(via www.communitygarden.org.au )
A series of introductory fact sheets from the Community Gardening Network Australia;
Bug Story
If the slideshow is working as intended, you’ll be able to see images of:
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 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.
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.
This is just a placeholder to remind me to look for this when it comes out.
I know a bit about gardening and have opportunities to learn hands on too, but I really like these kind of books that are self help with lots of illustration. Trail’s earlier book, You Grow Girl, is still the one I refer to most although it’s very 101 level.
It helps me work around my tendency, learning any new skill, to be quicker than average at getting the actual knowledge, but slower or more stop/start than average at applying it due to my disabilities. In other words, the essentials mixed with enough shiny visuals to make learning the slow way feel relaxing = ideal resource for someone like me.
That is all.
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about
Mini-blog of things I come across in my experiments with sustainable living, by an Environmental Science student in Australia - The person is political, the social ecology shapes sustainability - Should I stop procrastinating long enough to form any views, they will be my own, not my employers.
