>>1599
>Irl all my gardening ends in desaster, barely able to grow small tomatoes or 5 inch pumpkins without them mysteriously turning brown and dying long before their time.
I remember you talked about salt mist from the nearby sea making rust bubbles on the cars in your area or was that another place? It does sound like salt, either from the soil or from the water. We'd need a pic of thee plants to make sure. Tomatoes are relatively salt tolerant though so that's a bit odd.
Or it's a fungus like Fusarium or Phytophthora. They can persist in the soil and reinfect new plants year after year.
https://gardenerspath.com/how-to/disease-and-pests/common-tomato-diseases/

You're a smart bear you should be able to figure out the root of the problem, I'd recommend starting with fresh compost next year to eliminate any sort of biotic or abiotic soil problems.

>>1609

The cause is not lost, I'm going to get a soil tester, moisture tester, I'm going to use greenhouse sprayers for water with rain gages to make sure only the exact amount of water is used, lime to lower pH (or raise it, I forget) neem oil on the first sign of mold etc.

Look, there's a heck of a lot of plants that magically grow in untreated and unfertalized awful, clay ridden soil like in the middle of nowhere without any water from me like surprise barley, mysterious undying tomatoes growing out of a crack, a giant cucumber vine that made literally 10lb cucumbers before I looked at it twice, a huge corn stalk growing like a weed under the bird feeder, so it's not salt spray which is insane if you have a car, but plants don't care. Yes this is the same place, I can see the ocean and smell it of the wind is right. Thankfully I'm not so close that I smell rotten fish like at my work which is literally 1ft above the high tide mark at the water, but the occasional stray wind will bring me an algea scent. My poor truck was in rust free condition when I bought it and now it's a consistent dark orange on every free inch of metal.

No, the plants are fine, I am a noob and actually deter their growth. But that will change. I don't do pesticides or herbicides but neem oil seems to help mold.

We have morning mist and that's how native plants live because our rainfall totals are less than 1/8 the square root of a square horse per year, our temperature is always between 15.67 and 21.5 Rømer daytime temperature all year and never goes below 491.7 Rankine. So it's not frost. In fact a stray tomato plant that I did nothing to survived winter and is still growing to this day over a year old.

Well then it's clear, the problem is you!

No but seriously, those wild-growing surprise plants are one-in-a-thousand super selected champions of evolution, like those concentration camp survivor Jews who lived to over 100 after the war. The ordinary simply die, only the best survive. Modern commercial high-yield crop varieties often need optimal conditions to thrive and are not resilient to stress at all. Also they're clones with no variation so natural selection doesn't work.

Bottom line, plants most likely don't turm brown from your malicious bear aura alone, there must be some physical cause and we gotta find out what you are doing wrong. But it may very well be that the varieties you tried to grow are simply unsuitable for your location. It's always easier to adapt crops to your environment than your environment to the crops you'd like to grow. Host learned that the hard way because he's a fool.

>>1637
>lewd tomato
Pussy pareidolia at its best
would grow

>>1645

Those tiny happy people are doing lewd things

how about lewd pumpkin?

sometimes i wish i had a garden but then again its lots of work and responsibility so nah. i'll help out my relatives a few times a year thats enough

>>1678

I am so in agreement here. Even the word "Pumpkin" is lewd, it's the most lewd fruit just based on that alone.

Host has been tilling a field to grow spinach last weekend which included shoveling 5 m³ of soil into a wheelbarrow and moving it 20m. Worked over 6h on 2 consecutive days without noteworthy breaks. Body may not be strong but it does have decent stamina. Even more interesting, there was no soreness afterwards. Didn't even feel tired or hungry despite not eating all day. This should be in the fitness thread.

Anyway, spinach was planted just in time, autumn arrived full force and it's cool and rainy now. We'll have a looot of spinach this fall and winter. Thanks to climate change it grows until late December.

>>2043

Nice.

Yeah that last day I was dying, it was probably the heat.

>>4190
That's cool!
I wouldn't dare to harvest any wild flowers here in nature, a lot is poisinous. But you can buy a lot of flowers for food decoration. Not sure how many pesticides are in them though.

>>4190
we make juice out of elder flowers its like lemonade you can buy it everywhere

>>4203
thats what you get for living in a tropical hellhole where everything wants to kill you

>>4256
Yeah that's also awesome but the syrup contains too much sugar. We will try to make some with a bit of xylitol and sterilize it so it lasts without sugar as preservative. Just like our jams.

>>4391
>>4392
>>4393
Awesome pics!
Did you take all of them?
Which are the parasitic and carnivirous flowers?

>>4395
Thats some huge grapes! That's inches right?

>>4398
>That's inches right?

Yes, the post ww3 units

>>4398
Host took all those pics with the Pixel. He took a lot of the choughs to catch a few in flight.

The carnivorous plant is Pinguicula alpina. It catches tiny insects on its sticky leaves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinguicula_alpina

The parasitic orchid is Neottia nidus-avis. It has no green parts and gets all energy from mycorrhizal fungi that live in symbiosis with trees. The orchid pretends to be a symbiotic plant and attracts fungal hyphae into its roots, then digests them without giving them anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neottia_nidus-avis

>>4395
Grape roots easily go 5-6 m deep into the soil, old plants can reach more than 20m. We have a grape in the garden that's about 20 yeas old but it doesn't do too well due to lack of sun. It has a few handful of fruit every year.

Our Epiphyllum cactus is flowering, th flowers are the size of a child's head and smell like soap. Unfortunately they only last a few days. Pic related, we missed the flowers in full bloom. The Pithaya and Queen of the Night refuse to flower like almost every year.

Moar!

Lots of grubs, this one and 5 others. Some on the mother plant and others just on seedlings like this. I can't tell where they're actually eating though.

>>4558
wtf how do you know the names of all the bugs and plants thats crazy

EU elections today who will Alice vote for? how many germans will elect putin?

>>4558
No, even an autist like those can't identify these beetles by heart but he knows how to look up the necessary information. It's like solving a riddle.

