#growers&co

[jothetender]

Strain: Gastropop

Grower: Noble Cannabis Co.

State: Oklahoma

Medical/Recreational: Medical

[a-killer-obsession]

It's a SMUT Blog so I'm not shy to ask 😋.. Kid and Killers dicks..how do they differ from eachother? Length and Girth? Piercings? Hair? Circumsized with thick veins? 🤤

I saw this right before going to sleep but I was too eepy to answer, so instead I just kept thinking about it which means now it's gonna be a whole thing *flexes fingers*

I won't talk on circumcised tho cos its not really a thing in my country so I don't know much about it, in all my years of slutting around I never met a circumcised dick, but I'll include some other saucy details

Anway, now presenting:

☠️ Kid Pirates ☠️

Equipment headcannons 🍆

🔞 Minors DNI 🔞

Kid

Smallest of the gang in length at barely 7" but built like a fucking monster energy can with a girth that'll split you right in fucking half

No piercings, thick prominent veins. Hes pale as hell and that extends to his dick, with skin that translucent its practically red when it's engorged

I think since he never even has stubble after being in prison that he can't actually grow a beard, so by that thinking I reckon he doesn't actually have much hair on the rest of his body other than a thin ginger scattering. So his bush is bright fucking red and untrimmed but there's not that much to begin with

The biggest balls you'll ever see on a man, he's built for breeding

Decently big loads when he comes, but they're super thick so they don't go far

Absolutely rancid dick tho tbh, it'll have you gagging for all the wrong reasons. Someone get this man in a bath fr

Grower

Killer

Second longest after Wire at 8", slender and fairly smooth, the prettiest dick you'll ever see with a slight curve (like his scythes, ha)

One piercing at the end that Kid convinced him to get, he'll use his devil fruit to vibrate it if he wants Killer's ✨️attention✨️

Slightly darker than his tan skin, pretty in pink at the head

Thick blonde pubes that stand out against his tanned skin, with a lovely happy trail, but he keeps it tidy and clean 👌

Cums a shit ton, long thin spurts that'll cover your whole torso and maybe even get your face if he's pent up. Masturbating is a whole fucking ordeal for him cos of the cleanup

Grower, but impressive flacid anyway

Heat

7.5", somewhere between Kid and Killer's girth, slightly more bulbous towards the end.

Strange colour considering his strange grey-brown skin. His dick is almost purple brown, more purple at the head.

Set of three piercings like a ladder up the underside. Veiny but not as prominent as Kid.

Full bush baby, and its WILD down there. Thick blue pubes to match his hairy legs and happy trail, he's never even considered trimming.

The most average cumshots of the crew, a pretty regular amount, generic consistency, short spurts, maybe long enough to hit your tits if he's pent up. Absolutely drips precum though

Shower (I realise now that word has two meanings. I mean show-er. Obviously)

Wire

An absolute fucking monster to match his height. 10" and THICK. Got into BDSM purely because it takes so fucking long to prep someone to take him that he needed something to spice up the long foreplay. There's no possibility for a quickie with this man, its a whole ordeal (please ask me about my Kid Pirate kinks please please please 🙏 edit: here they are)

Dark brown, almost chocolate at the tip. Veiny as hell. So big and heavy that it can't support it's own weight so its always dropping even full mast

Clean shaved, Wire is a man who takes the upmost pride and care when it comes to his dick. No piercings because his dick is already so massive he's scared the pressure would rip them clean out when he fucks

Hes like a endless fucking volcano when he cums and it's THICK. He prefers to finish inside but it's always so much that combined with his size it simply won't all fit. You'll be dripping for hours afterwards

Shower, I don't know where this man is keeping it in those shorts, tucked for sure

[allthecanadianpolitics]

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/bc-farmer-fruit-co-operative-closes

https://globalnews.ca/news/10677970/support-lining-up-bc-fruit-growers-in-wake-co-op-closure/

A friend of mine in the area has been talking about this and how it’s going to affect the people around her, but it looks like this might impact a lot of Canadians across the board.

[racefortheironthrone]

OK, I'll bite - what's the deal with the United Farm Workers? What were their strengths and weaknesses compared to other labor unions?

It is not an easy thing to talk about the UFW, in part because it wasn't just a union. At the height of its influence in the 1960s and 1970s, it was also a civil rights movement that was directly inspired by the SCLC campaigns of Martin Luther King and owed its success as much to mass marches, hunger strikes, media attention, and the mass mobilization of the public in support of boycotts that stretched across the United States and as far as Europe as it did to traditional strikes and picket lines.

It was also a social movement that blended powerful strains of Catholic faith traditions with Chicano/Latino nationalism inspired by the black power movement, that reshaped the identity of millions away from asimilation into white society and towards a fierce identification with indigeneity, and challenged the racist social hierarchy of rural California.

It was also a political movement that transformed Latino voting behavior, established political coalitions with the Kennedys, Jerry Brown, and the state legislature, that pushed through legislation and ran statewide initiative campaigns, and that would eventually launch the careers of generations of Latino politicians who would rise to the very top of California politics.

However, it was also a movement that ultimately failed in its mission to remake the brutal lives of California farmworkers, which currently has only 7,000 members when it once had more than 80,000, and which today often merely trades on the memory of its celebrated founders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez rather than doing any organizing work.

To explain the strengths and weaknesses of the UFW, we have to start with some organizational history, because the UFW was the result of the merger of several organizations each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Origins of the UFW:

To explain the strengths and weaknesses of the UFW, we have to start with some organizational history, because the UFW was the result of the merger of several organizations each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

In the 1950s, both Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez were community organizers working for a group called the Community Service Organization (an affiliate of Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation) that sought to aid farmworkers living in poverty. Huerta and Chavez were trained in a novel strategy of grassroots, door-to-door organizing aimed not at getting workers to sign union cards, but to agree to host a house meeting where co-workers could gather privately to discuss their problems at work free from the surveillance of their bosses. This would prove to be very useful in organizing the fields, because unlike the traditional union model where organizers relied on the NRLB's rulings to directly access the factory floors, Central California farms were remote places where white farm owners and their white overseers would fire shotguns at brown "trespassers" (union-friendly workers, organizers, picketers).

