A fairly reliable choice in a wide range of conditions, but unfortunately not very goopy.

Possibly pushing your definition of “cucumber” a bit, but Cucumis anguria comes to mind. Probably not fit for the swamp, but in a container in full sun, it could work.

Ah, so I guess you don’t spend so much time sawing high branches then. Would you let the field reforest itself or just continue to mow it?

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

:)

Are your avocado trees seedlings or grafted? If grafted, you might try to ID them by comparing to the cultivars featured here. Pollination does seem like the most likely issue, but sometimes trees just aren’t strong enough to set fruit. Do they seem just as healthy as before? No strange weather anomalies during flowering?

I’ve never heard of Lemon Meringue mango before, but it sounds interesting! I’ve heard of Lemon Zest which is supposed to be delicious.

Did your Honeycrisp survive?

three sisters

You might consider Fordhook lima beans and Delicata squash. I’ve heard good things. Do you have purslane (Portulaca oleracea) there? If you let it colonise the garden beds, it makes a weed-suppressing moisture-retaining arthropod-sheltering edible ground cover.

Pruning hasn’t been an issue yet, but I will need to more actively manage the raspberries this year.

Yes you will, lest they begin to manage you. I recommend growing them over a fence or some wire or some sort of trellis and then pruning the ends before they can touch the soil and tip-layer themselves. Life is easier that way.

In the future I’m hoping to add lots more edible native shrubs, and maybe more trees if I can find good spots for them.

Some ideas in alphabetical order:

• Amelanchier laevis
• Asimina triloba
• Diospyros virginiana
• Prunus americana (if you don’t have plum blight there)

Last year one bin produced enough to cover about one and a half of my 4x8 ft garden beds

So you cover the surface of your garden beds with compost? That’s the way. Protect the soil from erosion while keeping the nutrients near the surface where the roots can reach them. A generous layer of mulch over the winter is also helpful, especially if the beds will be vacant.

I don’t really expect to get fully self sufficient on compost anytime soon, but I’ll keep producing as much as I’m able.

Do you compost your poop? Mixed with wood shavings, that could make a fair amount of compost.

One consideration is the seasonality of the fruits that you grow. Additional fruit-bearing plants would ideally produce during gaps between the other fruit seasons so that you have a continuous harvest for as much of the year as possible. That’s something that will be specific to your area though, so I can’t really advise.

If you toss in any native plant seeds that you can find and then don’t mow, the lawn will eventually reforest itself. (If you were in North America, I would recommend Robinia pseudoacacia.) Less work than mowing 1-3 times a year. In the beginning, pulling the grass at the edge of the clover can help a lot, and it only takes a few minutes every month or so.

Not Bangladesh?

archived (Wayback Machine)

record annual jump cited (Wayback Machine)

Please note that this article contains questionable arithmetic:

That brings the annual mean global concentration close to 430 ppm, about 40 percent more than the pre-industrial level, and enough to heat the planet by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius).

The actual figure from NOAA is 428.15 ppm (last updated 2025-04-14). If we use the more precise pre-industrial estimate of 278 ppm, then we get an increase of 54%, which is indeed “about 40%” if we round to the nearest multiple of 40%.

Climate models tend to underestimate the cooling effect of aerosol pollution, and the climate sensitivity is actually about 50% greater than previously thought, so a more realistic estimate of the warming caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration over the pre-industrial level is 4.5°C. If we assume that the relationship is linear, this means that the current level of 428.15 ppm is “enough to heat the planet” by 4.5°C * 54% = 2.43°C, which is… more than 1.5°C.

the 2023-2024 spike of the global average surface temperature, which has also not been fully explained

Yes it has.

WAAAAAAAAY too much grass.

Ah, of course. If you depend on the government and human-made infrastructure, New Zealand and Finland and the like are definitely more reliable than any countries at the equator. (Except Singapore? Interesting.) Governments don’t grow durian though.

Severe weather events in New Zealand

I know that New Zealand has the ocean to buffer it against temperature extremes, but based on this image:

it seems that the island of New Guinea, which is also east of the Wallace Line, has experienced similarly mild warming in recent decades. Maprik (3.63°S, 143.05°E) at ~200m, for example:

seems to have a much more durian-friendly climate than even areas at sea level on the north island of New Zealand (e.g. Ahipara).

And that’s not even Borneo. What is the advantage of New Zealand? Am I missing something?

archived for posterity

Best way to protect yourself is to find some land at a comfortable elevation near the equator and start planting fruit trees.

