After weeks of walking without signs of another living human you stumble upon an open Arby's nestled in an oasis of luscious greeny.
I think the fact that it’s the renovated building but the old sign really makes it
Hol up, kudzu is edible?! How were we never taught this???
Holy fuck that is amazing; if it can be floured, so much could be done with it.
See I remember, EVERY DAMN YEAR, back when I was a kid where I used to live, it used to be me and my siblings' job to clear the kudzu and creeper vines from the house's brickwork because every year, without fail, it'd grow like eight damn feet up the wall by the end of spring. Awful work, especially in blistering summer humidity-- if I'd have known the shit was edible...
It's also used in traditional Chinese medicine to make a lot of different medication and even works somewhat. Can be also used to make ropes, clothes, paper, baskets and whatever else people can make of such fibers.
Even if every yank started eating kudzu by the kg, probably they would start cultivating it while forests infested by kudzu wouldn't get cleared of it
See the Rubeus ulmifolius berry plague in Argentina and Chile
Capitalism only knows how to find the worse solution to fuck everything up
Meh it's not capitalism ruining things here, it's simply not the solution cuz:
If kudzu were hard to propagate and high in demand, people would go to the forests and forage it till it's no longer a problem. But kudzu is really easy to prooagate, so if it easier to grow it like another crop, it's not cost effective for most people to go to a fucking forest, so besides some artisanal harvesting by landless people, kudzu would remain a plague.
To actually solve this you need a Forestry Ministry or whatever launching a big campaign to save the forests, and part of that effort should be clear this invasive plant, which is a pain in the ass to do cuz you gotta go and kill it specifically in an area that is annoying to go and you gotta go there season after seadon, year after year,vuz the thing grows back easily.
Again with the R. ulmifolius example: it's a (delicious) invasive thorny bush plaguing mountainous forests, but it's also really easy to grow in any other terrain and we have non-thorny cultivars. So besides forest fires and pissed off hikers carrying a machete in their trips to clear trails, R. ulmifolius has no counter.
Hell, R ulmifolius probably benefits from forest fires.
I see Kudzu here were I am everywhere so I often think about what needs to be done about it. I appreciate your thoughts on this. I agree with state intervention and a forest ministry. It's amazing what a state can do when if actually has the political will :O
To "save face" I'll still relate it to capitalism through our bourgeoisie class having no ability or desire to do anything useful or good for the world except make line go up something something
I'll take a look at R ulmifolius. I love plants and this sounds like a good rabbit hole for the next hour or so!
My bad forgot the endsign "moreover capitalism must be destroyed"
R ulmifolious isn't that of a big deal, Rosa rubiginosa in the other hand is a bigger problem in patagonia specifically and every product I tried made with it sucks ass
R ulmifolious
My brother in communism you can just say "blackberries" so people don't have to google your dead language
Akchually according to google is "elmleaf blackberry" or "thornless blackberry" but the fuckers growing here are a solutely not-thornless
Plus that's the point of scientific names,for everyone to know what species is one actually talking about
If you said blackberry I'd have immediately known what you were talking about though
but hey it's fine, i'm here, it's blackberries everyone, big thorny blackberries
But what if you thought old smartphones were growing wild out of their original ecosystem
I actually remember when I was studying abroad Japan many years ago and I was doing some kind of presentation about our home ecologies and I brought up that kudzu was this big problem where I'm from and some Japanese students were just like, "But why don't you just eat it?" and I was just like
I would rather starve than eat a plant. My forefathers (vikings) didn't fight in world war 2 so I could eat something green.
My forefathers (vikings) didn’t fight in world war 2 so I could eat something green.
Considering that archeological studies discovered vikings very often had parasites and plethora of other digestive tract problems, they in fact must have eaten plenty of green things, but those that shouldn't be green in the first place, like sausages.
those that shouldn't be green in the first place, like sausages.
"Erik, why have you been looking right at a small rock and talking to it?"
"More than 1,000 years from now - cellphones, the net, and Tiktok will exist. But for now - what I can a meatfluencer do?"
you can actually get a lot of parasites from unwashed mishandled uncooked greens i.e. rat lungworm
I love how white people bring up being Vikings but they were considered a joke for the longest time. Mainly because they lost against the Mongols in the East. Its why the Ukrainian worshipping of their Viking roots is more modern and tied to white supremacy rather than some thing traditional and historical.
I mean of course Vikings are going to lose to fucking mongols, you've got, you've got one set of guys whose whole thing is fucking around on little boats doing hit and run raids, you've got another set of guys whose whole thing is massive armies of cavalry, unless the Vikings are tricking them into a naval battle or like guerrilla warring them in some swamp somewhere they're fucked I'm sorry
You're kinda wrong. The notion that the mongols came in and used only force is wrong. The reality is that the people who lived along the northern Silk Road knew of the benefits the mongols provided and willfully supported them in their overthrow of the Kievian Rus. The mongols also provided a pluralistic approach to many things. The Vikings weren't even considered to be white until the 19th century when anglos made up the social construct of race.