For example there's an almost identical species of ground beetle but the first 4 segments of its antennae are red. In the one we found only the first segment is red, the rest is black.
There are also 2 extremely similar bee-wolf species but the other has a red band on the tip of its hindwings. The one we found has a black band, you can barely see it. That's the easy stuff. Identifying tiny moths is a completely diffferent matter and often impossible. But why would you want that to begin with?

Got these planted in April and they're 6ft tall now.

The sunchoke is edible raw and cooked, it tastes ok alone, when I baked some they were similar to chips (baked potato) but weren't as starchy.

They also cause a lot of gas unfortunately.

Also I see a ton of milkweed in both yards.

>>4624
Oh yeah, terribly invasive weed here. The tubers go so deep that you'll never get rid of them. Don't really like the taste and consistency either, not to speak of gas. Nope, you can keep this one.

>>4629

Interesting, that's what I wanted, though I doubt the tubers will become invasive. They're very big, it might be a different species. They're so calorie dense, 1/16th acre can sustain a person intdefinately.

>>4631
There's tons of such sunflower-like asteraceae in the Americas but host is pretty certain yours is the common sunchoke or topinambur. Like with most crops, there's a ton of varieties bred for different purposes with varying tuber shape, size and color. In Germany it's mainly grown for liquor destillation but also animal feed and biofuel. It's healthy and has quite some potential but is invasive ans many don't like the taste and consistency. Also the tubers can't be stored for long. Don't know about California but in Europe it can only be harvested in autumn and winter. The tubers are hardy deep in the soil but while growing in spring and summer the plant exhausts the tubers so there's nothing to harvest. Only makes sense after the new tuber is formed in autumn. So it's a seasonal crop that's unavailable for half a year.

Have you tried sweet potatoes? They should grow in your climate. It's too cold here.

>>4625
And I see your pomegranates are already flowering? Our biggest one has several buds but I think it will drop them as usual. It's too small to produce fruit yet.

>>4654
>Have you tried sweet potatoes?

Too many pillbugs, they don't stand a chance. As with radishes, carrots, beets and other near surface tubers. The bugger bugs just live everywhere, but these are the cute small ones that walk snail speed and roll into perfect spheres not the big flat scary ones that run fast.

>>4655
>And I see your pomegranates are already flowering?

They flower three times a year, Early spring, late spring, summer. All three form fruit and so the fruit are several stages. These are two years old and had fruit last year, I have two different species planted together for cross pollination.

They were mildly tasty, hopefully this year they'll do better because they dried out several times last year, now that they're in the ground they'll be fine.

Ah I remember your pillbugs. Weird. They're not a problem here, it's rare for them to eat plants but they're a different species and don't curl up.

Harvested cherries, there's a lot this year after almost nothing last year because there was heavy rain and cold during the flowering period. We only harvested a little because no idea what to do with all the cherries. It's a lot of work to remove the stone and occasional maggots of the cherry fly

They look beautiful but don't taste like much. We froze some and made jam from the rest just cooking the fruit to preserve them. It can be added to our yogurt or as a chocolate cherry pancake filling but the usefulness is limited.

We also had tons of raspberries but they are infested by fruit flies since a few years so they're all full of maggots as soon as they are ripe and liquefy smelling like vinegar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_suzukii

You can't do anything against this as the fruit flies lay their eggs when the raspberries turn red and they develop within days. So you can't use pesticides. Only a fine netting would help. We'll have to try next year. Sucks, I like raspberries more than cherries but we only ate a few half-ripe ones and threw away the rest.

Those monarch catapillars ate all the baby milkweed plants now there's a dozen on the big one.

>>4718
Is that all the milkweed? They'll eat up everything!

Saw fireflies today, at least 4 in the garden and dozens in the park. There are lots this year! They only fly for about 1h at dusk starting around 10pm. But impossible to photograph. They're ugly anyway.

>>4728
>Is that all the milkweed? They'll eat up everything!

And in our hubris, we thought only humans consume without thinking of the future, yes they ate everything, all the seedlings, all the leaves, they're chewing on seed pods now so even new seeldings won't be sewn. When will they ever learn, when will they ev-ever-learn...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PS3-lyqCl80 [Embed]

Where has all the milkweed gone... long time passing...

>>4730
It's a common human misconception that nature is about balance or even reason. Most creatures inevitably destroy their own habitat if left uncecked. The only thing that prevents them from doing so are predators and diseases. It doesn't always iron itself out however. Not just animals, even plants and bacteria. The invention of photosynthesis by cyanobacteria caused 2 of the most massive environmental catastrophes ever, the Great Oxidation Event and probably Snowball Earth, eradicating almost all early life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_earth

Caterpillars killing their hostplant and starving isn't uncommon btw, it's often seen in Birdwings. The older larvae move down the vine they feed on an gnaw it off at the base. The entire plant dies with all younger caterpillars on it. Don't ask me what's the evolutionary advantage of that.
https://images.peabody.yale.edu/lepsoc/jls/1970s/1975/1975-29(2)85-Straatman.pdf

>>4810
Well there's a reason California is the agricultural powerhouse of the US. Ideal climate for all year round harvest. Do your sunchokes even die back in winter? Here they can flower until frost kills them in Nov or Dec but then they take a loong rest, only re-emerging in late May, later than most other plants. So they need to live off their tubers for about half a year, probably more.

Weather continues to be moist, after the hottest day of the year so far with 34°C yesterday, temperatures will remain below 20°C for the whole week. Expected night temperatures around 12°C. Feels arctic man. I bet even Kashtan has warmer weather.

>>4813

I haven't seen frost for a while. Maybe this year? We used to get frost in the canyon but not for two years now. Nothing died in winter, everything is evergreen and perennial now.

Did you know tomato plants and beans turn woody in year two, like a tree?

>>4815
Yeah, we overwintered a tomato once, it turned woody but also senecsent and didn't recover next spring and died. Beans can turn woody at the stem base even in one year.

