Speaker 1: This week's episode at a Crime Pace but Baden It
Doesn't podcast is sponsored by Possibility Place Nursery. Though the
name of a nursery sounds like a halfway house where
your cousin Chris Pabian or possibly Mikey Papadolo got sent
too after they got out of the joint for stealing snowmobiles,
snowblowers and assorted power tools. I assure you it's one
of the highest quality nurseries in the Chicago tri state area.
Poss Where's Possibility Place located? I'm doing an ad for it.
I'm the supposed to be an ad raid. There supposed
to be a fucking ad raid. I don't know if
they want to meet a Chris. I'm sure they knew
it was coming in territory anyway. Possibility Place is a
fantastic nursery on the in the Southwest Suburbs. I went
there for the first time when we were filming Killer
Law and they said they told us you guys got
to go down the Possibility Place, but we couldn't make
it there and to Pizzos, the other great wholesale nursery, well,
the other great nursery in the Chicago area they're out
in the pizzos out in Leland. Okay, Leland's funky out there,
but they're cool. They're great people. Okay, Jack Pizzole's great.
He got hammered at the at the show I did
there last week and took us all out to the prairie.
It was a wonderful time if it was like the
most Midwest shit you could do. Took us out to
the prairie that we created. Pizzle's great but possibility place
they grow shit that nobody else grows. I finally went down.
I made it down there last year. I did a
show there. I met these two guys, these two brothers,
these wonderful guys, and their whole staff. Everybody was dope
as how. Everybody was nice. And they're growing extremely rid
shit like shit that Pizzo doesn't carry, rare milk, weeds,
comp Tonia, peregrina they got, they got Delia foliosa, they
got a whole they you gotta go check them out.
Let me I forget where they're at. Yeah, they're down
there and money right off fifty seven southwest of Homewood
south to Tinley Park, Okay, south of al Sip. Wasn't
there a famous blues musician buried in al sip I
forget was it fucking jb Otto or some I don't know,
it doesn't matter. Get your ass it's not a possibility place.
The sun's coming out, the temperatures are warming up. You know,
the the gray skies up there in the Chicago Triestity
area are starting to taper off. CA there's a hint
of summer. You got two months left till it's really
safe to plant. You could start getting stuff. Because these
are natives, they evolved in the Chicago area. They could
take these these waning frosts and you know, before everything
finally thaws out. Let's be serious. The climate change is
really fucked up the whole, you know, the winter thing
up there. Anyway, get your ass down a possibility place,
buy up all their stock. I'm telling you these guys,
I would be advertising for them even if they weren't,
you know, throwing me some plants and stuff. Okay, go
to possibility Place and check them out. They're going. They're
growing a whole lot of rare stuff. They have an
awesome soil mix they're growing. They had you they got
like six or seven different oak species they're growing magnolias
like native magnolias there. I did a video on them
last year because I was so impressed with the stuff
they did. But check them out. They're great people, great staff.
These are the people you want to support. If you
don't go listen, if you don't go down there and
you don't at least check them out and buy a
couple of things. I'm gonna put beef bullyon cubes and
all your fucking shower heads. Okay, I will come to
your house and I will fucking poltergeist the shit out
of you. All right, You're not gonna have a good time.
When I'm through with your place, I'll come in there
when you're not there, all right, not gonna swipe anything.
I'm just gonna start putting stuff in it, you know,
just doing little poltergeist, the type shit like shit that
my five year old does. She's a poltergeist. Now. She
takes my stuff, she moves it around, she takes my
favorite drawing pens, she forgets to put the cap back
on him. She leaves stuff in the middle of the floor.
You know. Anyway, Possibility Place nursery located in Beautiful MONI
I'll noise seventy five forty eight West Money, Manhattan Road.
Check them out Possibility Place. It's not a halfway house.
It's one of the best native plant nurseries in a
tri state area. Welcome to another episode that a crime
pays the bod and he doesn't podcast. It's what the hell? Wednesday,
March eleventh. It's currently ninety degrees here in South Texas
and I'm taking some folks shot to thorn scrub tomorrow.
We just got our tenth pick. Let me turn this
down for a second. It's some This is his bird.
Do you believe this guy? This is not I recorded
that guy in Costa Rica a while ago. I don't know.
I don't know what his problem was. He's upset about something.
Speaking of birds, I got this inca dove nesting right
outside my door. I don't know why she picked that spot.
I got these little hanging it's like a it's like
a circle, a metal circle that you screw into to
like a pylon or like a wood post outside your door.
I screwed it to the post that hold up a
part of my awning, and I you know, it fits
one gallon pots perfectly. I order I'm on Scamazon and
so I put the pots on there, and uh, you know,
I got the little dangling cactus and stuff. I got
like a cleisto cactus Cola de mononas the monkey tail cactus.
And she nested right in there, right. I don't know
why she poked it, And now I feel bad about
when i' I leave my front door, like I'm bumming
this bird out and she got two eggs in there.
It's inca. Doves are fucking beautiful too, but it's it's like,
you know, what am I supposed to do? So like
me and Louis when we go out to walk or whatever,
we go out the back. Now I got to go
out through the back gate. It's a pain in the ass,
but you know whatever, Hopefully it doesn't last to thee
she I mean, she makes me feel like an asshole
every time I go out like she like, she gets
all freaked out and flies away. Fuck you, you showed
up at my front door, right, but I created the
habitat for you. So anyway, Yeah, welcome to an episode
of Crimpace a bot and he doesn't. I spent all
day yesterday brushing up on putting these slide presentations together.
One for plant id in taxonomy. I have like three
different plant id in taxonomy slide presentations that I put
together real real, you know, in depth. I really go
go hard on it, and I'm trying to do ones
that are not as in depth so that people don't
fucking fall asleep during it. Just emphasizing flower morphology stuff
like that. Uh, just getting right into it, not going
into the whole evolutionary history of angiosperms and how they
evolved and appeared in the fossil record one hundred and
thirty million years ago, right, But uh so that was
that was you really realize how fucking nuts you are,
you know, and like maybe mildly autistic when you're going
through old presentations you put together. Well, I was like
going to won when I taught this college course that
I put together, and I was blown away. I was like, man,
no shit, the athletes were falling asleep. I mean the athletes.
That's what you want to do. You want to reach
the athletes of the world and get them into natural sciences.
And it can be a little hard because they're kind
of thick skulled anyway, no offense, but you you that's
the trick. You you don't want to be one of these,
you know, academics. It's so good at sniffing your own farts.
You want to be able to reach people, right, and
you bring everyone up so that the whole populace, your
whole community, is less stupid, and that there will end
up benefiting you personally. Right, you don't want a bunch
of be around a bunch of dummies that just want
the uh, you know, the fancy shit, the shine shit.
They don't. They're just lowest common denominator human impulses to
horde shiny stuff and have nice cars and all this
stuff that you could show to your you know, primate
peers and gain social status. You want something that you
want a little bit more enlightenment than that, right now,
that's lowest common denominator shit. Aim higher. So, speaking of
these these uh, these wanting the shiny shit, you know
what people have been doing down here in South Texas.
People have been making their own billboards like say you
got a business, like a fucking funeral home or something.
Funeral homes are the worst. I fucking hate these motherfuckers.
They they build a they erect a sign, and they're
already bleak ass parking lot and uh, and then it's
an LED sign that totally pollutes the night sky. And
this is maybe just a South Texas thing people tolerated here,
but this is what ar fifteens were made for. They
were made for shooting these things out right, because appelic
gun's not bright, not strong enough to destroy these things.
And don't ask me how I know that, but I do.
And so you need like a high powered firearms, probably
with the suppressor. Of course, be completely exercised gun safety.
But these LED signs that these they're not full on billboards,
they're smaller than billboards, but they're LEDs. They're basically billboards.
And so these companies try to bring in a couple
extra thousand bucks by advertising, you know, advertise here, advertise
your shitty business. And what they did near my house
is they butchered the shit out of these live oaks, right.
Live oaks aren't native to South Texas. There's a couple
on the sandsheet Quirkus fusiformists. I really wish someone would
do some genetic testing on there, because there's no way
that growing on the Texas standsheet didn't naturally select for
a slightly different phenotype than say the populations that grow
up in Austin a few hundred miles north, right, really
interesting stuff. But other than that, oaks aren't really native here.
It's just too hot, you know. And so this is
tom a leap and thorne scrub. And it was up
until nineteen hundreds, when you know, a lot of the
land clearance happened for the citrus industry down here. You had,
you know, these anglos from up north, from the Midwest,
these pasty, pink motherfuckers. No offense to them, I could
say that, because you know, Melanin. This is the thing.
This is where I always break with the identitarians, these morons, right,
I don't care what your backgrounds. You're identitarian. You're fucking moron.
Nazis are identitarians too, They're like the quintessential identitarians. Right.
Then you get the college kids with the septumbrings and
a blue hair and shit, and they're talking about it anyway.
But when this is the thing humans do, everyone does it. Right.
You mistake culture for somehow being inherited or genetic, and
you associate it with human phenotype, right, like being pink.
The evolution of whiteness happened a number of times throughout
human history, the same way that evolution of blackness or
brownness did. It's just melanin content as it's selected alleles
for melanin as they're selected for by the environment from
a population evolving at a certain latitude. Right, you go
too high and you're too brown or black, you're gonna
get vitamin D deficiency, if you're too pink or aka,
you're going to go too far south. And if you
go too far south, you're gonna get vitamin B deficiency
and skin cancer. Right. So, and I've talked about this before,
but that's those alleles just code for melanin content. They
don't code for anything else. You know, maybe there's different
facial features occasionally associated with but that's it. That's I mean,
it's just these traits that have no bearing on culture,
which is not genetic. Okay, culture is taught, right, if
you grow up in a death cult, you're taught the
values of the death cult unless you rebel against it.
So it just it fibes me out. I feel like,
you know, elements, especially in the left, are slipping back
into the identitarian shit. It's not about having context for
how race has been used to divide and oppress and
justify exploitation in the past by human societies. Right, we're
talking about actually not looking deeper, not understanding what culture
versus human phenotype is. Nobody understands what human phenotype is.
I mean people who study it do, but members of
the general populist You're not taught this shit in school.
Everyone's so chicken shit about it because no one wants
to be called racist or they don't want to let
their own inherent racism out, you know, hint out whatever
can go both ways, okay, but there's no you know,
so many people are scientifically literate when it comes to
what race is or how it doesn't really even exist.
It's just been It's a construct that's been used to
oppress and divide and divide people and also to justify
expectation anyway, So you hate these anglos coming down here
in a nineteen hundred's wonderful book called Blood Oranges by
a dude name what was his name, Poeman or something.
I don't know. It was like a white name too.
It wasn't like a tejanod that wrote this book. Yeah,
it was Bowman. But it's a Blood Oranges. Colonialism and
agriculture in the South Texas border lands. Good book. Good book.
So we've anyway bringing this back around to the live oaks, okay,
and then we're gonna suck. We're gonna get back to
the signs. I always bring these disjointed rants back. We're
gonna get back to the signs the led these signs
that need to either be banned or taken out. Okay. So,
but these live oaks that kind of stop at the
same and she most of the native habitat here was,
of course, mimozoid legumes, and then you had siderox line celestrinum,
which is sapotacy. Right. You always got to ask what
family a plant is in before you really get into it.
And so these live oaks aren't really native here, but
they do all right, probably because they associate with michael
rise that's brought in when they're planted in the landscaping,
you know oaks, these oaks there, I think their Quircus fuciformists,
but they're probably you know, mislabeled as Qurcus virginica. I
don't know, I don't know where the source of these
landscaping landscaping kind of the landscaping industry fucks everything up here,
because these things are continental natives and they do provide
a lot of habitat and food for caterpillars, but they're
not directly native to this landscape, right, so it's still
a little too hot form. And they depend on irrigation,
and there's irrigation everywhere within human development down here. So anyway,
but it's tree cover, right, it's not that directly native,
but it does support life and it gives habit and
it's tree cover. And so there was this bleak stretch,
this bleak stretch of road, and they cut these trees down. Well,
they didn't cut them, they pollarded them. They look fucking ridiculous.
