Speaker A:
Hello and welcome to Live Like the World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. Today I’m your host, my name is Cassandra, uh, I enjoy they/them pronouns, and I’m here with Nolan to talk about One of my favorite topics, which is perennial crops. I love all things perennial plants. I love all things gardening, but I’m not a great gardener, and I found that focusing on perennials really helps me grow more food. So I’m excited to hear what you have to say about it. But before that, Live Like the World Is Dying is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. Here’s a jingle from another member of our network. Do do do.
Speaker B:
Fuck about it! Captain Wolf up now! Welcome to Molotov Now, a podcast about taking action. In Molotov Now, we analyze and discuss news articles and stories of resistance from around the globe and connect them to our struggles here at home in Aberdeen, Washington.
Speaker A:
In the spirit of building solidarity between the rural and the urban, we hope to inspire direct action in the face of oppression and to light a fire to find each other in the darkness. And we’re back. All right, Nolan, if you could introduce yourself. I already said your name, but pronouns. And if you could just let us know what brings you to perennial food crops and what your work is like around that.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I’m Nolan. I use he/him pronouns, and I got into kind of the perennial world In college, I went to a lovely conference for all deep root lovers called the Perennial Farm Gathering, which is hosted in the Midwest, and it connected a lot of things I was learning about in the soil science classes I was taking at the time to a lot of various social and ecological crises we experience, kind of connecting the science with the society. And kind of fell in love with the research. And I have been engaged in various research projects on perennials, and now I am primarily a writer about agroecology and related subject matter.
Speaker A:
And what does all that have to do with— like, we talk a lot about climate change and preparedness through a community lens here. Like, how do you see those things as related?
Speaker B:
Yeah, I mean, building landscapes of resilience is a collective effort, a collaborative effort. Everyone has different relationships to different parcels of land, whether they be legal or emotional or whatever, and building landscapes that can feed people requires coordination between a whole host of different groups on a whole host of different scales.
Speaker A:
Yeah, for sure. Why perennials specifically?
Speaker B:
It’s a fantastic question. Perennials, by virtue of their deep roots, that is where a lot of the power in perennials Lies. So perennials are plants that live usually 3 years or longer. They generally include various grasses, trees, shrubs, etc. So yeah, so to live this longer-term lifestyle, they tend to invest less in sheer output and more in root structures that allow them to access the resources they need to live 20, 50, 80, 100 years. This includes deep roots that can access water and nutrients or stabilize them in environments like marshlands or kind of river bottoms that really aren’t conducive to— that can easily flood or tip over a plant. And they just are invested in very long-term lifestyles and propagating their species through those types of investments, as opposed to kind of short-term bursts of existence.
Speaker A:
Yeah, and so when we’re talking about growing food, I know for me, I lean on perennials because I’m lazy, though I think there’s a lot more to it than— more reasons for people to get excited about perennials than that. But yeah, what do you mean when we talk about perennial crops and why focus on those, and what are some examples?
Speaker B:
Yeah. Perennial crops have a couple of different advantages to them, and it kind of depends. This is a very broad generalization.
Speaker A:
Sure.
Speaker B:
Oftentimes they can be very reliable producers of food. So one of my favorites is the chestnut. It can weather various droughts and various weather situations in certain environments a lot better than some alternatives, like annual alternatives, like wheat. Wheat or barley. Again, very context-dependent. Once established, some species can be fairly low labor.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker B:
There are practices you can do to optimize, say, again, chestnut production through pruning or fertilization. But if you don’t really have the time or capital to invest in that kind of thing, you can still eke out some sort of crop even without putting in a lot of work just to go and pick up the nuts, so to speak. And oftentimes perennial plants are also conducive to multiple uses. Once you prune a tree, you have wood that you can use for a variety of purposes. It’s not necessarily lumber quality, but you can use it for kindling. The Italians back in the Middle Ages would use chestnut branches that they pruned to trellis wine grapes and table grapes.
Speaker A:
Oh, that’s cool.
Speaker B:
Yeah. And then in terms of examples of perennial crops in the contemporary industrial food system, most perennial foods you will find are fruits, generally from fruit trees, or nuts. A few others are like asparagus as well and artichokes.
Speaker A:
Yeah, I was trying to rack my brain and those are the 2 vegetables that came to mind.