Here it's another year without sunflowers and tomatos. Snails ate them all. Host is always too late vegetables them anyway. Too busy with other garden stuff.

It's an unusual moist year and there are tons of slugs and snails. I'm not gonna cook them but we poison them with iron(III)phosphate. It works pretty well but new ones migrate into the garden within days like sandniggers storming our borders.

Do you actually have citrus? I forgot if I already asked. They should grow there. We have an orange and lemon, both about 1m tall but only the lemon flowers. It rarely produces edible fruit because not enough sun. But the flower scent is awesome! Needless to say they grow in large buckets and have to spend the winter indoors. They hate it and get all sort of diseases but they would just die outside. Needs more climate change!

>>4829
>Do you actually have citrus?

I don't but the neighbors do.

We also have orchids and other tropical plants in the neighborhood.

The orchids have edible flowers and lots of honey-like nectar.

>>4831
>The orchids have edible flowers and lots of honey-like nectar.
Interesting, what do they look like? I mean there's about 30K orchid species.

>>4869
Nice!
I don't think I ever managed to grow a tall sunflower, they were always eaten or stayed ridiculously small.

Plums and apples look promising this year. They both are infested with caterpillars though. Larvae of moths. In contrast, cherries and raspberries have maggots from flies. Strangely apricots have no pests. It's extremely rare to find a caterpillar. Quince also appear to be immune.

Wasp invasion.
They built their nest in the attic and the colony kept growing. Well we don't really mind them, host wanted to leave them alone but they were pestering the neighbors so we eventually had to poison the poor wasps with permethrin. Shit works, all ded now.

I wish we had hornets again, they're cool! Had a nest in the attic for 3 consecutive years but then they didn't come again. They eat wasps and a lot of other insects and are very docile compared to wasps or bees.

>>4936
Awesome.
How tall?

>>4952

That one's only about 7 feet, the big one only has one flower and it's about 7.5 feet but it hasn't opened yet. It's the biggest one I've seen yet, I wonder how big the head's going to be?

>>4963
Based.
Now much 137Cs in them from Chernobyl?

This year is unusually moist so I eexpect a good mushroom turnout compared to the dry last years. But we didn't have time to look this year. Soon.

>>4967
>Now much 137Cs in them from Chernobyl?
What??
Your mushrooms are contaminated with radioactivity? Just how close does Kashtan live to Chernobyl?

>>4975
>Just how close does Kashtan live to Chernobyl?
about 500km. never heard radiation being a problem in mushrooms here so i looked it up and lol contamination is higher in bavaria than here! super weird how uneven the distribution is. but is it actually relevant anywhere outside the exclusion zone after almost 40 years? you been there right Alice?

>>4985
>contamination is higher in bavaria than here!
Yes, you were lucky though you're far closer. It depends where the contaminated rain fell back then. South Bavaria and the alps were severely contaminated as you see.

> is it actually relevant anywhere outside the exclusion zone after almost 40 years?
137Cs has a half life of 30 years so more than half of it is gone. It's not a health concern unless you exclusively live off mushrooms and boar meat but continues to be a legal problem in Germany. Especially boars which accumulate Cs by eating mushrooms which already accumulated it. So quite a lot of hunted boar meat can't be sold and must be destroyed beause it exceeds the extremely tight radiation levels. But it's not dabgerous. Cs doesn't bioacummulate like Iodine. That was the main health concern after Chernobyl but 131I only has a half-life of 8d so it's long gone.

>you been there right Alice?
Yes, we've been in Chernobyl exclusion zone and NPP twice for a week each in 2015 and 2016. Saw the reactor up close before it was sealed under the new safe confinement. We had planned to go again after the pandemic in 2022 but you know, it turned into a war-zone. I wonder if we'll ever be able to go there again. It's one of the most awesome places I've ever been. Even there surface radiation is very moderate nowadays except right in front of the destroyed reactor and a few hotspots. But I wouldn't eat any mushrooms from the area.

>>5002
Oh I know that one!
It's Gaillardia pulchella. Is it native in California?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaillardia_pulchella

The other looks like a weird sunflower cultivar.

>>5019

They're both native and heirloom. I don't buy hybrid or Frankenstein seeds. I want them to self seed and fight to the death.

Which usually means Bermuda grass and fucking moonflower vine which has spread through lateral roots everywhere and chokes everything. Bane of the garden right up there with Bermuda grass. Should both be illegal.

>>5022

Friggen out of control sunflower. Like this soil is crazy good where I've been taking care of it. It's 10ft tall.

>>5019
you've been INSIDE the chernobyl npp??? you for real?

>>5027
Not inside the exploded reactor #4 of course. The NPP is huge and has 6 blocks. #5 and #6 were never completed. I was in #5 I think, don't remember It's just an abandoned construction site. And in the more or less intact block #2 that was shut down in 1991. You can see what it looks like here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reactor_Hall_of_Unit_2,_Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant.webm

It's not like the entire area is a death zone, people still went to work there every day to secure the NPP and work on the containment. Most areas are basically safe nowadays. You could live there.

>>5023
>10ft tall.
10 times my best sunflowers

>>5031
That's pretty crazy I didn't know that! Did you work there? I assumed Chernobyl was deadly.

>>5023
Never tried growing sunflowers but it works here too. I've seen some in gardens but not that tall.

>>5043
>not that tall

I've seen 6 feet in my yard, this is unbelievable. Like that time I grew zucchini the size of watermelons and they were tender too, that was a while ago. I'm an awful gardener so these flukes are always a surprise.

>>5115

Welp the milkweed grew back and now it's just a stalk again. There are at least another dozen monarch butterfly larva on it. I found the "last molt" of three about 2 weeks ago and now this place is teaming woth butterflies, all fluttering around that same sad milkweed plant that refuses to die.

>>5136
Can't you grow more milkweed for the poor butterflies?

>>5138

They're eating all the seedlings. There are dozens of seedlings and they get one pr two leaves and then gone.

