Safe at home?

© harrington

Welcome. Thanks for stopping by. The Spring flowers in the picture are certainly pretty. I have no idea if any of them are edible. The idea that something as attractive as a pansy is also edible strikes me as being absolutely terrific. Recently, My Minnesota has become more and more interested in how successful we might be using permaculture concepts on the property. Following up on the blueberries and bees idea, we did some online research today. Findings from the U of M Extension Service, which doesn't list bears among the pests that affect blueberries (more problems from birds and insects), we've decided that an electric fence arrangement around an apiary should be sufficient. Now the question is whether getting hives this year would be timely. We'll wait until next Spring to add blueberry bushes. That'll leave time for soil testing and possibly amending the sand with peat and, since one will probably be needed, figuring out a water supply for irrigating our Anoka Sand Plain soil. As we've been thinking about all of this, and planting Spring gardens and contemplating Minnesota cultivars, we've also been wondering about native species and non-invasive non-native species and what it means to be native to a place and/or indigenous. We all are indigenous to earth (unless there are indeed some Martians or something among us). Earth is made of bioregions, just like we humans are made of cells and organs and systems. Bioregions are usually based on watersheds. The concept of a bioregion  normally includes human culture. The more we've begun to explore the concept of bioregions, the more they've begun to resemble a confluence of Schrödinger's cat and Heisenberg's observer effect. Flows of water and energy and food and waste occur within soft boundaries set by language and culture with most of these factors  nested from the subwatershed or neighborhood or community scale up through the watershed and region and country to the global and universal. If each of us humans had more respect for our own home places, we might have avoided the messes we've made by inadvertently transporting brown snakes and zebra mussels and purple loosestrife and loosing greenhouse gases. Have you ever considered that non-terrestrial civilizations, assuming there are such, might see humans to be a potentially invasive species detrimental to a non-Terran civilization? Far fetched, I know. But then so was the idea, only 50 years ago, that climate change was coming. I keep coming back to the fear that we probably have too many sorcerer's apprentices among us. Learning to manage what we've already created might be a better long term strategy than increasing global corporate profits with "new and improved, bigger and better" widgets or whatevers. Snyder is right, it seems to me, when he says we each should “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”Thanks for listening. Come again when you can. Rants, raves and reflections served here daily.