It looks like the tree in Mad Max, you know,
when they're doing a hole who Killed the World? Thing
and it's like the ladies have inherited the earth because
all the men are dead from killing each other? Is
that Mad Max? My thinking of the right thing? I
think it is Fury Road. And so there's a shot
where they're on this like darkened landscape and they're like,
oho killed the world and it shows like these dead
tree that's what this looks like. I don't know why
they pollared them, right, there's so many landscaping practices here
and in I think they do this in many plays
in the Southeast too, that are just completely shit for brain.
There's no thinking behind that, that's just what you do.
And so anyway, they pollared these trees, probably because they
maybe they just pollarded them because they wanted They wanted
to get rid of the branches so you could see
the sign, this hideous led light up sign which is
blinding at night, and so it deprives the whole community
not only of the night sky, but now because this
sign is not planted directly adjacent to the road, it's
in their parking lot, and the trees were blocking the
view of the sign. So they powered the trees too
to get rid of the probably because they realized they
couldn't cut them down. That would be a little too hot.
The city would find them for it, even though the
city hates trees too, which again is not their fault.
This is all just the result of indoctrination. And so anyway,
they cut the shit out of these branches, so now
you can see the sign they powered at them. The
branches will, I mean the trees will grow back if
we get enough rain. Otherwise they're gonna die and we're
in a drought right now. The trees will grow back,
but it's gonna take two or three years. There was
a tree near my house where it is. Lady she
hates trees too. I know because this is this old lady,
because I've asked her if she wants trees. She's like, no, no,
they're messy. I don't want them. I don't want the trees.
They're messy. Okay, whatever, lady, have fun in the heat.
But there was an oak tree there. We had this
bad windstorm in May in twenty twenty two. I think
it was ripped a bunch of shit up. It was great,
did a great job, and it took this tree down,
the major branches of it. And so it's taken three
to four years for this thing to regrow a semblance
of a canopy that provides shade. So you know, it
is what it is. But these led billboards are driving
me nuts, and they're going up. The funeral homes are
the worst, right, like you're already making you're already shaking
people down, you know, for six grand for a fucking urn.
How much does a coffin cost these days? I don't
know what twenty k. The whole thing's a rip off.
You know what happened, buddy of mine, he's like sixty five.
This is a great story. Maybe I've told it before.
He when his mod died. His mod died, she was
going getting a little bit senisle. She was, you know,
an alcoholic. But he took real good care of her.
He's a wonderful man. She finally croaked. He just showed
up with a Subaru to the home she was in
because she had to be put in the home. She
couldn't take care of herself anymore. Got her body. They
let him take her body. That's amazing. I think I
think this is legal in Texas. He took her body.
And then he had a whole predug on his land
that he's restoring the native plants, and him and his
daughter went and got his mom. I don't know if
the rigor Mortis had said in or what. Now. This
might sound gruesome, but this is the real shit, right,
This is like death of Ivan. Ill it shit right.
Confront death and be a you know, live with it,
be a death dueler. Don't don't put makeup on it
and pretend it's you know, it's not what it is right,
that's fake, that's phony. So he went and he got this.
He got the corpse, the stiff, and uh, it's the stiff.
Did you see Goonies? Okay, anyway, he got the stiff.
Remember when Chunk gets locked in a freezer with all
the ice cream and the stiff that the fertilities killed.
I digress, great movie, too scary for my fiber though
she couldn't handle Sloth. She was being very ablest when
Sloth came on and I told her Sloth is a
good guy. She didn't care. She was just fucking terrified.
I was so disappointed. How ablest could she be? Anyway,
So he went and got his ma's body and put
it in the subro and then threw it in the
hole and placed it gently in the hole, and they
each like had a moment saying goodbye to her, and
then shoveled, you know, covered her up. And it was
all legal too. He checked the laws, He checked the So,
I mean, that's a great way to go out. I
don't want to be filled with formaldehyde or anything. And
I don't want you to spend you know, it's very
energy intensive cremating people. Right, My buddy Evan was cremated.
The whole time, I was thinking, Holy hell, can't we
just go bury him in the redwoods or something? Right? Damn? Now,
California's probably got laws about that, But what are laws
if not to be broken? Right? But anyway, these funeral
homes are real bad, and they're real bad with these
light upbillity these signs. Do you get these where you live?
They're fucking horrible. You can build your own sign it's
like twenty feet wide at the most, maybe fifteen, and
then sell advertising on it. Fucking unbelieving that should be banned, right,
If not, they should, you know, somebody should go turd
the sign. Could you get a third cannon? You could
get a potato cannon? Mean you get a third cannon?
Just turd the sign. Yeah, we got these kids showing
up in a parking lot every night. They're launching, you know,
with hairspray and a four inch diameter PVC pipe. You
know these they're launching bags of shit at our led sign.
I don't know why, you know, it's they say they
can't see the stars anymore. They're just seeing these these
the pink light, like pink light polluted sky from you know,
our shitty sign that's advertising the shoe store or some
fucking unnecessary service or a personal injury attorney more likely. Right,
get a third gun, go turd these signs you got,
someone's got. You know, when I see stuff like that
and I see that no one's vandalizing it, I'm so
I get so disappointed in area of teens. Right, it's
just just because they're on TikTok or they have no
political awareness these days? What is it? You know? I always
listening to Dead Kennedy's when I was like thirteen, Right,
I knew shit was fucked up when I was thirteen.
I read People's History of Night States when I was fifteen.
These kids today need to get they need to come
correct on some of this stuff. It's very disappointing, right,
And where's when you got teenagers that refuse to vandalize things,
and especially not direct it, right, not not selectively and
very specifically direct that vandalism towards just targets, very very disappointing.
You got to do that stuff when you're young, because
you can't get away with it when you're my age.
I can't go turtis, I can't go launch turds. At
a sign, an led light light up sign that you know,
the owners of this sign are trying to profit off
of it by both ruining the night sky and then
cutting the trees that make it hard to see. Right.
I can't go do that as much as I want to.
I mean I could, but if I got caught, it's
kind of a big deal. I'm trying to do other
stuff here. You know, people know me. You know what
I mean. You're fifteen years old. You can get away
with it anyway. Last Saturday, I did a presentation at
Quinta Mazatlan, which is a spot in McAllen. It's basically
like a native plant botanic garden here in South Texas.
It's in McKellen. Now. McAllen is home to a very
bleak in depressing shopping slum. But okay, south, just south
of that, kind of near the airport is this remnant.
It was like an old homestead some dude. I forget
the history of the spot, but this dude had. This
dude owned this house one hundred years ago and it's
a beautiful house and kept a parcel a large amount
of acreage of the native habitat intact. And I guess
you really liked the native plants, and so what it
has become if you look at the spot on a
satellite map, Quinta Mazatlane like La Kinta, but instead of
you know, a shitty you know, an overpriced for what
it's worth hotel stay and a shitty Continental breakfast though
they I'd have the Texas Toast waffle maker instead of that.
It's a native plant botanic garden for South Texas. Know
a bunch of people that work. They're good people, and
so if you look at the spot on a satellite map,
it's like an island of green surrounded by development and
old agriculture. Right, the former citrus fields that are now
being turned into shopping slums and housing and like tract housing, right,
tract housing with lawns, with Saint Augustine lawns. Right, don't
worry about where the water is going to come from.
Shout out the Corpus Christy too. I guess they're finally
running out of water now. It's becoming a pretty serious
issue over there. I had a friend that was going
to move to Texas and he was like one of
the things that really freaked them out when he was
he came here to sniff around for a week and
see about it. One of the things that really freaked
them out was the water issues, like, I'm not going
to move there. It's not stable for water. It's going
to cause there's too much development, there's not enough groundwater,
and it's going to be a serious issue in the future.
So anyway, but this spot king the Mazatlan is a
thank God for them because it's it's like three bucks
it cost to get into because it's partially run by
the city. Three bucks to get into. I think it's
like two bucks for seniors. You go in there, they
got you can like see what thorn scrub is supposed
to be. You could see what was supposed to be
here before it was shitty lawns and old agricultural fields
that just bake in the sun. You can see, you know,
the landscape in South Texas was really really cool. Down
closer to the river. You had the cedar elms and
the more you know, moisture, kneading species, plant species, very thick.
This is is subtropical, not really a desert. Right. You
hit more of the scrub land stuff when you go
west towards Laredo and thil rio. But right here it
was I mean, it was like thorn forest. And then
the upland sits. As you get further away from the river,
further north of the river, you start getting into more
of the actual brush lands as they call it, which
I kind of don't like that work because it's not brush.
It's like scrub. Right it's chaparral, it's thorn scrub. And
that's where all the cool plants are, like all the
mimosoid legumes, you know what I mean when I say mimosoid,
the mimosoid subfamily of the legume family for BASI. Right
with the little powder poof inflorescences, they look like, you know,
fireworks going off. And then you look at them the
flowers on these two on those mimosoid mimosa like flowers,
the petals and sepals, the klyx and Corolla Calyx sepals
Corolla petals are always highly reduced. And then the filaments
that the parts of the statement that hold the anthrope
are very long, and that's what is used as the attractant.
That and the smell for the pollinators. They fucking smell
great too, like the Guahil. The Senegala bolandri is going
off right now. The huisace Vicelia pernisiana is going off
right now as well. But this spot, Yeah, if you
happen to end up down here, check out Keith the Mazatlan.
It's a really cool spot. And three bucks to get in,
you know, that's I mean, And I'm a cheap wap
that's I can do that. I don't feel bad doing that.
Some of these botanic gardens you go to in other
places fifteen bucks to get in, and then half the
shit is, you know, the stuff I'm always reeling against,
the you know, rich, rich, old lady gardens like the
you know, a bunch of mums arranged in a line,
or some whack floral display that sucks, you know, a
monet garden. So anyway, so I did this. I did
a plant ide presentation there and I hit them up.
I was like, can I just do this? This would
be great. I'll make it cheap, like one to five
bucks suggested donation. If you're broke, just come in. I
don't care. You know, some fucking some of the kid
like nineteen twenty years old. You don't got a lot
of money, right, I didn't when I was young. Just
come in, it's fine, don't worry about it. Just pay
attention and ask questions. I don't want you to just
sit there if this is flying over your head. If
like I'm trying to teach you what's going on with
flowers of the sunflower family, asked RACI you know, so
you can identify them, so you can look at any
plant that identify what family is. And if I'm trying
to teach you what's going on, I don't want you
to just sit there gate mouthed. If you don't understand,
I want you to speak up. Don't be embarrassed, right,
don't be embarrassed to speak be embarrassed if you're too
chicken shit to speak up because you're worried about sounding dumb.
All right, everybody's sounds dumb, right, everybody, all eight billion
people on earth are just trying not to look stupid
in front of their their other, you know, primate relatives,
their primate peers. Right, we are just primis anyway. So
but it was a good presentation. It was like an
hour and a half. I'm trying to keep these short.
I would have preferred to keep it to an hour fifteen.
But that's kind of that. What I found to be
the important thing with these presentations is don't give too
much information, but when you do, with the information you
do give, make sure it hits the mark. Make sure
it really, you know, articulates the idea without being too
wordy because you're trying to make people understand it that
maybe you don't have any prior experience with this stuff.
So anyway, we're going to do another one in April.
I think, what is it April twenty seven? When is
it April twenty seventh, it's supposed to be uh, yeah, no,
when is it April twenty third, Thursday, April twenty third
at Kenta. Yeah, so we'll do a book release and
a presentation. It's gonna be outside, it'll be in the evening.
It's gonna be pretty it's gonna be pretty warm. So
definitely bring like a cold ice cold leader of water,
bring a yeah, bring a whole fucking cooler. Actually, and
when you bring a cooler, bring some non alcoholic beers
for me, and maybe a cigar too. I like Nico Roustka,
but I'll smoke anything really anyway. So yeah, so that
was fucking great because I love teaching. I love teaching
people this so that more people can experience what I
experience when I go look at these plants, Like I
walk into my front yard and I'm just like, holy fuck.
I love all you bastards everything around me, all the plants,
you know. I love seeing them grow. I love seeing what.