>>5115
Saw a few huge sunflowers driving by a small garden. Easily 2.5m tall with a relatively small flower. Gigantic stems though. I wonder wheter this is genetic or perfect environmental conditions. As always probably both.

>>5139
Gotta collect milkweed elswhere to feed them like cattle!
Host bred butterflies when he was younger. It's quite a chore to get enough food for the ever hungry caterpillars.
Speaking of which, I haven't seen one in ages.

This little hummingbird moth caterpillar about 5-6 cm long on a grape vine. Whatever it's doing there is a mystery because they don't eat grape vines. Maybe a neighbor has tomatoes.

The resulting hummingbird moths are quite impressive.

>>5181
That's cool!
What species is this? Tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta)?
Doesn't look like a hummingbird moth (Hemaris sp.) caterpillar but we aren't familiar with them, especially those from the Americas. All I can say for sure is that it's some Sphingid.

Haven't seen any noteworthy caterpillar in years, it's sad.

Assuming it's in the last instar, wandering off the foodplant to find a safe place for pupation isn't unusual for caterpillars. They generally try to hide whenever not feeding because many birds are smart and check plants with visible damage for the culprit.

>>5186
>hornworm

"Hummingbird moths, or sphinx moths, are large, furry, and active in the day. Their caterpillars are called “hornworms” because they have what looks to be a long horn extending off their rumps. Most of these larvae have multiple potential food sources."

They eat tobacco, tomato, and other nightshade family or solanaceous plants.

One of the few noteworthy butterflies I saw recently and host managed to photograph up close as it was busy feeding on the Buddleja flowers.

Silver-washed fritillary (Argynnis paphia), male.
They love bramble flowers. The larvae feed on violets but we've never seen one. The butterflies are quite big, up to 7cm wingspan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver-washed_fritillary

>>5246

Then this happened

>>5246
>>5252
Looks like a good harvest!
Do you eat the sunflower seeds too?

>>5253
>eat

It's odd, like it dropped all its seeds and they didn't seem as ripe as they did other times. A lot of them aren't ripe and of course the birds come in and take most of them. I never planted this species before so it's not how others did it.

>>5257
The parrots ate my sunflower seeds.

>>5283
You have parrots?

>>5284
>You have parrots?

They're a non-endemic species that has established a population and they're very noisy. I would take a picture but they're also very skittish. Wherever you go here along the coast you hear them chatter and fly around. At this point I see them a lot more often than crows, pidgeons, etc.

They love my yard now that they have all these sunflower seeds to eat.

>>5283
Yeah they make awful noise. I dont like parrots. We have these green parakeets in several cities like Stuttgart but not in Munich.

>>5296
Make your own wine!
I have several grape vines but most grspes are eaten by birds. Mostly starlings

>>5298
>wine

I don't drink, so no wine, but I do whine a lot instead.

>>5296
ate grapes growing at fence of a train station today. they were sour

My friend took this surveillance photo of the suspect with her potato (Iphone) eating my apples!

>>5336

Zoom in poor quality

>>5361
>Are they pests?

No way, we love them.

only showy birds here are cranes. never managed to take a photo of one only see them on fields while driving through countryside. theyre huge.

>>5369
Why is everything in your country grey?

>>5386
Collect them ans make apple pie with Yulya!

We also have lots of apples, but especially plums this year. Will be making plum butter by cooking them until only a thick paste remains.
Uma delicia!

>>5437

Now Alice is 5?

>>5439
fastflux magic

>>5460

>porch

That is a wall

>>5461
Where's there a wall in that photo?
Does the grim reaper eat parrots?

>>5437
>make apple pie with Yulya!
nigga i dont even have an oven

>>5468
>eating parrots
Probably

>>5513
Looks like a hummingbird moth

>>5519
Nah, it's a Nyphalid not a moth, much more closely related to your Monarch butterflies.

Nice woodpecker, haven't seen one in a while. But there are lots of swifts now, migrating south. I wish I could do the same.

>>5493
>nigga i dont even have an oven
That's no excuse young man, you can make apple pie even in a pan. It's much harder though.

You may know the rumor about Phantom Cats or Mystery Big Cats, strange sightings of large felines all over the world that look like panthers or lions in the most unlikely places. Often in Great Britain but also Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_cat

Well, early in the morning I was looking out of the window and saw a movement under the dense trees bordering the neighbor garden about 50m away. First thought it was a bird but it was bigger. I only saw small parts but it looked more like a fox but didn't move like one. After observing it for a while I went outside to chase it. You can guess whose idea that was though Alice was a bit conflicted. Don't wanna get bitten by a rabid fox either. Anyway, following the animal through the dense bush it turned out to be - a cat. Slightly European wild cat tier, not even exceptionally large. Clearly a normal house cat. It was highly focused and didn't notice me at all and jumped out of surprise when it saw me as I got about 2m close. Then ran away.

That was baffling. I had grossly misjudged the animal's size from the distance. Humans suck at estimating the size of far away objects, even with reference points. I imagined that animal would be at least 3 times bigger than it actually was. Guess that's how many Big Cat mysteries start. Well, it's not the first time, I know of such glitches from imposing tupper in some distance which often results in hilariously wrong sizes.

I did see another mysterious animal on the streets at night some years ago that likely was a Golden Jackal. Didn't look like a fox, more like a cross between a fox and a wolf. Alice chased it but it was too fast.

This guy flew in through the window in the middle of the night and buzzed around in the room. Host narrowly caught it as it collapsed in a corner from exhaustion and confusion before the cats could eat it and threw it out of the window again, so sadly no photos.

It was Agrius convolvuli, the Morning Glory Hawk Moth. A huge moth with up to 13cm wingspan, extremely strong and fast flyer. I had never seen one before, host did decades ago. It's actually a subtropical species that only migrates north in summer like your Monarch butterflies.
Very nice and unexpected!

