Given enough time to shift production over and train up people, certainly.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces was small prior to 2014 but they grew it substantially after Russia snapped up Crimea and sent the little green men to fight them in the east which is part of why they were much more prepared for the renewed invasion efforts than they had been eight years prior. This is not to say that Russia stands a chance against NATO but it is to say that Ukraine presently has a very large and powerful army even compared to leading European powers at this point. Zelensky said France presently has about 200k men in the military while Ukraine had at that time some 980k men in the military, and Ukraine are spending many tens of billions of dollars on the military also.

That’s awesome! I planted maypop seeds last winter and got some seedlings but then the sky forgot to rain for basically the whole spring so they died without proceeding any further. I did just recently find out that I have another native cousin of it called Passiflora lutea hiding behind a bush and near my watering hose, though I only see leaves and little clinging vines and no flowers. Not quite as spectacular but I’ll take it.

I live in a rather xeric sandhills environment with blazing sun and this year has had more drought than typical, so indeed a good number of my less well adapted or more poorly positioned plants have been crisping up. Even so, summer is a season of fruiting and growth for many. Ex. partridge pea barely germinates at the end of spring. It was July-early August for it to blossom gloriously, mid-August for the cloudless sulphur caterpillars to appear en masses to devour those blooms and leaves, and at present the caterpillars are undergoing metamorphosis while the partridge pea bereft of blooms now pushes out the eponymous pea pods. Beautyberries have only just now turned their delightful purple color, the black-eyed susans grew in the spring but did not flower until the summer. I can’t take a step anywhere without the grasshoppers fleeing and despite the dry conditions there are tree frogs taking shelter in the shadows of my house’s siding and toads singing, anoles basking in the force of the sun.

For some reason my county is like a black hole for deer with a way lower deer population density than not only the surrounding area but also the entire state. Never seen evidence of them nor rabbits on the property.

That said, while we don’t have those specific nibblers of things we might have liked to eat…

Hard disagree. In summer plants are doing a lot of cool things as are the insects and all that activity invites many interactions with larger animals also. Whereas in the winter almost everything closes shop and goes dormant which makes invasive ne’er-do-wells like Youngia japonica and Lamium amplexicaule more prominent.

I’d advise caution and make sure independently that the species you’re buying is native rather than trusting a company’s website because they can sometimes play a little fast and loose with what’s native… I get why, it’s hard to research the particulars of every plant you offer and to gate them off to some people cuts into the money when native plants are kind of a niche market anyway, and some people have looser definitions of native plants than others.

But for example, if I go to that website I am zoned for where they would send Asclepias syriaca.

However, if I open up Flora of the Southeastern United States which is a very authoritative and updated resource on determining if a plant is native to my region or not, it turns out that Asclepias syriaca is actually not native to my entire state. Perhaps not the worst non-native, but not something I would personally want to be planting when there are many native alternatives I can buy instead that fully integrate with my local ecosystem.

Also, even for states where it is indeed native, you have to consider site conditions. So for instance they provide Asclepias incarnata to northern Florida which is indeed native there (assuming it’s the pulchra subspecies, which may or may not be the case since they don’t say) but it’s called “swamp” milkweed in part because it needs moist or wet conditions common in places like marshes bogs and swamps. There are plenty of areas with conditions like those in north Florida, but if you try to plant that in dry & sandy conditions which are also abundant in north Florida that poor plant will have a terrible time of it due to the site conditions despite being native to the region. I have a dry sandhills site with STRONG sun for instance so I would want to focus on getting a milkweed that can thrive in those conditions rather than needing to be on constant life support to barely make it.

You were right BTW, RIP pine tree

I saw one before in a forest, beautiful caterpillar but the spines looked like bad news.

I agree but I do think we have to be careful to specify that locally appropriate milkweeds be planted rather than blanket saying plant milkweed no matter what. Some damage has been caused by people importing and planting ex. tropical milkweed Asclepias curassavica which is invasive in certain regions and has negative effects in those areas like tricking monarchs to stay and breed in regions where cold snaps may roll in to wipe them out, cut down on migratory behavior, and also allow Ophryocystis elektroscirrha spores to build up and infect many monarchs.

There’s such a huge variety of native milkweeds to fit all manner of situations, there are something like 19 different species native to my region of my state that can handle anything from standing water in dark forests (ex. Asclepias perennis) to blazing sun on sand (ex. Asclepias humistrata).