I love the Palo Verde with its bright green bark.
I love the the pencil cactus, the kind of serious postsega.
I've gotten the ground all over, all over the place.
They're about to blow up. And I use my yard
as active seed stocks so I can sip, you know,
produce seeds, farm seeds and get them off to people
so that more of these things can be grown. And
now I'm trying to reforce the whole fucking block and
the surrounding blocks and plant more of this stuff because
it's insane here. I mean, I feel so you know,
it's it's hard being done in South Texas because it's
just shopping slums, and you know, the cultures is in
some ways poisoned. It's just it's just indoctrinated into There's
a lot of wealth worship down here. There's a lot
of materialism, there's a lot of alienation from the living world.
But I feel like I've made my mission now to
do what I can to change that, and so I'm
much more useful here than say I would be. You know,
in California, where there's already you don't need it. You
don't need this as much, you know what I mean.
So in the plants down here are just so fucking cool. Man,
they're so fucking cool. And uh, the less people appreciate him,
the easier it is for some shitback developer or you know,
politically connected business person to come in and start saying, hey,
we need to, you know, get rid of more of
our public lands. Why don't we set this aside for development,
or why don't we turn this into such and such?
And no one's using it anyway, you know what I mean.
Whereas if people are actually no familiar with that last
remaining tract of wild land that they can publicly access,
maybe they'll get really pissed off if someone comes for
it in twenty years. Okay, what's going on? I'm back.
It was a wonderful day yesterday. It was like a
seventy five degree day sandwich between two ninety five degree days,
and then it's always hotter out at the conservation property,
out at Thornscrub. I took some people out there, took
five people out there, and we went on just like
a three mile hike out and back. We looked at
the rotting pig carcass though. You know, it was one
of the largest faral hogs. Benny had ever seen. That's
what he said. He's the one that went and dragged
it out. I saw it on the camera there like
beat up Chevy dragon, this dead pig by a chain.
It was fucking brutal. It was such a it was
kind of a cab. But he went and he dragged
it out. There's this spot on the property that I
call Zinia Alley because it's like this little inlet. I
don't know why it's like that, Like it looks like
a little you know, it's off one of the main
paths and it's a little inlet like the size of
a building, like a perfect rectangle. When I say inlet,
it's like an area of lower an area where there's
no shrub cover surrounded by shrubs. You know, if you
were looking on a satellite map, it would be like
a perfect rectangle and there's all this Zenia austro texana
down there, which is a fucking incredible plant. To be
there after, like when it's gotten good moisture, that whole
property is just fucking incredible, man. And all the peotes
are swollen up and like they literally poked their heads
up above the soil. There's a couple clumps that are
already above the soil, but then there's some that are
like flush at the ground. Right now they're underground. They
were cess like the taproot pulls them in, but after
a rain they swell up like That's how I saw
this like little quarter sized payota that was in the
middle of the one of the roads. But to be
there after a rain is so nice. And so that
was when I saw this Zenias spot. It was just
lit up with Zenia austro texana, which is like this
little kanescent that is covered in it's like whitish kind
of leaves like mint green leaves, you know, from all
the white hairs that protect that it protect the plant
against this brutal sun. And they were all flowering like these.
It's like a clump like eight inches tall by like
sometimes two feet wide. It'd be perfect in cultivation. I
don't know why it's not grown more. I mean I
do because it's South Texas and so many people don't
know about any of the plants down here, and no
one's trying to put them into the cultivation except for
like two people. But the thing would probably grow as
far north as it probably do fucking great in San Antonio.
San Antonio is so nice, you know, it really is
when you get tired of Austin because it's filled with
you know, goofy shit bags making six figure salaries, designed
smartphone apps and video games. I don't know what do
they do? What are these tech people in Austin? No
offense if anyone in in an audience it works in
tech and lives in Austin. This isn't about you, Okay,
it's clearly not about you. You're listening to this podcast. Okay,
But but San Antonio is nice because you got old
ass like buildings. In San Antonio. It's a little more rusty,
it's not as gouched out, you know, guccied, it's not
as expense. I'd like San Antonio. I wonder if it's
gonna get ruined like Austin anyway. Okay, The point is,
and it got a river going through Austin. Austin's got
a river going through there anyway, too. But this Zinnia
austra Texana it was. It was lumped in with Zinnia assarosa,
and I guess Billy Turner realized it was an rip
died of covid, well known Texas botanist. I guess he
realized this is different than aceosa. It's not the same thing.
It's way different, and so he he put it. He
created the species in Austro, Texana. It was either him
or someone else. I don't know. Forgive me if I'm wrong. Okay,
respected it that. I don't know who did it. But anyway,
Benny dragged this carcass out there. It was like a
two hundred and fifty pound sow with a bunch of
piglets in it. I know this is sad for the vegans.
If there's any of the vegans, listen and I'm sorry, Okay,
don't tell me about how you're vegan. No offense. Fuck,
I'm really I'm really alienating my audience again. I'm sorry, Uh,
you know, just but anyway, you gotta kill the feral pigs.
I'm sorry. They do so much damage. They're causing extinctions
of plants and of animals. They eat fucking baby tortoises
for Christ's sakes. Huh, isn't that sad? You want to
defend a pig, you want to see a baby Texas
tortoise fucking die? So anyway, this carcass was out there,
so we rolled up and we were up wind of it.
We couldn't smell it yet and U but I could
hear the car of cars met cad Damn. They make
this crazy sound. They sound like fucking dinosaurs. You know
what a car car is. If you don't, you got
to look it up. Cr A c aar crested Cara Kara.
The natives like their feathers. I wonder if there's probably
been a few. I bet there's been a couple natives
that have making some out just for their feathers. They
make the payote fans out are the cara car feathers.
You know, a payote fan is like a thing that
members of NAC you know, not me, I'm you know
people that can actually use use use Payotea's medicine legally
by the the obscene law. Uh. But anyway, but they
you know, they go they'll make these fans out of feathers,
and they take them into the teepee ceremony, and they
got the rattle and the gour making music and all
the payote songs, and then people bring their fans out.
It's like a really beautiful they're really beautiful instruments man,
and people carry them around in a little wooden box.
They've got the fan and the gordon, all this and
some cedar and juniper or Thuya, the Thuya genus. But anyway,
but they so the natives really like the car of
cars for the feathers. Hopefully or not. Hopefully you're just
finding roadkiller, not killing all these things, because it's a
beautiful fucking bird and they're hilarious. They make these like these.
I don't know what's the sound it makes. It's like
a clicking sound. They sound like fucking dinosaurs. They sound
like velociraptors in a in a Jurassic uh, Jurassic ballpark,
Jurassic ballpark, you know what I mean. They sound like that.
They're incredible birds. But they're also scavengers, so they're hunters
and scavengers, and so you'll see them hanging out with
turkey vultures sometimes, you know. And so they were all
eating the ass out of this dead pig. Are you
sorry if you're eating? By the way, I know this
is this is kind of revolting. It was revolting to
see it, but it was. And I wish Benny hadn't
have dumped the pig in Zenia Alley because if that thing,
they'll clean this, you know, these these scavengers should clean
this thing up within a week. But if we get rain,
I'm gonna want to go to Zenia Alley and look
at all of Zenia Ostro Texana. The cool thing about
that plant, too, is the dispersal mechanism. So it's asta racy, right,
And ast Racy can have discoid flowers where it's just
disc floor. It's if you don't know what I'm talking about,
that's fine, but you should really look into it. U
And in ast Raci can have ray floor its. The
rays are like the petals quote petals on a daisy,
but they're not true petals because Astraisi just does its
own weird thing with flower morphology, right, or like the
quote petals on a sunflower, those aren't true petals. Those
are rays or legules. As they're called and so h
but the the on these zinias for a seed dispersal
mechanism of these seeds, the seed remains attached to that
ray what looks like the petal, because these Zenians have
like these white petals, three lobed petals. It's imagine like
a the paddle part of an ore, and like you
got three that paddal is divided up into three Sorry
mocking birds having a panic attack out some mean when
he's throwing a tantrum. I don't know what's up anyway,
that paddals, you know, divided up into three lobes and
so uh so it's like a there's what I mean,
three lobed ray. It's like a three lobed pedal, and
uh the pedal stays at the race, stays attached to
the seed. Once the flower head dries out, and then
that raid the hisses and becomes like a little sail
that catches air currents with the seed attached to it.
And that's how that thing ends up everywhere. And then
you know, ends up on some calcareous mud soil with
the nice soil crust and once it gets wet, that
you know, crusted hairs to the seed, you know, it
kind of sticks to the sticky, calcarious soil and germinates
and you get new zinias. I think we grew someome
at Limestone Tortous. I think I think I got some
seed for James. I don't know if he germinated them yet.
But you know, all this, all the thorn scrupt shit.
You sow the seeds and they'll come up, you know,
intermittently over the next six months. Right, nothing, None of
these seeds germinate, you know, right when you sew them.
Some do, but most won't. But anyway, but that pig,
you know, if I want to go see these zinnias
and that pig is still the carcass is rotting, you know,
in like the next month, I don't want to. I
hope I can't smell it. But whatever, at least we got,
we're getting the pigs. We just got a third one today.
We trapped a third one. I went out there yesterday
when I went out the air stay, I saw that
I went to the trap and these pigs, these smart bastards,
knew not to go inside the trap to get the corn.
We've done there. The trap doesn't have a floor, right,
So they were digging under the trap to get the
corn that fell out there. So then I had to
go get some rolls of wire that we had up
at the at the shack up front and wire them
to the sides of the trap, extending like two or
three feet out from it so the pigs couldn't dig.
And sure enough I checked. I checked the cameras today
and it was in there. Massive fight. It's got to
be a two hundred pound pig. I have. I do
hate these things. It's it's personal. Now. They've just destroyed
so much. And I just repotted all the mammalaria's sphear
could it they ripped up? Because they eat the roots
and then rip up. There's you can't find mammalaria sphere
con our land anymore. They've gotten all of it. There's
so many fucking pigs, they've killed all of it. And
we're in a bad drought. So but uh, on the
drive out there, man, the Texas poaloverdi Parkinsonia, Texano was
going off. The blackbrush is going off. It smells so good.
The blackbrush smells so good when when it flowers. Man, mean,
you can have two inch long spines on that thing.
But god damn, the flower the inflorescences smell incredible, like
like some sort of fancy perfume. But yeah, the Texas
the pile of the Texas pealovardi is nuts because it's
it's one of those plants that really grows fast as
hell as long as it's in full sun, and if
it's in a pot too long, it starts to die.
Like it's this, it's this catch twenty two of well,
you have to water the thing, but the pot only
goes so deep and it's a small volume of soil,
and this I think these Parkinsonia texana is used to
sending its roots deep down, and so you have to
water at occasional and then you water it and then
it doesn't like that. That's when you water it, it starts declining.
It's like one of those things that just they just
do better in the ground. And the way you plant
it is you find the shittiest, hottest part, you know,
like most inhospitable part of a patch of land, and
you plant it there and then water it. Cover the
soil with a little bit of mulch, and then water
at like once a week if that only when the
soil is dry and they can grow. They can you know,
become an instant screen. Like I put one in my yard.
It got like twelve feet tall the first year and
a half. Such a fucking great tree. But it had me.
You know, a number of plants out here, number of trees, well,
a bunch of stuff is drought deciduous. And I think
that's it's such a crazy I remember the first time
I learned what drought deciduous was. It was in a
David Attenborough video about subtropical dry forests in India. You know,
you mentioned these trees lose their leaves not in response
to cold temperatures, but in response to a long, hot
dry season. You get the monsoon season, and then you
have a long hot dry season, so not really a desert,
but still a long because they get they still get
twenty or twenty five inches of water, if not more,
but u but you get this long dry season. It's
it's it was wild. And I think you know, once
you study bodany or you travel anywhere in the tropics,
you realize this is a thing. But if you grow
up in the temperate latitudes, most people don't even realize
this is a thing that the tropical dry force. So
I was really curious about how that works. I'd love
to do more research into that, like how does a
plant evolve the capacity to effectively shut down its respiration
because not just the photosynthesis, right, it's the metabolism too,
the respiration too, or not shut it down entirely, but
basically enter a state of torpor, right, like cut its
leaves off so that it's no longer absorbing water or
trying to absorb water that's not there because the soils dry.