Speaker B:
Exactly. So yeah, there’s not many vegetables, but it mostly is fruit and nut trees. So yeah.
Speaker A:
Why— this is sort of going off script, so if you don’t know the answer, that’s fine— why, in terms of industrial agriculture, why is it so heavily focused on annuals?
Speaker B:
So part of this is historical. In the— so the kind of core component of a food system are the carbohydrate crops. In industrial agriculture, it’s your wheat, barley, corn, rice, potatoes, etc. And some of that is rooted in biology. At the domestication of these species, the environments they were being domesticated in were very— were basically, at least in terms of wheat and barley, which is what I’m most familiar with the evolutionary history of, were on these flat river bottoms that were basically flooded every year. So those species were originally perennial.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker B:
But by the fact that they were being cleared every year by the flooding, Ah. Because the first farmers in the Fertile Crescent weren’t— basically weren’t doing any tillage. They’re just relying on the river to do the tillage for them. It basically created an evolutionary pressure for those species to lose their perenniality. Rice underwent a similar trajectory in the Yangtze River Delta. I think it’s the Yangtze River Delta in southern China. Um, so, and since again we really need Carbohydrates, you know, even if toxic masculinity tells us, you know, protein is king, we need carbohydrates. And just the grains that we relied on historically, just because of those natural and biological conditions, ended up being largely annuals.
Speaker A:
Huh.
Speaker B:
Now, when industrialization came around, it was doubled down in various plant breeding programs. that pushed those species to be more intensive, to use more water, more nitrogen, like fertilizers. But it is, broadly speaking, foundationally like a biological condition. Some folks call it the first mistake of agro— or agriculture’s 10,000-year mistake. I don’t necessarily take that view, but it’s kind of the framing that some people use. It kind of locked us into this situation. Interesting.
Speaker A:
Yeah. So are there, um, are there grain alternatives that are perennial?
Speaker B:
So there are a few traditional food systems that will harvest perennial grains, normally from what biologists will tend to kind of define as like wild type. So these are more like foraging-style systems.
Speaker A:
Like wild rice.
Speaker B:
Um, that’s often— that framing often kind of downplays the human management that like indigenous practitioners would use. It has a lot of differences from the type of agriculture we practice today or the other that Europeans practiced or that Southeast Asians practiced. But the framing is often to delegitimize it.
Speaker A:
Right.
Speaker B:
So yeah, so these wild-type species were like— and some examples would be wild rice among some indigenous people in the North United States. There’s a species called nepa, which is, I believe, in the Colorado River Basin. And the indigenous Australians also had some perennial grains that they would harvest and tend to in some manner. So these species aren’t as high-yielding as contemporary grains just because they haven’t had much dedicated breeding behind.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker B:
But there are reasons to believe that high-yielding perennial grains are possible.
Speaker A:
Hmm.
Speaker B:
So the 2 main efforts that researchers— and this is broadly a project of institutional research— is perennial wheat called Kernza, which is being developed in both Minnesota and Kansas, and perennial rice in southern China. Now, the perennial rice is probably the most successful program. It, in certain environments, can yield the same as annual rice. So in about, I want to say, 15 years, they were able to achieve same yields, which is huge.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
And that’s with, like, I want to say something like a quarter reduction in labor and a 50% reduction in, like, inputs. So huge sustainability potentials there, whether you’re talking an industrial context, you know, industrial food system context, or a more distributed kind of traditional style food system. There are gains to be made in both. And then Kernza, the perennial wheat, is more about a third yielding as regular wheat. Still has made major progress in recent years and is now grown on a couple thousand acres in the US, primarily for specialty products— beers, pancake mixes, etc. Neither of these are available in the commercial market at the moment, unfortunately. They’re more limited to farmers who are kind of involved in some of these research programs. But hopefully in— unless you’re in southern China, rice farmers in southern China can acquire rice seed. But otherwise speaking, it’s a little hard for the home gardener or small farmer to get to— or some small farmers can get their hands on them, but for someone not involved in these networks to get access to them, unfortunately.
Speaker A:
I feel like grains as a home gardener feel kind of out of my league regardless. Even if we’re talking perennials, it seems like there’s maybe a certain amount of space that’s required. Maybe I’m wrong.
