Permaculture Blog

Not mine! But I wish :-)

Source: Ducklings!

They are at Diane Kennedy’s. For the full details see the “source” above.

Diane has worked incredibly hard to have a wonderful permaculture demonstration garden. She runs tours regularly and if you would like to visit there are links from her pages or on San Diego Meetup. Please make sure you look at the right date. The link I have given may not be the best one by the time you look at this. She does a fabulous tour and if you hurry this year you may get to see the ducklings :-)

I regularly have Ducks show up on the swimming pools I have converted and down the road I am sure some of my clients will also have ducklings :-)

Best to all.

Legendary punk rocker Alice Bag has been carrying the torch for sharp feminist outspokenness since she helped pioneer the L.A. punk scene in the 1970s, so it’s hard to believe she’s just now releasing her first solo album. As an author, educator, lifelong badass and the leader of The Bags, among many other bands, she’s been a prolific and guiding light for Chicana punks, and on Alice Bag, out June 24 on Don Giovanni Records, she continues that force-of-nature output with fierce songs of protest and massive shredding.

Source: Alice Bag Protests GMOs and Monsanto in New Punk Song ‘Poisoned Seed’

Cool :-) I don’t know that I’ve ever listened to punk rock but I still think it’s cool :-)

A lot of 60s political music was about the Vietnam war that we all pretty much agree now was not our best idea.

Out looking at _my_ pond0 this time and was observing all the diving beetles, water boatman, and diving beetle larvae. Tons of predators for mosquito larvae. Did you know that some frog tadpoles eat mosquito _larvae_?

It made me think about people who add gambusia mosquito fish to their ponds and also water features. They are also released by the state into wetlands. Gambusia mosquito fish that eat tadpoles preferentially to mosquito larvae. And I wonder how many other natural predators of mosquitoes do the “mosquito fish” eat preferentially to mosquito larvae? Most insect predators such as the ones above and dragonfly larvae and damselfly larvae lay eggs that hatch out into tiny larvae that would almost certainly be eaten by mosquito fish.

It also made me think about aerial spraying as well. Spraying insecticides kills the insect predators too. Predator-prey relationships always, always, rely on the prey coming back first before the predators can reestablish themselves, so spraying insecticides, especially over large areas, is guaranteed to increase our mosquito problem and guarantee a market for the insecticide manufacturers in the future.

Insecticide manufacturers make money on their product. They have salesman to sell their product to large-scale users such as cities, counties, and states. These toxin sales people do not decide to take a day off. They are constantly promoting their product in order to make a sale. If we want to combat their aggressive and methodical sales tactics we need to be constantly promoting a variety of counterpoints and alternatives. We don’t get to go out and play a round of golf with the city council, but they do. We don’t get to go to cocktail parties with the city council, but they do. We don’t have an expense account in order to take city council members to expensive restaurants, but they do. We are starting at a huge disadvantage but we can make a difference.

Bob
www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

If the fish don’t get you the diving beetles will.

https://youtu.be/XGWY35IRGn4
https://youtu.be/-S_2jE7CHsM

Here are two beetle larvae fighting over the same mosquito larvae. Owwww

Bob

www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

Diving beetle larva from my pond0. I went and got them some mosquito larvae.

https://youtu.be/M4FdxcqY8Jw

I actually have to grow mosquito larvae for testing and in some cases food. One way to do this is to take a bucket, add pond water, put a few kernels of dog food in it, and set it outside.

This works well because you can monitor it easily and dump it out if the larva turn into the rounded pupa form. It takes several weeks for them to do this when it’s cool so it is quite easy to do and all the mosquitoes that lay eggs in it do so for naught. So it actually removes mosquitoes from the environment.

Bob

So I’ve been poking around investigating various additives that can be put into a swimming pool and I came across “chlorine stabilizer” and I start thinking “chemically what the heck would stabilize chlorine?”

Well it turns out that they use a close relative of melamine called cyanuric acid.

Remember melamine and poisoning our pets with contaminated pet food? Well cyanuric acid was a component of that poisoning. Turns out that melamine isn’t all that toxic by itself but when present with cyanuric acid causes fatal kidney damage.

OMG! Flip that around in your head. Say Cyanuric acid is not toxic except when combined with melamine. What the …. What other chemicals might cyanuric acid combine with to produce toxic results. And that’s just chemically.

Absorbing energy from sunlight could make it even more reactive/toxic. It took me a half hour of sniffing, but I finally found an absorption spectra for cyanuric acid. It absorbs in the UV wavelengths, binds to chlorine, and probably chemically shades the chlorine somewhat from ultraviolet radiation.

We have no clue as to what cyanuric acid might be doing with the ultraviolet light energy that it absorbs. The work I did getting my doctorate degree was investigating UV phototoxins and DNA damage.

A Phototoxin absorbs light energy, and then transmits that energy to the cell. Copper is a known phototoxin but even so it is often used in swimming pools. I have wondered in other links snake oil and copper-based-algaecides who in their right mind would promote adding a phototoxin to to an area where we regularly congregate _mostly on bright sunny days_???

The copper, and potentially the cyanuric acid pool stabilizer, dry on our skin after swimming. This increases the concentration and enhances the phototoxicity. Excellent idea don’t you all think.

Okay we don’t know all there is to know about a natural pond either but we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years around it as opposed to chlorine with stabilizer added to it. Just sayin’

:-) the best to everyone, and just a suggestion to all the smart ones out there, try to avoid all the toxic chemicals in your own living space as well.

Bob

The goldfish have been laying eggs non-stop for 2 months now :-)

https://youtu.be/wdDETu-DJUo

https://youtu.be/_jLR-s8TI-o

I wish they’d stop. I’m wasting too much time watching them :-)

Bob www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

Wonderful group of people on Facebook concerned about their kids, the environment, and the good things in the world.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10209505493372900&id=1193404768

Okay…. look, my fellow humans, permaculturists, and thinkers, could we maybe get better at looking at the irony in ourselves. Could we stop screaming “I hate Hate Radio” and try to just turn it off and do something positive. I know I fuss a lot about Monsanto but I’m also just trying to promote knowledge. I don’t hate them! There is nothing inherently wrong with a GMO just as there is nothing inherently wrong with a tobacco plant. It is how they are being used that I see as a problem.

So I have a suggestion. If you are a religious person try volunteering at a soup kitchen. If you feel that you have to teach others how to behave volunteer at an elementary school. And if you want to make an impact and benefit the environment maybe join a group that is working to decrease the pesticides that the cities are using.

But try not to hate the people that are promoting ideas contrary to yours. Even the cities that spray pesticides everywhere are doing so because they have been told by salesman (who also believe in what they are selling) that this is the best, brightest, greatest way to have their city look wonderful.

https://m.facebook.com/groups/982959398459301?view=permalink&id=1019831921438715&ref=m_notif&notif_t=group_activity

The best to everyone including the haters :-)

Permaculture is about living with the world and not against it and treating others as you would like those upstream from you to treat you. There is nothing sustainable in the behavior that leads to Walter Scott’s death.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/11/us/north-charleston-police-michael-slager-indicted-walter-scott-shooting/

Maybe there is some climate change going on. I think this bothered me more than the Sandra Bland killing. And the big difference is it was videoed without the police officer’s knowledge. I watched carefully what the cop did afterwards. It was not in a panic. It was not oh my gosh what did I just do. It was –I’ve done this before, this is just another day at the office. I’ll go back to where I was, pick up my Taser, walk over to the body, and toss it next to it.

He testified that Scott had taken his taser and was moving at him with it.

I was appalled. There isn’t anything even remotely sustainable about this behavior.