This is great. I have this vision we should all have two careers now. Our current M to F tech jobs and being farmers again. All of us. Like the industrial revolution has this last step. Back to farming but this time with tech.
Wouldn't this be inefficient, laborious, and dependent on a land distribution that's starkly at odds with the urban areas where this romanticized view of agriculture gets espoused by techies?
(TBC: Love hobby gardening, community gardens are cool, I hear some folks are doing cool stuff with urban agriculture, just seems weird to imagine it as a ubiquitous second career)
Home farming can make use of small spaces to farm some part of our diets. No need to transport the final product, o need to use a blanket of insecticides and herbicides because the manual labour of caring for each plant is very distributed. Regenerative farming is also trivial at this scale. Large scale farming is often as efficient as it is destructive.
This is a problem I often see when folks grow annuals. Perennials are way lower labor, and one of the reasons I encourage community gardens to avoid being entirely focused on annuals.
I learned this recently from another post here on HN:
"Brassica oleracea is a plant species that includes many common cultivars, such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan."
They’re really common here in the north of Portugal - everybody with a cottage garden, which is everybody, has a grove of them. They’re the principal ingredient in caldo verde (a soup that is eaten pretty much daily, by pretty much everyone) up here - further south they use collard greens, but here it’s all kale. When we moved here we were gifted a few plants, and two and a bit years on they’re going strong, and we’ve propagated them to a few dozen - ours aren’t 12 feet tall, more like 6, but either way, it’s a common home crop, and is mostly human, rather than animal, fodder.
As to walking sticks, haven’t seen them used for that here, but people do use the dried stems as trellises for beans and whatnot.
An amazing story that deserves a re-do, movies-wise. I'm pretty sure the underlying social conditions of the books' narrative are as relevant today as ever. Well, now I think of it, the blind enslaving the sighted might just be a tad on the nose for some ..
I'm in the UK but I was initially left wondering if it was something to do with New Jersey, it really isn't that clear. And I've been to Jersey in the Channel Islands (off France, not off California!)
Before we annoy any islanders, Jersey is not actually part of the UK.
More broadly, it's quite rare that things are this way round - usually when there's not much context the US interpretation applies more often than not.
> Before we annoy any islanders, Jersey is not actually part of the UK.
Jersey isn't part of the UK, but it's not exactly an independent country either.
If international diplomacy and constitutional law interests you, it's quite interesting.
Jersey is an autonomous, self governing Bailiwick and a Dependency of the Crown. It has an ISO country code and TLD, however the UK is responsible for representing the territory internationally in most cases, including at the UN. This is because the Crown delegates that responsibility to Her Majesty's Government. Jersey has no representation within the UK democracy itself and cannot sign international agreements independently, however it informally has relationships with lots of international bodies and other countries including the UK. Jersey has never been part of the EU and remains its own customs area. There are millions of other little warts and curious edge cases.
As someone from Jersey, I never quite know what to answer when someone asks what country I'm from.
> As someone from Jersey, I never quite know what to answer when someone asks what country I'm from.
So when do Jersey, Guernsey & Sark field their own Football and Rugby teams like England, Scotland & Wales, its not like the off-shore tax havens cant afford the talent!
Still I wonder what the vitamin K content is like for these 12ft plants and if they are any good for PotLikker?
Reminds me of Big Cabbage on the Sto Plains between Uberwald and Ankh-Morpork:
"Billing itself as the green heart of the plains, Big Cabbage boasts The Biggest Cabbage in the World, which turns out to be a building erected in stressed concrete to look like a hundred-foot high cabbage, in which a multitude of cabbage-related ideas may be wondered at, bought, and taken home as souvenirs of an exciting holiday. Cabbage Beer may be bought, as can cabbage cigars, rolled on the inner thighs of alluring young local maidens."
But like sibling says, it can only play in English leagues.
Also the thing about being a tax haven is that the government doesn't capture a huge percentage of the revenue flowing through it. The government is by no means poor, but it's not filthy rich either (unlike some of the inhabitants).
How are the leaves? I've let kale overwinter and it gets pretty tall but any new leaves in the spring are too fibrous and tough for my taste. I prefer collards in most cases. I'd be interested in what cultivar you grow.
The leaves are great, as long as you harvest them while they are green. I'm not sure what the cultivar is as I usually let them go to seed, collect the seeds and start over when they get too tall. Brassicas tend to cross pollinate, as far as I understand it. They get super tall, but I usually stop after 5 ft. and start over.
