Urban soil research and education
08/18/2026
My parents grow most of what they eat. My niece thinks this is normal.
Most kids have never seen a watermelon before it reaches the plate. Everything here came out of the same soil my family has worked for three generations.
➡️ Send this to someone who grew up in a garden.
❓What’s one food you’ve eaten straight out of the ground?
08/11/2026
There is an agave at Purdue spending its whole life on one flowering, and when it finishes, the fiber in those leaves goes in the bin unless someone asks for it.
Alice is an Agave americana. She flowers once and dies. Decades of stored resources are moving up into that bloom stalk right now, which is why the base is drying while the top is still going.
Agave is not a novelty fiber. Sisal and henequen are both agaves and have been commercial hard fibers for over a century. Long before that, Indigenous peoples in Mexico and the southwestern US pulled fiber from leaves like these for rope, netting, sandals, bowstrings and clothing.
The spines worked as needles with their own thread still attached. The stalks became instruments. Almost nothing wasted.
Purdue Botany and Plant Pathology is asking. Textiles, fiber art, music, education, design: request form in my bio. You collect from campus in West Lafayette, materials are limited, and she will likely die around October.
Request samples if you can use them, and send this to someone who can. Botany@Purdue
I’m halfway through and already annoyed that it’s going to end. If you’ve ever been the only woman in a room full of people who assumed you were the assistant, this one’s for you.
We rented one of those pedal cars and I spent the entire ride looking at the grass instead of the view, because apparently that is not something I can switch off.
There is clover all through this lawn, and clover moves in where nitrogen is short since it makes its own, which means it takes over exactly where grass is struggling.
So the lawn was telling me what a soil test would have said: the fill underneath is young and thin on nutrients, which is entirely normal for ground this new, but you have to be looking down to catch it.
Every tree here is the same age with the same thin trunk, the beds are mulched far more heavily than real topsoil would ever require because constructed ground drains fast and holds very little, there is water standing on the path where the ground beneath has compacted, and the slope toward the water is far too even to have formed on its own. This soil did not develop here over centuries; it was brought in and graded into place.
I am not complaining, because I genuinely love a park like this and building soil is one of the better things a city can do for itself. But it is a made thing, and made ground behaves like infrastructure rather than like nature: it compacts underfoot, it loses organic matter, it slowly stops holding water.
Almost nobody budgets for that, because everyone assumes the ground was always simply there, and in a city it very rarely was.
Send this to a friend who walks slowly and notices things.
#татарстан
08/04/2026
I get dressed up for museums and I don’t think that’s precious. I think it’s the minimum.
Somebody quarried this stone. Somebody laid this roof by hand, slowly, and it has stood for centuries. Turning up to that in whatever was on the floor says it isn’t remarkable. It is remarkable. That is the entire reason it’s still standing.
I learned this from my mother, who never once said it out loud. She just always got dressed, and took me with her, and stood in front of things until I started looking too.
We spent one afternoon in Kazan walking between a mosque and a cathedral inside the same set of walls. Nobody there finds that remarkable. My niece certainly didn’t. She was busy smelling the flowers.
Four of us in these photos: my mother, my sister, my niece and me. Nobody is explaining any of it to her either. We’re just taking her places.
Do you dress for museums, or do you think I’m insufferable?
#казань #татарстан
08/03/2026
Nobody knows when this tower was built. Kazan’s archives burned, and the first time anyone wrote it down was 1777.
The story goes like this. Ivan the Terrible wanted the Tatar queen Söyembikä to marry him. She said yes, on one condition: build me a tower in seven days. He did. She climbed to the top and jumped.
Beautiful story. She ruled in the 1550s. Most scholars date the tower to the 17th or 18th century. It is named after a woman who almost certainly never saw it.
What we do know is less romantic and more interesting. It leans about 1.8 meters. It stands on oak piles. And when archaeologists dug, they found the older city underneath, khan-era structures buried right below the foundation. One side of this building is resting on that. The other side is resting on something else entirely.
Brick does not forgive that. It just takes a few centuries to say so.
Pisa: same problem, better publicist.
Follow ANNA PALTSEVA, Ph.D | Urban Soil Scientist | TEDx Speaker for a soil scientist’s eye on the material world.
#казань #Сююмбике
07/28/2026
A name I had never heard of changed everything.
Swipe for Emma.
And tag the colleague you want to nominate next.
WomenInSTE
Turn the volume up 🔊
This is what months of healthy soil, sunshine, and hard work sound like 🌾
#уборкаурожая