sometimes I think about how brussel sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan are all the same species, and i understand why biologists are constantly furious about taxonomy

I’m sorry what

same species. same fucking species

Somebody please explain this because what the fuck

i can do that!

Introducing the Brassica oleracea, a plant species whose cultivars include…all of the above. They all originated from the same plant aka THIS FUCKER! 

No, really. This thing has existed in Europe for thousands of years, during which time different societies had different culinary preferences, leading them to selectively breed for different traits. For example, a preference for the eating leaves led farmers to select seeds from the plants with the largest leaves, resulting gradually in the development of kale.

The real fun thing is, this happened on a vast timeline. Kale was developed over 4000 years ago, while Savoy cabbage was first documented just 5 centuries ago. And different cultivars developed in different regions across Europe and Asia, with their phenotypes and names changing wildly over time. (Fun fact, Brussels sprouts are indeed named for Brussels, the capital city of Belgium, where they were developed from a predecessor imported from Rome.) 

The list above isn’t even exhaustive btw. There are plenty of other ridiculous cultivars (such as the Jersey cabbage, pictured below), and there’s no telling how many other forms existed throughout history, and which would have counted as distinct cultivars, and how many names and groups they were separated into, and, and, and—and imposing taxonomy on the real world is a mess, basically, because the real world does not give a shit about making itself comprehensible or categorizeable. But still we try. Planet Earth has Hot Mess Energy, and would you really have it any other way?

ko-fi

Also the reason they’re considered the same species is because if you try to crossbreed them they will produce viable and fertile offspring

Plants are insane that way

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

Introducing Kalettes (kale-brussels sprouts hybrid), Broccoflower (broccoli-cauliflower hybrid), and Broccolini (broccoli-gai lan hybrid)

look at the kalettes! the itty bitty tiny kalettes!!! I absolutely despise this knowledge thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bonus: Romanesco broccoli, which is not a hybrid but just….really fucked up cauliflower

And don’t even get me STARTED on ornamental cabbage. fuck off

Something that’s always been fascinating to me is that my spouse loves all brassicas EXCEPT the ones selected for the flowering parts. Leaves and leaf buds? A-OK, some of his top most favorite vegetables. Broccoli and cauliflower, however, he calls “the death vegetable”. My only conclusion is that there’s something specifically in the florets that tastes bad to him, something I can’t taste the same way he can’t taste that freshwater animals are made of mud.

Turnip and radish also.

@nathanwpyle

I literally love this.

I couldn't stop laughing for 20 minutes.

No joke.

This has the same energy as a writer desperately trying to make their insanely cool but devastatingly off the wall plot point work with the rest of the story

Other places:

INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK / ETSY / KICKSTARTER    

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. !!!

I've been thinking about the "orchid vs dandelion" theory that some people (usually discussed in context of children) are dandelions, who can grow anywhere, including 'coming up through cracks in a sidewalk', and thrive in almost all circumstances; where as other people, who are highly sensitive and have trouble dealing with stressful situations, are orchids.

Actual orchid plants grow a whole variety of different ways because there are, you know, 28,000 different species. But for the sake of the metaphor, assume they're talking about the traditional Phalaenopsis/ "moth orchid", which is just the normal kind of orchid you'd find at any grocery store. Those guys are epiphytes, which means that they don't grow in soil. Instead, they use their extremely cool roots to cling to the side of a tree or a rock or something off the ground. Because they don't grow in soil, they've got roots that can be exposed to the air. Strong roots, that are able to hold up the whole plant, keep it anchored, grab as much water as they need, and support the plant growing beautiful flowers. But in the soil, their roots are smothered. Soil holds too much water, doesn't create enough airflow, and the roots will rot away.

Dandelions grow in soil. They seem tough and easy because they grow the typical way that someone like me who lives in Canada expects plants to grow. But if I took a dandelion out of the ground, washed all the dirt off its roots, and tied it to a tree... that dandelion would die. That dandelion would die so fast. Any plant that grows in soil will die if left with roots exposed to the air; orchids love the air.

There's an idea that because orchids don't grow easily in the way we're used to, they're "sensitive" or difficult or tricky. But if you have an orchid in a nice chunky substrate (mostly chunks of wood) in a pot designed for orchids with big holes in the sides to let in more air, orchids are actually really easy to grow. They can handle getting dried out, because they've got those strong roots. And it's pretty hard to overwater if you've got them planted properly, because the water will just flow through the chunkiness and out the sides of the pot.