Speaker B:
I don’t know. That is fair. Grains just tend to have— you need a lot of grain as an individual. But yeah.
Speaker A:
I guess that’s why something— when we talk about carbohydrates more broadly, something like a chestnut has appeal.
Speaker B:
Yeah, yeah. Chestnuts. So chestnuts are unique amongst at least temperate tree crops, as they’re one of the only sources of perennial carbohydrates in the temperate regions. There’s others in the tropical regions like breadfruit, but chestnuts is one of the only reasonably available ones, and I’m most familiar with the temperate regions of the world. So yeah, it can basically produce in the fall a very carbohydrate-rich food, unlike other nuts, which generally are protein and fat-rich. You can have a foundation of your food system resting on chestnuts.
Speaker A:
And they’re delicious.
Speaker B:
Yeah, they are. I have a colleague of mine who likes to refer to them as tree potatoes, just to help kind of tell people what to expect, because you’re expecting something like a cashew or an almond, but when you get a chestnut, it can be hard to know what to do with it. But if you treat it like a potato, boil it and then mash it, do something like that with it, or I like to use it as a flour.
Speaker A:
Yeah, same. Chestnut flour shortbread cookies are a favorite here. Are there other plants that come to mind that you’re excited about right now?
Speaker B:
Nothing particularly comes to mind. I mean, most of the perennial plants that you’ll find otherwise are going to be your normal fat and protein-rich nuts and your fruits and vegetables, or some vegetables. In terms of Carbohydrates. Nothing really comes to mind, no.
Speaker A:
So what about folks who are working on a smaller scale, especially in community settings? Like, I could imagine if you’re working on some sort of food sustainability with your neighbors, for instance, a chestnut tree could be a great thing for you all to go in on together. But what are some other ways folks can start incorporating perennial foodstuff on a smaller scale?
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
Or are there?
Speaker B:
Yeah, I would say shrubs are a good place to start, especially if you’re thinking what size of yards most people have, most people who own property have access to. Obviously renters, it’s an even more difficult situation. I would say shrub crops like raspberries, blackberries are a good way to get sort of some perennials on the landscape. For some of that low-turnover, century-long source of food, you’re really going to be wanting to look for a tree. So honestly, you’d want to look at what tree species live well in your region. Again, nuts are going to probably be— chestnuts or otherwise— are going to be a good source there because the protein and fat, when you’re experiencing a lean time, Mm-hmm. are gonna be what helps continue, perpetuate your community, perpetuate your family, whatever, help fortify them for times when other sources of food are harder to get access to and you need energy. So depending on the region, walnuts, the eastern black walnut if you’re in the kind of central Midwest, is a wonderful species. And also provides a nice dye that you can use.
Speaker A:
It smells amazing too.
Speaker B:
It does.
Speaker A:
Just the fruit straight from the tree. I mean, it’ll stain your hands, but I think it smells so good.
Speaker B:
Yeah, don’t wear clothes that you care about when you’re processing it. Hazelnuts are another interesting species. There are some native North American hazelnuts. They’re a little less prolific than European hazelnuts, which are commercially grown in Oregon. But there are some efforts to hybridize them because the native hazelnuts have certain resistance to diseases that the European varieties don’t, and some climate, like cold tolerance as well. So again, it depends a bit on your region. State extension agencies will have lists of what species or varieties work in a particular area for cold tolerance and moisture and whatnot.
Speaker A:
Well, let’s just say what that is. Sorry, here it’s the Oregon Agricultural Extension, and I assume it’s something similar in most states.
Speaker B:
Yeah, you would just want to Google your state name plus agricultural extension. Oftentimes there are also county offices you can call, and they’ll be able to either answer questions related to individual crops you’re trying to cultivate or connect you to someone at your state’s land-grant institution, which is a type of university here in the United States that can again answer your question. And I’m sorry if you’re outside the United States. I’m not exactly familiar with the public information environment in other countries, unfortunately.
Speaker A:
That’s all right. Most of our listeners are around here, Canada. Yeah, and also, I hope it’s the same in other places, but in Oregon here, they offer a bunch of free classes and stuff. So I don’t know, if you’re trying to get into any sort of gardening or canning, food preservation, they have all sorts of things. It’s delightful.
