Permaculture Blog

For Immediate Release, November 4, 2013 Contact: Justin Augustine, (415) Settlement Will Safeguard Endangered California Frog From Harmful Pesticides SAN FRANCISCO— A federal district court approved a settlement today requiring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to better protect California red-legged frogs from seven common pesticides known to be highly toxic to amphibians. The settlement gives the agency two years to prepare “biological opinions” under the Endangered Species Act to analyze pesticide use in and near the frog’s aquatic and upland habitats. ^end quote Well like I said, it’s a start. But good for whoever brought the suit. Funny the story doesn’t say.

I was thinking about talking a little bit about worms in my Microbiology talk at the upcoming San Diego Permaculture Convergence. Unfortunately I have had to withdraw from the Planning Committee and subsequent Speaker positions. So I think that I will present a little of what I had been planning to talk about here.

How many people give their earthworms sand?

Sand you say, wouldn’t that scratch their little soft mucusy bodies?

Yes, sand. Earthworms have gizzards to grind up their food instead of teeth. Just like a chicken only much smaller. Hence the microbiology connection. So instead of pebble sized pieces of stone like for chickens you need tiny pieces of stone – like sand. You don’t need much, but their gizzard-sand teeth, wear down and it needs to be replaced regularly. My guess is somewhere on the order of a pinch of fine quartz sand per pound of worms -every month? Sort of depends on what you’re feeding them as well but this is a good ballpark number. If anyone actually has data email me. If the sand is not quartz it will probably wear down faster and need to be replaced more often. Enjoy your verma-composting.

Heeeee heeeee

They keep making regular passes now. I don’t know whether I am just noticing them more because of last week’s experience or whether they’re around more. Or whether they’re making a special effort to get by the Asian pear. Regardless the aphids are pretty much gone.

Okay this post is actually about people. I saw the following a news article. There is enough here for you to google and find the original article.

October 07, 2013 According to a news release from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, early hominids evolved finger dexterity and tool use ability before the evolution of bipedal locomotion. RIKEN researchers contend that their findings identify a solution to a long-lasting puzzle in human evolution.

The point being that a lot of smart people believe that our human hand dexterity relates more to the reason that a raccoon also has an opposable thumb than the reason that monkeys do. The idea is that we evolved for a significant period of time around/in a shallow body of water and searched for food in murky areas like a raccoon. The opposable thumb is more from a need to grab quickly than to grab a just a branch.

Best

The squirrel won by just a hair. One of my clients in Los Angeles has a hawk that hangs around. I have even see it taking a bath in the fish pond fountain. There is also this squirrel that eats their avocados. The hawk today was sitting in a tree and the squirrel was running across the ground and the hawk dived and just missed it.

This is why I go hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains. This is just one representative of the amazing talent and wonderful individuals that I am fortunate to know, care about, and interact with. To get you locked in fast feel free to skip about a tenth of the way forward to the acceptance speech. Then go back and see the whole thing. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j1tjZKamwDo Bob 310 429 8477 http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

I just lifted some spam stats from the little spam removal program my blog runs. Out of 86 Posts in 1Category I have 8,308 Comments of those15 were actual comments and were Approved. There are now 0 Pending. 8,293 were Spam. -sigh If you don’t run a blog you would be appalled at the kinds of spam I get. I have an automated spam removal program and I don’t believe it has ever mistaken a real post for spam but if some reader out there recognizes that one of their replies is not posted please feel free to email -a human can figure out how :-) and I will fix it. Maybe when we die we get to live in the world we created.

My Asian pear tree has been having a bit of an aphid problem. The Argentinian black ants herd the little juice suckers, and defended them from the ladybugs. They have taken over two trees in an area near my pond. I have been going out regularly and mashing most of the aphids I could easily find but I also haven’t made a big effort to get them all! Just trying to keep them at bay. And the reason I have not been trying to get them _all_ worked out perfectly this morning

This morning I was wandering around and taking it a bit easy because I tweaked my back last week and I heard chirping. I knelt down and stayed very still in order to see where the chirping was coming from and a little flock of birds maybe 20 or so were in a tree about 15 feet away and started flying toward me. I didn’t move and several of them flew right past me about three feet away and then others started landing in the tree right in front of me -the Asian pear.

Bushtits! I didn’t move and stayed very still and several more arrived. Pretty soon there were four or five little Bushtits hopping around literally within grasp, about a foot away from my face devouring aphids. I even already had my reading glasses on and got an incredibly good look at them. I swear I was looking at several right in the eyes. This lasted for probably close to 2 or 3 minutes – maybe as much as 5. I was getting tired of kneeling, and then after a last good look around they flew off.

Now they weren’t perfect. There was a cluster of aphids right at eye level that I could see and they missed. But I didn’t even go in and mash those few remaining aphids. The bushtits now know where to come and look for a bite to eat. If I completely clear out the aphids by spraying them with something toxic I screw up the Bushtits two different ways, 1: by poisoning them and 2: convincing them that there isn’t anything good to eat there and they will stop visiting. And another point, the Argentinian ants utterly failed to defend their herd. — losers! :-)

As usual we had a wonderful meeting. A fantastic fruit salad was provided. I assume by Claudia and Marianne, and if I am incorrect would be grateful if someone would correct me. It went quickly! Chris the owner of Closing the Loop Farm is doing a great job and gave a wonderful talk about the big picture of his efforts. It was an absolutely gorgeous day and those of you who are lazy bums and never come to a meeting after signing up, your loss not ours :-) I took a few pictures but could not get the meetup.com site to load them. So I am posting them here and then will move them over there. Thank you meetup.com. WordPress doesn’t have any trouble with them.
Bob 310 429 8477 http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com