An orchid can thrive in conditions that other plants, even the hardy dandelion, would find impossible.

The metaphor still mostly works as intended, but I think it's such a different way of framing it to acknowledged that orchids are actually pretty tough, pretty resilient. It's not that they can't handle "stressors". It's just that some things that wouldn't be difficult for another plant are impossible for them.

But likewise a bare root dandelion is going to die if it's tied to a tree.

In ‘Eyes as Big as Plates,’ Sculptural Garments Camouflage Subjects in Natural Environments

Oh this is why every gardening person I know keeps trying to give me the food they grow

That, and we love you. Homegrown produce is a love language.

Unless it's zucchini. Then it's a cry for help.

Tomato (June) - I think highly of you; treasured friend

Tomato (September) - you are a warm body that is nearby

Fresh new asparagus - romantic love

Artichoke - fondness

New rhubarb with leaves removed - flirtatious potential

Rhubarb with leaves left on - the bloom is gone

Swiss chard - I have made mistakes

Perpetual spinach - declaration of animosity between our houses

White-fleshed potato - you are a neighbor

Blue or red fleshed potato - as above, but with overtones of camaraderie/affection

Kale - you are a person who was nearby when I had kale

Raspberries - you are a person I admire

Strawberries - you are a treasure

Onion - I am confused

Young French beans or young peas - I thought of you especially

Runner beans - mild criticism; familial ties; gift from parent to child

Pumpkins - overt romantic, sexual or childhood-bestie interest; highest declaration of loyalty

Prettily coloured popping corn, I.e. glass gem - let this seal the breach between our houses

Zucchini/courgette - cry for help, resignation

Novelty pumpkins - marriage proposal

my grandparents have to lock their car doors when they go to sunday mass because people have been breaking in to unlocked cars and leaving entire piles of zucchini

i feel like i should’ve added more context when i posted this. my grandparents live in a rural area where farmers and casual gardeners alike are, at this point in the year, suddenly being hit with unexpectedly abundant zucchini crops. there aren’t just some random vandals leaving zucchinis in people’s cars for the hell of it, this is the work of some very exasperated, probably very elderly, folks who have more zucchini than they know what to do with

Yep. You can also expect to find a bag of zucchini on your porch.

My grandfather once found his neighbor stealing his tomatoes out of his garden at three in the morning. Red-handed, with a basket of the nearly-ripened ones.  He thought he was going to find gophers or something, but no, here’s Henry, taking his tomatoes. The best ones.

There was a long pause between them.

My grandfather (allegedly) said, “Henry… it’s OK.  You can take some tomatoes if you want them.”

Henry sighed in relief.

“But,” my grandfather said, “you have to take two zucchini for every tomato.”

There was another long silence.  “That’s a harsh bargain, John,” said Henry.  “But I accept.  I’ll tell Joe up the street, too.”

My grandfather said, “Tell Joe he needs to take three.”

a friend of my dad’s came by in the middle of the night, he seemed very nervous when my dad answered the door. he wouldn’t come inside but he leaned in and whispered to my dad in spanish, “i have some fresh grapes for you.” and then this happened:

the melon was a special bonus.

MY DREAM

A friend of mine lives in a rural area and he has been surrounded by zucchini for most of May, June, and July.

At one point he was so done with the whole zucchini madness that he came to classes actively begging people to “Please please please!! Take some my family’s damned zucchini!! I’ve been eating zucchini for weeks!! I’m going insane!!!”

Having grown up in a rural area and having come home to zucchini on the front step or in the mailbox, i find it highly amusing the OP had to clarify.  I’m sitting here nodding “yup.”

I have a friend with a garden in Oregon who literally made Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookies and sent them to me in Indiana. I texted her back “I SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING HERE”

I’m waiting for the day when someone will hear about my background in Botany and ask me for advice on what someone who’s just wanting to start exploring planting vegetables should try.

I know fuckall about gardening because my background is wild plants and not agriculture, but I’m gonna tell them

“Zucchini. Definitely try Zucchini. Just plant plenty of them and you’ll get a decent sized crop! They’re very rewarding to grow.”