In 1962, Chavez and Huerta quit CSO to found the National Farm Workers Association, which was really more of a worker center offering support services (chiefly, health care) to independent groups of largely Mexican farmworkers. In 1965, they received a request to provide support to workers dealing with a strike against grape growers in Delano, California.

In Delano, Chavez and Huerta met Larry Itliong of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which was a more traditional labor union of migrant Filipino farmworkers who had begun the strike over sub-minimum wages. Itliong wanted Chavez and Huerta to organize Mexican farmworkers who had been brought in as potential strikebreakers and get them to honor the picket line.

The result of their collaboration was the formation of the United Farm Workers as a union of the AFL-CIO. The UFW would very much be marked by a combination of (and sometimes conflict between) AWOC's traditional union tactics - strikes, pickets, card drives, employer-based campaigns, and collective bargaining for union contracts - and NFWA's social movement strategy of marches, boycotts, hunger strikes, media campaigns, mobilization of liberal politicians, and legislative campaigns.

1965 to 1970: the Rise of the UFW:

While the strike starts with 2,000 Filipino workers and 1,200 Mexican families targeting Delano area growers, it quickly expanded to target more growers and bring more workers to the picket lines, eventually culminating in 10,000 workers striking against the whole of the table grape growers of California across the length and breadth of California.

Throughout 1966, the UFW faced extensive violence from the growers, from shotguns used as "warning shots" to hand-to-hand violence, to driving cars into pickets, to turning pesticide-spraying machines onto picketers. Local police responded to the violence by effectively siding with the growers, and would arrest UFW picketers for the crime of calling the police.

Chavez strongly emphasized a non-violent response to the growers' tactics - to the point of engaging in a Gandhian hunger strike against his own strikers in 1968 to quell discussions about retaliatory violence - but also began to employ a series of civil rights tactics that sought to break what had effectively become a stalemate on the picket line by side-stepping the picket lines altogether and attacking the growers on new fronts.

First, he sought the assistance of outside groups and individuals who would be sympathetic to the plight of the farmworker and could help bring media attention to the strike - UAW President Walter Reuther and Senator Robert Kennedy both visited Delano to express their solidarity, with Kennedy in particular holding hearings that shined a light on the issue of violence and police violations of the civil rights of UFW picketers.

Second, Chavez hit on the tactic of using boycotts as a way of exerting economic pressure on particular growers and leveraging the solidarity of other unions and consumers - the boycotts began when Chavez enlisted Dolores Huerta to follow a shipment of grapes from Schenley Industries (the first grower to be boycotted) to the Port of Oakland. There, Huerta reached out to the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and persuaded them to honor the boycott and refuse to handle non-union grapes. Schenley's grapes started to rot on the docks, cutting them off from the market, and between the effects of union solidarity and growing consumer participation in the UFW's boycotts, the growers started to come under real economic pressure as their revenue dropped despite a record harvest.

Throughout the rest of the Delano grape strike, Dolores Huerta would be the main organizer of the national and internal boycotts, travelling across the country (and eventually all the way to the UK) to mobilize unions and faith groups to form boycott committees and boycott houses in major cities that in turn could educate and mobilize ordinary consumers through a campaign of leafleting and picketing at grocery stores.

Third, the UFW organized the first of its marches, a 300-mile trek from Delano to the state capital of Sacramento aimed at drawing national attention to the grape strike and attempting to enlist the state government to pass labor legislation that would give farmworkers the right to organize. Carefully organized by Cesar Chavez to draw on Mexican faith traditions, the march would be labelled a "pilgrimage," and would be timed to begin during Lent and culminate during Easter. In addition to American flags and the UFW banner, the march would be led by "pilgrims" carrying a banner of Our Lady of Guadelupe.

While this strategy was ultimately effective in its goal of influencing the broader Latino community in California to see the UFW as not just a union but a vehicle for the broader aspirations of the whole Latino community for equality and social justice, what became known in Chicano circles as La Causa, the emphasis on Mexican symbolism and Chicano identity contributed to a growing tension with the Filipino half of the UFW, who felt that they were being sidelined in a strike they had started.

Nevertheless, by the time that the UFW's pilgrimage arrived at Sacramento, news broke that they had won their first breakthrough in the strike as Schenley Industries (which had been suffering through a four-month national boycott of its products) agreed to sign the first UFW union contract, delivering a much-needed victory.

As the strike dragged on, growers were not passively standing by - in addition to doubling down on the violence by hiring strikebreakers to assault pro-UFW farmworkers, growers turned to the Teamsters Union as a way of pre-empting the UFW, either by pre-emptively signing contracts with the Teamsters or effectively backing the Teamsters in union elections.

Part of the darker legacy of the Teamsters is that, going all the back to the 1930s, they have a nasty habit of raiding other unions, and especially during their mobbed-up days would work with the bosses to sign sweetheart deals that allowed the Teamsters to siphon dues money from workers (who had not consented to be represented by the Teamsters, remember) while providing nothing in the way of wage increases or improved working conditions, usually in exchange for bribes and/or protection money from the employers. Moreover, the Teamsters had no compunction about using violence to intimidate rank-and-file workers and rival unions in order to defend their "paper locals" or win a union election. This would become even more of an issue later on, but it started up as early as 1966.

Moreover, the growers attempted to adapt to the UFW's boycott tactics by sharing labels, such that a boycotted company would sell their products under the guise of being from a different, non-boycotted company. This forced the UFW to change its boycott tactics in turn, so that instead of targeting individual growers for boycott, they now asked unions and consumers alike to boycott all table grapes from the state of California.

By 1970, however, the growing strength of the national grape boycott forced no fewer than 26 Delano grape growers to the bargaining table to sign the UFW's contracts. Practically overnight, the UFW grew from a membership of 10,000 strikers (none of whom had contracts, remember) to nearly 70,000 union members covered by collective bargaining agreements.

