Latest Page Discussions/Comic Update Chitchat

[thorny]

There are such plants. And in the region where I am from they where traditionally grown before growing wheat or barley. They where not edible but they bring a lot of nitrogen into the ground. Growing nothing edible for regenerationin in my opinion is a clear sign that nitrogen was the limiting factor for agriculture.

There are also such plants which do produce food for humans: quite a lot of them. All of the beans and peas, just to start with.

Nitrogen can be a limiting factor; but it's not nearly as limiting as the fertilizer sellers want everyone to think.

OK, that I can believe. But the minor problem with this scenario is that that entire vault in Svalbard isn't going to simply hand you proven-suitable crops for an ecosystem that just fell out of the mixer and has never existed on the planet before. In order to solve a problem of that magnitude, we'd need experiments, cross-breeding, possibly downright genetic manipulation, possibilities which the post-Rash society, reduced to subsistence farming, may simply not have ...

The same problem's going to exist without Svalbard, though. Increasing the stock people have to work with, by adding in seed from Svalbard, wouldn't make it easy, but it would make it more likely to succeed.

I presume the seed stored in Svalbard includes descriptions of what's known about each variety; I doubt people would have to take things at random with no idea whether they were likely to be suited to Egypt or Iceland. They'd choose samples of varieties known to produce in difficult conditions, and in the type of difficult conditions they were experiencing. True, a lot of them wouldn't work well -- but that would also be true of what they'd scavenged out of gardens and very true of what they'd scavenged out of farms.

And experiments and cross-breeding are what farmers have been doing ever since the first people started farming. Subsistence farmers do that all the time. That's how they got all those varieties of potatoes bred for best production in each microclimate on each soil type; plus which, of course, that's how we got just about all the crops we now rely on for food, in anything remotely resembling modern form.


ETA: there are also varieties that do better than others at dealing with variable conditions. Many modern agricultual varieties are what I call "perfect conditions" crops: if they get just the right recommended dose of NPK, the right amount of irrigation water, the right schedule of application of insecticides and fungicides and herbicides: lots and lots of crop! (Very likely tasteless and low nutrition per bite, but lots and lots of crop.)

But plant those things in erratic conditions and/or when those inputs are unavailable, and they're worthless or next to worthless; while a variety that was bred many years ago to keep people from starving even when things weren't ideal won't ever produce quite as much as the perfect-conditions crops will if they get those conditions -- but will produce a fair amount of crop under a wide range of conditions.

[Róisín]

The old crops are also more likely to be hardier and high in the nutrients that people actually need. And there is no reason that farmers can’t go on breeding and selecting as they have always done, saving seed from their strongest, most productive and disease resistant plants. Or indeed developing new varieties, in the same way that most of our cultivated brassica crops are descended from varieties of wild seakale.

There should also be a return to serious composting, soil improvement and the ancient practice of dunging: that is, while a field is lying fallow between food crops farmers used to turn livestock into the area to forage, which meant that they cleaned up stubble or weeds and other debris from the previous crop, thereby lowering the risk of pests and diseases persisting in the soil between crops, and in Australia also for preventing stubble fires. Burning stubble in a controlled manner can be useful for destroying fungal pests such as moulds and grain rusts, but if that isn’t a problem livestock can also keep stubble low until it is ploughed in, as well as feeding those animals and fertilising the soil with their droppings. Even now most organic farmers already do this.

There are also techniques such as crop rotation to prevent a buildup of family-specific pests and diseases between years, as well as to control the depletion of specific nutrients in the soil. This basically means that plants of the same family should not be planted in the same plot year after year, for example tomatoes, potatoes and eggplant should not follow one another. Plus soil-enriching plants such as peas and beans should precede hungry crops such as cabbage or tomatoes………

Don’t start me on this topic, it is one of the things I teach as a volunteer at our local community garden, and I won’t shut up for hours!

[JoB]

Don’t start me on this topic, it is one of the things I teach as a volunteer at our local community garden, and I won’t shut up for hours!

[goes online shopping for an industrial-sized-flywheel mouse]

[thorny]

Minna has said that she will leave the story in a place where she can pick it up if at some far future time she feels like it. Now don’t get your hopes up, this is not a likely possibility. But just to take into comments about the letter. So, some sort of new job / mission opportunity seems likely.

I wonder whether she's going to leave them pretty much right here?

They're together; they're temporarily safe, or as safe as anyone is in that world. Emil's got his private bed, currently complete with sleepy cat. They're at least possibly stuck where they are for several months. As it now stands, maybe they're going to Norway, or maybe they're going to investigate this mysterious unspecified job -- and maybe it'll stay unspecified, just so that if ten or twenty years from now Minna wants to come back to this she can decide then what she wants the job to be, instead of pinning it to something specific now.

And fanfic can come up with a hundred different ideas as to what the job might be, or as to what might await them in Norway, or what might happen en route to the job or to Norway or even right where they are just now --

[JoB]

And fanfic can come up with a hundred different ideas as to what the job might be, or as to what might await them in Norway, or what might happen en route to the job or to Norway or even right where they are just now --

"We need you to go to Dalsnes and bust out our mastermind Trond. He went to visit family there, and the local authorities promptly had him locked up in that retirement home again!"

[tehta]

Good point, JoB: the job could actually be IN NORWAY.

(But, allegedly, the ancient viking culture was not into retirement homes...)

[JoB]

(But, allegedly, the ancient viking culture was not into retirement homes...)

... you mean they ran out of nurses?

[Róisín]

Though there is that bit in Egil’s saga where Egil, in extreme old age and beset by his Christian descendants who are eager to inherit the proceeds of his long and adventurous life, in which he has among other deeds been part of the Vinland expedition, and survived, and been court poet to several kings. So at a time when the greedy young relatives are out of the house he bundles up the most portable of his wealth and with the help of one of the household servants hauls it to the cliff at the edge of the fjord, where he tosses the gold and gems over the edge, teaches the servant his last satirical poem to recite to the relatives, and himself follows the treasure over the cliff, laughing and invoking the old gods. I like that.

[Vulpes]

Does the object that I assume is meant to be a shrub on panel 6 of page 542 look like a giant teddy-bear head to anyone else?

[Róisín]

I noticed that and was puzzled.

[thorny]

Considering the "shuf shuf" in the same panel, I think it might be supposed to be a bear.

It's a very odd looking bear, if so; looks almost like it's made out of leaves. And it's right after the panel with the bear skulls; which presumably has been returned to for some reason?

Apparently we'll get two pages a week for the rest of January, and that if I'm reading the notes correctly before the possible one-page-a-week epilogue. So maybe there'll be more about the bear bush; though I'm no longer counting on anything.

[Suominoita]

Oh it totally looks like a bear eating berries. It is something Finnish bears are known to do all summer -- eat loads before hibernating.

[Jitter]

I agree to such degree that I’m amazed anyone is seeing something else than a bear It’s got its head down, eating the bilberries, and we see the top of the head with the ears and brows, and behind the head the shoulders.

Placed with the Kallohonka panel like this I assume it has something to do with the rebirth of the bear family.

[Vulpes]

Aaaah, now I see it properly! It's the catastrophist in me, I figured it was a quiet scene of shrubbery with something sinister going shuf shuf, but really, if this is pretty much The End we can't have Surma dragging itself out of the bushes, can we? So yeah, now I see the shoulders. It still looks like a bush to me, though. :'D   Instead of a bush that looks like a bear, now I see it as a bear that looks like a bush. And Jitter, thanks, now I see the bilberries! Makes me hungry...

[lwise]

It seems like Minna has basically lost all interest in the team and is more interested in the bears.