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Thoughts on synthetic fertilizers?

You need a pet chameleon.
Sarah is right, @NickF, but it doesn't even have to be a pet.

However, as long as we don't function as food for them, spiders are our friends. Of course, I didn't feel very friendly towards them when I woke up one morning at my stained-glass Nacogdoches house and had seven brown recluses busily biting me.

Almost all of my skin eventually turned black and then systematically fell off in half-inch-thick chunks.

Generally speaking, though, spiders are an integral part of the ecosystem. Can't really say the same thing about bedbugs.
 
A lot of pharmaceuticals make their way into the sewage Industrial wastes including heavy metals might also enter the waste stream.
Amen.
 
seven brown recluses busily biting me.
I have an uncle who has been bitten several times. Those are not friendly spiders!

The chickens should have been allowed to roam and forage more.
 
Gecko poop is ginormous compared to spider poop and I can't suck geckos up with the hand-held vacuum like I can get rid of spiders.
This is true.
Let me tell you a cool story about geckos though. Samuel's parents own a small church and they had problems with flies, especially cluster flies. They would vacuum and the flies would be back the next day by the thousands. So they prayed about it. Then, suddenly, there were no flies. One day Samuel's father saw a gecko inside the church and he realised that God had brought the geckos to eat the flies. The geckos are protected too, which is helpful in terms of protecting the church as it's now a habitat for protected geckos.
And no, those things are plain evil and descend on one when sleeping to inflict horridly irritating bites.
You probably get more of them where you are. I always kill them when I see them. They do have the advantage of killing other spiders though.
Only to the ignorant and unlearned.
Lol.
 
However, as long as we don't function as food for them, spiders are our friends. Of course, I didn't feel very friendly towards them when I woke up one morning at my stained-glass Nacogdoches house and had seven brown recluses busily biting me.

Almost all of my skin eventually turned black and then systematically fell off in half-inch-thick chunks.
Really wish I hadn't read this. I'm very glad we don't have those here, though I now can't stop itching...
 
Different genus and species. Most likely the Australian gecko is even a different genus from Texan versions.

Geckos are flat and have “sticky” appendages. They have a camouflage pattern and thin skin.

Chameleons are tall and have opposable digits that grasp branches. They also change colors like octopi.
 
Different genus and species. Most likely the Australian gecko is even a different genus from Texan versions.

Geckos are flat and have “sticky” appendages. They have a camouflage pattern and thin skin.

Chameleons are tall and have opposable digits that grasp branches. They also change colors like octopi.
So the Geico gecko is actually a chameleon? Because that's what the lizards I'm talking about look like.
 
The Geico gecko is just a CGI animation. Sorry man... These santa clause revelation moments can be rough. I could have been more gentle with this revelation.
But that type of lizard is a Gecko.

beautiful-chameleon-panther-chameleon-panther-branch_488145-431.png
This is a chameleon

Tokay_gecko_@Vnm.jpg

And that is a gecko...
 
The Geico gecko is just a CGI animation. Sorry man... These santa clause revelation moments can be rough. I could have been more gentle with this revelation.
But that type of lizard is a Gecko.

View attachment 3434
This is a chameleon

View attachment 3435

And that is a gecko...
OK, so I've learned something here that inspired me to do a little research. The lizards I've been calling chameleons are apparently commonly thought to be chameleons because they do change colors to match backgrounds, although not in that wonderful kind of pattern in the photo you've share, and they don't share that shape at all. What I've been talking about, and we always had many of them living indoors in Atlanta, is appropriately called the house gecko. It's range of camouflaging ranges from bright green to dark brown but never has a spotted look like the gecko you've shared with us. When green, they very much look like the Geico Gekko, so maybe house geckos exist in Australier.
 
Ahhh! Then you’re talking about the Green Anole.

When stressed or hiding from a predator they turn brown. When happy and content, they are often bright green. The males have a dominance display of a red throat pouch.


30F358FC-090B-4D3E-A0F1-7BE8075E1E9D.jpeg
 
This has been another segment of Exploring Nature with Nick! We hope you enjoyed yourself, please join us again next week when we explore the mysterious world of insect frass, otherwise known as Bug Poop!

*cut to commercial*
 
I just looked up the NZ gecko, and found that we have 48 different types, all native. I didn't know that. But yes, they look like Nick's post above, and they don't change colour.
We love lizards. We have lots of skinks on our property which eat insects. We like having them around our orchard and in the garden. They are the greatest reason we have not gotten a cat. While we would love a cat to keep down our mouse problem, they would also kill the skinks. This is a picture of the type of skink I think we have in our garden.
skink.jpeg
 
I just looked up the NZ gecko, and found that we have 48 different types, all native. I didn't know that. But yes, they look like Nick's post above, and they don't change colour.
We love lizards. We have lots of skinks on our property which eat insects. We like having them around our orchard and in the garden. They are the greatest reason we have not gotten a cat. While we would love a cat to keep down our mouse problem, they would also kill the skinks. This is a picture of the type of skink I think we have in our garden.
View attachment 3437
Interestingly, New Zealand skinks give birth to live young. Fascinating creatures. I really do love finding the things, they're everywhere around our place. If I went looking for one I'd never find one, but when you're not looking you spot them quite frequently.
 
I remember reading a while back about food that had been fertilized with human waste. The folks that ate the produce got sick. Don't know much more than that.
They either did something stupid, or didn't actually get sick for that reason and blamed the wrong thing.

Horse dung can contain pathogens that affect horses, but only a small portion of them will also affect humans, so you're fairly safe using it on food crops directly. But any pathogen in human manure obviously grew in a human so can affect other humans. So human manure does need to be properly composted before use. During composting, the microorganisms that are designed to live in a human die out, and are eaten by microorganisms that are designed to live in a soil or compost heap. By the end of that, there's nothing dangerous left in it, it's no more dangerous than soil.

So if you do something stupid with human manure - like spray liquid manure from a septic tank onto your lettuces, then eat them without washing them first - yes, you may get sick. You might get away with it if it's just your own manure (as you already have those pathogens so aren't introducing anything new to yourself), but if it's someone else's then there's a risk of disease. Of course, nobody in their right mind would do that, it's obviously stupid. But stupid people do exist in this world.

On the other hand, if you properly compost your human manure first, you can use it anywhere - it's completely harmless. Or, even if it hasn't been composted, if you use it in a way where it won't come into direct contact with the food, you'll also be safe (e.g. if you do your business in a hole beside a fruit tree - you're not crapping on the fruit and then feeding it to someone else, the faeces goes into the soil and never goes anywhere near the fruit).

Just don't spray raw faeces on your salad.

Also - it's not "waste" unless you waste it. It's manure.
That may have dealt with treated municipal sewage waste, which is sometimes applied to farmland.
That is another possibility. Municipal sewage sludge contains all sorts of chemicals from domestic cleaning products and factory waste, and those compounds are far more dangerous than the manure. Over here, sewage sludge is used to help remediate land after mining - it is cultivated into the site to help build new topsoil, before the land is planted in trees. It is not used in food production because some of the chemicals in it are harmful.

This is one reason flush toilets are so terrible an idea. Human excrement is a valuable nutrient-rich resource. But city sewers mix it with poisons, turning it into toxic waste and making it far harder to recycle. As a result, sewage sludge often ends up being landfilled.
 
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