3 Soil Inputs that Beat Peat
If you rely on peat for your soil mix, try one of these other more sustainable alternatives.
My latest article on Hobby Farms
Bagged or baled peat is a regular offering at most garden centers,
but in recent years, more attention has been paid to how this histosol is unsustainably extracted from the earth.Peatlands—also called bogs or mires—are unique and vital water-saturated habitats that house a number of threatened species: Acidic-soil
lovers, like carnivorous plants and heathers, are among them. Like
forests, peatlands are carbon-sequestering sinks, often hosting
thousands of years of successive layers of low- and slow-growing plant
deadfall, as well as sphagnum moss.When peat is harvested in strips for use in the garden (or worse, for
use as fuel), these delicate biomes that have taken eons to form are
irreparably damaged. In building gardens that require low pH
or high-organic-matter soil, consider a number of sustainably-produced
alternatives to keep the integrity of these non-renewable ecosystems
intact. Although these solutions require some experimentation, they
provide the basic building blocks for rich organic soil.
Peat is a limited resource and should be saved for things where only peat will do, by which I mean making whiskey.
If you’re interested in wood chip mulch (which is what I use as a weed-suppressor that decomposes into soil amendment) and you live in an area with plenty of trees, talk to local arborists. In big cities they may charge for their chips, but in lots of areas they’re a waste product and you can get ‘em free or for the cost of delivery.
If you have to go to a store and buy it in bags, there’s a good chance it was chipped just for this purpose rather than diverted from a waste stream, so the best bet environmentally in this case is also the best on your wallet!
Day: April 5, 2016
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Poet
Taylor Steele captures the problem with appropriating Black slang.
In her poem “AAVE” (which stands for African-American Vernacular English) Taylor Steele explains why appropriation of Black slang is the worst.
African-American culture is being popularized on a daily basis and while Black people are judged and mistreated for using something they came up with ages ago, White people come off as cool and original when they use it.#BlackLivesMatter
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I like Bernie but If Hillary wins the primary I’ll vote Hillary. I love y’all but if you let Christie or Trump become president because you wanted to throw a tantrum over Hillary winning primaries I will personally punch every other registered voter in the face. I had to suffer through eight years of a republican president I didn’t elect and I won’t do it again.
I’ll have at least four years to work my way through a punching list don’t think I won’t try it.
But Obama isn’t republican..unless you’re talking about a different president?
yes dear child, I was alive during the years 2000-2008, when President George W. Bush was president-elect. I don’t say this to be rude because you’re 16, and you don’t know, because you couldn’t have known, but now it is my faithful duty to tell you so you are informed as to why we (I) hate Republicans. You may not know him very well, but here’s a picture:
It’s an understatement to say that the Mission, was in fact, not accomplished.
He’s the guy that Obama replaced in large part because everyone hated George W. Bush. Why?:
- Despite extensive warnings of incoming threats, Bush took no action to prevent 9/11 from happening, leading several respectable political science scholars to indicate that Bush was at least partially responsible for the attacks actually occurring (if not wholly responsible for not preventing them)
- actually let’s remember that when he was immediately alerted to the attack, he continued to read a children’s story to elementary schoolers and then Air Force one and himself were gone for several hours after the attack.
- he turned an inherited budget surplus into a 1.2 trillion dollar deficit.
- a small deficit is one thing! 1.2 trillion dollars is NOT SMALL. Bill Clinton did have some part in the lead-up to a failing economy but Bush….Bush destroyed it.
- The entire 2008 collapse began while he was still in office and basically did nothing about it. This wasn’t just an American collapse. This was a world-wide financial collapse that happened because American banks were failing (in large part due to massive amounts of tax-cuts and de-regulation put forth by Bush!). It triggered a world-wide collapse. He was partially responsible for our country’s second great depression.
- He is 100% responsible for the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the guy Kanye West was referring to when he said “George Bush hates black people.”
- the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the “war on Terror”
- LAUNCHING WARS WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL
- the entire existence of Guantanamo Bay
- the Patriot Act
- his own party wanted nothing to do with him in 2008
- heckuva job, brownie
- waterboarding
- ….he literally stole the election in 2000
- pulled us out of the kyoto protocal to deal with global warming problems
- US troops given faulty, or unsafe gear
- Abu Gharib prison and all other crimes of war already mentioned here or not mentioned
- War profiteering! The list of top Bush administration officials whose former corporate employers made billions in Pentagon contracts starts with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Halliburton, which made $39.5 billion, and included his daughter, Liz Cheney, who ran a $300 million Middle East partnership program.