1970 to 1978: The UFW Confronts Internal and External Crises

Up until now, I've been telling the kind of simple narrative of gradual but inevitable social progress that U.S history textbooks like, the Hollywood story of an oppressed minority that wins a David and Goliath struggle against a violent, racist oligarchy through the kind of non-violent methods that make white allies feel comfortable and uplifted. (It's not an accident that the bulk of the 2014 film Cesar Chavez starring Michael Peña covers the Delano Grape Strike.)

It's also the period in which the UFW's strengths as an organization that came out of the community organizing/civil rights movement were most on display. In the eight years that followed, however, the union would start to experience a series of crises that would demonstrate some of the weaknesses of that same institutional legacy. As Matt Garcia describes in From the Jaws of Victory, in the wake of his historic victory in 1970, Cesar Chavez began to inflict a series of self-inflicted injuries on the UFW that crippled the functioning of the union, divided leadership and rank-and-file alike, and ultimately distracted from the union's external crises at a time when the UFW could not afford to be distracted.

That's not to say that this period was one of unbroken decline - as we'll discuss, the UFW would win many victories in this period - but the union's forward momentum was halted and it would spend much of the 1970s trying to get back to where it was at the very start of the decade.

To begin with, we should discuss the internal contradictions of the UFW: one of the major features of the UFW's new contracts was that they replaced the shape-up with the hiring hall. This gave the union an enormous amount of power in terms of hiring, firing and management of employees, but the quid-pro-quo of this system is that it puts a significant administrative burden on the union. Not only do you have to have to set up policies that fairly decide who gets work and when, but you then have to even-handedly enforce those policies on a day-to-day basis in often fraught circumstances - and all of this is skilled white-collar labor.

This ran into a major bone of contention within the movement. When the locus of the grape strike had shifted from the fields to the urban boycotts, this had made a new constituency within the union - white college-educated hippies who could do statistical research, operate boycott houses, and handle media campaigns. These hippies had done yeoman's work for the union and wanted to keep on doing that work, but they also needed to earn enough money to pay the rent and look after their growing families, and in general shift from being temporary volunteers to being professional union staffers.

This ran head-long into a buzzsaw of racial and cultural tension. Similar to the conflicts over the role of white volunteers in CORE/SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement, there were a lot of UFW leaders and members who had come out of the grassroots efforts in the field who felt that the white college kids were making a play for control over the UFW. This was especially driven by Cesar Chavez' religiously-inflected ideas of Catholic sacrifice and self-denial, embodied politically as the idea that a salary of $5 a week (roughly $30 a week in today's money) was a sign of the purity of one's "missionary work." This worked itself out in a series of internicene purges whereby vital college-educated staff were fired for various crimes of ideological disunity.

This all would have been survivable if Chavez had shown any interest in actually making the union and its hiring halls work. However, almost from the moment of victory in 1970, Chavez showed almost no interest in running the union as a union - instead, he thought that the most important thing was relocating the UFW's headquarters to a commune in La Paz, or creating the Poor People's Union as a way to organize poor whites in the San Joaquin Valley, or leaving the union altogether to become a Catholic priest, or joining up with the Synanon cult to run criticism sessions in La Paz. In the mean-time, a lot of the UFW's victories were withering on the vine as workers in the fields got fed up with hiring halls that couldn't do their basic job of making sure they got sufficient work at the right wages.

Externally, all of this was happening during the second major round of labor conflicts out in the fields. As before, the UFW faced serious conflicts with the Teamsters, first in the so-called "Salad Bowl Strike" that lasted from 1970-1971 and was at the time the largest and most violent agricultural strike in U.S history - only then to be eclipsed in 1973 with the second grape strike. Just as with the Salinas strike, the grape growers in 1973 shifted to a strategy of signing sweetheart deals with the Teamsters - and using Teamster muscle to fight off the UFW's new grape strike and boycott. UFW pickets were shot at and killed in drive-byes by Teamster trucks, who then escalated into firebombing pickets and UFW buildings alike.

After a year of violence, reduced support from the rank-and-file, and declining resources, Chavez and the UFW felt that their backs were up against a wall - and had to adjust their tactics accordingly. With the election of Jerry Brown as governor in 1974, the UFW pivoted to a strategy of pressuring the state government to enact a California Agricultural Labor Relations Act that would give agricultural workers the right to organize, and with that all the labor protections normally enjoyed by industrial workers under the Federal National Labor Relations Act - at the cost of giving up the freedom to boycott and conduct secondary strikes which they had had as outsiders to the system.

This led to the semi-miraculous Modesto March, itself a repeat of the Delano-to-Sacramento march from the 1960s. Starting as just a couple hundred marchers in San Francisco, the March swelled to as many as 15,000-strong by the time that it reached its objective at Modesto. This caused a sudden sea-change in the grape strike, bringing the growers and the Teamsters back to the table, and getting Jerry Brown and the state legislature to back passage of California Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

This proved to be the high-water mark for the UFW, which swelled to a peak of 80,000 members. The problem was that the old problems within the UFW did not go away - victory in 1975 didn't stop Chavez and his Chicano constituency feuding with more distinctively Mexican groups within the movement over undocumented immigration, nor feuding with Filipino constituencies over a meeting with Ferdinand Marcos, and nor escalating these internal conflicts into a series of leadership purges.

Conclusion: Decline and Fall

At the same time, the new alliance with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board proved to be a difficult one for the UFW. While establishment of the agency proved to be a major boon for the UFW, which won most of the free elections under CALRA (all the while continuing to neglect the critical hiring hall issue), the state legislature badly underfunded ALRB, forcing the agency to temporarily shut down. The UFW responded by sponsoring Prop 14 in the 1976 elections to try to empower ALRB, and then got very badly beaten in that election cycle - and then, when Republican George Deukmejian was elected in 1983, the ALRB was largely defunded and unable to achieve its original elective goals.

