A bract is a modified leaf, that usually doesn’t look anything like a regular leaf.
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
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October 25th is the date that most stores pull down the Halloween stuff and transition to Christmas stuff. It’s not unusual for most stores to have zero Halloween stuff on the shelves on Halloween.
The seasonal arrival of Spirit in the many empty commercial buildings has made this worse. Regular stores bring in less merchandize and are often stocking Christmas stuff 2 or 3 weeks before Halloween in my area.
Pull out some plants. What you are looking for is an unhealthy looking portion of the stem near where the soil meets the stem. It can be above or below the surface.
You might need a magnifying glass or use the magnification lens of you phone camera.
Look at the bottom of the stems near the soil
That looks like a seedling fungal infection to me. It could be numerous different species.
Likely a lot less than somebody sitting at an office asking AI a few questions a day.
They still find a way to delay the first flight out. You know gotta start the day of right.
I used to fly over 400K miles per year. Now I avoid it like the plague. It’s truly gotten terrible. It started with the checked baggage fees and has only gone downhill from there.
How about the Citric Acid Cycle then?
I probably should work on getting the bush type plant mutant into the giant pumpkin germplasm again.
The first tests were had a 400lb pumpkin into a 8’x8’ plot. They split and cracked however.
1·27 days agoNo manure is a waste product for crop production. It is extensively utilized in conventional agriculture. Organic production unfortunately uses it inefficiently.
There are some pretty complicated biological processes to explain this but I’ll try to keep it short.
First off manure is a not balanced fertilizer. It’s got two much of some nutrients and not enough of others . This imbalance causes two issues: it delays the release of nutrients and causes excess unused nutrients to buildup in the soil.
The nutrient composition in manure varies widely as well. There are many variables that can affect this. It’s pretty wild when you get the laboratory test back.
Most of the nitrogen in the original food source for the animal is lost by denitrification before the next years crop can utilize it. There flat out is not enough N in the manure to raise our crops without synthetic fertilizer
Application of manure acidifies the soil. Acidic soil locks up nutrient via chemical reactions.
The most efficient and environmentally friendly way to fertilize crops is with a combination manure, compost, synthetic fertilizer and covercrops. The addition of synthetic fertilizers allows farmers to reduce the amount of manure they apply and balance out the nutrients ratios. It also reduces the total need of synthetic fertilizer and increases the soil microbial activity. The covercrops capture and hold nutrients over the winter and minimizing the runoff and inputs for the following year.
First off generally these diseases are limited by environmental conditions and available vectors. So starting with clean seed/stock can permanently eliminate the need to worry about many of the diseases. A good example of this is SQMV. It’s spread mostly by the spotted cucumber beetles. These are only found in some states of the U.S. and Mexico.
As for how to deal with the disease depends completely on the pathogen. You can clean up many diseases by proper sanitation and crop rotation techniques. Historically leaving a field fallow was a method to reduce disease pressure.
Others are not so easy to get rid of. For example, Fusarium species can persist in the soil for up to 30 years. Once you get it, you are not getting rid of it. It’s such a large issue that commercial growers in highly infected regions have gone to grafting resistant rootstock of a different species.
Potatoes are grown from both seed and tubers.
Plant breeders develop new varieties from true seed. These plants are in the diploid state. They then convert them to the tetraploid state by application of colchicine. After conversion they are only replicated via tubers.
The first generation is completed in the laboratory by cell culture. This ensures the starting point is free from diseases. Then they go to small sterilized plots where a few potatoes become more. This process repeats for several years increasing in quantity until the first pre-commercial potatoes are grown. During this time all fields are carefully inspected for diseases and contaminated productions are sold for consomption.
The potatoes are finally sent out to growers for commercial production. That’s where they pick up all the lovely diseases and then are sent to the store.
Only among people who attempt to overcome their innate bias and come to rational conclusions based on evidence.
The Raspberry OS for now. Using Firefox.
Lol, you KNOW do you. That sounds like a religious belief. When you come to a conclusion based upon a belief and then try to force facts to fit it.
Yep that doesn’t work for me.
Did you read the paper?
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cd5/pdf
It’s a pretty decent one but there are others that I find better done. I posted the world in numbers one because its got nice graphs and is well cited.
I’ll post more if you would like to discuss it futher.
As for your question on nitrogen/phosphate runoff it’s pretty simple. Organic fertilizers like manure take time to break down by microbial action into the exact same molecular chemicals as synthetic fertilizer. Say you have 4 months of production time when the plants can use nutrients. Microbial action on manure can take up to 6 months until it releases all of the nutrients. The excess nutrients that are release when no crop is growing runs off and causes environmental damage.
As for my comments on disease and seed, I can give you references to all of them except the SQMV. That’s unpublished data that I used to convince some idiot C-suite types to release some capital investment. Gave a pathology tech a very bad few weeks one summer.
You are under the impression the all synthetic chemistry and GMO’s are bad. This is flat out not true . They are technology that can be used for very f Good and stupid uses. Example a very good GMO is virus resistance (PRSV in Papayas). A fucking stupid one is Roundup resistance.
Your reality sadly isn’t the real one. It’s far more complicated.
https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for-the-environment?ref=goodoil.news
The problem with organic farming is it is too simplistic of an approach. It’s tenants are based upon a guess not scientific data and enforced regardless of if it makes logical sense with what we known now.
Eastern Skunk Cabbage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symplocarpus_foetidus
The western skunk cabbage is yellow and quite pretty, from a distance.