The weather abruptly changed within a few days - from bone-dry hot summer with more than 30°C to mid autumn with 8°C and heavy rain. It's gonna recover next week but the warm days are ogre.

>>5705
My milkweed bush is big and beautiful but it's constantly being visited by monarch butterflies.

>>5709
>My milkweed bush is big and beautiful
Bear talking about his bush again

>>5705
never seen this one. have you ever seen a death heads hawkmoth? also from africa they go into beehives to steal honey seen a dead one at my grandpa once who was a beekeeper. bees got him and stung him to death. no immigrant nigger leechers lol

>>5740
Nice!
I've only ever seen them on the Canary Islands, they arrived there being blown across the atlantic in a storm.

>>5736
Nope, never seen the death head myself. Host saw a few as a kid. You'd think they'd become more common as it gets warmer but insect diversity has crashed in the last 25 years. So many critterst that were once common which are now gone. Same with birds.

>>5705
>>5736
>>5740
Oh cool!
I didn't know you had such nice butterflies!
We have the Common Tiger here, looks almost the same as the Monarch and is closely related. You often see them on flowers in parks but no idea what the larvae eat, never seen them.

My smartphone camera lens is fogged, can't really take photos. I'll get a new one at the end of the year then I'll share some pics of what's living here.

Oh cool!
They're not damaging anything?
The ants in my apartment haven't shown up again so far, at least not in masses. Only individual ones. But they're still there. I think they were also swarming last time I saw a lot.

>>5831
disgusting

>>5845
You're disgusting!
The ants are super cool!

Flowers and nearly mature apples from spring in nearly October?

>>5896
ive seen this before didnt Alice post her flowering apple tree in autumn or something?

found a shitload of mushrooms yesterday. lots of huge boletus and a few birch boletes. and the white parasols. i dried half and the rest will be eaten fresh. cant remember i found this much before ever. there were many more but thats all i can use. even gave some to my parents.

>>5901
That's a lot, how do you cook them, Kashtan?

>>5896
It's not unusual for trees to have fruit an flowers all year round here. No seasons. Bear has a subtropical climate but I guess it's different in Northern Europe. Is it rare?

>>5906
I may have told you about it but I didn't post any photos. Not sure if I have any?

But yeah, it mostly happens after an extreme summer drought. The trees lose most of their leaves and then produce new growth when autumn rainfall sets in. I think it was 2 years ago when we had flowering apples and quince in September. It's not a good sign meaning the trees suffer from extreme stress. The same happens with horse chestnuts which all suffer from leaf-mining moths here so the leaves are damaged and turn brown in late summer. Severely affected trees lose all their leaves and produce new growth and lots of flowers in fall, which ofc weakens them further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameraria_ohridella

>>5910
Well that wasn't the case here.

>>5910
>leaf-mining moths
didnt know that. so thats why the chestnuts turn brown in summer!
never seen an apple flower in autumn maybe im too far north. makes sense in california the leaves of your apple look like its summer too. here apples are already losing leaves. many trees already have autumn colors

>>5906
>how do you cook them, Kashtan?
just bread them. you know dip in flour egg and breadcrumbs and fry. you can freeze them after breading

Fucking sliced my finger with a sharp shovel all the way to the bone, just missed a tendon. It didn't cut through the glove, it pinched so hard the skin split open. I didn't think anything of it but the glove turned red and then I reluctantly wash it out. It's okay, put a bandage on, back to work.

Fucking Bermuda grass bitch weed.

Be careful damned!
Who's supposed to write our D&D adventure if you cut your hands off?

Host was loosening soil with a broad pickaxe, barefoot ofc because why not? Grazed his toes twice, wounds all full of soil. What an idiot, I had to yell a lot. No more barefoot soil work with heavy tools or without gloves. You's think he'll learn from mistakes but noo, next time same shit. But not on my watch.

>>6046
Don't worry, if I cut my hands off I'll just sit and let the blood gently water the soil until I run out. I'll finally get to rest.

[Ashley] see meme (no longer allowed in another world)

>>6050
No dying allowed, only hard DM work!

>>5914

One 2cm bulb = several 10cm clusters

>>6079
Happy farting!

>>6084

When the apocalypse comes, I'll die a bloated corpse.

Also I ate some and nothing happened.

>>6103
That's thee spirit!
Have you tried drying and eating a bit, Kashtan?
Amanita muscaria isn't overly poisonous but the concentration of ibotenic acid / muscimol varies greatly and effects can be unpredictable and pretty unpleasant. As the most common effect is nausea host only once ate a tiny bit with zero effect other than bad taste.

Btw in the news today, an entire family ended up in intensive care in Germany after eating Death Caps (A. phalloides). RIP liver. Happens basically every year. No idea how you can eat that mushroom, it looks and smells extremely unpleasant.

>>6103
lol yeah that too but some people here really eat the fly agaric as food you water them and cook them to destroy the poison. sometimes they pickle them. i imagine they still taste shit never tried there are so many better.

>>6111
>Have you tried drying and eating a bit, Kashtan?
nope as you said you have no idea about the effect but i might try drying a few for the lulz

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MkCS9ePWuLU [Embed]

>Germans eating Death Caps
figures

This is the warmest October in as long as I can remember. Still have mosquitos and they're still biting wtf?

Coldest night so far 16C last night 20C the mosquitos won't stop until it goes below 13C

>>6142
We have mosquitos all year round now. It's barely freezing. But 20°C at night is tropical.
Right now min night temps are about 5-10°C. No frost in sight until I return in Nov. House plants are still all outside in the garden.

>>6158
Yes they're around but they don't bite here if temperatures are below 60Freedom units. Yesterday it was finally into the 50's and this morning 53 Great American Freedom degrees. Somthing like what 11.6666666667 Communist degrees. Eww.

The mosquitos know that they are pussies for temperatures below 60 World Domination Degrees. Poor babies get "sluggish" and stop laying eggs, therefore don't need da blood of the innocent to fuel them.

