pinned post: FAQ

welcome to BSP! i’m quill, i love plant science, we are all here to have a good time.

BEFORE SENDING AN ASK:

-i do not do plant identifications. this is because plant ID down to the species can be pretty tricky and takes time, and its best to have the plant in front of you while you do it, not to mention that i’m only well-versed in iowa plants (my home state). if you’re in the USA, it’s likely your local/state DNR or USDA office will have a key to local plants up on their website. i’m in the process of compiling a resource list for plant ID state-by-state in the US and US territories, I’ll get that up as soon as i can

-plant care stuff is similar, mostly because even though i know a lot about plants on a scientific level, im TERRIBLE at taking care of actual plants. i’m actually best versed in commercial greenhouse care and diseases/plant pathology on a wider scale. at some point i’ll try to get a basic resource list for better plant care stuff up, too

-i don’t check my dms unless you send me an ask specifically pointing it out; i do, however, read every ask i get, although i get enough that i can’t respond to all of them!!

-because i started this blog in high school, some of the older posts on here can be inaccurate or poorly worded; typically my newer posts are better sourced and executed and stuff imo.

THE BEST POSTS ON THIS BLOG (under construction as i remember more i really like):

- “Can u tell me about moss“ (moss crash course post)

- ”what's the dumbest piece of plant anatomy. where do you look at a plant and you're like "why did evolution do this instead of literally anything else"” and (similar topic) ”so when i see museum paleobotany illustration like especially pre-cenozoic most of the plants look intuitively 'simpler' to me; more cartoonish than modern plants, even modulo the overall realism of the illustration. i vaguely assumed this was because they were based on degraded fossil evidence, but lately i was thinking it's not inconceivable that morphology actually tended simpler in the past. any insight?”

- ”Whats a lichen if not a plant“ and (similar topic) “What exactly IS a lichen?? Pls im just an artist who only knows that plants are pretty” (closest current post to a lichen crash course)

- ”A little while ago you made a remark about ferns along the lines of "God really left you unfinished huh?". Can you please elaborate on that?”

- ”OH! about double fertilisation: bls explain the polar nucleii”

ah to be a fat bumblebee in a pollinator garden or restored prairie…..

don't know what you're talking about specifically but my understanding of US agricultural policy in general is that being a farmer in capitalism sucks and has since colonization and for a long time the US government tried to make it suck less with subsidies which sometimes work (because people get paid predictably regardless of demand and its less like gambling with crops) but sometimes go over really badly (because then too many people grow it and the price per bushel goes down and then government has too much corn) and then a couple times they got rid of all the subsides and related regulations and that REALLY didnt work (because then the price just crashed hard and with nothing to compensate them a bunch of farmers, many of whom were in debt for other farming-related reasons, couldnt get paid and actually had to foreclose their farms, which accelerated the long-standing trend of farms getting foreclosed on and then being bought out by bigger farms that then ended up running INSANE multi million dollar operations, sometimes even on farms in other states where the owners do not live, in communities they do not contribute to) and they had to backpedal on it and then eventually they just started on the current system where you simply pass a farm bill every 10-12 years instead of yearly or biyearly and that way you simply dont have to think about it, and then when it is election time you go stand by a cornfield for a while for tv. it does not fix the huge enormous farms buying out smaller farms problem or any of the complicated related problems but it DOES put it off for longer which is more important.

sometimes also you (USAID for instance) can give the too-much-corn you have from farm subsidies to a foreign country as a 'gift' and say youre just being a helpful little guy, but in the process of doing so undercut the local farmers in that country because they cant compete with free stuff but that's cool because then the foreign country can't really survive as well without US agricultural aid and you can manipulate them to do imperialism better AND you have more demand for the corn which might raise the price per bushel in the US. also sometimes the corn is fed to livestock en masse because the meat is worth more and sometimes its made into gas or high fructose corn syrup, and sometimes the price is so low per bushel that the insurance on the field is worth more than the actual corn.

but. i CANNOT stress enough that the most important thing about corn is that you can stand next to it on tv and if you cant do that, maybe you can stand next to a guy who is around it a lot and say you are helping him.