It seems to be specific variety called Brassica oleracea longata (mentioned in the article) although in some places (https://www.victoriananursery.co.uk/Walking-Stick-Cabbage-Se...) it's called Brassica oleracea palmifolia which is a more widely known variety (cavolo nero in Italian).
How is it with plant genetics / breeding and taxonomy? When do you assert that something's a specific variety and apply a name to it?
Like any other brassica leaf - really similar to broccoli leaves, if I had to nail it down. Nutty, savoury, hint of bitterness. The leaves are pretty tough though, and have some fascinating hydrophobic properties, so need chopping finely and then either frying or boiling until they’re soft.
There was a place in San Francisco called Darwin Cafe that had the best kale salad ever. It used a lot (though not 1:1) prosciutto fried in garlic oil and tossed with lemon and balsamic with almost equal parts parmasen. The recipe called for the kale to presoak a bit tossed with the lemon and some salt to break down some of the kale fibers and make it more palatable.
You might try Red kale, strip out the stems and chop finely, mix with blood orange, blueberries, avocado and loads of nuts (I do chopped & toasted walnuts and pecans). Little olive oil, salt and vinegar? Mmmm!
Kale is awesome because it gives salad so much structure for all the nice tasty squishy bits!
Lettuce is my least favorite leafy green. It's outdone in every way by spinach, kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts, or collard greens. It's one of the most American foods I can think of: in an attempt to eat healthy we found the most bland, nutrient free food possible.
This does not seem to contribute much to an article that is not about the "modern obsession" with kale and that indicates, if anything, that kale is not a mere modern contrivance (though perhaps its use as a human food has become rather faddish—a fad which it is fortunately easy to avoid simply by not partaking).
The article itself isn't really HN material is it? If it was about somebody writing a Lisp program that generated pictures of 2m high Kale growing on modern pictures of Jersey it might be more interesting. As it is, cows eat green things, news at 11. Even the author at Atlas Obscura seems bored by it.
I make jokes frequently, and rarely get downvoted for them. They're rarely standalone. They're topical and non-obvious. Low-hanging fruit is punished here. Most jokes people happen to make are low-hanging fruit. It's like the reverse "lucky 10,000" effect: if you think something is funny, it's probably because it's novel to you. Meanwhile, the rest of us have seen that joke, on the internet, too many times already. Uninteresting comments go down. Also, delivery makes the joke: just like sarcasm, the medium isn't doing you any favors.
That's the sort of joke that you make and take your lumps for. Sometimes the feeling strikes you and you can't resist. Getting downvoted makes it funnier. The lowest you can go is -4 so it isn't even like you lose that many fake internet points for it.
I've seen enough of this crowd to not be surprised at any ridiculous thing that happens here. Like having a 50 page Very Serious argument back and forth about some minor, irrelevant detail, possibly having nothing at all to do with the actual article, but a simple joke gets downmodded because ZOMG HOW INAPPROPRIATE. Or lest we forget, the various articles about things this crowd clearly knows nothing about, like politics or economics, but everyone has an opinion about anyhow.
By the way, given the frequent gasps of horror which are heard here when people are confronted with the horrifying suggestion that Microsoft is an evil corporation and people should use Linux or BSD instead, along the lines of "but I might have to compile my own wifi drivers tho! egads!", or those who are appalled at the idea of system startup using shell scripts ("the barbarity!") or the frequent snarky remarks that C is a terrible, horrible, no-good "unsafe" language that is unsuitable for any use (despite virtually everything else in the world depending on it), etc, etc, it's quite charitable to describe this as being a forum for "Hackers." In many cases, it's more like just a bunch of pretenders and wannabes.
I read your comment profile, and know exactly what you mean about the "cancel culture." This is the first profile I've had here where I've actually managed to get a little positive 'karma' built up and avoid immediately getting downmodded into oblivion and run out on a rail. My very first account here a couple years ago, as a bright eyed noob, was literally shadowbanned within 15 minutes, which absolutely blew my mind.
The moderation system here is seriously broken, and has the effect of creating a toxic echo chamber of humorless trigger-happy goons. I've read a lot of complaints about it in various articles over the years, by names who no longer seem to be around. The response always seems to be EWONTFIX.
Indeed. The issue I had here was not that there was a joke in a place of solemnity, but that it was an old and low-effort joke that also didn't add to the discussion.
https://www.projecttreecollard.org/
They grow great in California (and places with a similar climate), producing harvestable leaves year round.