73 Future degrees today, gotta love that beautiful sea air. This is the issue though, that water is still 63 Fine beautiful degrees, so when there's an on-shore breeze, like 90% of the time, the night time temperature will be similar, especially on cloudy nights which is also very frequent.

All this to say I finally got to take a morning walk without being bitten by blood sucking bastards.

>>6198
It's awful here mosquito-wise. Host is dowsed in a mixture of 3 different insect repellents with DEET, icaridin and Ethyl-butylacetylaminopropionate and the fuckers simply don't care at all. Really nasty mosquitoes that are fast and hide immediately when you turn on the light. This and the ubiquitous trash makes me see Germany in a slightly more positive light right now.

>Aedes aegypti
Oh yeah we got them too.
Government undertakes huge efforts here to fight them, especially eradicating any brooding sites in the city. Tiny places where water stands like flowerpots or choked drains or where puddles form. And they release millions of bacteria-infected mosquitoes that only produce male offspring and can't transmit diseases anymore, especially Dengue fever. The males don't sting but feed on nectar. It's a huge and high-tech topic here. We want a green city with lots of vegetation but no mosquitoes

>>6241
>wolbachia
thats pretty nuts how the fuck does this work? eggsplain Dr. Alice!

no more pesky insects here we will get the first frost next week. already a lot later than usual

>>6244
>how the fuck does this work? eggsplain Dr. Alice!
Good topic!
Wolbachia interferes with the reproduction of host organisms in very complex ways.
Basically the bacterium fucks up cell division in sperm which causes the embryo to die if infected sperm fertilizes an uninfected egg. However if both sperm and egg are infected, the bacteria in the eggs alter them in a way that synchronized their cell division to be compatible with infected sperm again and the embryo develops normally. How exactly this works is still unknown. Yes, it's pretty nuts.

You can read about cytoplasmatic incompatibility here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytoplasmic_incompatibility

The fancy thing is that Wolbachia does a number of things:
It inhibits virus replication inside the mosquito so they carry less viruses
Also an infection often reduces the lifespan of mosquitoes which gives them less time to spread diseases.
It can also lead to producing male offspring only, killing the blood-sucking females.

But that's very very complicated stuff and not so straightforward as the fancy posters suggest. Wolbachia-infection can very well also boost pathogen transmission depending on strain. Host is also very skeptical this has long-term benefits. Mosquitoes and their pathogens will adapt quickly.

>>6264
>>6265
>Cytoplasmatic incompatibility
Wow I didn't know this! I thought it just kills the females before they hatch.
At least for now it appears to work here, we monitor all disease cases by neighborhood and dengue cases have dropped where the infected mosquitoes were released. But it is still a trial.

I saw a large owl at dusk!
Probably a tawny owl (Strix aluco) but we're not sure.
It circled over the garden twice, flew past host slightly above him only a few meters away. Though it was flapping its wings it made absolutely zero sound. Even small birds like sparrows produce audible noise, Owls don't.

I already said it in the VPT but in case you still believe in owls, I'll say it again: Owls aren't real! They're just a prop monted on strings or whatever but you can't fool me, that's not a live animal!

>>6264
dont understand much of it but its creepy af. how does something like this develop?

>>6275
>owl conspiracy
lmao

Listen to this crazy.

I have a raised bed, about 3x9 and I throw compost in there like olf fruit and so on. This is the planter the huge sunflower grew.

Occasionally tomatoes sprout from store tomatoes and they groe tomatoes and I eat them.

This time, I'm not shitting you, there's a strawberry plant from the tops of strawberries I threw in there.

Oh cool!
I've never heard about growing strawberries from seeds! Will it survive the winter?

I have planted guava seeds in a pot now. I wonder if they will germinate. It was a weird fruit from the botanical garden not from the market. The pulp and seeds were yellow but the seeds turned pitch black when I washed and dried them before potting. Like charcoal.

>>6427
>strawberry plant
Rare!
Make a photo for us!
It would be interesting what kind of fruit it bears. Commercial strawberries are highly hybridized so the offspring often splits and has traits which are significantly different from the parent plants.

>>6430
Guavas are cool, I like their bark! The fruit are also good. We bought some pink ones on our recent holiday. They had lots of seeds but you could eat them. Keep in mind that some guava species are extremely invasive so you better not plant them out in nature. Well you live in a huge city anyway.

Harvested Medlars this weekend, they are the last fruit to ripen. They need cold to turn into a brown pulp that tastes like Apfelstrudel. The yellow fruit in the pic are not ripe and inedible. The brown are ready to be consumed or processed. I cook the ripe fruit and squeeze them through a food mill with a sieve to remove the seeds and skin and get a brown mass. It can be frozen and will be used as cake and Christmas Cookie filling.

>>6430
>>6437
>some guava species are extremely invasive
inb4 Tamamo gets death penalty for spreading invasive plants

>medlars
don't think ive ever seen this fruit

>>6500
That's quite a big plant and must have germinated a while ago!
Why do you have so many rotten strawberries? A shame to throw them away. Do you grow them or did you buy them?

>>6505
These strawberries come rotten, it's just another scam. Oops all rotten.

>>6506
wait what you bought them rotten? dont they come in clear plastic trays in the us so you can check for rotten ones?

i harvested a bunch of fly agaric and dried them. dunno if i have the balls to eat them though

>>6515
It's like when you buy a car and the moment you drive off the lot it's worth much less, well perfectly good looking strawberries become rotten on the ride home.

>>6517
Must be a California thing. I noticed great differences in mold susceptibility. Just like in taste. Some strawberries taste great, others like nothing. Some rot quickly, some last forever and just dry up.But generally they last at least a couple of days. But my apartment is relatively cool.

>>6515
Starz with very small doses and see what happens. And only if you don't have to drive or do anything socially acceptable for 1-2 days. People react very differently to fly agaric.

>>6275
I saw the owl again yesterday!
Same time a dusk. It circled centimeters ablove ground in the garden and then grabbed something. Probably a mouse, there are a lot now. Good thing Cats weren't around. They would have gotten the owl too.
Again it was absolutely silent in flight and only made a rustling noise when it grabbend the prey in the grass during flight. Didn't land. Amazing!

