Permaculture Blog

Diane’s excellent plant guild series has a new addition: http://www.vegetariat.com/2015/12/plant-guild-3-sub-canopy/

Also: I have way of re-purposing that horrible plastic deer/bird netting. Plastic netting is a complete and utter disaster for the environment. First, it catches snakes and lizards and leaves them to slowly die of exposure. —- But don’t throw it in the trash either! When it is thrown in the trash it is very likely dumped at sea to become the second hazard to the environment: a gill net drifting slowly to the bottom trapping fish so that they also can slowly die. And we were so worried about soda can plastic rings.

I can re-purpose it so that it never catches another snake or lizard or fish. Stuff it in a box, pack it in as tightly as possible and mail it to me.

PuraVida Aquatic p.o.box 641541 LA CA 90064

It’s light and the mailing charge anywhere in California will be trivial.

Bob http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.co m

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-antidepressant-pregnancy-autism-20151214-story.html

Interesting story. I, fortunately, do not have children with autism. However, I know several parents who do and I truly wish them well. I am highly concerned about the neurotoxins that we spray all over our food and thus pay attention to autism stories.

There are several things that are interesting in this story and the first is that 0.7% of the babies were subsequently diagnosed with autism. This is vastly different than the one in ten number that I saw recently in the news. This is 7 out of a thousand which is incredibly high from a genetic standpoint but nowhere near one in ten.!!! Science editors: Start getting your information correct! What you publish is important to people.

Another interesting point is that statements like “twofold”, “twice as likely”, may not be very relevant at all but it sounds impressive.

The third thing that I find very intriguing is the fact that women who took chemical seratonin inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft were much more likely to have a child diagnosed with autism. I fuss repeatedly about giving our children brain-chemistry altering drugs! And there is so much neurotoxic insecticide residue in the environment. We know very little about how the neurology of the brain develops particularly in children, and yet we want to alter the basic chemistry all of their brains with poisons and drugs. What in the world makes you think that Dow Chemical is more moral than Phillip Morris?

And I think doctors who treat pregnant women should be careful about prescribing drugs that alter brain chemistry ! Arrrrrrrrrrg, I can’t find a good auto mechanic for my car — why in the world would I want to have someone who got a C in biology to be prescribing drugs for me.

I think in most cases giving drugs that affect brain chemistry to anyone under 21, or pregnant women, should require two separate completely unconnected doctors to agree so there is additional oversight. Bob

http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

I am going to buy another apple tree and put it in the orchard. I have bought four apple trees over the years and all of them were decimated by the Gophers. Gophers seem to adore apple trees. At least the apple trees on my property and yet I am going to buy an apple tree because I have not had a gopher in the orchard in over a year and a half.

A very good friend of mine told me about blending up kitchen scraps and pouring it down their holes. The icky food waste makes it so that they cannot simply wait a day and then use the hole again. In addition to the food scraps, I have been mixing in pond muck. And this is all written up in another post that I will try to find and put a link to here. But its great because you’re actually putting nutrients in the ground instead of poisons!

It works exceedingly well, and it doesn’t kill them. Killing them simply makes your gopher problem continue because all the old existing holes are still there. I dug down and looked at how some of their tunnels were constructed and in many of them they have a little air chamber incorporated into them so that they cannot be flooded out with a garden hose either. Gophers are amazing creatures. They are incredibly well adapted, and have been doing their thing for a long long time. In fact their bones were structurally almost identical 25 … million years ago. You think there might have been a flood or two in those 25 million years that they would have figured out how to prevent their tunnels and nest areas from flooding?

I have always said that I was willing to share the property with the native critters and so I don’t want to poison the Gophers or poison their predators.

So there is about a half acre of scrub that is next to my orchard that I am perfectly willing to let the Gophers have. It had a lot of mustard growing in it that the fire department wanted me to mow in the summer … when its hot. I haven’t had to mow that area in two years now and there is very little mustard because the Gophers eat it. They’re my friends. They keep me from having to work in the hot Sun, or pay someone else to do it. The area buffers my property from my neighbors and the road and I don’t have to mow it. My Gophers are paying me. Your Gophers are costing you everytime you try to kill them. Try living _with_ the world instead of against it and you might find that you like it.

