I call fake. Sure doesn't look like typical plants and trees commonly found in the Pacific Northwest. Almost had me.

Scary.
Here, I've seen them get so bad that they eat the bark off my plants and trees. I find them by the dozen in Apple bunches still in the tree. Under pots and yard fabric I usually find a carpet of them. This is new over the last few years, before then we had them, but not the swarms I see now. I have to wonder what's changed to swell their numbers, and what that means for the food web.

I tried lemons in the ground here....it lived almost 3 years, but never had a lemon.
I have peach, nectarine, and plumbs in 1/2 barrels now, doing OK, but the peach and nectarine could use more room, they're both around 8-10 ft tall. The nectarines might need more cold than we get to bear fruit, but it's happy so far a year in.
I also started a trio of Asian pears in a 1/2 barrel about 10 years back, twisted together in a spiral, then planted the whole thing a few years ago, barrel and all (with the bottom pulled out). A year later I pulled all the staves and hoops up and it's been pretty happy ever since. I've had hit and miss luck just planting smaller trees directly in our ground, so I try to get the trees pretty established these days before putting them out.
If I try an orange tree, I'll probably put it in a 40 gallon pot (I like the air pots now over 1/2 barrels, they seem to make a difference in growth speed and are far cheaper) and move it inside during winter for at least the first 4-5 years, and definitely bonsai it to keep it around 8 ft.
I have a small orchard of apple trees now....around 30, and a few other fruits. At least I know they do great in our climate.

EDIT: We have had years with over a week at 20°F in the past, so I'll definitely have to cover an orange tree at times once I put it outside. If I keep it small, no problem.

It sounds like you'd be just about OK to plant a tree in the ground outside. The (U.S. based) article I found on temperatures said more than 10 hours below 25°F would kill one. I think we might occasionally get to -3°C here for one to two hours before sunrise at mid winter in a cold year, but it's really only cold enough here to kill chillies and coriander from frost, not trees.

I have a lemon tree in a large pot, and have only ever had one small lemon from it... although that's partly from the annoying gall wasps we have here If you want normal sized oranges you'll need to plant a tree outside. They grow to about 5 metres (uhm, 15 feet maybe?) if you don't prune them (but you should).

@coolhand, What you suggested is being done around Beijing. They started before the '08 Olympics, and have plans to put in even more trees to combat the terrible air quality.

"The municipal government has announced that over the next three years it will plant 160, 000 acres of trees around the suburbs, a space which is 90 times larger than the Beijing Olympic Forest Park."

People, people, people. Walmart is not the REASON the entire civilised world is finding itself in this situation - walmart is a symptom of the problem.

Walmart is an organisation motivated by profit just like any other.

I heard energy companies posting record profits year in and year out before the recession. There's people at the upper ends of those kinds of companies taking wages, bonuses, pensions and god-knows-what that some people couldn't make in 10 years. They don't deserve it, they don't work 10 times harder then the next person down, but there is a culture of taking what you can.

People don't need that kind of wealth, they just want it. Now, in times of hardship, energy companies are demanding more money for their services because they are no longer making the profit they used to. Instead of relying on the wealth that they have amassed during times of good, they rely on us to give them more.

So they cut a load of jobs to maximise their profits, but now the people they fired can't afford their energy bills. And this is going on all over the place - it isn't just the energy companies, it's also walmart with whatever schemes they've got. It's the oil companies and the politicians with whatever schemes they've got.

And all these schemes intermix, people losing jobs, people unable to afford this here and there because we've stagnated our money, there was no trickle down wealth, it's stagnated so much that there's not enough available anymore to share between the people that need it.

So now the government starts giving out handouts to the elderly or unemployed - £300 for your winter heating bill. But that's a huge amount of money so we need to raise taxes - which is a solution to nothing but puts the problem further ahead and maybe you can work harder later to make up for it.

Meanwhile, half the jobs that are getting taxed are now moved abroad because production is cheaper there. So entire markets of jobs no longer exist, we lost all of our car manufacturers, coal mines (it's cheaper from china), etc. which amounts to millions of jobs, and there's not a lot left to tax. What's the solution now? Which country do we bail out with borrowed money that is earning interest? If the untold billions in profit was returned to the customers back when times were good, we wouldn't be in this situation. But instead it went towards making let's say 30 individual people a lot richer.

Do you see where i'm going with this? It's a culture of greed, and each point down the line there is just enough intentional maneuverability for people to take more than you deserve and/or need; you either are in the clique, in the power scheme, taking cash - or you're not and you're holding up the facade. This isn't what a society is meant to be - it's meant to be a group of people working for their own common benefit because when we don't we all suffer and no one is happy.

This model has a short life-cycle; the eventual result is a few people having a lot of little bits of green paper that don't mean anything because they've forced everyone into abject poverty.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in."
It doesn't get any simpler than that. Until these old men start planting some trees and giving a LOT back, we will stagnate and you don't want to learn this implied lesson the hard way.

That's really neat technology. We could also make park spaces in urban areas an plant some trees.

>> ^Duckman33:

However:
Genesis 1:29
Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you"


Apparently, they'd never heard of all the shit that grows on plants and trees that can really motherfucking KILL you.

Ah, god, you silly trickster you!

yeah it's moved to the tainted webfolk, who need to use their powers for good and not with what they have been programmed with....Perhaps a drum circle or some recycling...Stop the poison-Plant a tree and watch it grow instead of television-teach your children that information is what you can take in with your 8 senses-smoke more pot, eat more shrooms ,max out your credit cards and refuse all phone calls and correspondence on the matter....

I will give my interpretation of the movie.

