Turtlesong Farm

Turtlesong is 25 acres of mostly hay field on strip-mined land, and some wooded creek bottom. Add a few chickens, a donkey, a handful of goats...and maybe it's a farm. My last great project is going to be reforesting most of it. Or, to be more accurate, beginning the reforesting.

@LockedAccountL @EmbracingTara I also am a woman. You just don't like being told you have internalized misogyny. And from one woman to another, you are not representing us very well with your condescension. Do better.

@EmbracingTara I am a woman. You just don’t like being called out. That’s the problem. And from one woman to another, you are not representing us very well with your tantrums. Do better.

I went to purchase a car yesterday, and they were so condescending and lied to me at least four times about both the car and the process (of which I was fully researched) that I wasted literally 3 1/2 hours of their time beating them down on the price and then I walked away anyway. They chased me to my car twice. Totally worth it. The lesson is, don't condescend to or lie to women (or anyone) to try to get a sale. I was fully prepared to purchase prior to that.

@Hermesthethrice @yifever We do.

@yifever Oh shut the hell up. Its just a bowl of noodles soup. Imagine an American talking about a cheese burger this way.

never ask me for food recommendations if you're coming to Tokyo. "any ramen places you recommend?" like bitch we do not have a shared mutual understanding of ramen, to you ramen is just a bowl of soup noodles but to me it's a religion. I can trace the lineage of every ie-kei place back to yoshimuraya before you can even finish looking up the nearest ichiran beside your hotel. I have 300 points saved up on the nakamoto app and my local ramen shop gives me extra chashu for ordering the correct option everytime. to ask me for food recommendations is like asking LeBron James for shooting tips. We are eight leagues apart and nothing I can say to you will resonate in your uncultured brain for even a millisecond. but yeah just go to ichiran

@Crypt1cGengar @PolicyEnjodgn9 Absolutely. We've planted a few American chestnut, some hybrids, some Chinese.... looking forward to seeing what likes it here

@TurtlesongFarm @PolicyEnjodgn9 Those are absolutely all good reasons to dedicate space for the tree if you can manage it!!

Soooo many people gloss over the fact that many, if not most, of those dead American chestnut trees WEREN'T killed by the fungus. The timber industry rushed to cut down millions of healthy chestnuts "to combat the spread of the disease" while making bank themselves

@Crypt1cGengar @PolicyEnjodgn9 The key phrase there is "if you're lucky." Definitely, try growing the trees. Definitely, if you're lucky, you'll get a few pounds of nuts out of the tree before it succumbs to blight. And if you're REALLY lucky, the tree will show some resistance. And that will be cool 🙂

@TurtlesongFarm @PolicyEnjodgn9 From everything I’ve seen they can produce nuts within 5 years and people who work in ecology restoration peeps try and encourage growing the trees regardless of the blight — even touting that you can enjoy the nuts yourself if you’re lucky

Native plant roots grow 5 to 15 feet deep. Your lawn's roots go 4 to 6 inches. Big bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass, compass plant, and all the native grasses and forbs of the American prairie put more of themselves underground than above it. Up to 90% of a prairie plant's biomass is in the root system. Some species can reach as far as 15 feet down. Those roots hold the soil, recharge groundwater, store carbon by the ton, and survive drought because they're tapped into water tables that lawn roots can't reach. Kentucky bluegrass, the standard American lawn, has roots 4 to 12 inches deep. It can't reach water past the first hot week of August without you turning on the hose. Roughly 30 to 60% of municipal fresh water in this country is sprayed on lawns trying to keep them alive against their own design. The reason your lawn dies in summer isn't just the heat. It's that the grass you planted didn't evolve to live where you live, while the plants that did are being pushed out as weeds. Replace one section. Even 200 square feet of native plantings does more for your soil, your water table, and your local wildlife than the rest of the lawn combined.

@didivibes308 And were cutting before. They did use the fungus as a good excuse to pick up the pace

@TurtlesongFarm yeah but the timber industry didn't need the fungus to cash in. they'd've cut regardless

@jenelaina @PolicyEnjodgn9 The chestnut flour ad says "chestnuts grown by our network of trusted Michigan growers". There's not enough American chestnuts left in the world to create one full orchard, let alone a network of orchards. But I could be wrong.

@jenelaina @PolicyEnjodgn9 Michigan does have a few American Chestnut trees. It's also the #1 grower of chestnuts in the US (mostly Chinese/Japanese/European hybrids). Based on Treeborn's website, I'm sticking with my theory that it's American-grown chestnuts, not American chestnuts. But I could be wrong

@JerkPup Yes. Not an American chestnut. Chinese and European chestnuts are pretty good tho

@TurtlesongFarm ok but have you ever actually eaten a chestnut

@no1cahokiasimp A forest ecology paper: "Landowners were strongly encouraged to cut any chestnuts on their land, first in an attempt to halt disease spread, and later to profit from chestnut lumber before the opportunity was lost" sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@TurtlesongFarm Do you know where I could read more about this? I’ve never heard this but I’d love to learn more

@no1cahokiasimp A nice podcast here: "just cut down all the trees possible—probably because people thought they’d die anyway, so might as well snatch up all the healthy wood and use it while you could" gastropod.com/transcript-tha…

@TurtlesongFarm Fully unrelated, but nice pfp, twin!

@Crypt1cGengar @PolicyEnjodgn9 Nope. There are few hundred healthy American chestnut trees in the US. If you count the saplings being grown out that haven't shown signs of blight yet, maybe several thousand. The rest get killed back to the roots every 10 years or so. Those don't produce nuts

@PolicyEnjodgn9 @TurtlesongFarm And yet many grow for long enough to produce chestnuts

@PolicyEnjodgn9 The industry cut down as many as they could, first by trying to keep the disease from spreading, and later by trying to beat the blight to the healthy wood

@TurtlesongFarm That’s not true at all. We’re talking about ~4 billion trees. You think the industry cut down 2 billion in just a few years? They can’t even regrow now because the blight still kills them before reaching maturity.

@jenelaina @PolicyEnjodgn9 I can't find anywhere on Treeborn's website that they are selling American chestnut flour. Most commercial chestnut orchards in the US grow Chinese or Chinese/American hybrids. I think that is chestnut flour grown in America (which is still good), not American chestnut flour

@PolicyEnjodgn9 @TurtlesongFarm 🤨 They can absolutely grow to maturity now. Worked for a bakery that bought American Chestnut flour. Limited supply and not cheap, but it was still commercially viable enough that we did a special bake every week.

@SilverCharmer Good hunting! In another 100 years or so, with luck, chestnut prices may be lower 🫣

@TurtlesongFarm I just went down this rabbit hole last winter when buying chestnuts during the holidays and the prices were astronomical, and were only either from China or Italy. Devastating what happened. I did find a few chestnut orchards in California that I plan on visiting next fall season

@maxecowave Yep

@TurtlesongFarm Not blight alone. Timber interests used Cryphonectria parasitica as cover to liquidate millions of healthy Castanea dentata. I watch restoration enter its fourth decade. Extraction economics routinely outpaces pathogen damage when profit aligns with crisis.

In the ruins of the former American Empire, while travelling on dark routes, you may find yourself in the presence of an entity known only as "The bunny of the swarming bugs" or more commonly, "The Wabbit." He is said to be a long forgotten trickster god. Never quarrel with Him.

They deliberately destroyed the American chestnut gene pool. We have no way of knowing how many blight-resistant trees were destroyed. It's a useful cautionary tale about the choices we make when we "help" nature. We need to ask ourselves "who will profit from this fix?"