in my relatively uneducated opinion the most epic way to solve this complex multi-century interdisciplinary push and pull of supply and demand would be to just pay farmers a salary through the state since youre already paying out massive state subsidies for crops you dont need anyway and the farmers are performing a vital service and that way you can guarantee people a consistent salary AND control how much of each thing gets planted so you dont have a massive stockpile at all times AND you reward individual people instead of paying out large amounts of money to whatever massive operation sells the most corn by virtue of being big, but if you dont want to do that then the second best thing is to just pass another mediocre farm bill whos inflexible 10-ish year lifespan makes it impossible for it to respond well to changes in market demand and that way you can just put off making tough decisions and instead stand next to a guy and a cornfield on tv again. which as we have covered is the most important part of american agriculture

agricultural engineer at my work grew up on a farm in a time when being a farmer also meant being a carpenter (his words) and a couple days ago a piece of stupidly crucial wood equipment broke in our lab and i helped him build a new one in like 2 hours thats actually very sturdy and looks like it was actually done right on the first try because it was and i realized how incredibly powerful of a skill it is to be able to make like, a competent set of shelves, a piece of handmade equipment to specifications, etc and be able to at least have an idea of how to make bigger things and i cannot stop thinking about it now. like he was telling me about how when he was in college it was required for engineering majors to learn how to make the stuff they were designing so he had to take proper woodworking and metalworking classes too and they dont do that as much anymore. and how he has relatives that run a woodshop and build like tables and standing clocks and stuff. imagine somebody asking you for a table or clock and you can just make it and it looks nice and works well for a long time and you can fix it if it breaks. maybe im just gen z but whoa

thinking about the person on the whatisthisplant subreddit yesterday who had never been able to grow anything successfully in a garden but last year their dog stole a whole acorn squash of their table to run outside and play with it like it was a ball and now they have acorn squash growing in their backyard. dispersal via dog toy shape

>green revolution puppet show

my man. this is you and me righ tnow

messed up seed fact of the day is that even the ability for a ‘crop’ of plants to come up and flower and make fruit all at once is bred for. if you’re just some seed buried in wild uncolonized woods or prairie there is no such thing as a hard set emergence time even if all the other plants are doing it. it’s just when the vibes are correct and for some native plants that takes legitimately years and multiple winters. or you could do the opposite and try to grow all at once with everyone else right away in the first spring if it suits you but still, no guarantees. no point to this post it just weighs on me heavily

ok i doubt this is the true shape of the creature in question-- the fan shape looks like fasciation, which is an abnormality that can happen when a growing tip of a plant gets damaged or infected in a certain way-- but the absolute SHAPE this has taken as a result, like..... my god..... shapes that inflict tree europhoria upon ye for sure

Would you like a lichen?

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TELOSCISTIES SPOTTED

when new model army said ‘well we know what makes the flowers grow but we don’t know why’. me kin id this entire blog etc

fellas. ive been really aching for academia lately. i miss it so much

well-manicured blooming suburban gardens hit different through the smog it seems

saw someone in the last post link lichen pics for those who dont have lichens in their area and although that is a cool sentiment...that's the thing about lichens!

lichens cover an estimated 7% of the surface area of the earth. they will exploit anything that's been sitting still outside enough to become a predictable habitat (we're usually talking years or decades, although there are lichens out there that grow by the month, too). you could be living on a barge in the middle of the ocean and as long as the ship is more than a few years old you could find lichens.

in the arctic, in low-oxygen habitats on the tops of mountains, in the desert, in a city or in the country, on plastic or rock or metal or bone or on the right kind of miscellaneous household goods left out in the elements over the course of years, its one of the only kinds of non-animal creatures on earth where its not a matter of if you will find lichens near you, its a matter of noticing the ones you already pass every day just by like, going outside, and becoming acquainted with the species that live in your area and what they look like. from a science communication standpoint its incredible to be able to make that statement in confidence actually. i also think it's good practice in biology, because looking for them by definition means looking closely at stuff thats overlooked because it's been there forever and therefore kind of fades into the background of what we're conscious of.

10/10 would recommend looking for lichens near you if you havent already. my first stop if youre starting to learn how to look would be a cemetery; to lichens, a graveyard is just a largely undisturbed area with a bunch of big rocks and trees that have been there for a long time. the older the headstones the better, provided nobody's come and scraped them off.

ok. things have been bad lately. but at least lichens and mosses exist and i can view them at any time you know

ahh no, i was mistaken! wrote those tags and then second guessed myself. lemon and lime trees don't need a second tree to bear fruit, they can self-pollinate! i fixed the tags.