It may be a bit of a long game, but I’ll enjoy their screams of despair from across the void as they realize that they will eat zucchini forever

This is NOT an exaggeration, guys. Zucchini (and most squashes, really) will outgrow you so fast. Let our tale be a caution– or an encouragement, whichever. You decide as you hear the story of Squish.

When we were so broke we had to choose between gas and store-bought-food (I think I was about 10?), we had a garden so we could eat regularly (we also had chickens and pigs and hunted, but that’s beside this point). One summer, we planted 6 rows of yellow squash and 6 rows of zucchini. Each row probably had 10, maybe 12 plants in it. We created this giant squash-block in our garden plot so it was all right there together in the middle, and the needier plants like tomatoes were on the outside of the whole plot. We thought we were clever, til the first crop started coming in.

The outside two rows of each squash, yellow and zucchini, were normal. High yield, of course (because squash), but standard size for both summer squash and Italian zucchini. The inner 8 rows, however, created this hybrid monstrosity that we called Squish. It was pretty– a nice swirly yellow and green combination that made it clear the squash and zucchini had interbred.

Squish became a living nightmare for us. Something about the hybridization caused them to forget how to stop growing, or at least how to grow at a normal rate because those suckers were longer than my dad’s forearm, and bigger around than my (albeit child-sized) thighs. They didn’t get all hard and nasty on the inside, either, for some reason, like most squash will at that size. And they just kept coming. I don’t even remember seeing that many flowers, but every day we were pulling upwards of 20lbs of Squish out of the garden, only for there to be more the next day, or sometimes by the end of the day if we harvested in the morning. I don’t know where they were hiding, but it was like some sort of squash portal had opened into our yard and started crapping out Frankenstein’s Squashes.

At first, it was great. We could eat all we wanted and not worry about rationing it. But the growing season in Arkansas is long, and we had incredible weather that summer, so those darn things kept alternating flowers and fruit. Pull off a few Squish, new flowers budded out, and they ripened super-fast in the heat. We were absolutely swimming in Squish, because they were so big that even gorging on them meant only 1 or 2 got eaten per meal. (I think I recall using a few particularly enormous ones as swords for a duel with my sister, if that says anything about their size. I cannot overemphasize how absolutely, heinously gigantic they were. You probably don’t believe me but I am not kidding. Those things were bigger than a newborn by several many inches and a couple pounds.)

We had (luckily) a big deep freezer, and someone gifted us a bunch of freezer ziploc bags, so we started chopping them up and freezing them as we pulled them off. We ran out of bags real fast, so we caved and bought a ton more. We filled that deep freezer near to bursting. It was probably 3-4 feet deep, (as I remember barely coming up to the edge of it), and at least 4-5 feet long, about 2.5 feet across, and we filled it to the top with Squish. And that’s while we’re eating fresh ones every day with dinner! But still more Squish came before the first frost, so we started packing the fridge. And my grandma’s freezer. And my grandma’s fridge. And feeding them to the pigs and chickens. And giving them away at church.

Do you realize how big a deal it is that people who were so broke that they had to choose between gas and the power bill were GIVING AWAY FOOD??? That’s how much gosh darn Squish we had. And little did I know, but apparently, my dad HATES squash. He only planted them because they were a cheap, quick source of food and my mom loved squashes. And he got stuck with the folly of his decisions. For over a year.

Yep. We had Squish in the freezer for over a year. Eating it regularly. It lasted for over a year. A family of 5, plus often feeding my grandmother, we ate off a single garden’s haul for over a year. Of just the Squish. I tell you, if we’d had a farmer’s market back then, that Squish could probably have single-handedly lifted us out of poverty. Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.

We never planted both again, probably because my dad would have combusted out of rage if he’d ever seen another Squish in his life. But man those were the days for thems of us what loved squash.

So survival tip: If you need an absolute crapton of food, plant you a row of yellow squash and a row of zucchini, and keep that pattern going for as many rows as you like. You too can drown in Squish and love it.

Oh wow.

The last story is well worth the read. It might be long but I found it absolutely delightful! Thank you for sharing your childhood Squish gardening adventures!

Meanwhile, people are starving to death.

Ands What do you expect poor rural farmers who just have excess zucchini to do about that exactly? Mail them to Africa?

I was just talking to a friend today about gardening and she said “I’ll plant zucchini for this project.”