- cutting veteran’s health care benefits
- pardoning Scooter Libby
- cut and froze pell grants for poor students
- no child left behind act is the reason why you probably have to take those god forsaken dumb standardized tests for no real GOOD reason
- Reporters analyzing Bush’s record found that he took off 1,020 days in two four-year terms—more than one out of every three days. No other modern president comes close. Bush also set the record for the longest vacation among modern presidents—five weeks, the Washington Post noted.
- i could keep listing shit for days honestly but i won’t
suffice to say: George W. Bush is the worst president I lived through, he is the worst president in the last 50 years, and his blatant incompetence and failures are why the Republican party is rapidly devouring itself like a crazed ouroboros and might try to elect Trump. He is the reason why Stephen Colbert parodied the right as satire – why The Daily Show gained huge amounts of relevance, why the rest of the world hated us for a good eight years solid, why huge amounts of various civil and constitutional rights were literally eroded and denied to us, why we’re so in the debt hole even now, and why i registered Democrat when I turned 18, because honestly fuck the entire Republican party. Burn it to the ground and salt the earth.
Every. Damn. Word.
It’s really hard to explain how much the rest of the world disliked George W. Bush, because our journalism in the US was so “even handed.”
Let me put it to you this way. Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. He was nominated for the prize eleven days after he took office. Though the Nobel committee insisted that they would never award a prize to someone based on what they might do in the future… um. What? He had been president of the US for eleven days. He’d given a couple of speeches. Yes, they were really good speeches, but… it was weird! I mean, they had to know that we are the country with the most military power in the world and therefore the one most likely to be involved in any and all wars on the planet.
They gave the next guy one of the world’s most prestigious prizes for not being George W. Bush. So yeah, that was embarrassing.
Vote your ideal in primaries. Vote the lesser evil in the general. Always. Too many people will be seriously harmed by the greater evil if you don’t vote out of a fit of pique!
Sincerely, someone else who remembers Dubya goddamn Bush.
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the look on its face like “what is this inedible flying bullshit”
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This is killing a human life.
At 23 weeks chances are good that this fetus is being removed because it is:
a) Already dead
b) Suffering abnormalities such as it developed no brain, or had a serious genetic condition that would kill it quickly.
c) Was actively dying (not dead yet but would be within a few days, 100% guarunteed, 0 chance of saving it)
d) Was actively killing the pregnant person.Late term abortions, as shown here, make up only 1.5% of all abortions. The above four reasons are the only reasons such procedures are performed. Almost every abortion performed after 20 weeks is done on a wanted pregnancy. So you know what that means? You’re calling people who miscarried murderers. You just implied people who had a miscarriage or would have died murderers. How dare you call yourself pro life for that.
Now for the fun fact: They used to use a different procedure for these abortions in which they removed the fetus intact and allowed these people to grieve for the intact fetus, have pictures, etc. Pro lifers decided people losing a wanted pregnancy should not be allowed to grieve an intact fetus and we were left with this.
Congrats. Your movement is the reason they use this one now when people lose a wanted pregnancy late into the pregnancy. Your movement is intentionally making it harder for people to recover from the lose of a much wanted pregnancy. It’s your movement who left grieving people with this instead of allowing them something easier to deal with, something that would let them hold their deceased fetus.
Congrats. If you think you were ‘saving’ something think again. You’re hurting born people. You’re hurting people who lose a wanted pregnancy by shaming this abortion procedure. And you’re movement is the reason this is procedure doctors are forced to use now. You’re probably an awful and mean person to tell people losing a wanted pregnancy that they’re killers.
This is the post that made me pro-choice. Glad to see it still circulating.
I lost a baby brother at something like 14 weeks because he’d attached to the uterine wall backward, and when he started kicking he tore himself away and hemorrhaged to death.
You goddamn “pro-lifers” were ready to let my mother die with him rather than “killing him before God’s time.” He was already dead; it was a matter at that point of him bleeding out. My mother was bleeding with him. My mother was dying with him. And the hospital she was in? That fine pro-life hospital? Refused to let her transfer to another hospital to abort. She had a ten-year-old and an eight-month old at home, but making sure Joey didn’t die “before God’s time” was more goddamn important than making sure my mother survived.
