OFA has an article on what to add to your soil in the spring. Here’s what we do. Three of our five raised beds have no contact with the soil so they need a bit more help. For those, we:

• use a garden mix from our local landscape company to fill them almost back to the top;
• bring them all the way to the top with purchased compost;
• fill in around plants with castings from our little worm farm.

For the areas where we plant directly in the ground, we first:

• put down cardboard to kill the grass and weeds, and
• cover that with mulch.

Once those areas are established, we simply add a fresh layer of compost every year. It seems to be working–there are worms active all over those areas, just beneath the surface.

I seem to have found myself in a terminological drift. Green Man’s Grotto originally referred to the notch behind the garage, bounded by the fence. This was the first area we planted outside the two original raised beds. While it’s not literally cave-like, the name made a certain sense. But now I find myself referring to the whole backyard as Green Man’s Grotto, which is nothing at all like a cave. This will have to be corrected.

New video: March 2024 in the Grotto. Two videos in one day! Will he keep up this breakneck pace? Assuredly, he will not.

New video: Nessie lives!. Wherein our killer bullfrog appears for the first time this season.

Rhyd Wildermuth has just published an excellent article on degrowth (paywalled).

Put as simply as possible, degrowth states that the relentless expansion (“growth”) that capitalist economies rely upon to survive (and to outrun the crises they create) has a limit. Once that limit is reached and can no longer be postponed, they will then contract in often violent and tragic ways.

And he uses an excellent analogy with credit cards:

Readers in the United States will already be familiar with the analogy I’m about to use for this, while European readers will no doubt struggle with some disbelief that such a thing is even possible. In America, it’s possible to get a credit card without sufficient funds or collateral to show you can pay back what you borrow. Wilder still, once you’ve spent the limit of that first card, you can then get another one from a different provider, max it out, and then get a third, fourth, and even more. You can even use the credit from one card to pay down the minimum balance on another or even transfer balances, constantly juggling your debt load until you’ve gotten yourself into a terrifying abyss.

What often happens for the person using this strategy is that each subsequent credit card comes with a higher interest rate than the previous ones, and there’s a system of debt tracking (a “credit score”) which determines what this rate will be and what the credit limit will be. The more in debt you get, the higher the interest rate you’ll have to pay back, and eventually it all catches up to you.

Degrowth asserts that this is precisely what capitalist societies have been doing since the very beginning: borrowing against a future moment in which they hope they’ll be able to pay it all back.

Fossil fuels are the best example of this problem. They function as a line of credit to allow increased production, consumption, and accelerated technological change, while their invisible consequences (atmospheric carbon release) accumulated the way compound interest on a credit card does. We’re now starting to max out this line of credit, and will soon need another line.

Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear are potential alternatives, but again as with the credit cards, they each come with their own hidden fees and variable interest penalties. For all those alternatives, you need a large initial input of energy just to build them. The minerals required to build solar panels and the batteries involved all require energy to mine, refine, and create, while uranium mining and refining also require large initial energy inputs.

Where does that initial energy come from? Currently, fossil fuels — from one line of credit to another — all to make sure we can keep increasing the amount of energy available for technological solutions to the other problems our technologies cause.

Degrowth looks at this problem the way most of us might view a friend constantly getting new loans to pay back other loans. Just as we might ask, “why not cut back on your spending?” degrowth proposes we question the core value of capitalist expansion. It then asks what life might be like if we tried to live within our limits, tried to pay down the debts we’ve accrued (in the form of environmental damage and resource depletion). What might it be like if we stopped borrowing against the future?

My first real introduction to degrowth was Jason Hickel’s book. And based on Rhyd’s article, looks like I need to read this book by Kohei Saito.

Trillium on a moss-covered rock

First spring ephemeral I’ve spotted in Murray Forest this year: cut-leaved toothwort

Worth reading: “The IKEA Humans” by Samuel Biagetti

Jennifer and Jason are drawn to IKEA because it reflects who they are: they too are modern, movable, and interchangeable, their wants satisfiable in any neighborhood with a food co-op and a coffee shop. More fundamentally, Jennifer and Jason are untraceable, a “composite material” made from numberless scraps and pieces. They have a long catalog of home towns, and their accents are NPR neutral. They can probably rattle off the various nationalities in their family trees — Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Jewish, maybe some Venezuelan or Honduran for a little color. From these backgrounds they retain no more than a humorous word or phrase, a recipe, or an Ellis Island anecdote, if that. They grew up amidst a scramble of white-collar professionals and went to college with a scramble of white-collar professionals’ kids. Their values are defined mainly by mass media, their tastes adorably quirky but never straying too far from their peers’, and like the IKEA furniture that they buy in boxes, they too cut themselves into manageable, packaged pieces and market themselves online. They are probably “spiritual but not religious.” They have no pattern or model of life that bears any relation to the past before the internet. For all intents and purposes, they sprang up de novo in the modern city.

Peter Larson, A Year and a Day on Just a Few Acres:

Every place on the Earth has its own, unique energies. When I was an architect, I learned how to sense these energies, define them, and put them into terms others could understand. Healthy, living places were made, or most often grew, via working with, not against, their underlying energies. I think people used to sense these energies of place more than they do now, and used to value them more than they do now. The loss of this sense had increasingly allowed economics to dictate the qualities of places, and resulted in the creation of more and more “dead” places: shopping strips, placeless housing subdivisions, whole centers of communities blown out for corner drug stores and parking lots.

Worth reading:

• “Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI” by Erik Hoel
• Dougald Hind’s reply to the above, “The Hand Made Web”