Permaculture Blog

But I have to wonder how many people collected 50 gallons in their rain barrels yesterday.

I have mentioned lately to some friends that I think that 50 gallon rain barrels are a scam by the water companies to cause people to fail at collecting usable amounts of rainwater long term.

I compare it to a 10 gallon aquarium. It is designed to fail! A 10 gallon aquarium is far too small to be functional. A 10 gallon aquarium cannot maintain water temperature and other parameters nearly as well as even a 20g tank and that stresses the fish and causes them to get sick. And then you go and ask a kid who just got the job behind the counter what to do.

If you want an aquarium get the largest one you reasonably can. And if money is an issue don’t get all the accouterments first thing.

Do you really think that the water companies that give away free, or low cost 50 gallon rain barrels want you to succeed? Isn’t their goal to sell water?

People that have installed them and got water yesterday are feeling great, and …

I am appreciative that they have made the effort!

But I believe that in another year or two the maintenance of the rain barrel (it splits, the lid comes loose, the difficulties of getting the water out, the plastic deteriorates around the top, etc.) and the benefit of acquiring only 50 gallons at at a time will cause the majority of these people to quit.

I believe that building a pond that is functional at a half to a quarter water volume is the most economical and effective rain catchment system there is. Even better convert your swimming pool! And you get the enjoyment of the pond year round. Can you say that for your rain barrel?

Do you sit in your lawn chairs and watch the rain barrel with a glass of wine?

Do you go out and feed the pretty koi in your rain barrel?

When it is time to replace that rain barrel consider some other options :-)

Bob
www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

Well I just managed to get my carcass out of a warm bed and down to check out the pond0. And while it may seem quite silty in the pictures, I got several thousand gallons of water.

With the biological systems I’ve got, the silt will clear up in a couple of days. The gopher trenches on the other side of the drive have served a secondary purpose as well. They collected at least a couple of thousand gallons as well and it has soaked in. My ground was thirsty. You could see the marks as to how high the water had been in a trench a foot and a half deep and close to a foot wide.

This is the first time ever that the two halves of the pond have been connected by water. I built it in two so that I could transfer water back and forth. There’s also an insurance value. If one side gets damaged I can transfer everybody/thing to the other side. Oh my goodness I’m going to have a billion baby goldfish.

The long straight object jutting out from the top right in the first picture and the far right in the last picture is a movable divider that can be lowered to allow more water flow between the two halves. Couldn’t do that with concrete!

One of the difficulties with using the pond as rain water catchment is the changing water level with respect to planted pond plants so I developed these floating systems.

Bob

One last one!

Wow! I have gotten a bunch of rain today. Started out pretty easy. Soaking everything and then turned into a downpour. Thrre was also a flash…. BOOM and the lights went out. Fortunately they have come back on!

My roof is dripping a bit. Oh well–but my pond is full! I have collected 6 or 7 thousand gallons of water just today. Unfortunately it’s now full. Maybe I’ll dig it deeper next year :-)

I have two clients with pools that can collect rain water, and I hope that they are both getting much of this! So cool!

My neighbors weather station shorted out before one inch. I’ll have to check my bucket’s tomorrow :-)

Bob

www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

Kenya may soon allow the use of genetically-modified cotton and maize seeds following pressure from agribusiness giant Monsanto, USAID, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Source: RT International

The Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) partnership

Wow isn’t that a great name just makes you feel warm and fuzzy

is “a public/private partnership, led by the Kenyan-based African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF)

Another warm and fuzzy name

and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and USAID”.

AATF, “a partnership between USAID, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto, Dupont/Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences, Syngenta, and Aventis” and funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), has lobbied for the use of GMO in Kenya

Virtually a who’s who of environmentally conscious companies.

In 2008, AATF received US$47 million from the Gates Foundation, which has been criticized by global activists for pushing a “big agribusiness” approach to African farming.

Seattle-based AGRA Watch was founded following concerns about the Foundation’s influence and lack of transparency in Africa, as well as its close ties with Monsanto and USAID

And I’ll bet you thought that Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett were all just kind hearted philanthropists.

I’m sure they are. I’ve never thought that they were just cynical business people who had figured out a way to test new AIDS drugs and to experiment on humans without all the troublesome drug regulations in other countries. I’m also sure that it’s just an accident that it is all a tax write off too. And I’m quite confident that none of them have any investments and ulterior motives in agribusiness.

Source: Juanita Jean Asks an Impertinent (and Relevant) Question | Sheila Kennedy

A lovely post about looking at a situation from the other side, aka thinking outside the box, aka having the irony gene!

Juanita has taken note of the seizure of a national park headquarters building by supporters of Cliven Bundy
[Snip]

Her impertinent question/observation?

Now I want you to consider this: Let’s pretend it was Muslims who set federal land a’blaze and that Muslims overtook a federal building. In your wildest dreams imagine Fox News and Ted Cruz [snip]
sure looks different when the demonstrators (terrorists?) are white.

Just one more day in America, where the double standard runs so deep that satire is on its deathbed, and self-awareness is likewise a vanishing commodity…..

How true how true and I get upset about the 99percenters being run out of town when they were protesting Wall Street.

And there does have to be a line about when a protest, that has taken over an area, is out of line but the 99percenters were not armed and I think that makes a big difference whether you are considered peaceful or not.