It hasn't rained in a few months, and it's still
hot as balls because you're in such a low latitude
in the itcz the intertropical convergence zones on the other
side of the equator the equator for that season, you know,
it's not going to be coming back crossing the equator
to the other to your side out of the equator
for another few months. So just knowing how to downregulate
everything and reading about it was really cool because it's
it's uh, you know, respiration, and that's the thing. It's
like having to shut down, having to shut down respiration
or just really you know down regulated. You know, you
basically gotta you basically got to shut everything down, right,
or at least the interstate of dormancy, Like just like
plants and winter climates do. Okay, you mobilize all your
valuable resources, sugars, amino acids, all that shit from the
leaves back into the stems and roots. So the leaves,
like if you go to a dry forest, like the
tropical dry forests in Costa Rica they're in like they're
in Guanacosta, like in northwest Costa Rica. You go there,
go for a walk during the dry season or right
at the dry season, you'll see that the leaves are
turning yellow. And that's because all the chlorophylls going back,
the nitrogen, especially from the chlorophyll is going back into
the stems, and it's you're just leaving behind the carotenoid pigments.
You know, all the good all the good shits be it.
The sugar is especially going back into the stems. The
same same thing that plants and winter climates do. Right,
you're shutting down okay, of course, the point of doing
that is, uh, you know, you're shutting down respiration because
especially during times of stress and droughts, the time of stress, plants,
any organism, really animals, to start producing reactive oxygen species,
you know, as a product of metabolism. And so that's
where antioxidants come in, is to basically deactivate those reactive
oxygen species. That's why you you know, antioxidants, it's not
just a health food gimmick. There's actually a benefit to it.
And that's why you add that's why you know, there's
a benefit in consuming antioxidants from plants. Right, But don't
oversteam the broccoli. You just want you want it just right.
You don't want to brown, you want it still being green,
maybe five ten minutes max. You know, it's aside from
obviously conserving water, the main thing is really really you know,
cutt and respiration, uh, you know, by seventy percent or something,
and that's you know, fifty to seventy percent of respiration
occurs in the leaves. So you get rid of the leaves, boom,
You've you've you know, fifty to seventy fifty seventy percent
of respiration occurs in leaves, and you've gotten rid of
fifty to seventy percent of the potential for reactive oxygen species. Right,
So maintenance respiration still occurs in stems just like it.
You know, if you scratch the stem, it's still going
to be green, just like if you scratch the stem
on a maple that lost its leaves in fucking Vermont
or something. But it's a pretty amazing thing to evolve
because you'll see these trees and they just look like shit.
Like drive it like driving out everything. It looks like
a fucking mad Max landscape. Thorn scrub does rio. Grand
City got ray. We didn't get rain. We're a little
bit too far north. It's it's that's crazy to see too,
because it's like a forty mile thirty forty mile difference
if that. And at the south end, closer to the border,
I got two and a half inches. We didn't get anything,
but everything is dead and dormant, and so it looks
like a wasteland, but it was. You know, It's the
cool thing is watching all of that come back to
life literally within like twelve or thirteen hours after a rain.
Twelve or thirteen hours after a rain, stuff starts lighting
up again. I remember watching this was cool. I was
in I think I was in the turtle mounds of
the Mohave Desert. I was on mushrooms this day too.
This was a wonderful day. Almost stepped on a speckled
rattlesnake while I was on mushrooms. It didn't bite me.
It was so kind. I was with a friend and
we had crashed in the back of the truck overnight
listening to this hard rainstorm in the Mojave desert, and
then went on his hike to go look at this
disjunk population of fan palms. Was it fanm palm? I
think it was. Yeah, it was fan pomps way out
there and there, you know, the ground was really wet
and soro feminist spinosis. The American smoke tree right, one
of two unrelated plants known as these smoke tree. Right,
not the not Cotinus, the Eastern smoke tree. But this
is the desert smoke tree. Wait. I think it's desert
smoke trees, and I don't know they're fucking common names anyway.
This is a legume, really beautiful legume with photosynthetic stems.
It's got leaves when it germinates, purple flowers. It's Phaboides subfamily,
so it's got the banner wings and keel pedal morphology
as opposed to the seysalpinoid flower morphology or the Mimosa
flower morphology from Mimo soiity the Mimosa subfamily, and it's
one of my favorite trees. And the seed, these seeds
had been in this gravel wash and they it was
like six hours after the rain stopped, and the seeds
had germinated and they were already sending up kind of
leens like they respond that quickly. Like just the absorbent
capabilities of these roots and seed coats, especially once they've
been tumbled in a gravel washed and scarifight, as as
that desert smoke tree seed had been is incredible. So
but this, this this ability to die o drought is
so it's so incredible to me. And I think that's
one of the best arguments for convincing people to use
native plants, especially if you come from a fucked up
area where you can get months without rain and where
it's incredibly hot. The fact that people were the fact
these honkeys from up north and no offense, you know,
were actually fucked them. But you know what I mean,
these honkys from up north one hundred years ago, we're
trying to come down here exploit cheap Mexican labor to
grow citrus is fucking nuts to me, because this is
not the climate that you want to grow citrus in.
There's no water, the soil is salty, it's hot as
balls for eleven months out of the year. When I
was in that quarter, I was at six thousand feet.
They were growing citrus up there. Fine, it never gets
hotter than eighty degrees, right, it's like cloud forest, right,
high solar insulation never freezes. Six thousand feet you're on
the equator, doesn't get hotter than eighty degrees fahrenheit. And
then you realize, why the with these morons trying to
grow citrus in Florida and in Texas. You go to
Florida and the citrus all looks like shit, it looks
like fucking garbage. They're all they've got pathogens too, right, Especially,
it's easy to get, you know, to fall prey as
a plant, to fall prey to pathogens. When you're you know,
not growing in ideal temperatures. You can't manufacture all the
you know, phytochemistry. You need to defend yourself. And you're probably,
especially if it's not getting cooler than eighty degrees at night,
you're gonna hit your compensation point. Your metabolism is always
running twenty four to seven, but the sun's on the
out for twelve hours during the day, so you're only
able to manufacture, however, many carbohydrates and it never really
cools off, so you start depleting your energy stores and so.
But people, of course, humans always try to make a
square peg fit in a round hole, especially when it
comes to like plant life. I see this all the time, right,
we can have a grepe myrtle, it said, I go
just water it. Fucking insane. And so what they do
with the citrus is they just douse it with chemicals,
toxic ass shit, right, just they and then it's and
it still looks like shit. It's still got chlorotic leaves.
The citrus industry is falling apart. The city's citrus industry
in Texas fell apart, but it just got re all
the agriculture just got replaced by the tractouse industry. Building
these bleak houses, which you know these every one of
them's got a fucking lawn. There's no tree cover except
for these shitty live oaks they plant. Though I sound
a little mad, I'm sorry, it's it's fucking madness. I
see this and I'm like, this is good luck, good luck.
You guys don't even know that, like the leadership, you
don't even know how to live on this land. You
don't even know the tools that this land came with.
You don't even know what you're doing here. Man. You
might as well be in fucking Iowa or Connecticut or
you know, wherever you're or Georgia, Like you have no
clue about This is why you got to You got
to teach kids about native plants and like your ecoss
them your specific biome when they're young, like second or
third grade, start fuck even younger, man, and get them outside,
Like every school should have a native plant garden. I
went to pick my daughter from school the other day.
There's a line of cars. Everyone's three hundred No I'm not,
I know. I sound like everyone's three hundred pounds because
no one walks right. Everyone's waiting in these giant escalades,
which themselves are emitting heat, and they're just and they're
waiting there for like thirty fucking minutes to pick up
their kids. It's like, Jesus Christ, don't you want to
go take a walk. It's not even that hot yet. Like,
I can't sit still in my car for that long.
I Meanwhile, I'm showing up on a bike. They look
at me like I'm a crackhead. I got a bike
with this little tandem thing that she can ride. You know,
she gets pissed if I don't bring that to pick
her up. She gets mad at me. You know, she starts,
throws a tantrum, and shit, it's just and so I'm
out there waiting for them to bring the kids out,
and I'm just roasting in the sun. There's no tree cover.
It's just like a barren patch of soil and asphalt
and concrete. And to me, that's just fucking man Like.
Don't you want Don't you want nice stuff? Right? Don't
you want some like living things around you? Don't you
want some trees? Like, even if you're you know, uh,
whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, you want
tree cover. You just need trees. You They're fucking nice
to look at. They give shade, birds can hang out
of them. Don't you like to hear birds? Don't you
like to hear the little chirpies? Huh fucking madness. I'm
gonna hit the I mean, I'm gonna hit the principal
up be like, look can can we just plant the
tree here? I'll maintain it. Someone else hit me up
from she came to my show. It was this teacher
loved the school teachers. She uh, she came to my show.
She hit me up and she said, you know, can
you cause I was putting ads out for planting trees
around here and she said, uh, can you plant trees
at the school? I gotta get back to her actually,
because she was checking with her principal. I was like, yeah,
I can plant trees. You guys just got a multim
because I don't want to. I don't have that much time.
I barely have time. My time still prejudiced to me.
If I come over there, I don't want to. I
don't want them to die because nobody waters them. Can
you guys water them? Can we get some most there?
Let's plant some tepewahes, not live oaks. Right. I went
to speak at this school a month ago. I think
I mentioned this in the last podcast, and it was
really nice, these junior high school kids into plants. I
would love to teach a fucking botany class to junior
high kids. You know that shit changes. You get a
good teacher junior high or high school about ecology or something.
I remember the ones I got, you know, like the
guy that took us in a van to go drag
a deer carcass that had just been hit out to
a field and then come back and check on it
three days later to see how clean the vultures had
picked it. Right, that was like, I still remember that
thirty years later. I'd love to do that for kids.
I could tone down the cursing, right, Just give me
a semester. You even got your give me you know,
one one one hour class, right, like twice a week.
I could do it. I teach kids about some cool stuff.
Just take him out. But every school should have a
native plant garden where they got all the native plants
from that region, because that is so vital. Right, it's
not a feel good thing. Pay yourself on a back.
I'm using a fucking paper straw. That's so vital to
understanding where you live. These fucking things were built by
the region. They were built by the land that you
live on. Okay, you're not gonna go crate You're not
gonna grow crape myrtles in fucking South Texas. That's insane, right,
we have tepeways We got ebonies, We got all these
mimosoid legings. We got cideroxilon Coma sapotasi mostly tropical family.
We get you know, it smells incredible when it flowers.
The trees get covered in monarchs because the monarchs love
the flowers. You can eat the fruits. Do you like
the squishy fruits? We got so much cool shit. It
doesn't have to be like this. It's only like this
because of a lack of imagination, because of a lack
of awareness about the plants here. Got to educate people,
especially in the most extreme climates. You know they do.
They have stuff like this in Tucson, right. Tucson's like,
you know, ninety years ahead of the Rio Grand Valley.
I say Tucson because that's the hottest balls climate too.
Speaking of which, I just got Brad Lancaster's rainwater harvest
thing for dry Climate's book. We did a book swap.
I sent them concrete botany. He sent me, uh, rainwater
harvest thing for dry climates. Great guy, he's got fucking
equations in there. You know, you know he don't tell
me heat off that college. I see what he put
in a factor he's playing. They got numbers and equations.
He's a real smart guy. He's got he's got equations
and now I didn't read them. It's a little. This
is a little I said, wow, whoa, hey, easy there guy.
