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Sunbeam City is a anticapitalist, antifascist solarpunk instance that is run collectively.

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Sun :heart_aro: :heart_ace:

i'm gonna see if i can make a bug hotel out of knotweed canes in my ongoing quest to discover uses for invasive plants.
I've never made a bug hotel before so idk what i'm doing. but i've seen people make them out of bamboo and knotweed has a similar structure although it's not as strong.
anyone have tips?

Collected a few before it started raining.
Tied together with some blackberry cordage. Ill have to make some more bundles and build some sort of roof for it

@sunflower_avenue my childhood is filled with memories of cutting that stuff down with knives. it would take over our yard and I would go out and pretend I was a samurai

@sunflower_avenue my only tip is to make sure none of the cut parts have access to dirt, or they'll root. Knotweed is sneaky that way, it's why the only way to properly get rid of it is injecting herbicide directly into all the stems. Which is why when I join invasive pulls, we leave the knotweed and flag it for the city crews with the right tools.

@varve yep! Im not super familiar with knotweed. Still learning it. But for this project im using dead fallen canes so hopefully those wont pose any risk

@sunflower_avenue ohhh I wonder if that's herbicide treated knotweed... And if the herbicide is bad for bees :(

@varve yeah, i'll have to look into that
There's one patch that hasn't been treated at all and has some dead canes, although it's in the middle of a bunch of blackberries (ah, the invasives growing amongst the invasives, perhaps together they can create their own biodiverisity) and another that has been chemically treated about a year ago.