It is winter, and the monarch butterflies don't care.

>>6926
Nice!
That's California for you.
Only pirds here but a lot.
Long-tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus), shitty cellphone pic through window

Wheelbarrow wheel finally broke, bought a new one. I hope host can install it. Removing the old one was an ordeal as one screw would not come loose and rotated within the axle.

Hey cool!
Your spring flowers are pretty. It only lasts a very short time, right?

>>7075
>>7076
noyce its barely starting here
we are supposed to reach 25°C this week though which is crazy for mid april

These hawks have a lot to eat around here but their favorite meal is black birds so there aren't many around. They then go after finches, gophers, rats, mice, and they constantly fight crows so there aren't any crows here for long.

>>7124
No grapes are evergreen but many annuals become biennial like tomatoes and beans, and many birnnial become perennial. Like milkweed.

>>7125

>no, grapes are evergreen

Fucking...

THEY ARE NOT EVERGREEN!

>>7131
>>7145
>>7152
Beautiful!
European nature is so different.

>>7164
whoa thats some pro photos. i still cant believe you can identify all those critters lol

>>7204
nice
the fuck is that color of the lake?

>>7205
The lake floor is covered by white limestone powder washed in from the surrounding mountains. Looks like coral sea. The dark blue is just where it gets deeper. Awesome lake but cold. Went snorkeling but you can't stay in there for long without a neoprene suit. Not a lot of underwater life, too oligotrophic.

>>7208

Right, convergent evolution.

Hummingbird > Moth

Too many flying squirrel like things to mention have done this. I think it's Madagascar that has one genetic line that made everything from mice to canids.

Wow stunning photos! You took those with your phone? I really wanna go to the alps once. It's so different from the ecosystem here. What was the temperature?

>>7210
Yep, all with the Pixel 8 Pro.
The mountains are awesome but you mustn't expect any sort of wilderness. It's a millennia old cultured landscape. Basically a pasture surrounded by civilization. Temperature was about 20-25°C in the valleys and 10-15°C up on the mountains in around 2000m altitude

>>7208
Your orchids look completely different from the ones here. I would never have guessed those were orchids at all. All the flowers are very different, much more gracile.

>>7216
The alpine plants only have 3-4 months of growing season. The rest of the year they're covered by snow and ice.

>>7222
cant compete with your flowers nothing interesting flowers here. but mushroom season has started. late bc i didnt have time earlier. found a single one in the forest still within the city. dried it for soup.

>>7228
That's a nice macrolepiota.

>>7229
>macrolepiota
thx whoever you are
it was very wet this summer but still not a lot of mushrooms. maybe in a few weeks

>>7228
Noyce, I remember you found an unbelievable amount of mushrooms last year. W haven't found a single one so far.

A few days ago at night while reading, we saw a big insect helplessly flapping around on the wall, attracted by the light. It superficially looked like a dragonfly but host immediately recognized it as the imago of an antlion. We rarely see one every other year, but this one turned out to be SSS rare. And it had a problem. First I thought its wings were crippled but it turned out its hindwings were caught in a spiderweb and tied together. It tried to fly with its forewings only but that didn't work.
Luckily it came across me who is not only the Savior of the Earthworm and the Stag Beetle, but also the Antlion.

In contrast to the nightmarish larvae that make any horror movie look ridiculous, the imagines are frail and weak, much weaker than the dragonflies they superficially resemble. That greatly helped catching and fixating the patient. Host got two preparation needles and a razor blade and was able to remove the sturdy spiderweb that was wrapped around the hindwings with minor wing damage (see tip of right hindwing). After taking a few photos, we released the antlion back into the night and it slowly fluttered away never to be seen again.

Looking at the photos, it turned out this was not the usual antlion found here. We have a sheltered dry place under a pine tree in the garden where the funnel-shaped traps of its larvae can be seen. No, this guy had much darker wing pattern and was identified as Dendroleon pantherinus, the Panther-Treelion. While first described in 1787, very little is known about these animals. Their larvae hide in decaying wood and over the centuries only a handful were ever discovered! The species is widely distributed in the Mediterranean but always rare. Very few have ever been seen in SW-Germany. May be the first recorded sighting in Munich.

>>7233
I wish I knew more about insects and animals in general. I wouldn't even know how to start identifying them!

Ok, in your location it's a few magnitudes harder. Diversity in Europe is low. There's a lot of websites that offer identification guides. For plants, AI apps have become crazily good. I still think you should be able to identify most wildlife you see in a city even in Singapore. Remember 90% or so species are so rare that you probably will never encounter them. The fact that you stumble across them in an urban environment already means that they are most probably very common.

Another relatively rare guest I have never seen before in my life, not ultra-rare but clandestine. One of very few plant-hoppers we have in Europe. About 1 cm long. Apparently it's not even an invader from the South but occurs all the way to Scandinavia. Every time you find something new, you also learn something new.

based beetle rescuer!

today i saw ivy is flowering. wtf is this normal?

>>7245
I didn't know that!
So it grows during winter despite the cold and rests in the summer? We have ivy here as ornamental plant but I've never seen it flower or set fruit.

>>7230
We had awfully dry summer, plus boars rooted up the whole area. 0 mushrooms for now for me. Maybe in autumn. Macrolepiotas for example start growing now.

>>7261
Look at all these pictures, now I never have to go, thank you.

>>7265
Weird.
I've seen radish sow itself and reappear in following years. But never pop up out of nowhere

Medlar harvest.
Medlars are the last fruit to ripen in early to mid November. They have to stay on the tree until they turn brown and start to decay. Otherwise they're rock hard and inedible. They undergo a process called bletting which looks like they rot. But it is not microbial infection that turns other fruit brown and spoils them, it's an enzymatic breakdown of the fruit without fermentation. The bletted medlars turn into a brown paste that tastes just like apple pie. Very sweet. They can be eaten like that off the tree but they contain a lot of hard seeds. We cook and run them through a purée sieve to separate the seeds. The result is a brown paste that can be cooked into a jam or kept frozen. We make medlar tart out of it but also use it as filling for Christmas cookies or pancakes. One of my favorite fruit that barely anybody knows about.

