I got a couple plants from an enthusiast on a fruit forum. One is a hybrid called Newberry, and the other is this blackberry from Ukraine. Apparently this thing is insane, and I'm hoping it will grow large enough to block part of that back fence that the power company made visible when it butchered my neighbors trees. Despite being massive, it is thornless and well behaved, and can produce gallons of fruit all on its own. He calls it Victory, and I'm excited to give it a try.
Reblogged
Apparently you can add some dog coat color mutations and a gnarly overbite to a grey wolf embryo via CRISPR, plop it in a surrogate hound bitch, and call it a direwolf lol
For real though, the entire “dire wolf brought back from extinction” thing is so wildly misleading as to what they actually did that it’s crazy it picked up as much traction as it has. They have a VERY good media team on board.
These animals are grey wolves with a handful of modifications to their grey wolf genome to give them physical traits that the creators felt resembled dire wolves, based on their research into the partial genome they have available for the species. They did not insert dire wolf genes into these embryos; they merely edited the genes related to size, bone, skull size, and coat color. The coat color they introduced is a dog mutation (recessive red, commonly called “born white” in wolfdogs, is the result of e/e genotype on the E locus).
They’re basically fancy generically engineered wolfdogs — not dire wolves.
Reblogged jbbartram-illu
It's hilarious to me how Colossal Biosciences wants to be movie-version John Hammond but are 100% book-version John Hammond. In the Jurassic Park novel, it's very clear: John Hammond is a con artist who gives people an illusion, not the truth. He knew from the beginning that what he was making weren't dinosaurs, but he didn't care because he had a story to sell. He wasn't just "filling in gaps" with the frog dna, his scientists were basically making things up from whole cloth and he had no pretence about it- but he also knew what the public wanted to believe.
Case in point: https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/
These are not dire wolves. These are GMO gray wolves. Dire wolves aren't even in the same genus as gray wolves, and we know this from genetics.
What Colossal is doing is scamming the public. They want you to believe that they can pull off miracles. They can't. It's the flea circus where everything is mechanised, but because you want to believe, you "see" the fleas. They might be good at genetic modification and they might be good at hyping themselves up, but they haven't de-extincted the dire wolf. They didn't activate mammoth genes in a mouse. They are lying to you and they're going to keep doing it. Don't believe the hype.
Got the raspberry beds degrassed. That was definitely not my favorite thing to do and would have been significantly easier with a rototiller. We used to have one but the step-father got rid of it because he didn't know how to use it.
Three 15' beds 6' apart. I could have put them a bit closer together but that would've put bigass tree roots right in two rows and I didn't want to deal with that. I need to add sand and compost then they will be ready to plant in.
I don't need to degrass the blackberry row because it's just dirt by the fence.
Once all the plants are here I will build the trellises.
Most of my tomatoes got potted up yesterday. The rest need another week before they will be big enough for new digs.
I've ordered more raspberries and blackberries, I'm going to do three 15' or so rows of raspberries behind the big maple and one row of blackberries along that blank section of back fence. I currently have 19 types of raspberry, 5 blackberries, and 5 hybrids. There's a bit of room for a few more but the kinds I want are out of stock everywhere at the moment.
So much for "I'm not getting these I hate managing brambles."
Reblogged seasicksandile
We are almost ready to publish our second volume, but ... We've gotten ZERO art submissions!
If you like frogs and want to help a little literature and art mag out, we would really appreciate any art you've made or photos you've taken of frogs!!
Please reblog to spread the word and send to any friends you know who might like to contribute :)
You can read our submission guidelines and submit here: https://croaklit.com/submit/
With your help, we can bring frog art to the world!
Help make frog art!
Binch hike and botanizing.
I've been reading a lot about brambles this past week, particularly on a fruit growers forum. Something that pops up osassionally is yellow colored black raspberries. The cultivated yellow raspberries you can buy are almost always a red raspberry variety, yellow black raspberries are not common at all. One guy mentioned how they have yellow canes instead of the usual reddish purple, and that's how he identifies wild plants in the winter.
I know I have seen these before, so I took Ember to the park I've collected yellow black raspberries from. Once we got to the spot it didn't take long to find them, they were a distinctly different color than the other brambles in the area. I took a couple cuttings to see if I can grow them out in pots (I don't want to put them in the ground in case they're super aggressive and sucky).
There is one more in the woods I know the location of I'm going to try to find tomorrow.
Cinder has matured nicely. She has Ember's longer body without the funky topline. Her structure is overall better than Ember's, but not quite as nice as Flint's. Her rear is a tad unbalanced and I'd like a little more coat, but in general, I'm happy with how she turned out. (If you ignore the spooky lol) Torch's build is my favorite out of the three. He has Flint's structure with a tad less bone and slightly straighter front and an excellent coat. He was my pick as a pup if I were to have kept a male. Taras is my least favorite. His rear is very overangled, he looks like a funky GSD. His coat is thick but short and he has a silly babyface. I do not have an updated photo of him.