#how to get soil

[balkanradfem]

Okay, it's time. It's time to start the regular and the biggest wave of seeds. The middle of February is the best time to start if you live in a southern-ish country on the northern hemisphere that gets it's last from in the middle of April/start of May, if you're a bit more northern, then wait!

If you currently have a little bit of a backyard outside, with some grass on it, or maybe you have a nice balcony where you could place a little pot or two – you could do this too. If you're thinking 'oh but I don't have any containers' any plastic cup will do. If you're thinking 'oh but I don't have any seeds' if you have a tomato or a pepper from the store anywhere in your house, even if they're going bad, you can take seeds out of it and start them. Maybe you're thinking 'I don't have any soil' if you have access to go to a forest, or to a place with a lot of trees, you can find good soil underneath a tree that's been allowed to compost all of its leaves, it's usually forests that get to do this! You do need light and airy soil, because little seedlings wouldn't be able to push roots trough clay.

So if you have a plastic cup, a tomato or a pepper (or a hot pepper! or eggplant), access to some soil, you could grow a nice food plant! If you're worried you'd be bad at it – it's still so much fun, and you might be proven wrong, tomato plants are forgiving and vigorous. You might get free food out of this! And if you start multiple plants there's a good chance at least half of them will survive, and then you just put away the dead ones and it looks like you're an amazing gardener with 100% success rate. Lots of my plants die too! I put them away and look at my hundred live plants and feel pretty good about myself.

I'm gonna go with my 'tried and true' germinating method. I'm gonna put seeds on a paper towel, spray them with water, put a label inside, and then shut them tightly in a plastic bag. This way I can check in on them daily, and the conditions are ideal because the bag keeps all that dampness in, they cannot dry out! They usually germinate faster this way too, and then you get to plant only the ones who have already activated, so you're sure they're going to sprout.

Once your plants get big (in a month and a half), you'll need to get them adjusted to the outside conditions, they need a bit of time to adjust to being in the sun! This is achieved by giving them few hours in the sun every day, they'll grow darker green and more beautiful in the process, and each day you leave them for one hour longer in the direct sunlight. Then, if there's no danger of frost, you can transplant them outside, or in a bigger pot! If you don't have a bigger pot, do not fear. You can grab a bucket and use it. You can grab an empty container of a big laundry detergent or softener, cut out the top, and use it as a container. You have a big 5L or 7L plastic bottle? Cut the top and plant the thing inside. Plants just want to have access to more soil, they're not picky. Ideally your makeshift pot will have some holes on the bottom! But if not, you can just become a master at watering and water them the exact amount they need.

If you do have some backyard land, and you didn't plant on it before, now would be an excellent time to start gathering compost from the kitchen, and putting it outside on that piece of land. It won't have time to compost and create fertile ground in a month or two, but it will prevent the grass from growing on that spot by blocking the light, and if it rains, some of the nutrients from it will be transferred to the earth and your plant will get good food from it! When it's warmer outside, it will compost faster, and you can leave it on top of the soil for your plant to slowly absorb all that food. If some worms and bugs come along, they'll help it fall apart too, you love this, you love the wormies and the bugs. They'll even help your soil be more airy and easy for your plants to grow in.

There's nothing to lose in letting yourself try out a plant or two, and you might be surprised by how much food you can get from even a few plants! Try this awesome new hobby and hack the agriculture and food security with no budget and a lot of heart. And hey, if you don't feel like doing it right now, you can still do it during the entirety of March and April, you have plenty of time until summer.

[stealingyourbones]

Not even really a crossover but it could be

Danny gets outed/reveals/something and everybody knows he's Phantom. There are science organizations that are absolutely *frothing* at the mouth to hire him.

He gets hired to modify and then deploy hurricane and tornado reading equipment because he's able to fly into the center unharmed. There is much less margin or error because he's always able to get the equipment deployed if the weather is still happening.

Maybe it's a side job while he's in school for his BA or something

.

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Four felt pretty satisfied, if he was being honest.

It hadn’t been a terrible night. Nor had it been a particularly hard one. But his patient had started out somewhat unstable, showing signs of a brewing infectious response, febrile, unstable blood pressure, and shaking despite being sedated. Four had spent hours in his room trying to sort things out, hours trying to implement the plan the night team had put together during rounds.

And, slowly, things had started to stabilize.

After that, Four spent the next few hours just tidying things up and doing maintenance work - changing lines to prevent infection, cleaning messes, taking out the filled trash cans, keeping up with medication infusions running dry, checking vitals and outputs. Over the course of a twelve hour shift, he’d probably sat down for maybe an hour over multiple little breaks.

And, in the end, the patient was on less sedation and fewer blood pressure medications by the time day shift came.

So yes, Four was pretty satisfied. At least until the Monday-Friday day crew rolled in, checking lines, pointing out caps that Four had missed, complaining about the state of the patient’s dressing that Four had missed.