Speaker B:
And then local Master Gardeners chapters can also be a good resource. Sometimes you’ll find state native plant societies have plant sales as well. Sometimes they have food crops, and they tend to prioritize perennials as well for the pollinators and the soils. So they can be a good source for actual varieties, because oftentimes if you go to a nursery, they’re just— if you’re looking for something a little bit weirder, it can be hard to find.
Speaker A:
Yeah, yeah. That’s— speaking of pollinators, though, I know we’re talking about perennial food crops, but planting native perennial plants, they don’t have to be edible to be fantastic.
Speaker B:
Yep.
Speaker A:
Yeah. What about— have you worked with or done any research around perennial root crops? I ask everyone I talk to about this, everyone who’s into perennials.
Speaker B:
That’s a hard question. Nothing comes to mind. There’s kind of a structural issue there because that requires kind of disturbance of the soil.
Speaker A:
Sure, yeah.
Speaker B:
So if there are some, it’s probably going to be a difficult thing to manage, but potentially. I do know there is— this is more illustrative of an example because I don’t think it’s really easy to find— there’s a banana relative in Ethiopia, I believe. It starts with an E. I don’t remember what it’s called, but But it does— it is a perennial. It’s kind of a root crop. Part of it is in the ground, part of it is above ground. And they grow and raise these. They just basically lob off— they clonally propagate it. So they lob off a part of the stem and they just plant it in the ground. And then it grows up into the big bulb, basically. I don’t think it’s botanically the botanical definition of a bulb, but I’m going to call it a bulb.
Speaker A:
That’s okay.
Speaker B:
And they just plant them as kind of a famine food. So they tend to rely on their grain like teff, but if the teff harvest fails, they have these plants— I wish I remember what the name was— kind of around that they can harvest and eat as kind of a backup more or less. So they have a perennial— not really the foundation of their food system, but it supports them in those difficult times.
Speaker A:
I always ask because here there’s a native plant called camas that is perennial, and I think it’s technically the bulb. Yeah, I’m bad at botanical terms, whatever. The root, the bulb of the plant that’s eaten. And it’s evolved in such a way where when communities go out and harvest the underground part, it’s during the dry season, so they sort of dig up the earth, flip it like a pancake, take the root, and by flipping it that way, the seeds then go into the ground. So it’s a perennial plant, but it’s almost being turned like an annual, and that actually helps the stands spread. And my understanding is that it has stopped spreading because people aren’t engaging in this food practice anymore.
Speaker B:
Fascinating.
Speaker A:
Yeah, plants are amazing. And so are people who interact with plants. Yeah.
Speaker B:
So I think there’s very interesting opportunities for securing tenure and control over land— not necessarily control, but access to land that you wouldn’t necessarily historically have access to. Because if you can get a perennial stand established on a parcel of land and growing to a point where it doesn’t need active management, It could end up being like a way for you to, if you in the future don’t necessarily have access to that same land again, but the stand is still in place, it’s a lot less— it’s a lot easier to sneak on and access that food. Since you don’t have— since it’s a lot less management, there’s a lot less time you need to spend on that parcel of land.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker B:
But you can still access the food if there’s a situation where you no longer have access to it. I’m sure there’s a better way to phrase that, but yeah, kind of a trespassing strategy if you’re worried about losing access to a parcel of land. Maybe you’re renting a piece of land. I don’t know, I don’t necessarily endorse this, but there are certain strategies there.
Speaker A:
Yeah, I am a renter and I like gardening, and so I figure every native plant I put in the ground and every perennial, even myself seeding annuals, if someone rents this house after me, hopefully that just means they get food, you know? And if they don’t want it, maybe I can be like, hey, can I harvest this food?
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
And if neither of those things can happen, hopefully at least it’s good for the pollinators, you know, the birds. I guess that’s a good segue into— yeah, we’re talking about perennials, community preparedness. I guess I’m thinking about long-term stewardship of places, leaving places better than we found them. What are the— this is a really leading question— what’s the climate impact of working with perennials? What’s the ecological long-term impact of focusing on perennials?