I will look at them later, but I just wanted
it for the he's got these, you know drawings he
did of rainwater catchment basins and yards. Fucking dope. He's
got the website too, rainwater harvest thing for dry climates
and dry land harvest. Was it dry land harvest? Throw
dry land rainer rainer that you know, the guy that
he's got the stuff that he cuts the holes in
the curb and you think he's damaged in public infort structure,
but he's not. He's doing it because there's good he's
catching out of water when they run along the gutted. Yeah,
but you should check his website out Brad Lancaster rainwater
Harvester dot com. I think that's it. If you just
type in Bret you'll get to his website. But that's
the that's the type of shit. That's what we need
to be doing for infrastructure down here. Okay, you can't
do this, you can't have the way it is is
fucking nuts. It's incongruent combos. Say d say nice with
a nice with a good quality of life and a
sustainable future. Here you can't have turf, grass, lawns. I
see these guys mowing these dirt lots down here. By
the way, if you live in Texas and you get
a you get a video of a man on a
riding mower just doing donuts in a dirt lot, like
there's not even grass there because it's so dry and
parts and he's just clicking up, kicking up clouds of dust.
Please please record at least thirty seconds of it. You
can be as artsy as you like. Just get close
up to it. Don't do it from you know, one
hundred feet away. Go up there and just give him
a thumbs upper something telling me he's doing a great job,
and just say you rerecording it for a class project
or some Be really nice to him so he's not
vied out. You don't want to ruin a mood. Right,
he's in his zone. Let him do it, but just
get some footage and then send it to me. And
I'm not gonna like humiliate the guy, you know, if
you can do without his face. And there these guys
normally wear those masks too. They look like ice agents. Right.
I was wearing one of those just when I was
shoveling Moult. Just now. You know those those uh those
little scarfs you pull up, they're real nice too. They
block the sun. I got a little toasted yesterday. But
bring those out, get them in, you know, just get
some good footage and send it to me, because that
is the most iconic Texas thing that displays the madness. Brother,
what are you doing right? You are like you're this
is the most Sissyphician task is the fifthy tech, the
master gardener. I'm a master gardener, the Master Gardener Association.
I got my Master Gardener license. Listen, I don't know
what words are using, but I got my master gardener license,
and I got I did my volunteer hours at the
Botanic Garden, okay in the suburbs right there, and I
know what I'm doing. Now. You're gonna try a lecture me,
but get some get some footage of that. It's just
it's such a perfect you know, it's it's words cannot say,
words cannot describe what that video does. And it's a
Texas thing. The man that the man feels the sentence
that guy's just probably working the shit out. It's not him.
But you know, if it's if it's a private guy,
if it's like a dude doing it for his own yard,
even better. Right, the men get his sense of purpose
from riding mowers. Right, makes them feel like they're doing something.
They're just lost. You got to read direct that energy.
That guy should be shoveling mulch and putting fucking plugs
and native plants in the ground. He should be composting
his own ship, is what he should be doing. Right,
you want to you want to ruin the ambiance at
a dinner party talk about ship composting a amazing Get
some wood chips. I just got it. You know what
I just got. I got a wood chipper. You put
your friend in the chipper? Eh? And I guess that
was your accountlice and the wood chipper, the wood chipper?
Did you put your friend in the wood chip? Anyway?
I got this cheap woodship around Scampus. I was like
one hundred and thirty bucks and it was worth it.
I was out there because I you know, I get
all the sticks. I do it. You know, I'm not
mowing a law. But I'm trimming trees and shit while
you know, shrubs in the brush lands here in my
little thorn scrub garden, and I always get the little
sticks that I worry about those being a fire hazard.
So what I do. Granted there's a limit of about
an inch and a half inch and three quarters. It
says inch in three quarters. But I know I'm gonna
fuck that thing up, right. I run all my shit
into the ground, run all my equipment into the ground.
So I take an inch and a half. I got
a lot of sticks, some of the tepawahey branches. When
you got to prune those shits, you know. I went
and I was driving around on my truck throwing, uh,
throwing pieces of a live oak trimmings in there, long branches.
You just eye it right where it gets an inch
and a half thick. You cut there and then you
got like a four foot section. I was putting these
in the chipper. I filled up two thirty gallon tubs,
two thirty gallon planters with very finely ground wood chips,
like not the stuff you would get from a tree
company too, more fine finely ground that's the carbon. Get
some leaf mulch, in there too, and then and then
get some coffee grounds, maybe a turd, and you put
it in the tumblers and tumble it. Get some you know,
it's too hot where I live for worms, so we
get black soldier fly larvae. They just show up. They're amazing.
They look the maggots look like they're what they call
meal worms. You know, if you ever had a kid
in friend in high school who would feed meal worms
to his reptiles, you know, and they do quick work
of anything, man and eliot, the dairy delia whatever. The
meal worms are better than worms. I think the black
soldier flies, and I think black soldier flies are native anyway.
But I'm just gonna start making my own soil and
then I'll mix that with because I was trying it
with juniper bark. But you know, you need that shit composted.
And I think when I realized the good way to
do this, and you'll get like a I got like
a fifty gallon drum that just just woodships. That's like
the end stage. Once the you know, tumbler compost has
gotten good going. You know, it's not too smelly, it's
there's a lot of uh, you know, you could see
the springtails in it. There's a species of might I
see in the compost too. I'm getting all Damon tie
On this follow Damon tie On Instagram TI T I
G h E. My buddy. He's always posting good, good
shit about. He's got his own like circular ecosystem in
his backyard. He waters his tricho serious with urine. He's
he teaches what is he like teaches DNA sequence singing.
And I don't know if he's always flying all over
the place giving lectures and shit whatever. But I've learned
so much just from watching his stories. Damon tie friend
of mine from the Bay when I lived out there,
and he's he's responsible for a good amount of the
psilocybin mushrooms that come up in wood chip beds around
the Bay area, just from taking stem butts from old
patches and transplanting them to new patches of woodships during
the rainy season. But so I'll get all the hot
shit in the compost, tumbler, coffee grounds, food scraps. The
coffee grounds are great. That's high nitrogen. That's like liquid
gold to me, right, I'd like work with the coffee
shops around town. Give me your coffee grounds. Right, it's
like a mafioso thing. I'm going to make collections and
then I'll put that in the tumbler and then you
tumble it. And it's got to be sealed because it's
I use a tumbler because you can't just have open
compost here. It's too dry and moisture will just get
sucked out of it. It's weird. It's humid because we're
close to the but then the air will really it's
so hot, and hot air can hold so much moisture.
Whenever the humidity wanes even just a little bit, the
air then sucks moisture out of stuff. So I keep
it closed system, you know, so you're not losing as
much moisture. Keep it in a tumbler, and then once
it's like good and black, add some biochart to it.
If then nitrogen's not enough, you know, you got to measure.
I got a temperature gauge to a thermometer. You stick
it in there. You want it to be like one
hundred degrees fahrenheit hundred and ten. If it's lower than that,
you need more nitrogen. If it's warmer than that, you
need more carbon. And everyone does it their own way.
I'm not like a compost king. I'm just learning what works.
It's like go and but the end result is so
I've got it in the tumbler, and then I'm going
to put it into this other the last stage with
the woodships in like a bigger tub, a bigger barrel,
and then water the shit to keep it wet. Because
I noticed when I used to get these moltstrumps dumps
for the illegal garden. I got like ten illegal moult
dumps on Mendela Boulevard right there on a median strip
when I was doing illegal gardening out there, planting cypruses.
And then I moved to the cloud forest stuff from
the neotropics, right, so same lineages is the stuff we
would get in California, just you know, eight hundred miles
to the south in neotropical cloud forest settings. You could
do that in the Bay because the temperature was right.
It's got that cool maritime climate rarely gets hotter than
eighty five, doesn't ever freeze, and so they grow a
lout of that cloud forest stuff. You just don't get
anywhere near the amount of rain the cloud forests in
Mexico or Costa Rica gets so I was bet the
cloud fores stuff's amazing because it's all hummingbird pollinated shit,
and I love to see in the hummingbirds, you know,
in Oakland when I'm going to drink coffee and breathing
in diesel particulates. So, but I noticed when I would
get these mulch piles dumped, I'd look at the bottom
at a mulch pile, and the shit after it had
been there for six months, the stuff at the bottom
was like this fine powder, right, it was decompos closed
wood chips with this like they'd break down into this
fine powder. And that was the that was. You could
just use that as an organic base in a potting mix,
adding some perlite, maybe a little vermiculite, maybe some other
you know, bark fines whatever, but you had like a
potting mix. Right, it was fucking great and a little
bit of compost maybe. So that's what I'm trying to
do now and I need But so I needed to
get the wood chipper to do that, because that's going
to be the base. But to get the woodchips to
decompose faster and add nutrients to them. That's where the
coffee grounds and just the regular food, scrap composts come in,
so I'll let you know about my progress. But the
end of the day, I don't want to have to
be buying bags of peat moss or whatever stupid shit.
I don't even use peat moss like Burger pro mix.
You go to like a source supply store, they got
Burger pro mix. It's first off, it's forty bucks. Second
it's pete and so they're looting this shit out of
you know, peat bogs in Canada. It's fucking obscene. I
don't know why they don't just use composted forest products.
That's what Tristan, a possibility place uses. They use like
decomposed pine bark and you know pine finds from the
lumber industry, but in the South, the one in the south,
so it's all like pinus teta, what is it? Loblelly?
You know? Is that your friend in the wood chipper?
So uh, I think that's the best, you know, but
I'm curious to see. I don't know. You don't know
until you know two weeks after you've put a plant
in it, and then the plant is either doing well
or it's getting chlorotic leaves. That's why I would learn
my way. That's how I learned about the biochar fuck up.
I thought biochar could be used in just kind of
in lieu of pearlite, and that was not the case.
You can, but you've got to. It sucks nitrogen out
of stuff, so you have to compensate for the nitrogen
somehow by either using chemical fertilizer or urinating on it,
like Damon Tide does. Damon ty is really into the
urine thing, you know, is nitrogen. It's another great way
to buy people out to you because you want to
sift out the squares. You don't want to have to
be around people like that. If you don't have to
start talking about compost shitting or using urine as nitrogen,
and that'll that sh you get rid of the fucking guccas.
You know, you don't want the guccas. You don't want
people that are chasing the finer things in life. I
really don't. I don't really care to be around those people.
But the soil, you know, the soil thing's been a
real pain in my ass because I just go through
so much of it, and so it would be great
if I could find, you know, a place that would
come dump composted forest products like a cubic yard in
my driveway or some shit, or in a you know,
a vacant lot near my house. The vacant lots are great.
You got to use them right until the owner kicks
you out. Luckily the owner. Luckily the owner here doesn't.
I don't know if she knows or what. But who
knows or he just ask you know. But but other
than that, I was using like ocean forest, and then
I would just mix it with other stuff. But ocean
forest is a fucking rip off too. It's a it's
a bummer. How do you get if you got a
good gimmick for getting cheap, low cost soil mixtures. Let
me know the guy, this guy that used to draw,
He used to grow plants for fish and wildlife in
the tubes, you know, in little paper tubes, like two
inch by eight inch deep tubes. He would just get
native soil, which is shit in a pot. It's like
it's verdict. So it expands and contracts depending on the
moisture content. It is brutal if you let it dry out.
It's really hard to get it in a pot. It's
really hard to get it to absorb water. Again, you
have to like let the water sit and sink in
and so because of it. I mean, it's great in
the ground because it stays wet for a while. But
everything in a pot, the volume is much smaller, so
you know, temperature fluctuates more, much more than the ground does,
for instance, and so does the moisture content. Like a
black pot, a black one gallon pot sitting in full
sun will dry out, you know, if if it's from inundated,
completely saturated soil to you know, the the texture of
a brick adobe brick in the full sundown here in summer,
within like an hour or two. And so to compensate
for that, he would add vermiculate to the to the
the native soil, this fine silty clay loam, this calcareous stuff,
and and that would help. But then you still you
got to keep everything wet. You gotta I don't know, man,
I just I just want to grow a bunch more
shit and get it out everywhere. It's like a it's
like the same form of art, or like when I
used to do graffe. It's the same feeling. It's just
it's just planting as much shit as possible and trying
to unfuckify your local landscape for those of you that
are not lucky enough to live in a place that
already has a bunch of plants native plants around it. Anyway, unrelated,
me and my friend Caesar were supposed to go to Uh.
