Wild Strawberries!
I was hanging out in a field of daisies the other day, and look what I found:
Wild strawberries! I seriously recommend wild strawberry hunting. They’re like candy, and tastier than domesticated varieties. just look for leaves that look like this:
but don`t confuse them with snakeberries. If it looks like fake fruit, don`t eat it.
vegetable orchestra
These folks are combining two of my favourite things: art and food. It’s strange and quirky and beautiful. How did I not see this before?
More interesting, though, is the controversy in the comments on youtube. Their statement:
just one word to all the people who are concerned about people dying of starvation:
we are concerned too. but not doing this project does change nothing. it doesn’t make the world a better place.
if you are really concerned about the distribution of wealth then do something about it! read books about the real cause of hunger. talk with your friends and family about it. change your own life and try to change politics. buy and support the right things. it is not people using vegetables differently than usual that make the world a bad place. it’s all of us wanting too much. our own car, a new cellphone, a bigger house with air condition, more money…
sending the vegetables to africa does not help. on the contrary it destroys the markets there, so people can not sell their own produce, because the imported one is too cheap.and by the way: people have used vegetables for music for centuries. also in africa.
complete energy system by a 15 yr old boy
“An invention that is narrowly focused on solving a single problem often inadvertently creates more problems because nature is highly complex and interconnected.” – Javier Fernandez-Han
Who is Javier Fernandez-Han? He’s a 15 year old boy, who invented an energy system, centred around salt-water algae. The system is made up of six subsystems, which “can treat waste, produce methane and bio-fuel, and is a source of livestock and human food production… produces oxygen and sequesters greenhouse gasses”. He calls it the VERSATILE system.
The system uses waste from one part of the system, to fuel others. Not unlike feeding rabbit poo to a garden that will feed rabbits (I wish mine did). My understanding of permaculture is still very shallow, but this seems to sum up the principles pretty well: work with the interconnectedness of ecosystems to make things easier, rather than trying to beat nature into submission to accomplish a single thing. The more I pay attention to the world around me, the more I realize how much more sense it makes.
The benefits of the VERSATILE energy system include better health for villagers due to cleaner burning methane stoves, less deforestation due to wood scavenging for fuel, possible income from the sale of algae biomass for pharmaceutical or nutraceutical products, easier livestock production because of more availability of feed, LED lighting powered by electricity generation from the PlayPump, and a source of fuel for machinery (from algae oil).
Do yourself a favour and read more about VERSATILE on Clean Technica. It’s fascinating.
Javier’s idea won the “Invent Your World Challenge” sponsored by Ashoka’s Youth Venture program. The program empowers youth (“a global community of young changemakers”) to create positive social change, which seems like a pretty freaking good idea to me.
From their website: “everyone in society could take initiative and address social needs, rather than looking to the elite few who lead today.”
Garden Warfare: Deer
One of my gardening clients has a terrible deer problem. The deer have a taste for her phlox. The entire property is surrounded with wild phlox, but the deer would rather destroy the domestic ones in her garden. They just have a bad attitude.
I told her that Irish Spring keeps deer away. It’s not surprising, given the smell. I would stay away too. Just use an old stocking to tie the soap to shrubs that are a problem. She wasn’t interested in decorating her garden with soap (again, I don’t blame her). You can also string fishing line around the garden, because it confuses the deer when they walk into it. But if you’re like me, you’ll probably also walk into it yourself.
Human hair is also a good solution. Sprinkling it around the garden means that the deer are deterred by human scent, and your plants get nitrogen. But unless you have a deal with a barber, or spend a lot of time cutting your hair, a fresh supply of human hair is hard to come by.
The thing that finally worked was so simple it’s absolutely brilliant. She cut a small hole in a little garbage can, put a radio inside with an outdoor extension cord running through the hole, and tuned it into the CBC. Unlike some fear-based deterrents, the diverse range of music and talk radio changes enough to keep the deer away. For now, anyway.
Build your own Low Impact home. Seriously.
Simon Dale built his own low impact house with £3000, 1000-1500 man hours, and almost no previous experience. And with few exceptions, the only tools he used were a chainsaw, a hammer and a chisel. It’s absolutely stunning, and looks like it came straight out of the pages of a fairytale.
He says,
Being your own (have a go) architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass produced box designed for maximum profit and convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.
His website is packed with information about how and why he did it, including plans for the house. I’m absolutely floored.
Via Bad Time.
Drought-Proof Planting
How to drought-proof new plantings:
Drought-proof planting makes your plants strong enough to wait for the rain so you don’t have to water them.
1. Dig the hole twice as wide and 1.5 times as deep as the root ball.
2. Fill the hole with water.
3. Drop some composted manure in the bottom. Regular kitchen compost is okay, but the addition of composted manure makes it better.
4. Let the hole finish draining, and put a handful of bone meal at the bottom. Bone meal is high in phosphorus, which promotes vigorous root growth. If you want to, you can mix it up with the compost at the bottom, but it’s not 100% necessary.
5. Fill the hole back up with water.
6. Carefully plant right there in the muck. You will get terribly dirty. You will need to squish your fingers into the mud to get enough dirt underneath. But trust me, it’s worth it. The happy fertilized roots will follow the water down, instead of remaining shallow from watering on top after planting.
AFTER PLANTING:
1. Mulch around your plants to keep the soil cool.
2. Water in a doughnut around your plants, rather than on the crown. This will encourage your plant to continue to stretch out its roots. Plus, many plants (especially tomatoes) hate to be watered on the crown, so this will keep them happier as well.