In the wake of Deukmejian, the UFW went into terminal decline. Most of its best organizers had left or been purged in internal struggles, their contracts failed to succeed over the long run due to the hiring hall problem, and the union basically stopped organizing new members after 1986.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Sourcing food in biotech  factories requires a reorganization of the food system to be highly centralized, arranged into corporate-mediated value chains flowing from industrial processing facilities. To my mind that is exactly the corporate industrial food chain model at the root of so many of our current problems. We don’t want the food system concentrated in the hands of less and bigger corporations. Such a concentrated food system  is unfair,  extractive, easy to monopolize and  very vulnerable to external shocks  - which we are going to see more of in our unfolding century of crisis. Consider which food system is more likely to fall over in the face of climate catastrophe, dictatorship  or cyberattack: - a handful of large electrically dependent food brewers  or a distributed network of millions of small farms and local food relationships  spread across diverse landscapes? Which brings us to Chris’s other central premise in ‘Saying No to a Farm-free Future’ - the one that George does attempt a partial response to. Chris argues that the way to organise food to survive in the face of climate crisis is to withdraw away from the corporate controlled industrial agrifood chain  and attempt instead  to put power back into the distributed local ‘food web’ of small growers, local markets and peasant-type production . This ‘food web’ may sound  ‘backwards’ to modernist global north sensibilities of someone like George but it is what still characterizes much of  the food systems of the global South. It is also better suited to our times of crisis and challenge. Strengthening food webs is not a “one stop” bold  breakthrough. Rather its a distributed social process of ‘muddling through’ together  in diverse and different ways that are at best  agroecological and collective, culturally and ecologically tailored to different geographies. The food web (or ‘agrarian localism’ as Chris terms it) can’t be summed up in one shiny totemic widget. It doesn’t fit  a formulaic  “stop this, go that” campaign binary (“stop eating meet , go plant-based”).   Leaning into the complexities of  local agroecological diverse food webs is maddeningly  unsellable as a soundbite.  George presents agrarian localism as a ‘withdrawal’  but its more in the gesture of “staying with the trouble” - a phrase feminist scholar Donna Harraway so brilliantly coined to dismiss  big, male, over simplistic technocratic solutionists who claim to have the ‘one big answer’ to our global polycrisis. (sound familiar?). Staying with the trouble and leaning into food webs means embracing a messy politics of relationship, nuance, context, complexity and co-learning. It means a single clever journalist sitting in Oxford can’t dream up a cracking saviour formula all by himself in the space of a 2 year book project. . its why (and how) we build movements - to figure this stuff out collectively. So relax - take off the armour - make friends.

[witch-of-the-creek]

Fascinating flora, special edition.

White Sage

I am still doing a regular post about sage in general, but as a conservationist and student of ethnobotany, I wanted to address the conservation status and history of salvia apiana in particular.

White sage is endemic to Southern California and parts of Northern Baja, and is a valuable medicinal and cultural resource to indigenous populations who were forcibly relocated to these areas. Today, the majority of white sage is cultivated by indigenous Americans on protected land.

Smudging refers to a variety ceremonies that involve the burning of sacred herbs. The British, Spanish, and French colonizers started to relocate indigenous people, to wash away their culture, take their children, and erase their languages. Smudging is an English word that was used to generalize and belittle a widely held set of spiritual practices, and has now been reclaimed by many indigenous communities.

The use of this plant by non native people, and the misappropriation of the word ‘smudging’ came much later, around the time the first legal protections were established to protect the remaining people and culture. “In the 1960s, the hippie movement co-opted the use of white sage and evolved into the New Age Movement.” (Ramirez, Rose & Small, Deborah)

The popularity of white sage has only gotten higher, and with a boom in demand, illegal harvesting of the plant has become all to common a practice. “With very few commercial growers of white sage (Salvia apiana), the vast majority of products are wild-harvested.” (Ramirez & Small)

“What I learned when I was in California and visited the Etiwanda Preserve was that it is the epicenter of the current commercial harvest.” (Leopold, Susan).

“What is important to stress is that this underground sage mafia is not ethical or sustainable wildcrafting as it is portrayed in hipster IG accounts and stores! The scale of white sage commercial trade on the Internet and demand in China is alarming” (Leopold).

“I was invited by the owner of a white sage company to meet at the Etiwanda Preserve in March of 2019; he wanted to show his sustainable harvesting methods. I quickly pulled out my phone to show him that it was against the law to do so, and that recent arrests had been made. He carried on as if that was not the case” (Leopold).

The current elemental status of white sage is G4, which means ‘apparently secure.’ This rating has not been reviewed since June nineteenth, 2002. The lack of updated information on the plants range and occurrences have kept it off multiple endangered species lists.

The article referencing a book by Ramirez and Small, published in spring of 2020, evaluate that 50% of white sage has been eradicated due to urbanization.

I am not native, I can’t speak for any native people. All of what I have stated here is a summary or quotation of the words of indigenous activists, ethnobotanists, and conservationists. My hope here is to give a factual overview of the situation and provide direction to people more knowledgeable than myself.

Sources below

-News from Native California, Spring 2020 By Rose Ramirez and Deborah Small

[dailyanarchistposts]