He lives in Mexico City, Uh, and I was I
was gonna, I guess, fly down there, and that we
were gonna fly to Cuba. But I guess. You know,
Cuba is fucked from the US placing an oil embargo
on it. I guess they were getting their their oil
from Venezuela, so there's no gas and they're they're stress,
They're fucked, and the US is just causing problems everywhere
now for everybody, right, US and Israel both. I got
called an anti Semitic cook in my inbox the other day.
I don't know, I can't tell if it was a botterer,
if it was someone real, uh, but it was because
I posted something I got Israel. You know whatever man
Israel as a fucking It's so hard for me to
keep it closed politically when I see crazy, heinous shit
going on. You know, there was the it's and it's
always on Facebook too, whenever someone's going to tell you
to fuck off. It's always on on Facebook, I first
some reason. Instagram. Never, it was on a story too.
It was not like a disappearing story. It's well you
get for watching my stories, Get the fuck off and
get the fuck off. Uh social media, you're watching stories
that disappear in an hour, You fucking nerd. Then you
get an upset about them. But I get it's always
that they get. I don't know what these dudes think.
It's always a dude. Well, actually no, there was a
lady to lady who said that's the go to alien
eight a large part of our conservative audience. Yeah, if
they can't just agree to disagree, shut up. You know.
It's uh, we're living in these weird times. It's just
so fucking weird, noning. None of it makes sense anymore.
It's just so fucked so uh anyway, but no Cuba,
No Cuban serpentine for me. God, there's some incredible shit.
I want to go see that Mark Gravias species that
produces the radar dish leaves above its pendent inflorescences so
that it's visible by bats. I gotta I gotta presentation
on pollin a biology. You know you can look at
a flower and tell if it's pollinated by moths, if
it co evolved with moths, or if it covalved with
hummingbirds and butterflies. How how how it you know you
can tell if it's co evolved with bats or mammals
or whatever pollinating it. It's a cool presentation. I put
it together when I was teaching at college course at
the university two years ago. I forgot I had it. It
was on my old Google slides list. It's a fucking
dope presentation. And yeah, I had a present I had
a photo of I don't know where I got it
of that that mark Gravia species. I think it's what
is it even ensis? Oh? Yeah, there it is. I've
seen it. Mark Gravia ivinya e ve e n I
A god, this is a nice presentation. I got to
put this thing back together. This is holy fuck. I
forgot these flowers got the Oh, I would love to
see that. Where do you see mark Gravia avignya. Mark
Gravia is a genus in Eric Hayley's the Blueberry Order.
There's a lot of different family polmoniac Is in the
blueberry order of the ocatillo families in the blueberry order
Eric Cayley's it ends in a L E s so
it's an order, not a family. But yeah, they got
that cupped that cupped leaf above it looks unlike any
of the other leaves on this vine. It's so fucking cool.
You know. The bat's basically selected for that. It helps
them see it so that when they're emitting their little
chirp and sonar, they can pick it up where the
flowers are easier. And then I got the La Fouenzia pocaai,
which is I think that was lith racy big nectar. Yeah,
big white petals on a red cup that composed of
a sepals and you could so much nectar and you
could see it. I saw that in Brazil and minas
your rice. That was a crazy fucking hike that they
Dylan and I Dylan Zalar, crazy bastard, great fucking guy,
kids like twenty three. Maybe he's twenty four and now,
I don't know, you got a whole life ahead him me.
He's already knows so much. He's been all over the
world looking at plants. We went down there. We did
like fourteen twelve, No It was fourteen miles that day,
but it was intense. We saw a lot of crazy shit.
He got to see, Oh that promeliad that looks like
Ankolirium agavoides. Was that what it is? Yeah? What a
weird one. Holy shit he got he got to see
Ancolirium agavoides. I didn't make it because I got distracted
looking at too much cool shit. That was where I
realized that all the plants there had converged on the
same form of not having leaves for like the eighty percent,
you know, lower down part of their stem. I'm putting
that in this third book. I got coming out the
imbricate leaf thing because I saw members of coffee family
Asperracy Melostomatas all doing the same thing, converging on the
same form of Imbrikit sessile leaves with no petiole and
then you know, leaveless for the bottom eighty percent of
the stem. You know, if it's like a three four
foot tall shrub. It was fucking whe I was like,
why are they all growing like this? You know, it's
got to do deal with the heat that just the
stress is there, The soil is shit, It's all quartzitic
sand that's you know, super nutrient poor. And then they
got that long dry season. God, there's so much crazy
shit in Brazil and minas your rice and Bahia Bahia.
I know how you pronounced that. It's Portuguese. Shut up
to Brazil anyway. And then I got pictures of Kegelia africana,
big red flowers, another bat pollinated and bird pollinated flower.
You know, you could look at the flowers like that,
You could look at the the corolla opening and see
it obviously wasn't made for bees. That thing's fucking huge.
It fits the head of a bat or a bird perfectly.
And then you know what I should have put in there?
I should have put what is that asparagaceous thing from
o al of Faarax Arethrina Crista gali and Ali faarax
to another bird pollinated caranthodendron pentedactylone. I wish we could
grow that here. It's just horrible climate. That's a Wahacken
cloud forest. Melvin malves far too hot for it down here, right,
That's definitely needs temperatures of like seventy degrees max and
lots of water vapor. But I should have put the
what is that member of aspara gailees that grows in Australia.
They got one of them. It looks like a formium
or in a gave maybe, but they can get like
eight feet wide eight feet tall and they get dori Anthes.
That's it, dori anthesd r y a n t h
ees fucking wild Australian bird pollinated Aspara gailees member. Yeah,
I got photos of at dori Anthes. I put it
on my I neet and my eye naturalists, even though
it's cultivated, because I want, you know, I'll use the
photos for presentations again or something. I want to be
able to show people, forgot, what a dope plant that is.
God I miss living near UC Berkeley because in that
climate you could grow anything. That is such a great
fucking botanic garden. It's a living museum of plant from
all over the world. I'm so grateful that it is
like that that it's basically like a science botanic garden
and research botanic garden, and taxonomic botanic garden and ecology
botanic garden. Like you go to the Eastern North America section,
you feel like you're in Eastern North America, you go
to Mexico, you feel like you're in Mexico. You go
to fucking the Australian New Zealand section, you feel like
you're in Australia, New Zealand. You know, it's fun. It
gets so fucking cool. And yeah, they don't none of
the stuff they plant. I think they don't plant something
if it's invasive because if it's invasive, there's no point
in having in a botanic garden anyway because it would
be probably out colonizing the fucking hills already, So they
don't need to, you know, so they strictly use stuff
that And I think especially it's safer in that climate too,
because the summers are dry. Sorry it was Benny Klemy,
but yeah, you know the the it's so dry in
a summer, stuff can't really get established, like shit that
would be invasive. But yes, yes, it's just so nice
to be able to. I would go there three times
a week seriously when I was when I was living there,
when I wasn't working, because it's you learned something new
every It's like having a you know, ah past to
the museum, like if you lived close to the to
a nice natural history museum. Wouldn't you go there a lot, right,
or like a nicer barium. Every every time I went,
I learned something new. And especially with you know, plants,
something might be flowering at a certain time of year,
and then it would be flowering the rest of the year.
So then you know, you only see it. You know,
you half the time you go there, it won't be
it won't be an action. And then you go there
one it's so you always see something new. I learned
so much, and I would go to like, you know, Chile,
and I know you know a few of the plants already,
or the lineages, the generic because I'd already seen them
at UC Berkeley. That's what every botanic garden should be.
That's why it makes me so mad to see the
show garden shit, the show gardens, you know, just like
fancy fancy show gardens for the rich. Got it, No
one wants to see that stuff, huh, some some rich
old lady or something, all right. The crime pace fans
are the cool old ladies, not the fucking rich. Orthodonis's wife,
who's you know? Anyway? Say? Why are these thingling out? Orthodonas?
That's the pay that could be anything and you know
just the show gardens. Oh look it's the Home and
Garden Show. But anyway, doriy Anthony's PALMERI that was it's
a massive plant too. When is it flower? Bright red
large flowers on it? And this whole spike like an
eight foot long spike of baseball sized red flowers flowers?
Says it flowers mostly in September and October. And it's
it's Eastern Australia, so it's gonna be what is it
like Sydney? Yeah, right on the border are Queensland, New
South Wales and it's probably in cultivation. I would assume
it's in cultivation there. Anyway. God, there's some cool shit
out there. But uh yeah, man, I forgot on that presentation.
I had a bit on fly pollination too, you know,
I got the stapeliads, I got Aristo Lochia erect the
which was you know, all the all the pipe vines
are fly pollinated. They keep the flies in the little
tube flower, the pipe vine, the pipe flower, Dutchman's pipe?
Why is this Dutchman? Why's it got to be Dutchmen?
These common again, with these common names, could be anybody.
It's not just Dutch people. That smoke pipes. Why has
it got to be a man anyway? So the hares
keep that fly in there, and then once the thing's pollinated,
the column is, you know, composed of all the stamens
and the stigma or aggregate together in a single column
at the base of that pipe flower. And if you
cut it open at the right time, I've got a
massive patch of a rist Of loki erect in my backyard.
I need to get more of them. They produce little tubers.
They're self seating at this point, so I can probably
dig a few up. But but but yeah, so you know,
cut the one of those flowers open. There's a bunch
of flies in there. All. You know, what is it?
Five hundred species of Aristolochia do that. Costa Rica's got
some incredible ones. We have Aristolochia ringins and I think
Gigantia at limestone tortoise right now. A friend sent the
seeds Costa Rica, and so we got a ship tone growing.
You could hit up limestone, hit up our nursery. You know,
we got a nursery in Sagine. It's being James Peace.
I collect the seeds, he grows the stuff and then
I just go in there, we check check on stuff,
and it's you know, it's mostly him growing, but but yeah,
it's we got a lot of good stuff up there.
We got a bunch of Vernonia larcini. We got we
got pal Maria ostro texana, that rare, say style pinioid
legume that nobody fucking grows. Nobody else is growing. That.
The flowers look like orchid flowers. They're so cool. Oh,
I got nice photos of on a in ad of
Aristolochia corda flora from Costa Rica. A nice macro shot
of the gnostemium. That column that I was talking about.
It's such a weird structure, man. You got the stigma
up top all glistening, and then the the stamens down below,
the anthers down below. But I don't think there's really
any filament, not that you can see. It just looks
like a weird crown shaped structure. And so the flies
go in there, they're trapped. And I think Aristolochia are
protogenists too, or proto ginus, so they're female first. They're
facultatively female first, before the anthers mature and open and
you know, the hiss and release pollen and then after
the pollen gets deposited on the on the stigma up
top the top of the crown, then the anthers down
below release pollen and the flies get covered in pollen,
and then that's when the hair is with her, and
then the flies can escape and then they go get
trapped by another flower. Also going back, I think it
was last episode, you know, the one before last episode
I had talked about, you know, the redneck rbid legend,
that a redneck rural legend that the trees suck up
all the water, which it turns out some of them do,
the junipers do. I mean, they don't suck up water.
It's the cohesion tension theory. You know, as water evaporates
out of the stomata, the cohesion and tension of water
inside the xyleum vessels. Well, I guess in the case
of juniper it would be tracheads because remember jymno sperms
have tracheods which look different. They taper at the ends,
they come to a point and then you know, they're
all just smushed into each other and then the pits
at the end of the point on the lateral sides
of the tube. Can imagine a tube like I don't
know how long tracheads are, how long are trachiads. It
says the trachead length in juniper is between one hundred
and one thousand, five hundred micrometers, which is point one
to one point five millimeters. That's kind of long one
point five millimeters. Shit, So you should be able to
see that under a dissecting scope. But the tracheads, you know,
so at the end of the at the the end
of the tracheads, it's where the pits are. Maybe they're
in the middle too, I don't know, I forget, I
have to look this up again. But the pits so
like the point that end of a trachead will line
up with the point that end of a tracheod next
to it. These are a range longitudinally, and so that's
how the water flows. And so that's really good, it
turns out at preventing air bubbles from moving from trachia
to trachiad, because that's how that's how you know, that's
how the plumbing gets all screwed up during times of drought.