The vikings also specialized in hitting areas with litteral no defensive fortifications. The english had placed their monasteries on the rocky eastern shores to prevent them from being overrun by the locals, as the local population would occasionally attack them, but since monks generally did not fight back, attacking them was sort of like attacking a university, whose students are armed with sticks, while the vikings had axes and swords. An axe typically beats a stick, particularly if the stick is wielded by a guy who mainly does yard-work for a living.
This honestly may be a stupid question but is kudzu edible to humans? I’ve seen people bring like, goats in to eat a bunch of it and clear out an area, but I assumed it was on the same level as grass.
lush abundant food-producing leaves growing all over a massive temperate continent
crackers: "now I'm gonna starve"
goats don't like grass that much, they like leaves more
grass is a cow/sheep thing
Feral hogs are considered a problem in Texas— a state where practically everyone has a gun and an insatiable appetite for barbecued meat, and they still can't get the populations under control.
Turns out, exterminating all natural predators of a species lets that species go bonkers.
Except hogs are also invasive. They don’t have natural predators cause they’re not supposed to be on the continent.
its why pig hunting is so important here. good source of food and also keeps wild hogs from destroying the native plantlife
This photo is strangely beautiful. Feels like something from a dream.
Greenery has a charm all it's own. Plus - in that photo anyway - kudzu envelops things in a way that reminds me of a 3D fractal program I used to use called Chaoscope. Some fractal shapes just really feel "right".
today I learned kudzu existed and people have a lot to say about itkudzu is not even a problem compared to more invasive plants/vines like ENGLISH IVY (which is present in like 47 states iirc) and JAPANESE KNOTWEED (42/50 states) & that isn't even bringing up hyper-competitive decorative trees/shrubs like **ALL TYPES OF PRIVET ** but mfers who can't tell the difference between kudzu, mile-a-minute, and knotweed when they're driving on 70kmh on a highway/road will have you believe kudzu has swallowed the entirety of southern forests when in reality it doesn't really like anything further than the forest edge or an open field.
Kudzu grows fast and is a bitch to get rid of once established, sure, but it doesn't actually reproduce fast - it only disperses like a couple of seeds yearly and those don't immediately germinate. Meanwhile Japanese Knotweed, by the way, is perfectly happy creating its own little thicket in worse areas than kudzu does like frequently flooded areas, the shorelines of creeks/streams, and even straight through asphalt.
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Kudzu spreads quickly thanks to its runners; Japanese Knotweed does that and then ups the ante by dispersing a fuckton more seeds by wind & water & bird.
Don't get me started on privets - literally rented a house a few years ago that had a fairly young (maybe 4-5 years old) Chinese Privet that was the only thing in the (largely uncared for) backyard because the topsoil hadn't been amended in years so it was largely nutrient starved loamy sand. Told the landlord the privet was invasive and bound to fill the entire backyard in a few years with its offspring & clones. Pointed out that the tree itself was growing right next to the wooden deck (literally it was planted right next to the corner post) & eventually would either begin to overtake it or. Asked if I could cut it down & offered to even spend my own money treating the stump so it didn't grow back and buying/planting some native alternatives.
"Please do not make any alterations to the yard that cannot be mowed or easily removed after your lease is up. And no, we'd like the tree to stay."
I spent so much time making sneaky cuts into the trunk and applying herbicide in the hopes that fucker would die, but it was still thriving by the time my lease ended two years later. I did fix the rest of the backyard though by buying a bunch of native bird seed & 'feeding' the birds by spreading it out back with extra compost I wasn't using for my potted plants. Landlord was very surprised to see a bunch of milkweed plants and clover covering the backyard when they came by for the move-out inspection but I know in my heart they probably mowed that shit down 2 days after I moved out so the privet could out-compete literally nothing.
Oh the knotweed, I pull knotweed along a local walking path (I need to talk to the town about herbicide but there's a waterway nearby so probs a bad idea). I pulled enough this year to see a duck return to swim in the water, but those underground vines mean they'll always come back.
A guy with no cattle.
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You may have heard the Texas slang, “big hat, no cattle” — referring to a person who makes him or herself look important, without the substance to back it up.
It's a Randy Newman song too: Big Hat, No Cattle - YouTube.
invasive as it is that setting looks gorgeous, there was a similar area I would visit where the forest was just draped in wisteria
Yeah I was honestly struck by how nice that looks minus the arbys
Im pretty sure too get the tubers that means you have to dig up the root which is 1) a pain and 2) not what people are going to think of when you say "wow it's edible"
Anybody reading "kudzu edible" is gonna be thinking of the greens and the greens are 90% of the bulk and problem
This whole argument that was had is silly because the greens are edible.
So are sweet potato greens, westoid society doesn't appreciate shit
A single trip to the vegetable section of any Asian market would kill the average white American.
Now I wish "meat hole" was a common way of saying mouth.
"When I put that burger right into my meat hole - man, I was happy!"
