Material World

(via National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com)

Bug Story

If the slideshow is working as intended, you’ll be able to see images of:

• a ravaged salad plant
• a container with my home-made bug spray and book on natural bug control methods
• a ‘before’ bug picture of the salad plants when healthy
•  my arch nemesis, the leafhopper.

I tried this about two months ago, when leafhoppers were ravaging any salad seedlings I tried planting.

The spray is one of the simplest and common DIY organic pest mixes: a dash of crushed, fresh garlic and chilli in water. It’s the odor, as much as the chilli nom repellent factor, that deters insects by confusing or diminishing the ability of passing insects to smell out your garden edibles. This is additional to always planting a variety of edibles, in a pattern other than straight rows, for the same reason. Best to make just a little of this spray at a time and use it up quickly though, so the condiment content doesn’t degrade into slime water. 

Another version is adding [ground, plain] soap - which coats leaves more thickly and is supposed to prevent some insects from chewing them. I only tried this once: it’s so sunny and dry here, that the tiniest bit of soap residue encouraged leaf burn followed by quicker rotting the next rains: definitely not worth any slug repellant trade off.

A brutally Darwinian version - for non-vegans only - suggests crushing up several of the type of bug you’re trying to kill in your water mix.  Possibly just a gross out urban myth of pest control. [Crushed chicken eggshells, otoh, really do work to limit snail attacks on seedlings if spread around their bases - anything unappealing abrasive would probably work as well for vegan gardeners].

My little spray trial did work a bit. I did notice slightly reduced leaf attack on the seedlings I’d sprayed compared to the ones I hadn’t [I left some unsprayed for comparison, and for the permaculture principle of always factoring in a little spare growth for the birds, insects that you do want in the garden to eat].

But these hoppers were damn nearly swarming, way to many of my greens were being eaten back to the stems for me to plan a decent kitchen garden harvest  relative to the space used.

I was getting frustrated enough to consider physical barriers for the whole fruit and salads bed - reviving the mesh covers over wire frames I use when possums attack. Also I was worried that even selective spraying seemed to be repelling the bees. 

Then the seasons shifted and all the nasturniums, marigolds, wattles, grevillias and borage plants bloomed. Which suddenly brought all the higher up the food chain insects and some birds to the yard, resolving my leafhopper mini-plauge instantly.

Zero problems since.

I’ve also cleared some dense tall grasses that were growing near our water tank, because I was concerned that the cover and damp earth would attract cane toads. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that several types of insects had laid their eggs in the thicker clumps of grasses, on the underneath of the blades near the center of the patch:nicely covered from any predators or my spray. I removed the lot and replaced them with just a few [pregrown] flowering herbs, to prevent any swarm V2 next season.

Verdict = live flowers beat crushed bugs, permaculture beats ‘natural’ approaches used in traditional ‘single issue, single strategy’ ways. 

(via Tea Bag Fashion)

English fashion designer Grace Robinson uses the most unusual material to make her feminine attire – used tea bags. After making a splash with her tea bag clothing on Britain’s Got Talent, Robinson’s line of tea-ware has become increasingly in demand.

via Food Security or Food Sovereignty? The view from the global South

From discussions with a diverse array of food sovereignty actors in West Africa including peasant food producers, farmer organisations, academics and civil society groups involved in the World Social Forum (WSF) in Dakar, it became clear that food ‘security’ and food ‘sovereignty’ represent increasingly diverging visions for the future of agriculture and food in the world.

While the definitions of food sovereignty varied between actors, there are some core values that are widely shared. Most broadly, food sovereignty is defined as “the right of people to choose their food systems”. This right exists at all levels, from the household and local community, to national and global. It includes decisions about how to produce and consume food, but also extends to the types of relationships that are built into this process. According to Mamadou Goita (from the Institute for Research and Alternatives in Development), while food security is the sum of having access, purchasing and consuming food, food sovereignty refers to the capacity of people to choose what they want to eat, how it will be produced, and what relationships this entails with others. For Mr Goita, therefore, “food sovereignty is a right that food security does not include.”

Achieving food sovereignty requires both recognising the political nature of food and addressing social inequality in the global food system.

(via Vimla Bahuguna: Treehugger of the Chipko Movement | EcoWalktheTalk)

By Bhavani Prakash

Chipko women hugging trees : Wikipedia

Much has been said and written about the Chipko Movement. It continues to be one of the most prominent and analysed of environmental movements emanating from India. Long before ‘treehugging’ became a fashionable word in the west, women villagers of the Garhwal region on the foothills of the Himalayas (Uttarakhand District in Northern India) were practising it by becoming brave champions of the forests. To resist commercial felling of trees, they hugged them, giving rise to the term ‘Chipko’ which means ‘to stick‘ in Hindi.

The modern day Chipko movement is now nearly 40 years old.  On March 26, 1974, a group of peasant women in Reni village, Hemwalghati, Uttarakhand, India, prevented the cutting of trees by contractors of the state Forest Department.

Vimla Bahuguna

Vimla Bahugana, a Gandhian social worker became one of the prominent women leaders of the movement. Women bore most of the consequences of tree felling. They had to travel long distances to collect firewood. Water sources were drying up, and the soil was getting eroded as their trees were cut for cricket bats and other commercial products. Women were at the forefront of the movement.

Building a Worm Farm

Only feed a little bit at this stage because they are getting settled into the bedding material. Use lettuce, old bits of banana, anything that you’ve got that’s wasteful in the kitchen sink. Then add just enough newspaper or hessian over the top to keep them moist. Always make sure that the newspaper, or hessian, is kept moist. They will start to feed and after about two weeks, add the next layer on top and that’s the time to start feeding all organic waste and the worms will travel up through the perforations.

[via Gardening Australia - Fact Sheet]

This morning I trowled through the worm farm that got soaked in the floods a few months back, which I’d consequently given up for dead. Happiness then was finding many health worms and a very rich layer of freshly turned soil inside. It saved me the effort of finding another nursery or gardener who could sell/trade some of the red worms needed for worm farming [a different species to the earth worms you can attract to your garden with mulch], and the built up worm tea has already revived my little flood damanged lemon myrtle tree seedlings.

This is the benefit of doing everything organic and diy, especially if you’re lazy and have a really changable routine like me. It takes a bit more planning to set up a garden that’s largely self-sustaining for fertilizer and seed [but less cost and chemicals]. Once you’ve got it set up though, things adapts through set backs much better than a high maintenance, commercial fertilizer dependent garden full of exotics does. 

Even my tomato plants, rosemary and coriander self seeded and came back in a bed I’d also thought too soil damaged to plant in yet. Woot permaculture!

What does “greening the ghetto” mean?

Poverty exists all over America. These are often the places of greatest environmental degradation, as well—for example, in the South Bronx with power plants and trucking, or in West Virginia with mountaintop removal coal extraction. Not only are these public health burdens that we all pay for now, they are major sources for greenhouse gases. If we green these areas first, we double our impact on the short- and long-term health of our society and planet.

Poor communities often have the most energy-inefficient homes. Energy costs represent a greater percentage of household income there as well. Greening those areas first will help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and help create jobs, because somebody has got to do the work of retrofitting buildings.

How do you define environmental justice?

No community should have to face more environmental burdens than any other. Period. We have to strive for equality in all aspects of life, but the environment is chief because it affects everything—how we breathe, what we eat and how we move through our communities and our lives.

via Greening the Ghetto: An Interview With Majora Carter

Homework, plant pest and disease identification [baby steps!]

thesustainable:

teaandtiffin:scrumtrulescent:adorablelife:

(via mothtales)