Y'all ever get so excited about a scientific paper you're reading that you get chills???

So I thought to myself

Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan

And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat

And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China

And ohhhhh my goddddd. I'm vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.

The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:

KUDZU IS NOT WILD. IT IS SEMI-DOMESTICATED.

In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!

THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH

and in turn

HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS

*AND*

in its natural range, humans are the main "predator" of kudzu

"Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas."

Kudzu is like that because it co-evolved with humans.

WHAT

YALL

This means

That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans

The other half of the ecological partnership that keeps Kudzu in balance with everything else isn't a caterpillar or a hoofed beast. It's us.

Wait, you can spin kudzu? Why aren't we harvesting and marketing this as the newest eco friendly fiber for hand spinners in the US? The market may be small, but I guarantee you with the "spin" that you can use your hobby to fight invasive plants and save the earth that people would pay money to have it sent to them.

Someone send me a sample of kudzu bark and I'll do some research on how they got the spinnable fiber out of it.

Of *course* someone has figured it out already:

http://fiberhousecollective.com/invasive-fiber-study-group/2021/12/5/meeting-1-weaving-with-kudzu-amp-bast-fiber-processing

If you live in areas with kudzu, go get some and spin it!

Hell yeah

…Well whaddaya know. !!!

Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”

“Friend”

Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.

Plants don’t wage war

Ever heard of blackberries?

Yes, plants do wage war

Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else. 

I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.

It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.

Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.

And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.

This post did not go where I expected it to.

Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.

Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.

Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed. 

Can second the comments of Kudzu.

I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.

I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:

See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.

Southern Gothic knows Lovecraft. We have fucking kudzu.

Trees definitely do war. My little sister and I both got tiny fir saplings for arbor day when we were sprouts. We planted them about 8′ apart. 25 years later, mine is a mighty forest giant, at least 50′ tall. Hers is a dead stump because mine stole all the water and sunlight.

Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”

“Friend”

Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.

Plants don’t wage war

Ever heard of blackberries?

Yes, plants do wage war

Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else. 

I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.

It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.

Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.

And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.

This post did not go where I expected it to.

Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.

Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.

Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed. 

Can second the comments of Kudzu.

I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.

I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:

See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.