The Demands and What Lies Ahead

On June 9th, CHAZ representatives released a list of demands that were authored by many of the collective voices in the zone. Most of them are extremely realistic and can be accomplished if Seattle actually had a representative government instead of one that works for Amazon. The list of demands falls under four categories: economics, education, the justice system and health and human services. The authors stated further that the zone was on land taken from the local Native American Duwamish people over a century ago. The Pacific Northwest has a long history with native tribes and the collective voices of the zone realize that. Additionally, they have requested no violence be used in attempts to remove the zoners and that they be allowed to operate in a communal structure in order to “show the country what is possible through collective voices.” CHAZ has been praised by the IWW’s Industrial Worker publication as an effective way to distribute badly needed social services. The irony behind the creation of CHAZ is that austerity measures have been put in many American cities since the CARES bailout back in March. This is expected during crises and it’s not acceptable to those not just in CHAZ but protesting within the BLM movement. Austerity has been a prime focus during these protests because while police departments across the country see their budgets increase every year, every other line item of public services continue to be cut. Anarchists in the zone realize they need to do more planning going forward. They have already began deputizing scouts and are working on expanding their perimeter even more. Smoking areas have been designated and local marijuana growers have flooded the zone to provide free marijuana. The anti-capitalist views of the inhabitants will create an atmosphere of brainstorming that will only serve the commune for the better going forward. As an example of this, many have began talking about black-owned banks, divesting from local corporations and prison reform. Local activists even gave a soapbox speech criticizing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and how their representatives in conservative state legislatures write laws without “any clue” as to who they represent. The opportunity is there to create a flourishing commune in a short term project that will ultimately likely be destroyed at some point. The main goal is to provide a glimpse for Americans what can be possible though communal action when you operate outside of the system of government that many Americans take for granted. This is not a country that is used to communal action and most citizens probably don’t even know the definition of a co-op. Kshama Sawant is a Seattle City Council member and member of the Trotskyist Socialist Alternative Party (SA). She visited the zone on June 9th and asked the residents to turn it into a community center for restorative justice. She agreed that there needs to be long term goals and that the method of going beyond policing (police abolition) needs to be analyzed and discoursed in the mainstream. Sawant did suggest caution though on pushing the city too far. She, along with the residents want to avoid future violence if the police do eventually move in to tear down the commune. The development of CHAZ is a real time education in community organizing and anarchist alternatives. Amazon and Boeing weren’t going to provide the people of Seattle with basic life necessities. Those in CHAZ hope they can demonstrate that social services can be provided in a vacuum. They have stated they will continue to build the commune and will continue until they are forced out. Long live the commune!

[startedwithaseed]

Lettuce!

The first time i encountered lettuce plants going to seed i thought they looked like little palm trees... I was really surprised at how thick and sturdy the stems become when they are left to live out their full life cycle, especially if lots of the bottom leaves are stripped to reveal this woody stem. This is one of the joys of seed saving for me, seeing plants transform (often into relatively monstrous proportions!) and getting to appreciate the plant in a totally different way.

I didn't know at the time that lettuce was comparatively easy to save seed from, with the plants being mostly self fertile with perfect flowers, so there is minimal chance of crossing. The official advice is still to leave several meters between varieties, especially in hotter climates (where insects are more active/abundant? I have no idea), but if that would stop you saving your own lettuce seed for your own use, I say ignore the advice! I had been enjoying the benefits of saved lettuce seed, with the saved Cocarde seed being the most reliable germination in my fortnightly salad sowings that I was overseeing, often out performing much newer, bought in seed. Since I found out it could be achieved without complicated isolation netting and fears of cross pollination, I'd been dying to try it for myself. Just one plant can produce up to 10 grams of seed (that's around 8000 seed!) so it is the gift that keeps on giving. I also feel that most organic lettuce varieties are open pollinated and not hybrids, another plus for ease of mind when seed saving from this crop.

There are 3 main types of lettuces cultivated in the UK-

Romaine or cos lettuces, which form tight heads with long leaves, a typical example being little gem

Head lettuces, which again form heads but can be looser, and include smoother butter head types and more frilly batavia types

Leaf lettuces, which don't form heads and are often more frilly. an example is lollo rossa

They are all within the Lactuca sativa species so could all technically cross with eachother.

Lettuce are surprisingly hardy plants and such a mainstay for UK market gardeners, selling them as whole heads, and as part of mixed salad bags -which I believe are the highest value product for growers, although I have no recollection of where I heard that so can't fact check it! It makes sense in that it is high turnover, and many successions can be grown in a season. I personally find it hard to get too over excited about lettuce, preferring the more showy fruiting crops, and things that can be cooked and preserved in a variety of exciting ways. And seeing that it is often the veg that goes the most to waste (people love to buy mixed salad bags in shops because they look so appealing, but often fail to get round to eating them before they go slimy), it's hard to see it as the most sustainable crop. However I have made a deal with myself to get over my trepidation and finally experiment with lettuce soup this season!

As the stalks elongate and these beautiful heads start forming, the plants will want some kind of support if they are standing alone as this one is, we do have some that seem to be fairing quite well supported by tomato plants either side! I think it is quite common for several plants to die off at this stage, so select more than you think you'll need. Removing lower leaves can help to reduce the risk of rotting/moldy leaves/ slug damage leading to disease.

(A beast of a slug found hanging out under the module trays)

Watch out for flower buds starting to form, when open they almost look like little dandelion flowers, and in fact there method of distribution is the same with fluffy tops forming at full maturity.

It won't be long after flowering (about 2 weeks) that those seeds are mature, however flowers appear at varying times on the same plant so there are different methods of getting as much good, mature seed off the plant as possible. A good method for wetter UK conditions would be digging up the whole plant, roots and all, bagging the roots to stop soil dropping in with the seeds, and in a well ventilated, dry area , hanging the plant upside down in a paper bag (could be a potato sack or similar, just check for holes and turn it inside out so it's clean on the inside). Do this when about 50% of the seed are mature some will continue to mature on the plant and drop into the bag, ensuring a fairly good yield. Alternatively you can always just hand harvest mature seed from the plant as and when they come, with the main stem of the lettuce generally producing the best seed. They are mature when they easily separate from the plant.

Make sure the seed is completely dry before storing in a cool, dark, dry place.