You get cavitation, you get an embolism, you get an
air bubble inside the plumbing. But regardless anyway, so it's
it's water evaporating out of the stomata in a leaf
or in a juniper scale, and then as it evaporates,
the cohesion intension of the water pulls up more water
from down below. And I guess junipers can get very
deep tap roots, and so they actually do use a
lot of water. They can access water from deep down,
and that's different from something like mesquite, which can get
really deep tap roots but will actually bring water up,
transport it via it's internal plumbing in the roots and
then but then dissipate the water at the top part
of the route into shallower soils. So it's kind of
like which ends up benefiting grass around it and other
plant species around it. Miss So mesquites do that. Mesquites
are what you want around They use hydraulic lyft. That's
called hydraulic lyft. Right, it's like the deep tappert system.
It's kind of like nature's well, you know, bringing water
from below, whereas junipers just access the water in and
piss away. But that's still not a good reason to
wipe out all the junipers in an area, which is
and this is the thing you always hear, you know,
redneck land manner. There's no offense bliss their hearts talking
about is that junipers suck up all the water. So
we're going to save water by you know, clearing the
juniper pine woodland. Well, are you clearing it? Because what
the encroachment is the thing that's occurred over the last
century due to fire suppression, and you're trying to, you know,
bring back the grasslands. That's not so bad, it's kind
of good. I like that. Or are you just clearing
it because you that's just what you're supposed to do,
You just clear. And so you're clearing, you know, a
juniper pine woodland that the area might have always been
a juniper pine woodland. Maybe it's not. It doesn't just
exist as a result of fire suppression. Are you sure
you want to do that? Does that make sense to
And then you're exposing all that land, the barren sun,
you're moving all that habitat right. So, and that's of
course the all that you always hear people saying that
we're gonna get the trees suck up all the water. Well,
first off, it's not active, it's passively they suck it.
And also they're very good at mitigating drought and controlling
how much they're relieving. Miscuit does that wonderfully, but uh,
you know, but also woody encroachment is the thing. Woody
encroachment do the removal of herbivores or like Kyle Liibarger's
dealing with an Alabama fire suppression, you got, you know,
juniper woodlands encroaching what were formerly glades in grasslands and
leading to hugh, you know, just sucking up the ecology.
It's a native species, but it's like deer. But overpopulation
of deer, overpopulation of juniper, they can both fuck up
the ecosystem. They can both lead to reductions. You know,
if you have just a monoculture of juniper woodland with
whatever else in it, you're not gonna have any of
the cool pedio mealums or oh punthia like the native
prickly pair they have on glades and Alabama. Alabama's got
some fantastic shit. Thank god for Kyle Liiberger. They're getting
people to appreciate grasslands. Man. Some of the stuff he's
been posting lately has just been a bummer. Man. I
don't know how he keeps his head up above it,
because it's so aggravating the development that's going on up there,
Like in Huntsville. It's the same shit they do here.
It's just totally mindless, incongruent with ecological reality, incongruent with future,
with the sustainable future, and just highly ignorant. There's I mean,
the people doing this, the developers, they go in, they
clear everything, they don't leave any of the trees. Then
they bring in horticultural atrocities like crape myrtle and all
this other you know, garb, and then they're trying to
do turf grass lawns. It's like, man, you've got all
these cool fucking natives, You've got the native prairies of
Alabama that are so underappreciated. It just drives me nuts.
Just got to be, you know, just the fucking development
that goes. And it's so sleazy too, like the people
doing this no offense right, no offense, full offense, the
ship bag developers and just all fucking you know, mar
A Lago face and fucking suits and all phony. You know,
just intellect of a fart, right creativity of a fart.
Just people who you know, subordinate, followed the rules their
whole life, never fucking you're just really good at following directions,
you know, so they can get their pat on their
head and you know, get theirs. They can go get theirs,
they can get like a like fucking fancy car to drive,
or go live in a mcmacha with a bunch of
other boring knobs. I really got some contempt for this stuff, right,
I just that's is that really the world you want
to live in? It's so fucking whack, it's so dead
on the inside, it's so sterilized and just lifeless. God,
I mean the developer, city politician connection, local politicians, and
developer like you never meet anyone cool who works for those.
I'm sure there's exceptions, I'm sure they exist. Have you
ever met a developer that seems like they actually be
fun to hang out with and doesn't just have like
this plastic shit eating grin and just just full of shit?
You meet these meet these people are just full of shit.
They're just good, it's smiling. They're full of shit, right,
full of shit. God of it reminds me that George
Carlin bit. You know, I'm just gonna go ahead and
play it full of shit, stupid or fucking nuts. You'll
be listening to some guy. This guy is fucking stupid.
Then there are some people they're not stupid, they're full
of shit. That doesn't take very long. This body that
doesn't take you about the same amount of time. You'll
be listening to some guy and saying, well, he's fairly intelligent.
He's full of shit anyway. And more depressing news, another
Mexican environmentalist was attacked, probably by cartel people or government there.
They're kind of the same in Mexico. There's a heavy corruption.
This dude in Niareate, this activist, land defender, environmentalist, Eric
Saracho s A R A c Cho. If you want
to look it up, Eric Saracho, Agui laru. They try
I guess they tried to kill him. He survived. I
guess he's in the hospital. This happened March eleventh. Yeah,
and Nioret Jesus Christ, this happened so much. Man, it's
so because they don't know. Mexico is so corrupt. Mexico
is so corrupt. And the cartels, I mean they run everything,
not just drugs. Like they they're demolishing a lot of
the butterfly the monarch Preserve in mitchell Acan, the Aby's
religiosa forces religious fur forests. Those forests are incredible. To them. Man,
it's like nine foot tall loopins and the understory with
all these mushrooms the other during mushroom season, it's incredible.
Now these Aby's religiosa force like nine thousand feet and
I guess cartels are cutting. They're log doing a bunch
of logging to put up fucking avocado fields. They have
their hands in everything. Drugs are like so little of
what the cartels do now it's literally it's like the
Italian mafia. They've got hands and everything. So I don't
know what he was, what was he working with? H
what was his main? What was this guy Eric Saracho's
main What was his jam? Uh? Yeah, he was just
raising awareness of socio environmental risks related to development projects
and the overall expansion of real estate and tourism so
phrases that threatens the ecosystems of the Mexican Pacific and
light of the tourism infrastructure boom in different parts of
the state, including Sayulita, Nuevo Varta, Plaia Lore Marcos and
the project for real estate development the construction of a
marina at Plia el monteon residents and Collectives of San
Panco of organized themselves demanding full access to information and
transparency from municipal, state, and federal authorities regarding pertinent environmental
impact statements and the granting of land use licenses that
can provide legal certainty of the populations to the populations
directly affected. Yeah, so developers are just coming. I mean
the whole economic model is of this economic model of
just development and tourism. Well the phrase of bullshit. You know,
you see a billboard with the glistening signs and the
fucking plastic face, you know, wearing too much makeup, with
the perfect teeth. It's like that's it's all part of
the same fucking poison. It's all part of the same
shit cookie this whole like culture that worships money and
want and it's all over the world, worships money and
wants the finer things in life. And it's just remember
when like growing up, there were cartoons. They were really
cartoons that made it like, you know, there was like
environmental awareness was just seemed more of a common thing
that everybody agreed on was good. You don't want to
ship where you eat, you don't want to fuck up
the planet, and here, it's been politicized, and you know,
business interests have done a really great job of marking
it as just the you know, anti growth, anti business,
just wacko environmentalists. And then but I mean it's everywhere,
it's it's it's a now that's all gone, there's no
like who cares, fuck earth and just loot what you can.
But for what that's not just what? I don't understand.
What do you do? You have all this, you have
all this money. You could drive fancy cars and have
like a turf grass lawn and a swimming pool and
a McMansion with you know, all glass windows. And then
what you like, what do you do with that? Like
that's not gonna make your life happy. You haven't had
a cool life full of experiences, and you haven't created things,
you haven't taught yourself a skill. You're just the fucking vacuole.
You're just the fucking you know, what do you do
with that? It seems so boring to me. It's it
always has even when I was a kid. And it's
so obvious too, like you just want this a lot
of this ship. You just want so you can impress
some fucking dummy that you know, you don't really know
or respect in the first place. It's all just primate
social signaling and social stratification. You know, at the end
of the day, we're just monkeys that want to be
noticed by our monkey peers. And once you realize that
you don't, you stop wanting this shit. Doesn't it seem
more ridiculous to you? I don't caire it like I
want to. I want to learn how to do things.
I want to travel, I want to, you know, I
want to have good experiences, whether I'm like laughing my
ass off, lighting my farts on fire around a bonfire
at you know, at a campfire at night, or whether
I'm having like a you know, a large dinner with
a bunch of friends and we're all having a great time.
Doesn't that seem more for I mean, that's the ship
that those are the moments that make life worth it,
not whether you have a fucking Jaguar, the automobile or
you know, or fancy stuff. I mean, you want to
be comfortable up up to a point, but beyond that,
doesn't it just get fucking boring? Like the wealthy always
seems so fucking boring to me, Just so boring. And vapid.
They're just holes. You know. The wealthy never create cool culture,
they never create art, they never make good music. They
just they're all just sniffing each other's farts. The reason
they the only reason the wealthy are ever into culture,
most of them, is so that they can you know,
it's it's social points. They have something to talk about
at their party or to or this. Knowing about this
gives you status. It's so fucking you know, do some
all That's what I say, Do some all, right, force
them to have a really bad trip and take away
their toys. But it Shit's part of the same culture
that's killed in the world. It's disgusting. They're fucking boring people, boring,
shitty people, plastic people, you know, not every which person.
Just you know, this type of value system when you
see it, you really do. Dumb is a brick. Not
a lot of content there, not a lot of substance,
relatively empty, and they have all the shiny shit, stupid
shiny shit. Really concerned what others think of them, Really concerned,
don't want to be embarrassed, don't want to be embarrassed
by anything, Really concerned about not looking weak or stupid,
or whatever, and all their energies put on how you know,
attractive they are or how tough they are they appear,
and then the shiny shit that they have it's got.
It's so fucking lame. It's like it's it's literally it's
like lowest common denominator chimp shit, that's like chimp behavior.
Chimps probably are smarter than that. It's just it's the dumbest.
It's bottom of the brainstem stuff, Like there's aim higher, man,
that's the most you want for your life really anyway, Uh,
this guy is still alive. Thank god they didn't kill him,
but they'll probably try again. It just sucks. This is
such This happens so much in Mexico and Central America.
I'm sure it happens in Old World tropics as well. Yeah, man,
I can't imagine what it's got to feel like, you know,
trying to protect the the insane and stupid members of
your species from decimating things that that you know are
the lifeblood of the entire world around you, you know,
and then getting getting attacked for it. You have to
risk your life to do it. God, it's it's especially
nauseating hearing about like the two real estate development and tourism.
Like wait, they want to build like hotels, so some
Fraser can go sit on the beach and it fuck
wants to go to the Who wants to go to
the beach? I got a beef with the beach. I
got a problem with the beach. It gets it's so
boring to me, But that's what I get. That's because
it's what the phrases love doing. It like sitting on
a beach. You go sit on the beach, You take
some selfies, We through sunglasses, check your phone, check your
social media every half hour. Sit on a beach and
just get his get his sun, tap, work on your tan.
Sit on the beach, check each other out, sniff each
other's farts, sniff sniff on each other like dogs. Go
go sit on the beach. I have no interest in
being on the beach because there's no plants there. I
don't what am I going to do on the beach.
I don't want to go swimming. You go swimming out
in South Padre down here, you're gonna get attacked by
a bull shark or something. Sorry about that went off on.
I got a little rantied, Eric, I got a little
hot but uh, I forgot to mention one thing I saw,
I say, when I was at uh at thorn scrub
and again it looks like shit, it's such a bad route.
Was a Verdin nest v r d I N. This
is a cool little bird. You should look it up.
V e r d I N Verdeen and it built.
We saw we found this nest that it but it
didn't have it wasn't just like an open top nest.
That wouldn't make much sense in a hot desert like
environment where you need to shield yourself from the sun.