So my friend just sent me a note that they had photographed and rescued a gopher off their driveway who couldn’t climb up over the edging. I am so thrilled and amused. There is just no need to kill them, and by the way how’s all that poison that you’re putting around for your dog to eat working out for you? :-) http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

http://m.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/1204/Habitat-loss-could-spell-trouble-for-91-percent-of-migratory-birds

And flooding rice fields that have been sprayed with pesticides and have no ecology and no aquatic animal food chain is not, in my opinion, the best replacement for Wetlands.

Why don’t you convert your unused/underused swimming pool?

Bob http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

Yeehaw. The second of Diane Kennedy’s plant guild series is out.
[quote]
Canopy provides protective shelter for many kinds of mammals, birds, reptiles and insects as they hide under the leaves. A mature oak is home to over 300 species. [Endquote]

http://www.vegetariat.com/2015/12/plant-guilds-upper-canopy/

Bob
http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

Here is a great article on plant associations and communities. The same idea as companion planting but on a Permaculture scale :-) http://www.vegetariat.com/2015/11/plant-guilds-work-1/

[Quote] The Southern California hills and mountains there are small forests of tall shrubs called California lilac, or ceanothus. Ceanothus is a nitrogen fixer (I’ll go into what that is in another post), so it is building soil as it grows and dies. I met a man who is receiving government funds to ‘reforest’ a portion of local mountains, and he’s bulldozing acres of ceanothus and planting pine trees in their stead. The soil isn’t ready for pine trees, which is the soft wood stage of succession. As we are going into decades long drought, and there is great tree loss due to a pine beetle, his project is doing much more harm than good. In fact, he has such a small success rate that I wonder why he’s still pursuing the project.
[EndQuote]

I know someone just like that. Spraying Roundup all over the hills around Julian to kill the California lilac (ceanothus) in order to plant pine trees –in a fire zone.

He is always interested in helping by telling me what I’m doing wrong when I am digging up my waterline or working out in the yard. He is such a wonderful neighbor.

Bob
http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

The following is a comment on something I was re-editing that I saw and read again. I like it so much I’m going to post it again because I think building community amongst Permaculture people is incredibly important but it’s also important for a community to be able to criticize freely. And I also do not believe that Permaculture is about finding the “best Permaculture way to kill something.”

Requote— So I made the following response to someone else’s post on this website http://www.permies.com. And apparently Paul Wheaton felt that it was over the top and needed to be deleted. What I was responding to is someone who was saying that they needed to find a way to kill voles and kill the mice and kill the Gophers on their property. And I had previously posted that I thought that the idea behind permaculture was long term stability and that if you kill something you will always need to kill it. Where as if you give the predators a chance to move in you can sit back and be lazy and let them do your work :-)

They had responded that they were a struggling little farm and needed to kill stuff to survive. So I posted the following:

Start post—————————– And I grant you a big problem might be your neighbors. I’ll bet you they do not welcome in the Coyotes and the Bobcats. I have got a picture, that I don’t advertise because of _my_ neighbors. It is a picture of a young coyote maybe 25 or 30 feet away from me just lying there with its head on its paws, ears up, watching me. It is waiting for me to quit taking pictures of it so that it can go down into my constructed wetland and hunt voles. Owls, snakes, Hawks, Raccoons will eat voles. But if you kill and poison the voles and mice the Hawks, snakes, owls, and raccoons are going to find someplace else to regularly visit.

You need them to regularly visit to be an effective deterrence. Which if you think about it means a constant low level of mouse and vole destruction. If you want the instant gratification of seeing the slightest bit of vole damage and having the owl come and get it that night — it’s not going to happen. And here’s 1 of my biggest complaint about cats — they kill the lizards and snakes which are such effective natural controls for insects and voles and mice. I saw a garter snake just yesterday. Dj I get so tired of going to permaculture meetings and listening to everybody describe how they tried to kill everything they don’t like. Guy wants to know what to put in a beehive to kill spiders. So wrong, so wrong, on so many levels. Everybody wants to kill rattlesnakes and Gophers because they’re “in the way of what I want”. Everybody rationalizes that they really do love nature, and are the world’s best environmentalists and permaculturists, because they like hummingbirds and compost.