>>7265
Oh, I know this one! It's Daikon radish also called white carrot!

You can make Singaporean 'carrot cake' (chai tow kway) from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_tow_kway

>>7267
I've never seen medlars. I wonder if I can buy them here. Looks interesting.

>>7270

Pulled it, was common raddish, they are invasive here. Was too old and tasted woody.

>>7267
Host finally made the medlar tart for Easter. It turned out very well. The medlar filling is the brown layer between cake and cream - obviously. Ground roasted hazelnuts (bought) on top. We also have our own hazelnuts but they ripen in summer and were long consumed.
I wanted to slice the cake part into two disks and add an additional layer of medlar filling between them, but it turned out too thin and started to crumble. Doesn't matter, it was still great. The taste is really unique. Like apple pie but with more flavor and more sour.

>>7302
Oh nice!
I totally missed that. Guess it's something Cat can't bake because we lack your fancy fruit.

Harvested cherries this weekend. The year is already half-over...

>>7324
cherries are still very pale here

Lots of plums this year. Not the usual oblong purple ones who suffered from drought, but the greenish-yellow round ones. I just learned this is called a greengage in English. This is Reine Claude d'Oullins from France. The fruit are about the size of a large egg and very sweet.

Oh cool!
You have a lot of pretty fruit. How many did you harvest and what do you do with them?

>>7351
Not a lot as the tree is still small. Ate them as they were.

Beautiful mullet plants grew from birdseed, zero water, technically a weed, so my business partner chopped them down so they wouldn't spread.

Even a zen master like myself has moments of weakness. She got mad at me for "freeking out" about a weed.

She's done this sort of thing before.

However, this is a good example, I ask myself why I was upset, simply that this very healthy weed brought me joy.

Attachment is the root of all suffering.

So instant calm. So I ask myself, what happens when she does it again? Nothing.

I'm good now. Joy comes from within, you can't have it without.

Old me would have ruminated and held a grudge. How barbaric.

>>7487
Why does your 'business partner' (is she bestie mom?) weed your yard? My father loves doing this and he has an Alice-tier aversion against certain plants he just weeds out wherever he comes across them. Be it my garden, a total stranger's or a public park. He's also autistic about removing all even remotely brown leaves, often severely damaging the plants by ripping them off. He genuinely wants to help, but he helps whether people want or not. And he really gets mad if you tell him to stop, because then you're an ungrateful bastard. Well, he's almost 90 and isn't going to change.

Me, I would never freak out, but I would definitely ruminate and hold a grudge. Touching other people's property without permission is not acceptable. I'm not Alice, who holds grudges and maintains death lists for the most minuscule reasons, but still...

I like being attached to things. Lack of attachment leads to indifference. And indifference leads to communism. Or buddhism, which is just as bad. Buddhists are hypocritical liars. So tell me, where do you draw the line? If a nigger steals a large sum of money? Burns your house down? Rapes your girl friends? Will you remain calm and tell yourself the attachment to all this was your fault? I would go another route and say it's not about you, but about society. You shoot the looting rapenigger not (only) because he hurts you, but because he hurts society. This is why you have to punish wrongdoing from the perspective of general prevention. For the same reason the wacky weeder must be confronted with her deed. Not because she ripped out a weed but because she did something in another person's property she was not asked to. And enabling such behavior brings us one step closer to anarchy - or communism.

>>7489

Bestie mom (BM) is my age, we went to undergrad together. Business partner is like 20 years older, or 15? I forget. Business partner does 55% of all the work for my private business, BM does 5% probably more, there's also another part time employee that only works summers so I can do other projects.

She's always weeding my flipping yard, cutting my good grapes so they don't fall and stink, pulled out something else, forgot, annoying. My private business sometimes spills out into my house but we also use her house and in the summer it spills over to another house. She doesn't want to see weeds or smell wine from the rotten grapes. It's been an ongoing discussion for years.

Lack of attachment is not indifference, you can still like and appreciate it, but it is just as valid to appreciate the good as experience the bad, neither reaction need be controlled by emotions. the emotions can exist fully, they should and do; feel them, experience them, let them pass. It becomes automatic for most things. I know there are things I haven't gotten over yet, some things I can't begin to unravel. This is just how it is. But it has gone from 99% uncontrolled (2018) to 99% controlled. (2021 ish) though there are also weak moments, being tired and hungry, uncomfortable or in pain all complicate things.

Somehow I don't believe you wouldn't freak out.

>Will you remain calm and tell yourself the attachment to all this was your fault?

I'm not your spiritual guide, I don't know how to address this level of misunderstanding or where it's coming from, but no. I am not a pacifist cuck.

>It's about society

Externalizing is good coping, but ruminating about things you can't fix isn't. If you can honestly say you've done everything you can, then rest on that and live your best life.

Wacky weeder is fine, I am a weed sympathizer and so we're somewhat both wrong.

The house I live in is a common workspace, so it's technically shared space even if it's mine. I invited the intrusion and there are certain rights by others even if they're somewhat quirky but never did I say I was enjoying those weeds, so I was wrong to 'freak'. Still enjoying weeds is kinda quirky so it's fair.

Communism and Anarchy... You do know I'm, part liberal progressive right? If it was up to me, we would have a tribal society where you work or you die. Kinda communist really, but one without any slackers or invalids, no crazy people, no obesity etc.

Everypony loved, everypony equal wasn't lost on me even if it's cancer. The question is all about implementation and control over corruption, which likely requires an authoritarian dictatorship, but whatever. Better that then oligarchy like now. Communism only works in theory as we all know. I wouldn't mind it, just not as a second class citizen.