My mother asked the nurse if she’d take pictures, saying that the ultrasound images were really blurry and she’d at least like something to remember him by. The nurse, after Joey was dead and my mom was in recovery, threw pictures on my mother’s bed. This fine pro-life nurse gave my mother pictures of a baby that was jet black where he wasn’t blood red. He didn’t even look human. And she threw the pictures in my mother’s face, like it was her fault that there was a terrible, terrible biological mistake that made it impossible for her baby to survive.
We wanted him. Not that the fact that you’ll notice he already had a name picked out would’ve clued you in. I would have had a baby brother just a year younger than me. My sophomore year in college I spent a lot of time crying alone in the student union, thinking it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, I should be taking my brother to dinner with friends or helping him study for his first midterms. I’m a big sister with no little brother to show for it, and there was a year that pain and loss came back eighteen years after the fact to wound me when I least expected it. There was a year when there were songs I couldn’t bring myself to listen to without crying because they reminded me of what I could have had. And I still wish, I still wish, they’d aborted him. Because the end result would have been the same. And my family would have been spared a world of pain believing we were losing brother and mother both. I was in ICU at the time after an allergic reaction that left me unable to breathe. How do you suppose my sister felt? Mother dying, sister dying, brother dead—just a matter of time on that one. Ten years old, watching her entire family struggling to breathe, struggling to live.
And you motherfuckers would call my mom a murderer for this. And you cared more for a baby already dying than you did for the two already born who needed their mom.
Fuck you. You’re not pro-life. You’re anti-woman, anti-family, anti-compassion and anti-love.
Someone on my FB shared this photo and I had to go sit in silence for awhile at the stupidity of her comment that went along with it. Most people don’t wait so late into a pregnancy and randomly decide ‘kill the baby’ because they want to. What the fuck is wrong with people.
Why I will always be pro choice
I’m absolutely crying right now
This really pisses me off, because last year my cousin Emily (Emmie) actually did die from not being able to abort her baby. When she was just under 20 weeks along with her second daughter they found out she had a condition which causes high blood pressure and protein in urine. The doctors gave her like a 5% chance of being able to bring the baby to term with both of them surviving. She and her husband were DEVASTATED.
She regretfully scheduled an appointment to terminate, but people found out. She went to church for comfort, so that she would have people there for her when she would need them but she got the opposite. Her church threatened to ex-communicate her, even though she tried to explain she didn’t want to abort, she had to to survive. People told her that a good mother would be willing to risk her life for her child, and sent her letters saying she was going to hell and threatening to physically attack her if she went through with it. Someone even told her four-year-old daughter, who was really excited about getting a little sister, that “You aren’t going to get a little sister because mommy is going to kill the baby.” They told that to a FOUR-YEAR-OLD! The harassment got so bad that on the day of her appointment, she didn’t go. About a later her liver started to fail, then her kidneys. Within a few days she was dead. They did deliver the baby at 23 and a half weeks, but she didn’t survive more than a few hours.
Of course the church held a big memorial for her and the baby, going on and on about hour strong she was and what a great person and mother she was. And how it was a tragedy that she was taken so young but “god works in mysterious ways.”
BULL FUCKING SHIT! Emmie was already vulnerable and distraught and she went to those people looking for comfort and they turned on her so brutally that she was too terrified and ashamed to have a necessary medical procedure. That’s NOT pro-life. That’s not even anti-choice, because she didn’t have a choice, she NEEDED that abortion to save her life. That is pro-birth. Congrats, the baby was born. She lived for 2 hours and 48 minutes, the entire time in pain, but she was born. Mission accomplished. But now the baby’s dead, Emmie’s dead at only 28 years old, her husband is a widower, and her now 5 year old daughter gets to live the rest of her life without a mother.
This is so important to understand.
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Oh god this is good. Please, take a moment.
PLAY THIS
omg she’s hilarious
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See, what you need to understand is that “Not all guys like that” is never going to work. Because you’re answering an entirely different conversation than what women are actually saying.
You think women are saying “Every man is a predator and a danger to me.” And you’re replying, “But I’m not like that.”
But women aren’t saying that. They’re saying “There are too many situations where women have to worry about their safety,” and you’re saying “That’s not important.” They’re saying “Women are constantly told it’s their fault if something bad happens,” and you’re saying “Don’t worry about it.” They’re saying “Too often, women find their trust violated by men,” and you’re saying “But you should trust me!”
They’re saying “So many men have decided that what they want is more important than anything about a woman.” And you’re replying “I’m exactly like that.”
bolded for emphasis