And suddenly, all that hard work felt completely disregarded, and Four found himself in a sour mood as he headed towards the parking garage.

He caught sight of Legend, who looked similarly grouchy. “How was your night?”

”Fine,” the travel nurse shrugged. “Just some annoying patients.”

”Oh?”

Legend huffed. “One guy said I wasn’t taking good care of him simply because he was a Zora. Like I just was a racist to him. Meanwhile, his chief complaint was back pain that he’d had for four days, while my other patients had chest pain, an asthma attack, and a drug overdose. The doc gave the guy a muscle relaxer and some pain medicine and we were discharging him and he said I hurt him when I took the fucking pulse-ox sticker off his finger and demanded a bandaid. I hate people.”

Four grimaced. At least his own patient hadn’t really been an issue, particularly since the guy had been intubated and sedated the entire night. “Were the others at least decent?”

”Oh yeah,” Legend answered casually. “Chest pain dude was pretty chill considering he was probably having an nSTEMI. Even cracked some jokes. OD was an OD, usual nonsense. Before that group I had a teenager who had broken her ankle from running in heels and her friends kept trying to make her laugh so that was nice, and then there was the two-year-old who fell down a couple stairs… uh, what else, priapism guy came back—"

”Not priapism guy,” Four laughed. “He really never is gonna learn.”

”Hey!”

Legend and Four turned to see Twilight and Wild trotting towards them with a wave.

”Wait, are we all on night shift rotation right now?” Four asked, baffled. “I swear you were on days, Twi.”

”I picked up extra,” Twilight answered blearily. “I hate myself.”

”Oh shut up, you love night shift,” Legend huffed. “Best time to work.”

”I’m a morning person,” Twilight grumbled. “I want to go to bed.”

”I say we should get breakfast together,” Wild proposed.

Twilight rolled his eyes. “You always want to eat. I want to sleep.”

"I'm down for food," Legend said, shrugging.

"Breakfast it is!" Wild clapped his hands happily as Twilight groaned.

[medi-bee]

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

not a desert technically but I just visited the dunes in Monterey and gleefully trampled on some ice plant and I feel like you might enjoy that. if you wanna talk about the kinds of vegetation that grow in sandy soil or something I invite you to 👀

(also you're doing it! you're surviving! you'll get through that doctorate!)

ok ready this is my most important soapbox of all because soils in the desert are very special and have such cool organisms you don't find in these arrangements outside of drylands...

first lookee here. wauw beautiful utah

ok now look closer

no closer closer closer

CLOSER CLOSER CLOSER

WOW is that MOSS? you are thinking. the answer is YES. but doesn't moss like lots of water you are thinking??? WELL USUALLY. BUT in the desert you will notice that things like grasses and shrubs have lots of space between them unlike in more temperate climates-vegetation cover is not truly continuous. And there's less leaf litter than in forests obscuring the dirt. Which means all that soil is just sitting out in the open with nothing to protect it from being blown away by those harsh desert winds... except of course for our friends the BIOLOGICAL SOIL CRUSTS. also known as crypotbiotic soils, cryptogrammic soils, and biocrusts (for short).

These are communities of mosses, lichens, cyanobacteria (aka blue green algae--yes, those are usually Wet too, but ironically so so common in deserts), and the tens of thousands of surface and subsurface microbes that are associated with them. It's easy to forget just how many organisms are living in one single scoop of soil, especially because science can barely identify 1% of these microbes. Like of JUST the ones we have enough info to classify enough to count in my own master's dataset left me with over 25,000 unique taxonomic units I had to manage. don't worry about what that means just know it was very annoying and makes statistics a headache. anyway you find them all over the southwest US states as well as in other deserts around the world (spain, australia, sooo many in china, incredible ones in the succulent karoo in south africa/namibia, plenty in argentina etc etc), if you know where to look...

anyway OUR HEROS THE BIOCRUST aren't just there to look pretty (though you will can see from photos they also do this :) ), but are a vital component to the dryland ecosystem! They literally hold the soil surface together to prevent erosion, they influence hydrology in terms of rainfall runoff + infiltration, they impact how seeds germinate, they contribute to nutrient cycling and what plant-available compounds are held at the soil surface... like i feel like Tumblr in general has been made aware of how fungi & root networks interact in large scale systems like forests, but that is also happening on a more microscopic level in deserts! just in the top couple centimeters soooo much is happening. Cyanobacteria in particular are tiny organisms that produce little nets of sugars woven in the soil to climb around on and protect themselves, and if you crumble a little bit of soil from the surface you can see how the little spiderweb strings literally hold together the sand particles.