“Oh dear… what’s your damage control plan?”

“Oh,” she said, intuiting what I meant. “Eating the blossoms. Love stuffed blossoms. Pumpkin, squash, zucchini. It keeps the crop down, and you get lots of mileage out of them. You keep a mixed crop that way, too. Plus, people don’t always welcome gifts of zucchini, but they find gifts of blossoms exciting.”

This struck me as absolutely game-changing.

My problem is that I legitimately love zucchini. “Lizard,” you ask, “why is that a problem? Just eat the zucchini!” The problem is that in the middle of the growing season, there will be a point where I physically can not consume enough zucchini to keep up with what the plants are producing. It does not matter how much I chop, freeze, fry, bake, etc– there will always be a point where I have more zucchini than I have time in the day to do something with that zucchini.

But eventually it runs out. Like summer, it’s as intense as it is fleeting and come November I want for some zucchini fried with onions. By January, when I’m planning out the spring garden, there’s always that thought, that voice of hubris whispering in my ear… “maybe I should grow more zucchini?”

Children, it is a trap.

Stories like this are why, despite my absolute passion for zucchini, I have never tried to grow them. I have more than one chronic illness. I will not have the strength to fight this fight, I know it. 

The world's most unwanted plants help trees make more fruit

Kleiman compared mango trees at a local farm in Homestead, Florida. One plot of trees had weeds growing around them. The other plot was maintained and weed-free.

The pollinators preferred the trees with the weeds. In turn, the trees benefitted and produced more mangos. In fact, there were between 100 to 236 mangos on the trees with weeds, compared to between 38 to 48 on the trees without weeds.

Kleiman points out findings apply to mango trees, but also to all of the roughly 80 percent of flowering plants of Earth, including fruit trees and all flowering vegetable plants like tomatoes, beans, eggplants and squash. She also hopes this information can help farmers save time and money, as well as reduce the use of chemical pesticides.

if anyone is curious how I’m utilizing my English degree in the office

this post makes me so happy.

The amazing side characters in The Tragedy of Shrublet: Prince of Foilage!

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

They existed *before beetles*

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

https://xkcd.com/1259/

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:



sometimes I think about how brussel sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan are all the same species, and i understand why biologists are constantly furious about taxonomy

I’m sorry what

same species. same fucking species

Somebody please explain this because what the fuck

i can do that!

Introducing the Brassica oleracea, a plant species whose cultivars include…all of the above. They all originated from the same plant aka THIS FUCKER! 

No, really. This thing has existed in Europe for thousands of years, during which time different societies had different culinary preferences, leading them to selectively breed for different traits. For example, a preference for the eating leaves led farmers to select seeds from the plants with the largest leaves, resulting gradually in the development of kale.

The real fun thing is, this happened on a vast timeline. Kale was developed over 4000 years ago, while Savoy cabbage was first documented just 5 centuries ago. And different cultivars developed in different regions across Europe and Asia, with their phenotypes and names changing wildly over time. (Fun fact, Brussels sprouts are indeed named for Brussels, the capital city of Belgium, where they were developed from a predecessor imported from Rome.) 

The list above isn’t even exhaustive btw. There are plenty of other ridiculous cultivars (such as the Jersey cabbage, pictured below), and there’s no telling how many other forms existed throughout history, and which would have counted as distinct cultivars, and how many names and groups they were separated into, and, and, and—and imposing taxonomy on the real world is a mess, basically, because the real world does not give a shit about making itself comprehensible or categorizeable. But still we try. Planet Earth has Hot Mess Energy, and would you really have it any other way?

ko-fi

oh honey

yeah

I looked up artichokes because of this post and found out that they’re thistles.

I just artichoked what the fuck

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-22/food-plant-solutions-malnutrition-farming-edible-plants/12580732

https://fms.cmsvr.com/fmi/webd/Food_Plants_World

This guy is my new hero. I LOVE learning about native food plants that just grow everywhere without human help.

The database is a little clunky to use (especially on a phone), but still loads of excellent information.

Here’s their website - Food Plant Solutions - and they can use volunteers! And $ of course. What they really need help with is connecting with NGOs/groups on the ground already working in countries, to get them access to the database. They also need help from formally trained agronomists, people good with website stuff, and people good at marketing / getting the word out about their project.