I believe the movie to be about death as a natural and needed event, and coming to terms with that.
In the conquistador times, he searched for the tree of life to please the queen and help defend Spain. But he failed to learn the lesson the native was trying to teach him. Death is needed, and should not be averted. And that's when you get the first clue to the meaning of all this. He drinks the sap, and he dies, but new life grows out of him.

In the modern days his wife is dying, and he does everything he can to avert death. He says so himself. "death is a disease". Eventually he finds the cure, but too late for his wife, and he never comes to term with that. He planted a tree over her grave. Hundreds of years later (I wanna believe the 3 parts of the story are set about 500 years between each other, so the future part would be somewhere in the 25th century) he is still alive, having cured death, but he still grieves over the death of his wife, and can't let go, and his tormented by that. And the tree he planted is now dying as well.

In the end he comes to realize that only by dying can life be renewed, and does life have meaning. When he dies the tree comes back to life. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed. Everything must die, so that new life may appear. And it's also about accepting death. Not wishing it obviously, but accepting that it will come for you, and everyone and everything else. Everything dies, even stars. But because your atoms carry on to something else, you also truly never cease to exist. You know... "We are all made of star stuff" kind of message. I don't find the movie religious in the slightest.

>> ^Xaielao:
Yea I don't understand the whole 'leave the ashes in a jar on the hearth' thing either.
Me, when I die, throw my body deep in the woods so the natural processes can be had. That or bury me somewhere and plant a tree over the grave.


There's a man who loves all the little critters!

I've asked to be slaughtered and served to my friends and family, but for some reason nobody seems to like that idea. Weird.

Also, if you look, there's very few ashes in that urn, unless "Mom" was a dwarf, there should have been far more ashes.

Yea I don't understand the whole 'leave the ashes in a jar on the hearth' thing either.

Me, when I die, throw my body deep in the woods so the natural processes can be had. That or bury me somewhere and plant a tree over the grave.

winston , no there has not been a period since we have been able to measure it , or in ANY historical sample that has carbon ppm as high as it is now . That's in 400,000 years.

Go back further. This is one of the key problems with the many flawed "global warming" models that people are trying to pass off as science. Why only look 400,000 years back? If you are going to do a comprehensive analysis then you have to look at the entire record. Cenozoic, Mesozoic, Paleozoic... In the past, atmosphereic C02 levels have been as high as 4,000+ PPM. TEN TIMES the current measley 380 PPM. When you look at the whole record, our current C02 levels are at a very low point.

Now - the way global warming alarmists discuss C02 you would think that at 10X the C02 levels our planet would be a wasteland of acidified oceans, baking deserts, and inhospitable wastes. Pht. Those periods of time were points where earth had far greater variety in plant and animal life and far more of earth's surface could sustain life. So why are global warming alarmists so all-fired paranoid about the relatively tiny increase from the LOW point of 280 PPM to a miniscule 390 PPM?

The only thing that is political in this movement is that studied observation may lead the way to better governance

The carbon taxes they want to impose would amount to one of the largest (if not THE largest) transfers of wealth to government in all of human history. Literally trillions of unaccountable dollars will be pouring into world governments all supposedly to 'fix' global warming. And you are trying to say that this isn't political? This is a cash grab, and they are getting useful idiots to play along by making the scientific community their little dancing monkeys in a game of modern-day patronage. When you follow the money trail, all these so-called 'climate studies' are bought and paid for by governments who winnow the results to get the scary headlines they need to spook the slow-witted and gullible into happily giving up their freedoms.

And government doesn't have to do squat except rake in the free money. They can't influence C02 levels any more than they can stop the sun, but they'll take your trillions of dollars - thanks. It is simple matter of Return on Investment. Is there ANY possibility that trillions of dollars going into government will in any way move the dial? There is no evidence that it will do a blessed thing. Therefore, why should we give up trillions to accomplish nothing except make paranoid people feel better about themselves? If you want to feel better about yourself then just go plant a tree and keep out of everyone's wallet.

>> ^burdturgler:
Making fun of people who "believe" in homeopathy feels like disinformation to me. Turn them all into loons so that no one demands alternatives. Most drugs are derivatives of plants, herbs, trees etc. They were all "homeopathic" at one point. If he said "isolate the salicylic acid from the bark of a willow tree" that would sound funny too. Unfortunately now it takes upwards of a billion dollars to get something through the FDA. I don't know what that answer is, we can't have people selling dangerous and ineffective crap, but that doesn't mean that everything "homeopathic" doesn't work.


You're talking about Naturopathy... herbs have effects, yes... it is plausible.

The thing about Homeopathy though, is that if it's truly homeopathic according to the rules set down when it was invented... there really is no way it could work. Any active ingredients are diluted to the point that there is only water left.

Some products are labeled homeopathic, but actually have enough drugs in there to still do something. The only difference, then, between these falsely-labeled homeopathic treatments, herbal remedies, and the drugs you get from your pharmacy is that the homeopathic treatments and herbs are "alternative" and therefore, not regulated for safety by the FDA. Given the choice, I would go with the mainstream drugs which have been tested more thoroughly.

Zicam users recently fell afoul of a dearth of safety testing. Zicam was falsely labeled homeopathic, but it actually had measurable levels of zinc in it. People shot it up their nose and lost their sense of smell.

Making fun of people who "believe" in homeopathy feels like disinformation to me. Turn them all into loons so that no one demands alternatives. Most drugs are derivatives of plants, herbs, trees etc. They were all "homeopathic" at one point. If he said "isolate the salicylic acid from the bark of a willow tree" that would sound funny too. Unfortunately now it takes upwards of a billion dollars to get something through the FDA. I don't know what that answer is, we can't have people selling dangerous and ineffective crap, but that doesn't mean that everything "homeopathic" doesn't work.