3. Water deeply, when you do.
3. DON’T over-water. Don’t even bother getting out the watering can for a week, unless your plants are really droopy. Decide this early in the morning, because many plants naturally wilt in the sun but will perk back up in the evening without help. Water them no more than once a week for the first 3 weeks, and then wait two weeks before watering again. By that point, your plants should be just fine waiting for the rain.
The “Bee Issue”: monoculture is endangering the food supply
Because we depend on bees for “1 in 3 of every bites of food we eat,” the collapse of bee colonies is a pretty big deal. Michael Pollan suggests that pesticides may not be the only problem. Did you know that 75% of the bees in America are shipped out to California to pollinate the almond crops? Why would they need to do that? Because there’s nothing but almonds in the Central Valley, so “there’s nothing [for bees] to eat for 50 weeks of the year.” Oh, and to get the bees “in shape” for their road trip, they feed them high fructose corn syrup. (No word yet on the scary things GMO corn may be doing to bees.) Would it kill them to plant something else so they could sustain their own bees?
Have you heard of Backyard Bee Keeping? I’m fascinated by the movement even though I’m not that hardcore. Yet. 
Depression-Era food
The Ethicurian points to a New York Times review of a book called: “The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food–Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal”. The book is a “higgledy-piggledy” collection of Depression-era food writing, and a
vivid example of how much America, and its food, has changed in the last seven decades. But also how much it hasn’t: note the denunciation of “American standardization,” a charge that predated fast-food chains, the Interstate highway system, frozen dinners, the rise of artificial flavorings, high-fructose corn syrup, widespread factory farming, genetically modified foodstuffs and all the other developments that have flattened the landscape of American eating, on the road and off. If there are surprises to be found in reading these dispatches from bygone dinner tables, the greatest may be the elegiac tone that suffuses some of the entries. It’s always twilight, it seems, when it comes to American food.
Sounds like an good time. (Read the review)
While we’re on the subject of depression-era food, have you seen Great Depression Cooking with Clara? Not only does she make simple, cheap meals, but she’s incredibly charming.
Her survival guide to help you through hard times:
1. family
2. have a garden
3. use and re-use
4. make your own meals
5. eat healthy (“we were all healthy during the depression”)
Canada Hates the Blind
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a meeting in Geneva this week, where the issue of a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and other people with disabilities regarding copyright law.
The purpose of the treaty, introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay, is to permit the cross-border import/export of accessible books (like audiobooks, refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or books with large type), so that people with visual impairments, dyslexia, or other reading disabilities can have access to the works, which are expensive to make. Who would object to “a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it’s possible for disabled people to get access to the written word?”
Well, Canada does, but that’s probably because America does. So does Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway.
Yup. The governments that are supposed to be representing their constituency are willing to place the interests of corporate lobbyists before the rights of disabled people.
As Cory Doctorow says,
We know that WIPO negotiations can be overwhelmed by citizen activists — that’s how we killed the Broadcast Treaty negotiation a few years back — and with your help, we can make history, and create a world where copyright law protects the public interest.
The proposed treaty is still on the agenda for the next meeting, so you have time to tell your government how disgusted you are that your voice at the meeting thinks it is appropriate to deny equal access to information for people with disabilities. Where I come from, they call that a human rights violation.
Get the word out. Is your MP sick of hearing from you yet?
Via BoingBoing.
Hot Season Lettuce
R asked me the other day whether it was too late to plant lettuce. The short answer is yes, it will bolt in the heat. Bolted lettuce is terrible. The long answer is, you can get around that. Here’s some tricks:
1. Give it lots of water. Lettuce is mostly comprised of water, so water frequently to keep it in shape. By frequently I mean daily, at least.
2. Give it nitrogen. Lettuce likes fertilizer. You can apply a balanced composted manure, or for a bigger nitrogen kick, apply fish meal or blood meal. Interplanting lettuce with soybeans is good too, so you can enjoy edamame and nitrogen fixing from a plant that will be roughly the same height. Another surprising nitrogen source is hair. Finely chopping up the (un-dyed/permed) hair from your comb and pets and mixing it into the soil is a good way of adding nitrogen. On another note, your soil loves toenails, but the wonders of human soil additives are best saved for another post.
3. Eat your sprouts. Make sure you are thinning your lettuce crop as it grows, so that the plants have room to grow. Lettuce can’t bolt before it’s mature, so eat salad every day. With leaf lettuce, you can also harvest single leaves from the plant, so that it continues to produce new leaves without having a chance to reach its bolting stage. This reminds me of another tip:
4. Plant leaf lettuces, not head lettuces. Head lettuces are harder to grow, even in the appropriate season. Plus, there are more fun varieties. Check the seed packets for varieties that say they’re resistant to heat or bolting.
4. Shade it. Keep it out of full sun, because lettuce isn’t a fan of summer weather. If you’ve ever moved a plant into natural sunlight without adjusting it first, you’ve probably seen that plants can get a sunburn (whitening of the leaves). Lettuce is the Irishman of the veggie patch: it sunburns easily, and then it’s cranky. Either plant it in part shade, install a shade cloth, or plant tall things to shade it.
5. Use containers. A soil-less potting mix retains water better than earth, so container planting can be a good solution if you’re more neglectful. Just remember to plant it in clay, not plastic, so that the roots stay cool.
