Tomato Growing Made Simple
Tomatoes reward small, smart habits. A few simple steps can turn average plants into strong, productive ones.
1 Feed the soil first
Add compost or organic matter at the bottom of the planting hole. A little wood ash can also boost nutrients.
Relatable mistake – planting straight into poor soil and expecting miracles.
2 Trim before planting
Remove the lower leaves a couple of days before transplanting. This encourages deeper rooting and helps reduce disease risk.
3 Water wisely at the start
Avoid overwatering early on. Slightly drier conditions encourage roots to grow deeper and stronger.
4 Pinch the suckers
Remove side shoots when they’re about 5 cm long. This helps the plant focus its energy on fruit production instead of extra foliage.
Simple, consistent care leads to healthier plants and a more generous harvest. Small actions, big tomato rewards.
How To Prune Rosemary
Rosemary hides its problems well — it still smells good even when half the base is dead. Annual pruning prevents the point of no return from arriving unannounced.
The rule that governs rosemary is the same as for lavender: below the green zone lies grey wood that does not regenerate. Without annual pruning, the shrub lignifies from the base upward, and within three years you have a bare trunk topped by a green tuft at the tips. At that point there is no recovery — old rosemary wood does not carry dormant buds capable of breaking back into growth.
How to manage it through the year in the Northern Hemisphere:
— Late February to early March: formative prune. Cut back the green stems by roughly a third, keeping carefully above the visible junction between the soft young growth and the rigid old wood beneath. That junction is the line that must not be crossed.
— April and May: leave the plant completely alone and enjoy the flowering. This is the main pollinator window — early bumblebees and honeybees depend on rosemary as one of the first substantial nectar sources of the year.
— June: a second light trim to remove spent flowerheads and encourage new lateral growth.
Two rules that never change:
— The dry grey bark at the base is a no-cut zone. Cutting into it leaves permanent stubs that will produce nothing.
— Remove stems that cross through the centre of the shrub. Without airflow, the interior stays damp and fungal problems develop.
After six to eight years, even the best-managed rosemary thins at the base. Replacing it with a rooted cutting taken in summer is a better option than trying to force recovery from an old plant.
The line between green and woody is the only secret to a compact rosemary for years.
For the Southern Hemisphere (e.g., Australia)
Seasons are reversed, so shift the timing by about 6 months to match the equivalent part of the seasonal cycle:
- Main formative prune: Late August to early September (your late winter/early spring).
- Leave alone for flowering: Roughly October–November (your spring flowering window for pollinators).
- Light trim after flowering: December (your early summer).
Fruit Tree Helpers
Each plant at the base of your fruit trees has a specific role: feeding the soil, deterring pests, attracting pollinators, or covering bare ground. Together they form a self-sustaining ecosystem that works for the tree throughout the year and progressively reduces the maintenance it demands.
Comfrey — deep roots that draw up calcium, potassium, and phosphorus from subsoil layers. Cut the leaves five or six times per year and leave them as a free mineral mulch directly under the tree.
Chives — sulphur-rich foliage that deters aphids and limits fungal disease around the trunk. Self-maintaining once established.
White clover — a living mulch that fixes atmospheric nitrogen in the root zone and provides continuous nectar for pollinators from spring to autumn.
Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) — flat flower clusters that attract hoverflies and parasitic wasps, both significant predators of aphids and caterpillars.
Daffodils — toxic bulbs planted in a ring near the trunk to deter voles and other burrowing rodents that target fruit tree roots.
Calendula — root exudates that reduce harmful soil nematode populations, and a strong scent that disorients flying pests.
Sweet alyssum — a dense mat of tiny flowers that draws hoverflies, lacewings, and parasitic wasps in large numbers throughout the season.
Borage — one of the best bee plants in the British garden, improving fruit tree pollination significantly. Self-seeds reliably from year two onwards.
Nasturtium — the most effective aphid trap plant available. Aphids gather on nasturtiums in preference to almost everything else nearby, drawing them away from the tree.
The more this system matures, the less you need to intervene.
The Plastic Detox
Jack Seale, The Guardian:
“Get up, after a restless sleep. Shower, using products that contain plastic and are in plastic containers. Fix your hair and deodorise your body using sprays smoothed by plastics, before putting on clothes woven from synthetic (plastic) fibres, picking up your plastic phone and heading out, sipping water from a plastic bottle. Chew plastic gum. Buy a snack wrapped in plastic and receive a receipt printed on plastic-covered paper. Come home, take food out of its plastic packaging, cook it with plastic utensils, then store the leftovers in plastic tubs and clean up with detergents that contain plastics and come in plastic bottles. Clean your teeth with a plastic toothbrush and plastic-infused toothpaste. Go to bed.