Course it’s sort of (edit for readability) easy to like hummingbirds and compost. ————- how about being a great permaculturist and great environmentalist because you do the stuff that’s hard. ————— And for all your reasons, and rationalizations I didn’t read once — and I went back and checked — the words “you know you’re right we do kill too many things and we/I could do better.” It was still all about what _you_ want with _your_ property. As I said, I am sure I will never change your mind. I have about 1 acre of usable land. I have been gardening for many years myself. Maybe less than you but I’ve progressed further than compost. It is not urban and we have a lot of the same critters that you have. And except for 1 animal, which I regret, I have not deliberately killed anything higher than an insect in the years I have been here. And knock on wood, I have very little rodent critter damage. So you asked for my solutions — I have told you, over, and over, but I will never change your mind. And you might jump to the conclusion that you could say the same about me, but there you’re wrong. See I already have changed my mind. I used to be like you but instead of rationalizing I used to think “I can do better.” Looking forward to reading all your future rationalizations. :) End post

—————————— Yep I’m terribly mean spirited and call him all sorts of derogatory names so that post needed to be deleted. And, in retrospect I should’ve left off that last line but that is certainly reason enough to delete the entire post right Paul? Couldn’t have just sent me a quick note to be more careful. And you know no one _is_ ever going to change his mind. But I wasn’t responding to change _his_ mind Paul, but to talk to all the people who were reading it behind the scenes. I don’t believe permaculture is taking the easy way out.
End Requote—

And as an open letter to Paul Wheaton. As someone who is dedicated to Permaculture, I believe that we need to tell people that Permaculture is not about destroying everything in our way. And not just to have the biggest Permie website to sell things on. Bob

Here is one way of looking at it :-) Even though its intent is a sushi dinner, it won’t be able to catch more than maybe one or two at best. It’s mostly hoping for little chorus frogs and tadpoles. I tell people all the time that fish are pretty darn good at staying away from their predators. They’ve been doing this a long long time.

If they’re not feeling sick, and up at the surface gasping, they will be very hard to catch. If it does gets a small one, that’s $10. How much you would you be willing to pay for bird seed to have birds and wildlife come into your yard?

I think most people would be willing to pay $10 a year for bird feed so one way to look at it is that you’re just providing some free range, organically grown, happy fish for a meal once a year.

Best

Bob

http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

The article http://m.sfgate.com/news/article/UC-Davis-scientist-develop-a-clever-way-to-6596426.php is about diverting large amounts of rain water into farmland and letting it then percolate into the soil and recharge the groundwater supply.

Wow really clever idea let’s divert as much water as possible into the most chemically polluted land as possible so that we can carry those pollutants into our drinking water. Roundup in your coffee anyone?

Brilliant idea we should put tons of money into this. We can transfer all those agro biocides and herbicides into the water that our native Oakes and Pines use for water year round. Oh wait, maybe a better idea for you is to use your swimming pool as a massive rainwater collection system instead of a 50 gallon drum. http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/index.php/pool-conversions/ Or visit www.vegetariat.com, (or Finch Frolic Garden on Facebook!) and set up a consultation with Diane Kennedy and let her show you lots of other options as to how to keep more of the rain water on your property. And if you want to collect rainwater please stop using all the herbacides and pesticides that you can walk into the nearest Home super store and buy. http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

[quote]Sulfoxaflor is a systemic insecticide which acts as an insect neurotoxin and is a member a class of chemicals called sulfoximines which act on the central nervous system of insects.

….

Because sulfoxaflor binds much more strongly to insect neuron receptors than to mammal neuron receptors, this insecticide is selectively more toxic to insects than mammals.[5][end quote]

Isn’t it great that EPA is initially approving using a neurotoxin that’s somewhat more toxic to insects than mammals :-) And we all know that mammal and human receptors are identical. Also there is probably no variation in human neuron receptors the same way there is in eye color, hair color, skin tone, height, etc. Shaquille O’Neal is probably just as safe as a racehorse jockey.

Bob http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com