I have the same caterpillars going wild on partridge peas (Chamaecrista nictitans) and some are winding up in weird places to make their cocoons… like the inside of my porch somehow…

Thanks for the luck! That’s actually exactly sort of what I’m looking for. I want to help out the native plants so I can get all their weird insects and also the critters that eat those insects. So if it is native, grows easily and makes a lot of material that supports critters then that’s all gravy for me, and longleaf pine is a keystone species for the area too.

Ex. I also have partridge pea nearby which I think is also given the side-eye for being messy and just springing up, but it’s like a caterpillar factory for cloudless sulphur butterflies and has had a ridiculous number of bumblebees all over it.

Yeah… I didn’t apply a mulch layer around it and I didn’t clear the competition around it unless it was approaching the height of the tree which were mistakes compounding on the root being messed up. Still watering it but I’m going start looking into where I can get a little one in a plug instead of a potted version. Apparently most plugs are bought in bulk with minimum orders of a few hundred or a thousand near me but I’m not looking for quite that many haha

edit: I can actually get individual ones for $3.50 apparently so that’s cool

I took a closer look and didn’t find any insects munching on it, even when I moved the straw aside to look at the bark. Though while I was out in the yard I did see that the persimmon fruit was being attacked by a ton of stink bugs so I was able to use that advice there. Thanks!

Hmm I will investigate further as there’s light! I was meaning to clear out some of the plants surrounding it anyway to reduce competition so I should be able to get a better picture up close.

That gives me some hope so I’ll do my best! I think it would be more or less functionally impossible to drown that particular one because I have a sandy soil that drains quickly and it’s on bit of a slope too. Great soil for discouraging fungal rot but unfortunately not so much for retaining moisture, at least in the top couple feet. A bit better further down than that where the increasing amounts of plinthite/ironstone and clay do a better job of holding onto moisture for adventurous taproots to suck up.

Sea shipping is incredibly efficient which really helps make such surprising things possible with a strong enough comparative advantage. That said, it’s still an added friction, does take time and adds in some more risks. Being close counts for quite a lot if that trade is more or less freely allowed.

Looking at this World Bank data for Denmark in 2023 (latest year it was tabulated for), it actually has next door big neighbor Germany as getting ~13.7% of Denmark’s total exports followed by Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway before getting to the US’ ~5.0%. Somewhat more distant European heavyweights like the UK, Poland and France follow not terribly far behind before you get to enormous economy China. Swap it to import and again neighboring big economy Germany is providing a whopping ~20.3% followed by Sweden and the Netherlands before you get to China’s ~6.5%, then Poland, then the US’ ~4.6%. Not far behind trails Norway at ~4.5%. So Norway has a relatively similar share of Denmark’s trade going either way compared to what the US has, despite having an economy multiple hundreds of times smaller than that of the US. That proximity really helps!

The US in the same data is importing roughly the same ~14% share from each of neighboring Mexico and Canada as well as giant super focused on exporting China, and going the other way US exports are double to both Mexico and Canada what they are to China. Despite the Mexican and Canadian economies even combined together being like a fifth of China’s economy.

Also most of Canada’s population is distributed pretty near to the very lengthy border with the US, intermittently broken up by challenging terrain and only a comparatively small fraction is coastal. This has had the effect of encouraging parallel north-south trade corridors going across the border. If those flows instead are directed east-west to Canada’s ports which are also already stretched then the existing infrastructure can also potentially be limiting even with Canada signing a ton of amazing trade deals. Check out this picture of Canada’s road networks and see that there are some rather surprising bottlenecks.

All that said Canada should absolutely seek the best trade deals it can get with as many countries as possible in the circumstances. But I think it may be difficult to find enough low-hanging fruit still left to make up for such a huge gap, surely if it were that easy to expand trade so massively it wouldn’t have been ignored prior to this point of crisis?

Happier days back when it was pushing up a fresh candle 😭

I never had any interest in drinking alcohol, the smell is horrible and while you can supposedly push through and acclimate to it fairly easily and there are mixes that will mask that harsh scent/taste I never really saw a reason to do that since there were very clear examples around me of people screwing up their entire lives with alcohol.

People intentionally say stupid things on Twitter to rile up viewers into arguing in the replies (free engagement!) and get even people who hate them to share their “content”