It's spring, and I am honing my observational skills and planning my garden, and I want to share some tips for building these skills in a way that lends itself to practicing permaculture.

When building an ecological mindset, it's essential to start with the practice of simple observation, noticing the plants and animals without making any assumptions or judgements about how the land came to be. It takes a lot of practice, but from then on you can start formulating questions that will lead to a greater understanding of how the land around you is or wants to be.

OBSERVE THE EDGES: If you look at the edge of your yard, or the edge of a sidewalk, you may notice a greater abundance of growth. The edges between biomes are often the most biodiverse because it effectively doubles the amount of species present, but even the edge between grass and concrete, or rocks and flowers, gives a lot of insight into where plants like to grow - is the shade cooling the plants? Is there a dip in the landscaping where water is pooling? Are rocks bolstering the insect population in the area?

OBSERVE THE PIONEER PLANTS: Although "weeds" such as dandelion, kochia, and mallow can and will grow in very poor soil conditions, where they accumulate is still in an indication of soil quality and water retention. If there are no pioneer plants in a given area, could the soil be too rocky? Too compacted? Too polluted?

OBSERVE THE TOPOGRAPHY: Even fairly flat stretches of land have some degree of incline and decline. Are some plants growing more successfully in low areas compared to high areas?

The half moons are for retaining water on gentle slopes, with the flat side pointed uphill. The major function besides water retention is to prevent topsoil erosion by wind and water. They still need about two feet of annual rainfall and some soil fertility to work.

There's a similar method for highly degraded and hardened soil called a 'zaï hole' where one foot deep holes are bored at regular intervals and filled with compost. This, combined with shallow half moon walls built similar to the crescents pictured above provide a low-dig method with broader application and similar results.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Za%C3%AF

Here some links in my search engine bookmarks:

Not an engine, but a search query generator: https://dorkgenius.com/

Customizable Search:
https://kagi.com/

Private search:
https://duckduckgo.com/
Https://qwant.com

Ai search:
https://www.phind.com/
https://metaphor.systems/
https://consensus.app/search/

"Old" simple web search:
https://search.marginalia.nu/
https://wiby.me/
https://searchmysite.net/
https://vhs.neocities.org/ (⚡️by google)

Forum search:
https://crowdview.ai/

Public record, libraries search:
http://judyrecords.com
Https://WorldCat.org

Reddit search:
https://conversations.aawadia.dev/find (broken 😔)

Copypasta search:
https://copypastadb.com/

Reverse image search:
https://tineye.com/

Pdf search:
http://pdfyes.com/

For more inspiration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

//FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD, CONSIDER THESE INFORMATIONAL RESOURCES INSTEAD OF COMMERCIAL SEARCH ENGINES. MORE NUANCED RESULTS, LESS AD REVENUE FOR BLOATED CORPORATIONS.

I will say that tineye only works for photos. If you want an art reverse search then saucenao works well.

I don't know what's with people thinking trains are full of drugs and criminals. There's...security guards on trains.

And like, I HAVE seen people using meth in big train stations and sometimes there are weird people on busses but. They're not doing drugs on the bus. They're not actually bothering anyone

Sometimes you just gotta learn how to deal with strange people

Bit late to the punch but I thought I would chime in on this since I’m in freedom land and can’t get sued by her.

https://open.substack.com/pub/sarahkahn/p/yes-it-is-holocaust-denial-to-say?r=rx976&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

I joined landlord groups to persuade them to be better people to their tenants
Article, Comments

Praxis