Now that you're Aware of biocrusts, when you look at larger scale landscape photos taken in un-trampled areas of desert, you will notice them as darker patches and textures on the lighter soil:

Yep there's these tiny little communities all over, that many people never learn to see. And now what I said before about mosses & cyanobacteria usually preferring wet environments--they have in fact adapted to life in the desert in ways that means they're dormant for most of the year. They live in stasis until the rainy season hits (or in some cases, winter moisture from a snow layer--many will photosynthesize through a few inches of snow since it's clear/white), and then burst into color and life. Many patches of biocrust will look utterly lifeless and dried out at first and then become vibrant and swell up within a few minutes of being exposed to moisture. Lichens, while more vibrant even when dry, will also mostly only grow/reproduce while wet. And biocrusts come in all sorts of colors, shapes, and preferred microhabitats!

anyway this post is long enough already so i'll be quick. while beautiful and important as you can imagine these are FRAGILE. if they get trampled too much, by humans or cows or cars, that's it. you're back to bare soil that can blow away whenever it wants.

I was lucky to get to participate in a 2x/year survey of one of the very few places in Utah to NEVER have cattle grazing or development, a remote area the entrance is kept secret to inside Canyonlands National Park, where you can see just how dense and lush biocrusts once could be in the US southwest:

ah... glorious. what special little guys. this is why if you visit many of the national parks in Utah you will see signs & stickers around with slogans like "Don't Bust The Crust" and "Tiptoe Through The Crypto" and etc. so heed that advice but DO stop and kneel down and get a better look at them!

[flamemons]

[girltoya]

Every time I get a bad on prsk I NEED to kill myself. What did I do to deserve that. I’ll take a good and I’ll take a miss but nothing makes my heart sink quite like seeing that green text at the bottom of my screen from my peripheral vision. I’d rather the note jump out of the screen and strangle me honestly

[plantanarchy]

The strange quiet at the very end of a mid-May greenhouse Saturday workday is something so eerie to me. In only another week or so, all of this will be empty for another year.

After a year of planning, weeks of planting and months of keeping it all alive and hoping it grew well, it all goes so quickly out into the world

[sea-glass-and-fire]

okay i'm like 3 episodes behind on fantasy high so no spoilers BUT

i'm absolutely in love with all of the shade towards the soil club, because the only time i have to watch is while i'm doing soil experiments for my phd. I was literally sitting in a lab that is entirely focused on soil, holding a beaker of soil and water, as Riz told his mom how weird it was that it's a soil club and not a plant club. Oh, you're trying to identify exactly what is in that soil? You and me both, dude!!

[so-bitya]

HATE when I'm reading romance and they have to pause and state the female lead is an ✨innocent virgin maiden✨whose eyes never laid on a man before until the male lead came into her life and he had soooo much sex 😜, he was sleeping with 15 women before he stumbled out of bed into the arms of the female lead whose a virgin btw, and he says he wants her but she just shivers and weeps because she doesn't know what to do because she's a virgin and the male lead loves it 😍 she's different from those other ~filthy~ women that intimidate him with their confidence SHES A VIRGIN BTW

[sombreset]

I have so many thoughts about Logan's past that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to get to into, at least not in Old Soil (it's bloated enough as it is with different ideas and concepts) but I'm not sure where to share them. I'm not sure if this will ever see the light of day because I don't have enough context for comic (or world history) lore but

holy shit I'd love to see a story focused on Logan during wartimes, specifically WWII, his relationship with movies, music, war, and the world in general. I also would REALLY like to see his time fighting alongside Bucky and Steve in WWII expanded upon??? Like holy shit so much potential there. I'll have to do some comic digging at some point but there is........................ so much interesting stuff to be had there

[prince-liest]

I love my pinguicula so much... I think I now have all of the ones I've been really hyped about and wanting to try out! I lucked out and nabbed a Razzberry Blonde from California Carnivores when they first went on sale, which was a wishlist ping for me, and because I was camping the sales page and got them just as they went up, not only did I get one that was very large...it is also about to bloom and splitting into two crowns!

That puts me at two pings currently blooming: the Razzberry Blonde, and a P. gigantea "red flush" x cyclosecta cross that's consistently bloomed for me! I've rearranged and moved my windowsill collection into a larger pot that's easier to water and put them all on my artificial light shelf. I think even on the windowsill, they weren't getting enough hours of sunlight in the day, and the few pings I've had under lights were visibly doing better, so I'm really hoping the lot will grow faster and color up now that they're on this shelf! I have a number of pings that are known for going very pink and purple in color when under bright lights, so I'm stoked for it.

All transplanted and ready to grow! Most of these are babies and will get much larger. (Escept the P. esseriana, which are mostly babies and will stay cute and small, haha.)

[weezerlvr228]

what are they doing to his leg💔💔

[raiiny-bay]

wip

[irradiatedpiratebooty]

Horse collection update

[goldenthyme]

Realistic isekai with an engineer protagonist: "oh shit I don't have any of my reference material or programs and I don't know how this method was originally developed or justified I'm going to die"