Speaker B:
Yeah, it depends on how the land has been managed in the past. So generally, it’s Going to improve a piece of land. So if you’re taking a piece of land that’s been managed under annual agriculture, has been managed poorly, perennials, they feed the soil ecosphere. They bring— they, by the process of photosynthesis, they take carbon from the atmosphere, they put it into new substances, and their roots inject it down into the soil either by exuding substances for fungi to eat.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Speaker B:
And then the fungi help facilitate nutrient delivery to the plant, or just by the shedding of roots that are rotting away. And, you know, the plant will grow new roots every year, some roots will be shedded off, um, and that just locks away new carbon in the soil. Um, that carbon then helps improve various qualities of the land. It can absorb more water and hold more water, um, than If there was less carbon in that soil, it feeds again microbial life, fungi, bacteria, etc. And yeah, and then perennials also hold down the soil. With annual agriculture, unless you’re planting cover crops, and even then cover crops still have periods of time where there aren’t— where there is bare soil, that soil can run out, can run off into the waterways and down, at least here in the Midwest, down to the the ocean and be lost to agricultural productivity and couldn’t— and is no longer here to support food production. So perennials just kind of help hold land together and do a lot to improve the land.
Speaker A:
What is just the— I don’t know if this exists, but is there a Soil 101? Like, why? So we’re talking about how perennials are locking carbon in the soil and creating these sort of networks of roots and mycelial systems and how that’s good for the soil. But why is the opposite not good for the soil?
Speaker B:
Gotcha. Yeah, so by leaving a lot of ground bare throughout the year, you will often have kind of a variety of processes going on. So wind and water can more easily move across the landscape, and if you’re not having plant, like vegetation holding that soil down, it’ll just physically carry off particles. And with that is carbon, is nitrogen. And if you’re using fertilizer, that’s extra nitrogen that might pollute downstream waterways, or phosphorus that might pollute downstream waterways. Um, so yeah, there’s just that kind of physical removal of the soil surface.
Speaker A:
Sure.
Speaker B:
And then soil carbon— everything, every piece of life likes to eat carbon. So if you’re not continually putting carbon in that soil, it’s being respirated away, processed, eaten by those fungi, by those bacteria that we love. But if they’re not continually being fed, the carbon in the soil does get eaten up by them and then either released into the atmosphere, or some of it at least gets released into the atmosphere.
Speaker A:
Sure.
Speaker B:
So it’s somewhat something of a maintenance strategy, um, to help just keep those stocks elevated and keep it out of the atmosphere. So when you remove perennial vegetation, like Hundreds of years ago, we removed the prairie and planted corn. That’s largely why those falls and springs and winters without corn cover or soybean cover, it’s carbon that is slowly being degraded over time and released into the atmosphere. Or yeah.
Speaker A:
So when people talk about capturing carbon in the soil, is that the process they’re talking about?
Speaker B:
Exactly.
Speaker A:
Yeah. Cool, that’s a helpful puzzle piece for my brain.
Speaker B:
Yeah, it is also important to kind of contextualize that while perennial plants do play a role in mitigating and helping trap more carbon into the soil, it’s to a volume where we still need to be pretty aggressive about shutting down carbon, like burning fossil fuels and stuff. It’s not going— it’s not It’s not a silver bullet, I guess. And it’s not often framed that way, but it’s occasionally framed that way. So I just want to emphasize that point a little bit just to contextualize how beneficial it is. It’s more— I tend to view it as you should do it because it improves a local ecosystem. And any global benefits are kind of icing on the cake, if that makes sense.
Speaker A:
That brings me to a point of curiosity, which is Annuals are also great. They can be, you know. So how do you work with perennials within a localized food system?
Speaker B:
Absolutely. There’s a couple of practices that are less about food production and more about perennial practices and more about mitigating the effects, the negative impacts of annual agriculture. So the 2 main practices that are common in my area of the world are conservation buffers and windbreaks.
Speaker A:
Okay.
Speaker B:
A conservation buffer is basically you plant strips of perennials either along waterways or just kind of within— and I know I’m talking more about large farms than I am talking about home gardens, but I’ll get to home gardens in a second.
Speaker A:
Sure.
