Schleier-Gipskraut—that is, chalk-loving), thistles (Silybum marianum, Disteln) and daisies (Bellis perennis—pretty everlasting, Gänseblümchen), the fields are droning with the buzz of bees.

evening of the seventh

Japan, ascribed to the Gregorian calendar, will mark Tanbata (meaning above, たなばた or七夕) on this night. Common to several countries in the region that keep this star festival in their own ways, the celebration marks the reunion of two star-crossed deities called Orihime and Hikoboshi—represented by Vega and Altair (α Aquilæ and α Lyræ, which form a bright asterism during the high summer in the Northern Hemisphere)—whom are kept asunder by the gulf of the Milky Way and only allowed together on the seventh day of the seventh month.
Originally introduced to Japan in the mid-eighth century under the more utilitarian label of “The Festival to Plead for Skills” and included customarily the opportunities for girls to wish for better sewing and crafting skills and for boys to wish for better penmanship. The ceremony was conflated with the folklore tale “The Cowherd [Hikoboshi] and the Weaver Girl [Orihime],” a hapless couple whose passion for one another caused each to shirk their duties and allow their talents to atrophy. In order to restore balance to the Cosmos, the two were only permitted visitation once a year, the magpies forming a bridge that crossed the expanse. Contemporary festivities include composing wishes—in verse—on small strips of paper and hanging them from a bamboo wish tree, which are then burnt as votive offerings or released down a watercourse to bare the postulants’ prayers aloft.

calpe mons

In response to a constitutional convention held regarding the promontory’s sovereignty and continued allegiance to the British crown—affirmed by a referendum of Gibraltarians not to become a condominium, Francisco Franco closed the land border with Spain on this day in 1969, stopping ferry services and cutting utilities. The border would not be fully open with egress and ingress restored until 1985. The near unanimity of the 1967 vote to remain an overseas territory is mirrored by the Gibraltar’s strong rejection of Brexit and the contention Spain’s own disputes with Morocco over its exclaves on the Africa side of the straits, Monte Hancho in Ceuta being the complimentary Pillar of Hercules.

рентгениздать

Previously we’ve encountered bypassing censorship and sanction through bootleg distribution of Western recordings pressed on exposed x-ray film, so we were a little surprised to see a resurgence in the method—albeit in a symbolic sense to protest current prevailing attitudes towards censorship and cultural heterodoxy in Russia. A consortium has partnered to release a vinyl with tracks from various groups labelled as subversive.
The title refers to the term roentgenizdat—that is, music on ribs or bone music and the improvised recordings whose centre hole was made with a cigarette burn and resulted in awful fidelity that could only be played around five times before the stylus destroyed the record altogether. True to tradition, the new vinyl editions can be played but with the same limitations as before with the tracks rubbing away after a few iterations—which seems sort of a useful feature rather than flaw of the media, especially in terms of plausible deniability if caught with contraband. Much more to explore at the links above.

me + t

Having explored the proven and somewhat more esoteric ways that plants are networked and sustain one another in the past, we really appreciated Open Culture’s take on plant communications and how, if the titular character of Shel Silverstein’s story, had not been in isolation a You Gotta Be Kidding Me Tree would have intervened when the giving came to taking. See a suite of lessons on how trees talk to one another at the links above.

fackellilien

A new and hopefully long-term resident of our garden is this bright orange torch lily (Kniphofia, named after the Erfurt botany professor Johann Hieronymus Kniphof) is a healthy exemplar of a species native to South Africa first imported and described by Konrad Mönch in 1794.
The contemporary of Carl Linnaeus (see also here, here and here) who also formally classified Echinacea (though its reputation as a folk medicine long preceded its classification), Moench (Conrad, using the Latin spelling of his name professionally as was the style at the time) thought that the decorative plant would thrive, despite the obvious differences in climate, in German parks and gardens and they have proven themselves to be pretty wide-ranging indeed.

boreal

Though not totally out of the woods (like the paradox that holds one can only wander half way into the forest because after that point, one is on the way out), Swiss researchers bring the encouraging news that planting a trillion trees could reduce carbon dioxide levels by fully two-thirds, sequestering the green-houses gases that man has been flagrantly pumping into the atmosphere for the past quarter of a century.
That last third will be tough to eliminate but together with continuing emission reductions, dietary changes and advancing technology, the task at hand no longer seems as hopeless—the boost from the trees, according to new models, far greater than expected. Not only would the massive greening of the planet be logistically tenable and a bargain too great to pass up—at around thirty cents per sapling, it would cost all of three-hundred billion dollars—and despite the considerable space that this many extra trees would need to grow, continental America plus China, surveyors have found room at the borders and verges and in derelict land without taking any places used for growing crops and urban spaces—though more trees would dot pasture lands and be to the benefit of grazing livestock. Everyone can take part and aside from the intrinsic and aesthetic value of trees (helping to stop erosion, drought, flooding and preserve biodiversity), it’s moreover an intervention that is not predicated on convincing the nay-sayers and science-deniers otherwise.

essential amino acids

Developed in partnership with a state research centre and a prestigious Finnish university, the protein powder provisionally called solein, brewed by microbes fermenting the gaseous by-products of the simple electrolytic reduction of water—pliable into any form and with magnitudes less of an environmental impact than traditional agricultural, needing no extra irrigation or arable land, certainly sounds intriguing.
What do you think about that?  Considering how much territory is given over to livestock grazing and the ecological pressures that creates, it is time to re-evaluate our priorities. Fortified and chemically flavoured, the start up behind it which aims to scale-up to produce two billion meals per year after its initial debut says that the powder base can be adjusted and improvised to fit any palette.