These are just my musings from observations and my experience, as an enthusiast not a professional. My recommendations for deeper dives from the experts -

The seed growers podcast focused on lettuce seed production with Frank Morton

diyseed.org has beautiful videos going into detail on the seed saving process of most vegetables you could think of

realseeds.co.uk are an open pollinated seed company that encourage and have lots of resources on saving seed

[finniestoncrane]

i was inspired by your recent posts, also I'm not sure if you've answered one like this before?- but headcanon request of all the Eddies and who is a 'grower' or a 'shower' and anything else you'd like to add on about their cocks 😇

Riddler Dicks

Riddler Headcanons you have asked me the exact right thing at the exact right moment lmao ok so i did this ages a while ago with so few riddlers so this is a nice excuse to go back over it and go into some detail >:3 💚 request info • prompt list • send me a request • kofi • masterlist minors DNI!! 🔞 cw: suggestive duh it's COCKS

arkham

ok so he is definitely about average, maybe an extra inch in length

6-7 inches probably, doesn't look much different flacid to hard

definitely veiny though, and with a slight curve up

and his balls are huge, good at making a slapping sound

and he has entirely unruly pubic hair

dano

i think he is hung like a fuckin horse, like 8 inches and thick

something about those tall nerdy boys, they're just always hanging

he also has a pretty head, all pink and shiny

and his balls are cute? do you know what i mean

like they're so round, so spherical, so adorable

zero year

we're rockin with 3 inches while stiff here and i am into it

he's got a lot of hang-ups about it but i. love. it

pretty little dick surrounded by a tuft of flaming red hair

balls that are small but red and smooth

and he ruts like a wild animal, so he puts a lot of effort in

unburied

little bit below average but it's fine cos it looks fuckin amazing

an impressive grower though, like that shit is dinner and a show

it curves to the right, and he's prone to wagging it around

and it tastes so good, like he puts effort into his diet

because he likes getting those four inches slurped on

btaa

4-5 inches, and he's proud of it

he gives me short stature, short dick, short king energy

and he's so talented with his cock, and his mouth, and his fingers

so you never really realise that he's just average

cos baby girl is far more impressive than most

telltale

5-6 inches with a nice thick girth

he's not going to brag about it, like he does with everything else

but he knows it looks good and feels good

especially when paired with his amazing tuft of grey pubes

(also his balls are long, gravity comes for us all)

twojar

he's got 7 inches of primo dick, but he's thinks that's enough alone

so he hasn't bothered to learn how to use it properly

interestingly enough, carpets do not match the drapes

they're much darker, same with the skin tone of his cock and balls

but hey you're not in it to feel something with him, just to look

btas

i am giving don juan five inches of gorgeous and talented meat

he's good with it, of course, and it's nice to look at

thick, uncut, tidy pubes, nice balls

but he could make you cum with a smile and a compliment

so it really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things

young justice

baby boy. is a full on breeding stud. with neverending capabilities

a definite shower, thick, long, twitches when he's hard

the tip is always slick with precum the instant he's aroused

his pubes are interestingly not shaped or trimmed

and he is pretty clumsy with it, so it might be painful...

gotham

like everything else about him, it is long and skinny

but also very pretty, and pleasant to look at, and strangely cute

PLUS he has very tidy pubes, immaculate presentation

and he is very careful, or hesitant, because he's a timid thing

and so is his dick! because it's a definite grower

[mybeingthere]

Palms - ferns - Geo. Wittbold - 1899 - via Internet Archive.

From The Geo. Wittbold Co., Largest Palm Growers in the West: Illustrated and Descriptive Catalogue for 1901 and 1902.

[tundrafloe]

Noel: “My grandma is really strong. I like strong women. That's what I respond to."

(Guardian, 2011. Photos clockwise from top left: Ameena Kara Callender, costumer on Luxury Comedy and GBBO; Dolly Wells, co-star on Lux Com and Noel's upcoming Dick Turpin show; new GBBO pal, Alison Hammond; and frequent collaborator Mercedes Grower "Come on Eileen" and "Brakes.")

[mokeymokey]

Most important jobs according to tumblr (LOL) (SMH)

mushroom grower

mushroom picker

mushroom distributor

mushroom sales co-ordinator

mushroom scientist

mushroom artist

mushroom philosopher

mushroom fanfic author

mushroom seller on etsy

mushroom small business owner

^this is due to their childish mindset and their ignorance of the necessity of a nutritionally balanced diet. and because they don't read marxism-leninism

[jothetender]

Strain: Ghosted

Grower: Noble Cannabis Co.

State: Oklahoma

Medical/Recreational: Medical

[rederiswrites]

Experimental Farm Network

Since it's seed-buying and garden-planning season again, I'd like to highlight a few of my favorite nurseries and seed sellers, and Experimental Farm Network is way up there.

For the love of all that's good, somebody in zone 6 or warmer grow Szechuan Pepper, because I can't.

To quote their website,

We believe agriculture can and should be used to help build a better world, not help destroy it. As the planet warms and the climate changes, it is critical for all of us to do whatever we can to prepare for what lies ahead. We need to preserve and expand crop biodiversity. We need to grow more perennials to trap carbon in the soil. And most of all we need to put the brakes on neoliberal capitalist exploitation of the planet and its inhabitants.

EFN's seed operation functions as a cooperative. While co-founders Nate Kleinman (in New Jersey) and Dusty Hinz (in Minnesota) grow most of our seeds, each year we are adding more growers to our roster. Many of them are inspiring plant breeders who receive precious little support for their incredibly important work.

I need more calendula like I need a hole in my head, but LOOK AT THAT!

Their general area of operations is significantly north of me, but that matters less than it might otherwise, because their specific focus is on experimenting with a diversity of genetics and cultivars to try to expand and explore plant ranges. Many of the things they sell originate further south of them to begin with.

EFN is fun even if you're just window-shopping, to learn a thing or two about the plant breeding world and the incredible diversity of plant genetics. You're bound to see things you'd never heard of, which is actually kinda hard for me to find in the seedhouse world at this point.

Aptly named "Mr. Lumpy". The fact that the photographer is wearing a rubber glove to handle it is a bit intimidating.

I've been following EFN for a long time, and never cease to be impressed by their commitment to intersectionality, to preserving the cultural roots of their offerings and giving credit where due, and their determination to improve the wold.

[antidrumpfs]

Wonderful’s owners, the Beverly Hills billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick, say their “calling” is “to leave people and the planet better than we found them.”

Here’s another side of the company. Since February, it has been engaged in a ferocious battle with the United Farm Workers over the UFW’s campaign to unionize more than 600 Wonderful Nurseries workers in the Central Valley.