Speaker B:
They intercept basically any erosion, any sort of loss of soil, and can help keep it kind of local onto the farm and capture and absorb any nitrogen or other fertilizers that are leaving the farm and help utilize that in some manner. And even if dedicating 5 to 10% of a landscape to perennial use can have huge improvements on local environmental outcomes. It’s good to have as many perennials as possible, but given the low productivity of some perennial grains and stuff, this is often a really good approach to mitigating some of the damage of annual agriculture.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker B:
In a home garden context, this can look less like planting large strips of trees in your plot and more like planting strips of grasses or strips of shrubs. You want to work with the waterway. Where does water flow through your property? Because water is the main agent of moving soil, or wind.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker B:
If you have a very windy area, putting up a strip of grass or shrubland to block that wind, or if you have a place where water is exiting, planting various strips of perennials there will help. It will help not only retain soil. It’ll also help water— slow down the flow of water and help more of it percolate down into the soil as well.
Speaker A:
Is that why— you might not know the answer to this, and that’s fine. When I drive through rural areas here, I notice strips of like cottonwood and oak usually between different farm plots, and I assumed it was like maybe no one owns that little part and maybe no one’s tending it, or maybe they’re leaving it there because it’s beneficial.
Speaker B:
Yeah, those are windbreaks probably. They tend to just block the wind and prevent soil from being carried away, or sometimes they’re also used to provide a little bit of shade to whatever is being grown on the other side of it, which will reduce the amount of water that’s lost.
Speaker A:
Sure, that makes sense.
Speaker B:
A lot of those were actually planted during the 1930s with the New Deal programs.
Speaker A:
Oh, really?
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
Okay, that makes sense. It always gives me a little glimpse into, you know, what— this used to be an oak savanna apparently. Every time I can get a little glimpse of it, it’s interesting because it looks very different now.
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
Yeah. Well, let’s see.
Speaker B:
Would it be possible to tell a quick story of securing tenure?
Speaker A:
Yes, please do.
Speaker B:
So one of my favorite kind of stories from the history of perennials comes from medieval Italy.
Speaker A:
Mhm.
Speaker B:
There were basically these peasants, serfs, whatever the terminology is for the time, and they were looking for different strategies to secure control over land. And through the legal structures of the time, they didn’t really have many ways to acquire land. All of it was controlled by the lord or the church. And one benefit they had though was if you planted a tree, even on land you didn’t necessarily control, maybe you were renting it for a season or had some very limited access to it. If you planted a tree on it, you had the right to utilize that tree for the entire lifetime of the tree. Wow. And peasants would use this to basically take control of land that they didn’t otherwise have access to, denying that land for whoever controlled it and just securing access to new food resources that they didn’t necessarily have access to. It’s also often played a role in inheritance strategies where Basically, a father or a husband who wanted to ensure that his wife or daughter had access to more autonomy would let them— have them inherit the chestnut orchards of the time. And basically, via the social mores of the time, it was only seen appropriate for women to tend to chestnut trees and not to work in a wheat field or whatnot. So by giving them a chestnut tree, Basically guaranteeing them a little more autonomy over their food sources and ability to make decisions about— more buffer to make decisions about who to marry or if to marry or remarry. Obviously, this is still couched in having a man decide the inheritance.
Speaker A:
Sure, yeah.
Speaker B:
But there is still an aspect of attaining autonomy through trees that I find really interesting. And you’ll find these stories across indigenous history, peasant history, whatnot across cultures.
Speaker A:
I want someone to gift me a chestnut tree, even though I don’t need it to— it won’t make a difference in securing land or whatever. Yeah, uh, put that out there. Someone, if you would like to get on Cassandra’s permanent good side, you can gift me a chestnut tree. Nice. Do you have any other good stories you want to tell?
Speaker B:
Uh, more of a plug because I can’t— I cannot begin to tell Robin Wall Kimmerer’s own story for her. But if you have a copy of Braiding Sweetgrass, the chapter, The Council of Pecans, I believe, tells a similar story about her grandfather, I think.
Speaker A:
Which is right at the beginning.
Speaker B:
Yes, I think so.
Speaker A:
Yeah. Wow.
Speaker B:
So that’s one I recommend to listeners.
Speaker A:
Yeah. Oh, I saw that on your blog, I think. Yeah, we have a radical book club here, and we read that earlier this year, and I did like that chapter. Also, pecans are delicious. My dad’s from Texas and his parents would go glean from commercial pecan orchards and then send us boxes. Yeah. And then we’d make pecan pie. He calls them pecans though.