The list of ways in which humanity is committing species suicide may be long and growing, but The Plastic Detox is here to suggest that room should be found for the overwhelmingly widespread use of petrochemical-derived plastics.
That’s the main concern of this documentary’s protagonist, epidemiologist Shanna Swan, whose 2021 book Count Down claimed that chemicals in plastic are a factor in falling sperm counts. Swan, a vibrantly bustling grandmother of six and great-grandmother of a precious one, hooks us in with an experiment flavoured by reality TV. Visiting Florida, California, and Idaho, she finds six couples who are struggling to conceive, and challenges them to live for three months with their exposure to plastics dramatically reduced.”
After all this doom, Swan’s final visits to the six couples reward us with happy tears: her admittedly small-sample experiment has produced startling results, including some that go beyond being pregnant or not.
Perspectives
When you get upset about something small, this may help you to put things into their proper perspective.
Click to view the video: https://www.flixxy.com/188-seconds-that-will-amaze-you.htm
An Open Sourced Full 3D Building Editor
An Open Sourced Full 3D Building Editor
Someone just open sourced a full 3D building editor that runs entirely in your browser.
No AutoCAD. No Revit. No $5,000/year licenses.
It’s called Pascal Editor.
Built with React Three Fiber and WebGPU — meaning it renders directly on your GPU at near-native speed.
Here’s what’s inside this thing:
A full building/level/wall/zone hierarchy you can edit in real time
An ECS-style architecture where every object updates through GPU-powered systems
Zustand state management with full undo/redo built in
Next.js frontend so it deploys as a web app, not a desktop install
Dirty node tracking — only re-renders what changed, not the whole scene
Here’s the wildest part:
You can stack, explode, or solo individual building levels. Select a zone, drag a wall, reshape a slab — all in 3D, all in the browser.
Architecture firms pay $50K+ per seat for BIM software that does this workflow.
This is free.
100% Open Source.
Click to view the video: https://x.com/heygurisingh/status/2035674710005187065?s=20
Adverse Event Risk from Repeated mRNA Booster Vaccination
This source article is filled with medical terminology related to the immune system and for most of us would need to be studied in conjunction with a medical dictionary in order to understand it.
A lay person summary of it (thanks to Grok) is that:
- 1. mRNA COVID vaccines work differently from some other types (like certain DNA-based ones mentioned for comparison). After several doses, especially boosters, they can cause the body’s antibody response to change in a specific way—shifting toward antibodies that mainly block the virus from entering cells but are less good at rallying other parts of the immune system to actively destroy infected cells and clear the infection.
- 2. This change means the protection from infection isn’t as strong or complete as what you get right after the first doses or from natural infection. The antibodies still help stop the virus to some degree, but the overall immune defense against catching or spreading the virus may weaken over time with repeated shots.
- 3. Regular antibody blood tests that doctors usually do won’t show this change. Those tests just measure overall antibody levels against the virus spike protein—they don’t reveal how the “style” of those antibodies has shifted or how well they activate the full immune attack. Special, harder-to-get lab tests are needed to spot it.
- 4. Giving boosters too close together makes this immune shift more likely and stronger. When shots are spaced out (like waiting a full year or more), the body has time to reset, and the unwanted change is less pronounced or may even reverse.
- 5. Kids can experience this shift after fewer doses than adults (sometimes just the initial two shots in studies of children). Since children generally have a very low risk of serious COVID illness, any potential downside from this altered immune response could matter more for them than for older or higher-risk adults (where calming down overactive inflammation might actually be helpful in some cases).
https://open.substack.com/pub/rwmalonemd/p/igg4-class-switching-immune-tolerance
Vitamin Handlings
Grok evaluates thus: The list shared is a popular type of social media post that links common symptoms to specific nutrient deficiencies and suggests “natural cures” with vitamins/minerals. Many of these associations have some basis in medical and nutritional science, but the claims are often oversimplified, overstated, or incomplete.
These symptoms can have multiple causes (e.g., dehydration, stress, infections, hormones, medications, or other medical conditions), not just deficiencies. Deficiencies are real but relatively uncommon in people with balanced diets in developed countries — they’re more likely in cases of restricted eating, malabsorption issues (e.g., celiac, IBD), certain medications, or specific groups (vegans for B12, limited sun exposure for vitamin D).
Here’s a breakdown of the claims, based on reliable sources like NIH, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Harvard Health, and peer-reviewed literature:
Cracked lips (often angular cheilitis/cracks at corners) — Mostly accurate. Strongly linked to deficiencies in riboflavin (B2), sometimes niacin (B3), B6, iron, and occasionally zinc or other B vitamins. This is one of the more classic and well-supported associations.
