As we're on the subject.
Has anyone got any good pointers to any actually scientifically sound research/advice on gardening/growing crops on a smaller scale.
The amount of rubbish I've heard spouted by gardeners about what you should and shouldn't do is crazy.
And I'm not even talking about the more 'spiritual' side. Even seemingly mainstream type stuff like companion planting isn't internally consistent.
Permaculture is going to become a very important subject for study. I have recently gotten interested in the subject and the results have been amazing even in very unpromising conditions. Geoff Lawtons work in Jordan is inspiring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk
Greening the desert, I've been following that for months, after watching the Oregon YouTube channel on permaculture. I've just spent an hour following up on Managed Aquifer Recharge, albeit not entirely relevant in my part of Europe.
To bring it back to HN, I keep thinking there must be ways to model landscapes, and planting strategies to increase permaculture efficiency, although probably the antithesis of permaculture.
The issue seems to be putting plants together so they can support each other in close quarters, sounds like an optimisation problem to me, I've called it augmented permaculture before.
Your description of an app for designing / modeling edible landscapes with permaculture principles in mind is exactly what I am working on: https://automicrofarm.com/app/
Interesting fact is that red alder trees are used for fancy furniture, and it's the wood used in Fender Stratocaster guitars. It's also probably the best wood for smoking fish.
Its not clickbait, its just efficient language. We have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in our gut but don't explicitly distinguish it every time we refer to human digestion.
Actually this article and study is not intending to reveal anything new about how trees and other plants fix nitrogen (using microbes). It is revealing that the symbiotic arrangements (far from entirely understood) also cause the breakdown and release of scarce nutrients from rocks, enabling increased growth and building soil fertility over time.
We wouldn't say that a people perform some very specific, detailed process that is attributed to gut bacteria. E.g. "humans break down oligosaccharides".
Digestion, as such, is a concept independent of gut bacteria.
I've given this a few minutes of thought. Basically, the situation is that some bacteria take nitrogen from the atmosphere and then spew out ammonia and related compounds, which are taken up by the roots of the symbiotic plants. I would call this "fertilization" (in the agricultural sense).
But then it becomes ambiguous whether you're talking about fertilising the tree, or the tree fertilising something else. Perhaps self fertilising? But that sounds like reproduction.
And that's assuming we're living in a world where you can petition the World English Language Governing Body to make the necessary changes to the language.
But for better or worse that body doesn't exist so we are stuck with what we've got, and at the moment people talk about nitrogen fixing plants, so if you want to communicate with people, you need to use those terms.
That isn't clickbait, that's just making sure a headline doesn't turn into an off topic essay.