Having lost a series of motions before the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board to delay a mandate that it reach a contract with the UFW as soon as June 3 or have terms imposed by the board, Wonderful on Monday unleashed a nuclear attack: a lawsuit seeking to have the 2022 and 2023 state laws governing the unionization process declared unconstitutional.

If it succeeds, California’s legal protections for farmworkers could be rolled back to conditions that prevailed before César Chavez’s campaigns for farm unionization in the 1960s.

*********************************************************************

Boycotting the products that make these assholes filthy rich is not enough. Write letters and emails regarding why you will not purchase products from Los Angeles-based Wonderful Co. — the world’s largest pistachio and almond grower, the purveyor of Fiji Water, Pom pomegranate juice and Justin wines, and the Teleflora flower service. Greed knows no bounds. Thousands of millions of dollars have been made by these people off the hard work of thousands but it will never be enough to satisfy them... -antidrumpfs

[back-and-totheleft]

Blowback

”I’ve enjoyed dope for more than 40 years,“ Oliver Stone says, speaking by phone from his Los Angeles office. “It started in Vietnam, I was a soldier. I showed it in Platoon. Half the platoons were getting high—not in the field, but in the back, and it made that whole experience survivable to a large degree. I don’t think I would have kept my humanity without it. Getting high was an antidote to the madness we were surrounded by. I’m very serious about that. The music and the dope.”

I’m talking to Stone about his latest film, Savages, the story of a couple of high-end hydroponic pot growers—rock stars of the Southern California boutique marijuana scene—who run afoul of a ruthless Mexican cartel angling for a cut of their business. It is, I think, his best movie in years: a ripe, wildly energetic caper—a Stone(r) noir, if you will—that also provides a sharper snapshot of the way we live now than the more overtly topical World Trade Center, W., and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. International diplomacy and the state of the economy are very much on Stone’s mind here too, but the politics are niftily concealed by a vibrant genre-movie surface; striking, color-saturated visuals; and the toned, tanned bodies of a sexy young cast in various states of rest and motion. Think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (a movie Savages directly makes reference to) if Butch, Sundance, and Etta were a full-blown ménage à trois. Think They Live by Night with surfboards and tattoos.

Adapted by Stone, Shane Salerno, and Don Winslow from Winslow’s compulsively readable 2010 novel, Savages follows the perils of Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch), yin-and-yang best buddies who meet cute on the beaches of Laguna and soon go into business together. They use primo seeds ferried back by Navy SEAL Chon from the Afghan war zone to cultivate a highly potent strain of weed whose profits in turn fund the new-agey Ben’s third-world nonprofit. The two friends share home and hearth with the movie’s narrator, O (Blake Lively), a burnt-orange beach bunny who claims to love the two men in her life equally, though perhaps that love is not quite as intense as their own bromance. Then into this progressive love nest comes a missive from the cartel honcho known as Elena “La Reina” (Salma Hayek), who makes Ben and Chon an offer they can’t refuse: join forces with her or else it will be O’s decapitated head they find under their communal sheets.

The cartel in the film behaves like a corporation—Wal-Mart by way of Monsanto—wanting to co-opt not only Ben and Chon’s distribution network, but their seed-growing technology too. And everyone is, literally or figuratively, in bed with everyone—the cartel with American Indian reservations, the DEA (in the person of John Travolta’s deeply compromised agent) with the dealers and the growers alike—leading to a wild, loop-de-loop climax that may leave some wondering if THC has somehow been piped into the cinema.

Savages presents a fascinating cycle of subterranean trade: high-quality Afghan weed makes its way to Southern California as a kind of byproduct of the war over there, and ex-SEALs use their military training and weaponry against the Mexican cartel in a new kind of war zone.

I don’t want to be preachy, but that ties in to my belief that blowback exists in this world. You don’t go fight foreign wars and expect them to stay there. The blowback comes, and not only in the form of Osama bin Laden in 2001. We have so many wounded people from the two Iraqs and Afghanistan, people with diseases and concussions and maimed limbs. There’s tremendous callousness in the country and it destroys us, and in a strange way Don Winslow caught that in his book with this idea of these soldiers becoming active here. In Vietnam we always thought that we’d come back and we’d make a difference here in this country; we’d lead the revolution against Nixon. I love the idea that this kid Chon just takes things in his own fucking hands. He doesn’t go crying to the cops—there’s no cops to cry to. They drive around on bicycles in Laguna. So he gets his RPGs and his IEDs and he fucking does it with real hardcore veterans. I loved that idea of war coming home to roost.

The depiction of the Mexican cartel is unusual in that the characters are quite three-dimensional, particularly Salma Hayek’s Elena, who has a fraught relationship with her twentysomething daughter, and who ends up treating O as a kind of surrogate daughter when she kidnaps her.

We always thought of it that way. We also had scenes with Uma Thurman as the mother of O—they were good scenes that were funny, actually. But with the movie being two hours and 10 minutes now, we were concerned. John Travolta’s character also had a wife, and there was a tender scene between them. And there was a very interesting side story with Lado, Benicio’s character—we had Mia Maestro as his wife, and we see that she is trying to make their children into Californians and the kids disgust him because they don’t have any of the old-fashioned ways that he wants. But we had to let all that go. What I like about the movie is that it has a tension to it, and I think it keeps you going, wanting to know what’s going to happen next, and it doesn’t let up.

The three leads have a terrific chemistry together. They really click in a way that gives the movie a lot of energy. How did you decide on the casting?

Aaron was the first one in. I met him and I just fell for his charm. We met in London and I said, “I don’t know which one you should play, but I want you to do this movie.” He was getting hot, he had done Kick-Ass and I had liked him in that. He was being offered a big role, and it was a big deal for him, but he gave up the [other] movie because he loved this idea so much. Then I saw Taylor in Friday Night Lights and an early version of Battleship and thought he was dead-on for Chon. So that made Aaron Ben. Blake came about after Jennifer Lawrence dropped out to make The Hunger Games. It was a difficult movie because she had Gossip Girl shooting 10 months a year, so she had to fly to New York practically every fucking day. She was working monster hours, as they do on TV. We stayed on schedule, but it was a difficult shoot.