Dandruff — Partially accurate but overstated. Linked to zinc deficiency (supports scalp health/oil regulation), B6 (riboflavin/B2 and B6 can contribute to seborrheic dermatitis-like flaking), and omega-3 (anti-inflammatory, may help dry/scaly scalp). Not the only or primary cause — dandruff is often fungal (Malassezia), hygiene-related, or seborrheic dermatitis.
Frequent headaches — Some support. Magnesium deficiency is associated with migraines/headaches (supplementation like 400-600 mg riboflavin/B2 or magnesium often recommended for migraine prevention). Riboflavin (B2) has good evidence for reducing migraine frequency. Iron deficiency (anemia) can contribute via reduced oxygen delivery. Not all headaches stem from this.
Fatigue — Very common and accurate. Classic for B12, vitamin D, and iron deficiencies (anemia from iron or B12/folate leads to tiredness/weakness).
Weakness — Accurate. Overlaps with fatigue; linked to B1, D, magnesium, A, and E (e.g., vitamin D for muscle function, magnesium for energy/contraction).
Hair loss — Partially accurate. Biotin (B7) is heavily promoted but evidence is weak except in rare true deficiencies. Better links to iron, zinc, vitamin D, A, E, and protein/essential fatty acids. Telogen effluvium (shedding) often ties to iron or other shortfalls.
Brittle nails — Some support. Linked to biotin (B7) (popular but mixed evidence), vitamin D, and zinc/iron.
Acne skin — Overstated. Vitamin A (retinoids) helps regulate skin/oil; zinc has anti-inflammatory effects and evidence for acne reduction; omega-3 may help inflammation. Vitamin E has limited direct link. Acne is multifactorial (hormones, bacteria, etc.).
Dry skin — Some support. Zinc and essential fatty acids (including omega-3) support skin barrier; deficiencies can worsen dryness.
Mood swings — Some support. Vitamin D, B6, and magnesium influence neurotransmitter function/serotonin; low levels associate with mood issues/depression.
Weak bones — Strongly accurate. Vitamin D, K, and calcium are essential for bone density/mineralization (rickets/osteomalacia in severe deficiency).
Bleeding gums — Accurate. Classic for vitamin C (scurvy causes bleeding gums/swollen tissues); K for clotting; zinc for healing.
Muscle cramps — Good support. Magnesium and potassium deficiencies commonly cause cramps (electrolyte imbalance).
Frequent infections — Accurate. Vitamin C, zinc, and D support immune function (e.g., zinc shortens colds; D deficiency links to higher respiratory infections).
Pale skin — Accurate. From anemia due to B12, iron, or sometimes vitamin C (aids iron absorption).
Poor night vision — Classic and accurate. Vitamin A deficiency causes night blindness/xerophthalmia; zinc aids vitamin A metabolism.
Memory issues — Some support. B12 deficiency causes neurological symptoms (memory problems, neuropathy); omega-3 for brain health; vitamin E as antioxidant.
Slow wound healing — Accurate. Vitamin C (collagen synthesis), zinc (cell repair), and adequate protein are key.
Tingling or numbness — Strongly accurate. Classic neurological sign of B12 deficiency (peripheral neuropathy); also B1 (beriberi) and B6 (in excess or deficiency).
Overall:
About 60-70% of the pairings have legitimate scientific backing (especially B vitamins, iron, zinc, D, C, magnesium for the symptoms listed).
The list presents them as direct “cures” and implies doctors hide this info — that’s misleading. Doctors do check for deficiencies (via blood tests) when symptoms suggest it, and supplementation helps if a deficiency exists. Self-diagnosing and mega-dosing vitamins can cause issues (e.g., excess A, iron, or B6 toxicity).
If you’re experiencing several of these symptoms, see a doctor for proper testing (blood work for vitamins/minerals) rather than just supplementing blindly. A balanced diet usually prevents most deficiencies, but targeted fixes work when needed.
Former President of the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association Says 30–40% of Corpses Contain WHITE FIBROUS CLOTS
For the first time, a former U.S. state funeral directors association president publicly acknowledges the white fibrous clots: “They’ve been the size of the arteries.”
Since 2021, reports of unusual white fibrous clots discovered during embalming have been dismissed as anecdotal or attributed to fringe voices within the profession. That dismissal is no longer credible. The phenomenon is now being confirmed by senior leadership across multiple funeral director and embalmer associations—individuals with decades of experience and responsibility for representing thousands of professionals.
Continue: https://open.substack.com/pub/petermcculloughmd/p/breaking-former-president-of-the