I like this, I mean, sometimes there’s an invasive species that’s going to completely wipe out a plant you’re trying to grow, and sometimes the plant itself is non-native and has no defense against endemic insects (such as…most things people traditionally like to grow, actually) but the people who just blast the shit out of their gardens with every pesticide and herbicide really need to relax. All plants evolved to handle some degree of being chewed on.
One cool thing I hear some people have been doing is just planting some extra things that are even tastier and more attractive to “pests,” as basically a diversion, or I guess a sacrifice. It can apparently work pretty well!
My mom did this with her garden! We planted a lot of tomatoes to appease the wildlife so they would leave the peaches alone, and lots of other easily-accessable Ground Plants For Munching, Many Of Which Are Tasty To Wildlife But Not To Humans to keep deer and other sundry creatures from eating all the leaves off of the fruit-bearing trees. Usually this was in enough excess that we could still feed me, my parents, my grandmother, and three of my siblings plus their offspring and wives AND the local wildlife flourished without issue. I don’t think my mother has used a pesticide in her life either. Seriously this works great. Also figure out what kind of moth and butterfly you have in your area and plant things accordingly for them. Caterpillars won’t bother your foodstuffs if there’s plenty of things they like (milkweed for Monarch Butterflies if you’re on the migration path) to munch and lay their eggs on/in.
Tomatoes are hilarious they’re SO nutrient rich and fat and delicious to almost every general herbivore but that’s only because they’re so greedy and so competitive with other plants. They dig their own grave.
On this day, 14 March 1883, Friedrich Engels sent a wire to Friedrich Adolph Sorge in New York City saying simply “Marx died today!”. German communist Karl Marx had died in London, aged 64. He had travelled to Britain after being banished from Germany, and arrested and imprisoned in Paris, from which he managed to escape.
The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser reported that at his funeral Engels, Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator, described Marx as the “best hated and worst calumniated man in Europe… [who] had lived, although his work was not finished, to see his views embraced by millions of both hemispheres.”
Marx was clear that the driving force of history is the fight against oppression, writing with Engels: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
"The modern bourgeois [capitalist] society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
"Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie [capitalists] and Proletariat [the working class].”
We have a number of works by or about him available here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/books/karl-marxhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1671761953008948/?type=3