The film feels in some ways like a sibling to Natural Born Killers and U-Turn in its ferocious pacing and the hyperreality of the imagery—the intensity of the sunlight and the bold primary colors.

Let’s put it this way: it was going to be a sun movie, which is to say Mexico, the South. The colors were intended to be primary, and I drove everyone a little bit crazy with that. Early on, I screened Contempt for [cinematographer] Dan Mindel, and I said, “I want these colors.” We had great sun all summer, we were shooting outdoors, we shot with windows, we shot with light, we tried to use as much beach life as we could. At one point, I went out on the set and screamed that I wanted towels, as many bright yellows and blues as possible, to get rid of the weaker colors that were sneaking in. Sometimes set designers want to have that tasteful balance, and I said, “No! We want excess!” Flowers, paintings, everything we could do to get some color in there, including bringing standby painters in and just slapping a wall together if we had to at the last second. My references in this were certainly Contempt, but also Duel in the Sun—I saw that several times when I was young, and I saw it again recently, and it’s just beautifully done. The showdown scene at the end was sort of an homage to that. Also to Leone.

To wit, the movie’s score has a strong spaghetti Western feel to it.

It’s funny you should say that, because I went about 10 rounds on U-Turn with Ennio Morricone. It was the only time I worked with him, and I never worked with someone so difficult in my life. It was a creative collaboration, but I think I’m the only American director who made him return to America a second time—he doesn’t like to travel—because I was unhappy. At one point in our collaboration, I actually showed him a Road Runner cartoon and I said, “This is the type of music I want you to write.” And he looked at me with a cold stare and said, “You want me to write cartoon music?” But if you listen to U-Turn, there’s a lot of boings and bings and bangs.

On Savages, I didn’t really know what the sound should be. There was a guy, Adam Peters, who I’d used on The Untold History of the United States, and he did great work for me. He’s English, so he’s not at all of the Italian style, but he adapted. As with Natural Born Killers and Any Given Sunday, we used a lot of needle drops, a lot of Mexican music. We listened to all the narcocorridos, but we didn’t end up using any of those. We put Brahms in under the sex scene at the very beginning because I wanted the movie to have some tenderness and romance. There has to be that element like in Duel in the Sun where you feel for these people—they’re young, they’re tender, they’re at the mercy of the world, they’re in danger, and they’re in love.

How do you interpret the love triangle at the center of the film? Do Ben and Chon really love each other—as Elena intimates—more than they do O?

I don’t know. I did look at Butch Cassidy before we shot the movie, and it’s interesting, because Katharine Ross is with both men, but it’s so hidden in the movie that you barely notice it. Certainly, Butch Cassidy was considered, even at the time, a bit homoerotic. O has her own journey, too. She lives through this thing and she has to find herself, through this process of looking at death so clearly. She says toward the end: “I don’t think it’s possible for three people to be equally in love.” Which indicates that she’s thought about what Elena says to her in the dinner scene: “Something’s fucked up about your love story, baby.”

What is the current status of your Showtime miniseries, The Untold History of the United States?

It grew out of my desire to leave something behind. I’m aware of what my three children studied in American History and I’m aware of what I studied in American History, and I feel like we were all cheated by the book publishers and by the schools. In my case, it grew into a mythology about the United States that was very dangerous, because among other things I went to Vietnam under the belief that we were fighting the demon enemy: Communism. And what we did in Vietnam was so heinous, so evil, and it bothers me still that it was never apologized for, nothing changed, and we went to more wars. So in 2008, around the time I was doing W., I started this project. It was designed to be 10 chapters about the mythologies of American history, going back to 1945 and the bomb and working our way through to 2012. It’s an upside-down version of American history, which is to say it takes everything you thought you knew about America and questions it. Anyway, it turned into a monstrosity. It went two years over and took a lot of time. Writing history for film is the hardest thing in the world, and I’ve been giving all my free time to it when I haven’t been making other films. It was originally scheduled for May, but when Universal moved Savages to July, we and Showtime decided to push it back to November because we didn’t want to overlap. We’re working like dogs on it as we speak. We keep revising, fact-checking. Things change. It’s a bitch.

Savages ultimately feels like the work of a filmmaker reborn. If you watched it without knowing who directed it, you might think it was the work of a first- or second-timer fresh from film school or music videos, showing us everything he can do, in case he never gets to do it again.

It’s really my third or fourth childhood, because I’ve had these kinds of periods before. Bear in mind that I did Platoon when I was 37. To me, part of me had died in Vietnam, and to finally get a chance to make a movie about Vietnam in 1986 when I was almost 40, I felt like an old man then. I was going back to my 20-year-old self, and being in the jungle with Charlie Sheen and all those young dudes, I was the old guy. Life is like that—you get old, you get young, you get old, you get young. That’s happened to me repeatedly. Natural Born Killers was an enormous explosion of energy at a time when I was getting divorced and my life was falling apart and I was in a very dark place and I just said, “Fuck it.” So the answer is, I felt very old on the movie at times, because it was such hard work, and to get out of your chair for the hundredth time of the day and have to walk over to some young person and talk them through the whole thing again… What am I doing out here in 100-degree heat at Pyramid Lake? But it’s the idea that keeps it alive.

As a director, you sometimes feel like you’re the most loathed person, because you’re telling everyone what to do. And most people in life, myself included, don’t like to be in control all the time. I don’t enjoy it. But once in a while, you have to go out there for 60, 70, 80 days and you’ve got to be in charge and you’ve got to be tough to bring it together, because it’s tremendously logistically complex, and if you have 16 competing visions or even two competing visions, it won’t work. Every time you direct, it’s a tremendous effort. It’s like mounting the D-Day invasion. I’ve made 19 movies and they were 19 wars.

-Scott Foundas, "Blowback," Film Comment, July-August 2012