Not even fair to compare to 2024. This year is on track to be the warmest non-El Niño year on record.

Some highlights:

Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.” Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too.

In her Atlantic piece, Bruenig argues that the left should claim the right-wing birth-rate rhetoric in order to justify putting forward modest welfare policy increases. Well, at least for those who have children. But at the same time, instead of taking a moment to wonder if Millennials having fewer kids will really lead to human extinction, she unfurls her banners and from the parapet declares triumphantly: “humankind is excellent—the paragon of animals”! This is a pretty unequivocal reinforcement of a particular human supremacist ethic. This ethic, also gleefully championed by fascists like Matt Walsh, is central to the value system currently annihilating life on earth and is apparently shared by every commentator on this issue. This idea can be found running through not just Bruenig’s leftism and Walsh’s rightism, but through Ezra Klein’s centrism as well. His “abundance agenda” espouses spreading human development and quietly accepting the demise of all the wildlife that would have otherwise inhabited the land being developed, or whose habitat will suffer the consequences of expanded fossil fuel energy systems, like catastrophic climate change.

But the bigger problem with Walsh’s argument is that it only makes sense if you care about the quantity of human life more than the quality of human life. Sure, it is technically low cost to impregnate someone. But in the U.S., providing a stable, healthy, safe, and enriching upbringing for a child has become increasingly difficult due to rising costs of living, stagnant wages, and disinvestment in public goods and services. When someone is making a choice about whether to have a child, they ought to be anticipating loving that child and wanting the best for them. So a rational person should look at the conditions in which the child would be raised and make an educated judgment about whether they would be able to provide safety and stability. The world as it is simply contains a scarcity of these things, and they are diminishing thanks primarily to the actions of leaders committed to Walsh’s ideology.

When authoritarians bemoan falling birth rates, they’re not really concerned about children’s health and well-being or about imminent human extinction. They’re concerned with maintaining a certain system of production that is dependent on cheap, abundant, and disposable labor.

Essentially, Cowen is suggesting eliminating programs for the elderly and the poor and diverting that money to subsidize childbearing people. His mention of Christian Science is telling, as adherents of this sect tend not to live as long as the general population. He doesn’t say it explicitly, but by focusing on eliminating welfare for older and poorer citizens, he is advocating for a demographic strategy of producing lots of offspring and letting the ones he deems less evolutionarily fit, mainly the older and poorer, die off. This is called “r-selection” among other species. It’s a strategy used by creatures, like some rodents, fish, and insects, often when there is environmental scarcity of resources. Apparently it’s a strategy that Cowen sees fit for humans. We need to call this what it is: a clear example of 19th-century social Darwinism and a grim case of, like Walsh, another far-right authoritarian advocating for quantity of human life over quality of life. It is a view of life that is fundamentally incompatible with maximizing well-being, health, and happiness for all.

Whether delusion or propaganda or both, “demographic collapse” is a false problem. The fact is, the human population will absolutely never disappear due to a low fertility rate, unless there is some environmental impact on the physiological ability to reproduce.7 This is not impossible, given all the known and unknown effects of chemicals and plastics permeating the environment, which are already negatively impacting hormones and reproductive health.8 Microplastics have been found in every human testicle—and region of the planet—where they’ve been looked for. But even with these pressures, the human population continues to grow (while wildlife continues to decline).

If the quantity of human life does one day stop growing and actually starts to decrease, it is likely that, in many places, if history is any guide, the quality of human life will be fine and could even increase with it. Perhaps more importantly today, the quality and quantity of non-human forms of life—which, unlike Musk’s mass-human-extinction lie, are in a state of actual mass extinction—would receive a vital respite. More forms of life would have more good opportunities to exist. As with many other issues, if the right wing’s greatest fears were to come true, it would almost certainly be fine for everybody… except, maybe, a few oligarchs.

archived version (Wayback Machine)

Partly because many recently deforested areas (mainly in Mato Grosso) were “legally” reclassified from Amazon to Cerrado. Either way, there is still massive deforestation going on, no matter how anyone manipulates the statistics.

Are you sure that the trees aren’t Dunstan chestnuts?

Well done. Thank you for this detailed analysis.

Let us not forget also the role of grass in enabling the herding culture.

Hamilton added that it’s also unusual for two North Atlantic right whales to stick together unless they’re mother and calf, which Koala and Curlew are not. Researchers have been tracking Koala since her birth in 2009 and Curlew since hers in 2011; the pair have been seen swimming together for the last several months.

The reason for this will probably never be known except to those two whales, but… it’s possible that some whales are gay. And that’s okay.