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Redwood Leaves

Redwoods have two types of leaves, one to make food and the other to absorb water. This makes sense, given that they are ecosystem engineers. Such species often have tools that others don't.

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Maybe local soil is to trees what colostrum is to mammals?

Yeah, I think I've watched too many episodes of Call the Midwife or something. Ah, well, at least they have decent EFA/emotional labor skills, unlike most other medical dramas.

Colostrum = nurse logs. Redwoods have a very hard time growing anywhere else. Similar with spruce and hemlocks in a temperate rainforest.

Hunh. Interesting. I'd wonder if species or kinship between log-and-seedling affect the effectiveness. There's stuff about antibodies factoring into human mate selection.

Also, now I want to see a scifi with a terraforming spaceship where the decor is designed to break down to feed seedlings...

Well, whenever I die on a planet I'm terraforming, I customarily leave instructions to stuff my mortal remains into whatever equipment we've got roaming the environment to spread microlife. I can give it a good solid boost. On a good run, you can see the path green up a few days later. :D

I imagine spacefarers and terraformers would likely have a far more pragmatic attitude towards corpses than many terraformed-planetbound groups. Which would freak out already terraformed folks - Courtship Rite, for example.

One day it would be an interesting experiment to see how far one could get from an Earthbound 'concept of civilization' and still be functioning humans.

Planning to go there myself. Keeping an eye on body farms, composting, etc. I want to return this lump of flesh to the biosphere as quickly as I can once I'm done with it.

Go you! Green burial is awesome.

Nurse logs and commensals may be crucial to the growth of many organisms.

I watch a YouTube channel about a woman who raises sheep. When the lambs are born, they may not be strong enough to stand up and find their mother's udder. She buys a powdered mixture of "instant lamb colostrum" and mixes it with water to bottle-feed the new little lambs. She also has a machine that dispenses a solution of this powder through a system of rubber nipples installed inside the sheep barn, so the stronger lambs can get up and drink from it at need. And then they get big enough to eat silage and grain and "adult" foods. (Baby lambs are unbearably cute.)

Apparently redwoods communicate with each other through their roots. And the squirrels apparently know that the redwoods coax rain and fog out of the upper atmosphere. And as I said, the New Hampshire pine trees needed ferns, soil, and other stuff from their native soil. There's a concept called the "landrace" - a particular subset of a specific organism that is native to a particular location.

>> Apparently redwoods communicate with each other through their roots.<<

They can also support each other through root grafts.

>> And the squirrels apparently know that the redwoods coax rain and fog out of the upper atmosphere. And as I said, the New Hampshire pine trees needed ferns, soil, and other stuff from their native soil.<<

Interesting.

>> There's a concept called the "landrace" - a particular subset of a specific organism that is native to a particular location. <<

More adapted to it. Some landrace crops have later become cultivars, and some landrace livestock have become breeds, but part of what really distinguishes a landrace is its genetic diversity and that usually gets lost in trying to stabilize it. I'm planning to write about landrace gardening this spring.

I'll be interested in seeing that - I don't know a whole lot about gardening (I have a "brown thumb". I had an aloe vera plant that got salt water into its pot during Superstorm Sandy, and of course it died. So did all my hydroponic watercress.)

The pine trees in central New Hampshire, as well as the maple trees, seem to be perfectly evolved for the environment where they grow. (And nothing beats the flavor of old-fashioned maple syrup. Which has the lowest glycemic index of any kind of natural sweetener. WE'd always buy a gallon of syrup in the summer, and take it home to have on waffles and pancakes over the winter.) There were also some people who made jam from fruits that grew wild in the forest - grapes, strawberries, and they also made a champagne jelly that was amazing. So we'd bake homemade bread in the wood-fired stove, cut big thick slices and toast them over the coals, and spread with butter from the dairy on the other side of town, add some jam, and that was breakfast fit for woodland royalty. (Or make French toast to put maple syrup on).

*wist* That sounds wonderful.

I love maple syrup.

I'm thinking about making an ice cream topping with fruits that grow here.

I would expect the fruit that grows near you to be mostly berries, and maybe apples (John Chapman got around a lot). I don't even like fruit - but the wild grapes and rasberries made wonderful jam. There were four women who had been in the military in WW 2 - two from the Army, two from the Navy. And apparently they were two couples. They build a house, and one of them built a Hammond organ from a kit, and began recording herself playing the organ and singing (usually well-known hymns) and selling the recordings. And paying local young people to go out in the woods and pick fruit to make jam. They also had a deal going with three women (a 3some) on the other side of the hill who made ceramic knicknacks, which they designed to hold jars of jam in a pretty container (you could use it as a planter after you ate the jam). Things got pretty exotic in the woods of New Hampshire :-)

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Redwood Leaves

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