This is great. I have this vision we should all have two careers now. Our current M to F tech jobs and being farmers again. All of us. Like the industrial revolution has this last step. Back to farming but this time with tech.
Wouldn't this be inefficient, laborious, and dependent on a land distribution that's starkly at odds with the urban areas where this romanticized view of agriculture gets espoused by techies?
(TBC: Love hobby gardening, community gardens are cool, I hear some folks are doing cool stuff with urban agriculture, just seems weird to imagine it as a ubiquitous second career)
Home farming can make use of small spaces to farm some part of our diets. No need to transport the final product, o need to use a blanket of insecticides and herbicides because the manual labour of caring for each plant is very distributed. Regenerative farming is also trivial at this scale. Large scale farming is often as efficient as it is destructive.
This is a problem I often see when folks grow annuals. Perennials are way lower labor, and one of the reasons I encourage community gardens to avoid being entirely focused on annuals.
I learned this recently from another post here on HN:
"Brassica oleracea is a plant species that includes many common cultivars, such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan."
They’re really common here in the north of Portugal - everybody with a cottage garden, which is everybody, has a grove of them. They’re the principal ingredient in caldo verde (a soup that is eaten pretty much daily, by pretty much everyone) up here - further south they use collard greens, but here it’s all kale. When we moved here we were gifted a few plants, and two and a bit years on they’re going strong, and we’ve propagated them to a few dozen - ours aren’t 12 feet tall, more like 6, but either way, it’s a common home crop, and is mostly human, rather than animal, fodder.
As to walking sticks, haven’t seen them used for that here, but people do use the dried stems as trellises for beans and whatnot.
An amazing story that deserves a re-do, movies-wise. I'm pretty sure the underlying social conditions of the books' narrative are as relevant today as ever. Well, now I think of it, the blind enslaving the sighted might just be a tad on the nose for some ..
I'm in the UK but I was initially left wondering if it was something to do with New Jersey, it really isn't that clear. And I've been to Jersey in the Channel Islands (off France, not off California!)
Before we annoy any islanders, Jersey is not actually part of the UK.
More broadly, it's quite rare that things are this way round - usually when there's not much context the US interpretation applies more often than not.
> Before we annoy any islanders, Jersey is not actually part of the UK.
Jersey isn't part of the UK, but it's not exactly an independent country either.
If international diplomacy and constitutional law interests you, it's quite interesting.
Jersey is an autonomous, self governing Bailiwick and a Dependency of the Crown. It has an ISO country code and TLD, however the UK is responsible for representing the territory internationally in most cases, including at the UN. This is because the Crown delegates that responsibility to Her Majesty's Government. Jersey has no representation within the UK democracy itself and cannot sign international agreements independently, however it informally has relationships with lots of international bodies and other countries including the UK. Jersey has never been part of the EU and remains its own customs area. There are millions of other little warts and curious edge cases.
As someone from Jersey, I never quite know what to answer when someone asks what country I'm from.
> As someone from Jersey, I never quite know what to answer when someone asks what country I'm from.
So when do Jersey, Guernsey & Sark field their own Football and Rugby teams like England, Scotland & Wales, its not like the off-shore tax havens cant afford the talent!
Still I wonder what the vitamin K content is like for these 12ft plants and if they are any good for PotLikker?
How are the leaves? I've let kale overwinter and it gets pretty tall but any new leaves in the spring are too fibrous and tough for my taste. I prefer collards in most cases. I'd be interested in what cultivar you grow.
The leaves are great, as long as you harvest them while they are green. I'm not sure what the cultivar is as I usually let them go to seed, collect the seeds and start over when they get too tall. Brassicas tend to cross pollinate, as far as I understand it. They get super tall, but I usually stop after 5 ft. and start over.
It seems to be specific variety called Brassica oleracea longata (mentioned in the article) although in some places (https://www.victoriananursery.co.uk/Walking-Stick-Cabbage-Se...) it's called Brassica oleracea palmifolia which is a more widely known variety (cavolo nero in Italian).
How is it with plant genetics / breeding and taxonomy? When do you assert that something's a specific variety and apply a name to it?
Like any other brassica leaf - really similar to broccoli leaves, if I had to nail it down. Nutty, savoury, hint of bitterness. The leaves are pretty tough though, and have some fascinating hydrophobic properties, so need chopping finely and then either frying or boiling until they’re soft.
https://www.projecttreecollard.org/
They grow great in California (and places with a similar climate), producing harvestable leaves year round.