So it was a nest with like a side door
came out the bottom. It was really cool. I had
no idea what it was, but it's obviously an adaptation
to hot and dry regions. You build a nest on
the side. And I sent it to a friend who's
a burder and then they told me, yeah, it's it
looks like a Verdin nest. Really fucking cool. How about that? Huh.
You know the effects of adapting to your region are
all around, except within human society. Not a lot of
whole not a lot, a whole lot of uh, not
a whole lot of adaptation here night, we're still trying
to grow turf, grass, lawns, just having open exposed parking lots.
And you know, we hate, at least in South Texas,
we hate trees because they're messy. We got it. It's
much better to just have all that land just open
and exposed to the hot sun because at least you
don't have a mess to clean up, the mess being
leaves and whatever detritus the tree might drop. Fucking fucking madness.
See that's what I say. It's incongruent. The little birdies
can can learn to survive in their climate, why can't we?
What is it like in Florida too? It's the same
kind of derange ship. People are just totally the culture.
People are just human. Culture is just totally out to
lunch with learning to you know, live where you learning
to appreciate where you live and figure out how to
how to you know, it's you can't. You can't do
the same shit you do in New England in Florida
or South Texas, you have to adjust much different climate. Anyway.
A couple of days ago, I stopped by ut RGV,
A excuse me, ut RGV. The community counts down here
and they're doing some really interesting work. I think there's
a guy I forget his name, but he leads one
of the bodany departments there and they're doing some really
interesting work with the thorn scrub species and they're growing
all these mesquites and a few texas ebonies, both mimosoid
legumes in PVC tubes, experimenting with three different diameters of
pc PVC tube. They literally just got four foot sections
of PVC tube filled with soil. And because these get
really deep tap roots, all the mimozoid legume trees that
do so well in the deserts get really deep tap
roots and uh, you know, stash everything in the ground,
try to reach some water. If you can build an
extensive roots system that goes very deep, and that makes
them great for you know, the hell strip two for planting,
because they don't go they don't go out laterally like
oak trees or sycamore roots do. They go down, so
they're not gonna fuck up the sidewalk. But anyway, and
so they've got three different diameters, ones like two and
a half inch ones diameter four foot two and a
half inch diameter four foot deep, the others like three, three,
maybe four inch diameter four foot deep, and then they
got like a six inch diameter, four foot deep tube
and all three they've got probably twenty of each, maybe
thirty of each, and each one is a ceiling in it,
and they were all sewn at the same time. They
all look great. None of them have chlorotic leaves, yellow leaves,
or dieback or anything. But the ones in the larger
diameter tube, not surprisingly, are maybe twice as tall as
the ones in the two and a half inch diameter tube.
And so and then that, you know, the more root
space you give it laterally, the bigger it's going to get.
There's also a larger volume of soil, so there's more
nutrients to pull from, and they don't dry out that volume.
Soil doesn't dry out as quickly. The larger the volume
of soil, the less time, the more time it takes
for it to dry out in between waterings, you know.
And so they've just got these things outside cooking in
the sun. They they're held in like a you know,
a four and a half foot tall wooden crate, and
they've got on the sunward side. On the south side,
they've got a board blocking it so the PVC doesn't
get hot. But it's really cool because I saw a
photo of that, photos about where one had been unearthed.
It would be cool if they could grow them in
clear tubes because then you could actually see it without
having to destroy the tree. But you could see the
tap root. But either way. I mean, you know, for
a six inch tall mesquite ceiling will have like a
thirty six inch deep tap root maybe four maybe four
feet deep, so what is it forty eight inch? So
I mean it really you could visualize it. You know,
the root is four to five times the length of
the shoot up top. And that's what makes them so
good at growing. And you know these silty clay soils
that bake in the in the sun and get extremely
dry and also to be able to deal with the
drying winds, et cetera. And you know I was at
a oh that and the rhizobial bacteria of course, that's
fixing atmospheric nitrogen, turning it into a usable form for
the plants, you know, using that nitrogenase producing root bacteria,
the Rhizobium bacteria. So anyway, and I was at a
spot today, you know, some bleak fucking development. It was
in far Edinburgh, one of these like major these big
South Texas cities where it was agfields and then they
cleared it, and then the mesquite and some of the
prickly pair took back over pioneer species once the agriculture
died out and it was abandoned, and then now they're
clearing it again to put up the most depressing, soulless
shit for brain, just completely shipped for brained buildings. Like
you know, if look at the climate here, these are
not the buildings you would think you'd be building in
the hottest climate in the United States. Right, Phoenix gets
individually hotter days, but Phoenix actually has cold winters. I
say this all the time. We don't have Death Valley
has cold winters. It gets cold. That's something in the
back of a truck in Death Valley. It's fucking cold,
and then it'll get really hot during today. So we
have but we've got stable and consistent heat throughout the
year except for like February. And so this kind of
shit with the large expanse of parking lot, no tree
cover whatsoever, Saint Augustine grass that you're watering, you're draining
the aqua for the water. That's fucking Saint augustine grass
you know that no one's gonna use. You're watering a
useless crop that no one uses. It just gets mode
and then mulched. It looks horrible, I mean. And then
just the most basic, bitch, lowest common denominator you know, landscaping,
none of it native, that they use, like these shrubs
to line these buildings. It just looks fucking bleak. And
then the massive strips of black asphalt that just turn
into heat mats in the sun. It's fucking miserable. And
then of course you have that around and no one
wants to go outside when everything looks like that, you know,
and no one knows what's being taken from them to
begin with, because the habitat's all been destroyed, and very
few people you know, in these places are into nature
to begin with, or hiking. It's just fast food, video games,
staying in your car, working your job, being good, taking
the little pat on the head, following the rules, and
that's it. That's life. And so but one of these lots,
you know, So do I figure what these buildings even house? Like?
When was a medical building? One was like some sort
of I don't know, they're like medical the medical industry
is huge down here, the health industry because there's so
many people that get metabolic diseases that it can be
so sick. Huge industry down here. That and border patrol,
very little manufacturing, oh in retail too, and so but
one of these lots hadn't been cleared and so there
were little patches of green around that. It was mostly
kr bluestem invading these recently graded, mostly barren clay lots
that are awaiting development. And there was Solanum eliagnefolium, which
is a relative of potatoes and tomatoes that forms a
tuber like root, has really cool radar disc purple flowers
with big yellow anthers. The bubble bees love it. It's
a great pioneer species. Weedy as hell, hard to get
rid of, but it's a native. There was Convolvulus equitans,
you know, which, like Solanum eliagnifolium, has this minty green
look to the leaves due to the presence of tiny
white pubescent hairs on it. That's an adaptation to drought
and wind and heat high heat. But then there were
these patches where the you know, you could tell there
was a mesquite there, but they were just getting mode. Right,
So it had this extensive roots system underground. If you
could look at it with like an X ray vision,
there was an extensive root system underground. But you know,
you get some guy in a riding mower going past
it every week or two in it back, and so
it's got multiple stems. But if you were to let
that thing just grow, you would, you know, and just
train one leader, like cut every every all the branches
except for one. Let it get kind of bushy. I
keep the solar panels out and I get like two
or three feet tall, and then trim all the sides.
But one develop a single leader. It might even be
good to just leave the shoot set so it can
build up that root system. It's going to make a
stronger plant and then well, you know, wait to prune it.
Prune it. For a single leader, you'd have a tree
that's built for this landscape, for this environment. You'd have
a mesquite that you know. Then they get big done here,
they get like, you know, thirty foot tall trees. There
was a gorgeous one on this lot that hadn't been
cleared yet. There was like a you know, a dead end,
one of those dead end signs like the railroad crossing
red and white color, and it looked like someone that,
you know, probably a drunk driver something had driven by it,
almost probably doing donuts there on the weekend at like
two am, you know, because just people drive drunk here
and everyone's getting hammered. There's not nothing else to really
do on the weekends. And but this misquite looks beautiful,
and it was in full flower and it was fucking
vivid green. And meanwhile, all the landscaping in these lots,
these commercial properties was just fucking dead. And it was
being watered too. They were spending tons of money to
irrigate this stuff, and the landscaping, the trees were all dead.
It was like non native oaks, like oaks you know
that grow on like the East Coast and like Maryland.
You're trying to get him to grow, you know, in
a in a fucking landscape where peote grows. He had
good luck. It's like, remind me that the dude in
West Texas who this this house got sold I think
the owner died. It was They had an amazing native
plant garden there. I don't know if someone taught at
the university there. What this is an Alpine Texas there
were gray foxes living in the yard. It was a
beautiful yard. A gave have Alaradiana, Lucophylum agarita growing there, everything,
all these wonderful native plants. They demolished it. This guy
moved there, didn't know anything about it, had some money,
demolished all of it, and then hired a landscaper to
come in. The landscaper did the weed fabric and cobbles thing,
and the dimulch looked fucking landscape of death, just so bleak,
and then planted an evergreen magnolia. You're planting an evergreen
magnolia from a you know, which is native to where?
Where are they native? Like Florida, Georgia, Mississippi. You know
climates that get like sixty inches of rainy year. You're
planting that in West Texas, which gets like eleven inches
of rainy year. Good luck, Holy shit. Anyway, I'll wrap
it up there, and it's an hour and forty five minutes.
For Christ's sakes, you're still listening, Jesus. Anyway, So I
got a couple things. I got a presentation on Wednesday,
March eighteenth at Wildwes dot Org. It's at six pm.
It's the lives. Well, it's supposed to be. It's a
live stream of a pre recorded so it's not really
a live stream, but you know, and that's nice. That
should be the attacks and the kind of horticultural atrocities
I talked a bit about in this podcast. It's about
an hour and a half long. And then what else?
I'm going to the Philippines in April. I got invited
to go with a couple botanists out of Manila doing
surveys in the cloud forests in the Central Philippines. And
then I got a book release thing April twenty third
at Quinta Mazatlan. And then what else the fuck do? I? Oh, yeah,
I'll beat the Carnivorous Plant Symposium in mid May. That's
May sixteenth, I believe, presenting plants, presenting on carnivorous plants
from both the Eastern and Western hemisphere, but everything in
the southern hemisphere. Well, no, there's a couple of Mexicans.
Got a couple of Mexican pings, including Pinguicula gypsicola. That's
May sixteenth. Where's where are carnivorous plant people have their
thing at it? It's in North Carolina. And then I'll
be I'll be sticking around North Carolina until May twenty second,
and then May twenty seventh through June roughly eighth or ninth.
I'll be on me and Al will be on tour
doing for the book release, and I'll be a Chloween
Native Plant Society thing. Well, what is it Kloween Native
I don't know it. It's something in Klowe, North Carolina. They're
doing a they're doing. Ah, I should find the name
of this. I don't know. People just tell me where
to be. It's too much for me to keep track of.
And it's you know, I'm not I'm not interested in
the boring details anyway. I just go there and run
my mouth and hang out with people. It's Callowe Native
Plant Conference and I believe that. A hold on, let
me look up wording and that'll be okay. Yeah, that'll
be a Western Carolina University in Kulowe, North Carolina. I've
been there once before, like two or three years ago.
It was a while ago, what was it twenty three
I've been in Brazil and I had the fly back.
My daughter got sick. Oh, it was fucking terrible. It
was an anxiety inducing it was an anxiety inducing for me.
And then August fourteenth to twenty first, to think I'll
be in Denver, got invited to speak at Denver Botanic Garden.
And then September seventeenth through the twenty first, I'll be
at the Aeroid Society in Miami. What a what a
funny city. Miami's I want to see the Pine Rock Lands. Oh,
it's real nice. It's nice to go over there. And
then I think after that, I'm fucking free and I
can travel around, you know, like for for pleasure to
go look at plants. And you know when I say pleasure,
I mean go spend twelve hours a day hiking up mountains,
photographing plants, getting stung by insects, cut up, and you know,
nowhere within sight of a single billboard. So anyway, all right,
well that's all I got. Have a recurret. They hopefully
get some out of that, and uh, I don't think if
there was anything, I think that's it. All right. You
just have a good you just have a good rest
of your day there, buddy, Okay, go buck yourself. Bye,