The irony gene. What if some people are physically (brain chemistry) not able to get the irony in their behavior. Is being a Neanderthal the Neanderthal’s fault?

Best
Bob

So I was reading a post on Diane Kennedy’s wonderful Facebook page about corn and people.

It is not that long and I suggest you look at it now.
https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1174068439274649&id=100000145136797&set=a.194732157208287.54613.100000145136797

And I decided to google the phrase

Why sir,” said the farmer, “Didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn.

There were thousands of hits.  There were books, PDF articles, blogs, websites.  There were many Christian sites.  The word Hindu caught my eye, and then Muslim, and I decided to do the same search with some of the major religions included with it. Buddhist, Shiite, Sunni, Judaism.

Just like the movie Groundhog Day, all the major religions say “oh that’s us!”

Sure would be nice if we acted like it.

But I think this is the perfect illustration for why I just recently posted … that I believe open source software is such a Permaculture concept. And it’s also why I tell people as much as I can … as much as I know, about how they can have a chemical free pond or pool.

Community: community has never been about “I’ve got mine, and I’m going to keep it just to myself.”

And community is also the reason why I am critical of specific organizations.

I have received a variety of concerned comments about my posts regarding permiesdotcom and most recently Deer Park.
I very much appreciate all the concern and give the following response:

How beautiful to work _with_ the world instead of against it. I think this corn post is beautiful. It _is_ all of our responsibility to encourage those around us and try to increase the happiness in the world — and decrease the hatred!

And yet at the same time it is difficult to find a line in our lives to _not_ support something.

If we simply support everything, we ultimately support primarily the easy things. The weeds of the world… Weedy solutions such as Pesticides, GMOs, Herbicides, –make everything get out of my way — poisons. The quick and easy solutions. The careless solutions!

If Permaculture is truly a community we need to be free to tell our own people that they might be wrong.

And to promote something or someone just because it has the name “permaculture” on it will give us the same thing in the long run as “organic” does today.

I don’t hate the people I criticize. (I do hate seizures, autism, muscular dystrophy, muscular sclerosis, ADHD, Parkinson’s, mad cow disease, Alzheimer’s, other neurological dysfunctions, etc, etc).

And I don’t tend to criticize people that I don’t believe are capable of thinking about the criticism.

Happy 2016 to all!

Here is another of my clients who do get it. I was terrified after a month or so in the beginning that this wasn’t going to work out. They were so enthusiastic! They kept changing everything! Everything! :-) They also became members of the Koi club and were adding fish right and left :-) .

It has settled down and they are wonderful people. Just a minute ago they sent me a link to an Audubon article written about what I did. www.sandiegoaudubon.org/images/PDF/sketches/skjan16.pdf

It starts on page 3

They are also involved with
www.sdchildrennature.org
And I can’t think of anything more wonderful than getting children exposed to this kind of idea right from the start!

One can see from the pictures that the pool is still murky but I kept their infrastructure intact and they easily could go back. They won’t because they love it so much more and get such pleasure in having this wetland ecosystem in their backyard. They tell me how they are constantly saying that they “have waterfront property.”

One of the reasons that it is still murky is that we wanted to work with a friend (Chris Meador of permasystems.org) to built half of the modular system. Initially we spent some time fine tuning these new modules and soon they will be filled with my wetland systems and the pool will ne clear again. Chris did a great job of working with me on them and I hope to work with him again in the future.

And give me another couple of months and the entire system functioning and I’ll post the pictures of it clear all the way to the bottom!:-)

Bob
www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Banking into the wind and then gliding out of sight, a male California condor flew back into the wild after a captive breeding program that helped save North America’s largest species of land bird. AC-4 needed only a few minutes to get his bearings before flying out of the pen and over the canyon, said Joseph Brandt, a lead condor biologist with the wildlife service. “Many people have poured their heart and soul” into saving the condors, Jesse Grantham, a former condor program coordinator and part of the original team that captured AC-4, said in a statement from the wildlife service.

Source: California condor that helped save species returns to wild

Biologists believe AC-4 was 5 to 7 years old when they captured him for the captive breeding program. He fathered the first chick born in the program, giving the program’s founders greater hope they could save the species.

In all, AC-4 sired 30 condor chicks that have been successfully released into the wild.

And maybe someday in addition to bald eagles flying around over my property there will be condors. One can only hope.

Big things can come in small packages.

Source: The tiniest chameleons may actually have the most powerful tongues

Oh I so want one! Well ok they’re not native, they would do much better in their own environment, and just because I think they’re really really cool I don’t have to have it.

When I was little and would catch lizards, I would want to have them and keep them. My mom who was a teacher: everything from preschool, to high school, to college; told me one time that to grow up was to be able to appreciate something without having it. I try to do so. But they are cool :-)

A new study says that wild bees in the US are declining in many areas because of increases in the amount of corn being grown for biofuel.

Source: US wild bee numbers decline as land is converted for biofuel – BBC News

In the areas that have seen the most serious reduction in wild bees, there have been 200% increases in the amount of corn planted.

And look at the graph below that shows the increase in use of GMO corn. Bt-Corn: corn that has been engineered by Monsanto to have anti-insect Bacillus thuringiensis toxin in its pollen.

(Ht is herbicide friendly)

Oh my.