Speaker B:
Yeah. When the Spanish first were exploring that part of the world, they were very dismissive of pecans because they said they were basically walnuts, which I think is just another very strong evidence that the Europeans had no business doing anything in North America at the time. Yeah, or taste buds.
Speaker A:
And I love walnuts, but Jeez, yeah, nothing beats a pecan. Now I want pecan pie. Speaking of plugging things, do you want to plug your blog or any of your work?
Speaker B:
Yes, uh, you can find my blog at headwaters.eco, and I mainly write about a lot of perennial-related stuff, a little more on the, you know, science and research side of things, as long as— as well as other agroecology science of nutrients, things like that. And then I also write a little bit about institution— like human cooperation and the built environment, just kind of whatever I’m interested in week to week.
Speaker A:
Cool. Um, is there anything else you feel like you want to cover that we didn’t get to touch on today?
Speaker B:
I think we had a pretty comprehensive conversation. So cool.
Speaker A:
Yeah, well, thanks for being here. I love to talk about perennial everything, but specifically perennial foods. Um, and I’m happy to know about your blog now, and folks should definitely check that out.
Speaker B:
Thank you.
Speaker A:
Yeah, yeah. Have a good day. All right, thanks so much for listening to Live Like the World Is Dying today. This podcast is produced by the anarchist publishing collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We also produce a podcast called Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness, which is based on our monthly zine, and another called The Spectacle, which is hilarious and you should check it out. We’re on Bluesky and Instagram @tangledwilderness. You can get our books and zines and read all of our stuff at tangledwilderness.org. This podcast and a lot of what we do is made possible by Patreon. If you want to become a supporter, check out patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. If you support the collective at $5 a month, you get a discount on all of our digital content. At $10 a month, we’ll mail you a monthly quarter-size zine. They’re pretty great. They’re everything from fiction to preparedness information. At $20 a month, we give you a shout out on all of our podcasts, which is which is getting so long. It’s exciting. That’s the thing I’m going to do now, though. So first, I’m going to give a shout out to these folks who supported our Kickstarter for the Immortal Choir. So that includes Cool Zone Media, Be Kind to Strangers, Ulysses and Alder, Tikva’s Favorites, and the Waterfront Project. Nico, the CAO Initiative, Groot the Dog, the Black Trowel Collective, Dolly Parton and Edgar Meowlin Poe the cats, Accordions, the Experimental Farm Network, who we’ve also had some episodes with talking about perennials. So if you’re interested in learning more about that topic, you can check those out. Arguing about what to shout about.
Speaker B:
Tenebris Press.
Speaker A:
Potatoes. Staying hydrated, brought to you by Hannah and Simone Wheel. And then special amazing thanks to our monthly supporters. This is gonna be long. I’m gonna do my best. All right, the first 2 chapters of The Eden Project by James Hollis. The truth that we will outlive them. Ponoko Pink Pistols. The Kiwanis Socialists. The Astoria Food Pantry. The Athens People’s Assembly of Athens, Georgia. Optikuna. TSNB, Baby Acab and Her Three Great Pups, Sarah, Mr. Crafty, Your Canadian Friend, Mark, Tiny Nonsense, TheGoldenGate26, again The KO Initiative, The Incredible Aranarai, Alexander Gopal, The Future for Abby, Ha Yoon Hee, Max, Enchanted Rats of Turtle Island, Lancaster Chooses Love, Karen, The Canadian Socialist Rifle Association, The Massachusetts Chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, Feral in West Virginia, Blinkcat, Shulva, Jason, Jenny and Phoebe the cats, Aiden and Yuki the dog, Sunshine, Amber, Ephemeral, the Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland’s Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, Tokirev, Julia, Carson, Lord Harken, Community Books of Stone Mountain, Georgia, Princess Miranda, Janice O’Dell, Ali, Bob Aruna, Milica, Theo, SJ, Paige, David, Dana, Micah, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah, Nicole and T for the Dog, and our favorite, the immortal, the amazing, Hoss the Dog. If you’re still here, thanks for being patient. Um, we really appreciate you, and we hope you’re doing as well as you can be, uh, given the times as they are. Uh, look forward to talking to you soon.
