Permaculture Blog

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2013/03/20/autism-prevalence-is-now-at-1-in-50-children/

Oh my G.. 1 in 50! We have freaking poisoned an entire generation of kids! Why in the world are we not 100,000 strong outside the big chemical companies?

In a related article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/health/parental-study-shows-rise-in-autism-spectrum-cases.html?_r=0″. The first article is also probably related to this CDC report. The likelihood of an American child being diagnosed with autism, Asperger, or related disorder increased 72 percent in 2011-12 from 2007! 72 percent in as little as 5 years. ARGGGGG. This was a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We have utterly no idea how the biocides we are allowing to be sprayed all over our land and food are breaking down in the environment. And the big chemical companies are withholding toxicity data, production and sales data, export data, and say (just like the tobacco companies) “oh it won’t hurt you.” Where is the USDA? Why in the world should a company that manufactures something to be sprayed over huge areas of United States — and our food, be allowed to withhold toxicity data. And why should they be allowed to produce it while only investigating minimally the first break down product of the toxin. Please, please where is WikiLeaks?

If we sit back and let it, the word — no, the idea of permaculture will mean as much in 10 years as the word organic does today. Organic means that there are several pages of approved toxins at the USDA website that you can spray on crops and our food. And if one of those doesn’t work you can get a waiver and spray virtually any of the known ag chemicals on them and …. here’s the best part :-) still list it as organic! That way when the statisticians determine cancer rates agribusiness can say “Oh look there’s just as much cancer in people that eat organic.” ;-)

So it really is up to us we can let agri business hijack the term permaculture, or not. So be aware that there are probably agribusiness vice presidents a d sich who’s daily _job_ it is to monitor the organic and permaculture groups and given the right opportunity to say “oh but it’s really not that bad to kill things and spray pesticides.

They would also say

Really, I have your best interest at heart. And trust me, cigarettes don’t cause cancer” :-)

Best to all

Tadpoles. They’ve gotten humongous. They’re quite interesting when you pick them up out of the water they wrap their tails around their bodies. I wonder if they are geared to bury in the mud and survive as a tadpole another year in order to fully develop. There are a lot of the toads around but there didn’t seem to be a nearby stable -even relatively stable- source of water for them to develop in. So when I saw the tail wrapping behavior that’s when I thought well maybe they didn’t fully develop in 1 year. Or …. Maybe not even a year! The first rain came way back in November, then there was a dry spell — all the water dried up — and now it has rained heavy again. So maybe they don’t have to last a year but could last a month or a week without any ponded water. This is all speculation but isn’t nature amazing!

They are amazingly chubby little things and they haven’t even started their legs yet.

Of course the rabbits have been making a comeback too. Hard to tell. It’s where the grapefruit rolling squirrel liked to take the grapefruits. It may have tried to go for 1 too many grapefruits. But it is not like it was my pet. If it re-formed part of the ecosystem then I’ll have more grapefruits for a while until another squirrel learns to do the same thing. On the other hand maybe by that time the tree will be big enough to the squirrels can’t get up into it. But, my friends, if you kill all the predators you’re gonna have ground squirrel, gopher, vole, mouse, aphid, etc troubles.

by voice recognition on bob’s droid. Sorry for the Weird capitalization. Website http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/

Wow what a great weekend. I gave my talk. A few people said they liked it, and I hope that they did. I started out describing what a carcinogen was and how to detect it. Went from there to the fact that it has been shown that plants can convert some of the non carcinogenic chemicals sprayed on them into carcinogens. How little we know about how chemicals are degraded and changed in the environment, to all the toxic chemicals in our groundwater and how little we know about them and particularly their breakdown products. And finished up with the idea of using a constructed wetland to clean up well water before you use it in the house. There have been requests to try and post the slides online and I will try to do that on the blog — here if that’s where you’re reading it.

And the rest of the talks were fantastic. Paul Wheaton’s keynote address was mind blowing. We gave him a standing ovation, of which he deserved every second. I saw initially that it was going to last 2 and a half hours and I said to myself, there is no way I’m going to sit through somebody talking for 2 and a half hours. Well it started at 4:30 p.m. and at 7 I was standing with the rest giving him the ovation he deserved.

The only thing, _only thing_, that I am somewhat concerned about is that there were a lot of people who still advocate killing anything they don’t like. There was this huge guy with tattoos all over and who was talking about a spider in his beehive and wanted to know if there was something he could put in his bee hives that would kill spiders. Not only is this wrong on so many levels but I asked him how many people he knew who had been killed or injured by spiders. Answer: none

Then I asked him how many people he knew who had been injured or killed in automobile accidents. His response: well it’s not the same.

So this huge 6 foot plus guy is afraid of a little spider and this little scrawny runt he’s talking to who, he probably thought he could squash with 1 finger, isn’t :-)

Ahhhhhh I love I irony. And he was such a manly man laugh, laugh, laugh.

Bob

I was walking along this morning and came upon a grapefruit lying under the grapefruit tree. I paused and looked at it and thought well that’s not really ripe enough to have just fallen off but I didn’t think that much more about it and put it in a container to take back up to the house. Was working on several things, and maybe 2 or 3 hours later I started heading back up the path to the house and saw a grapefruit rolling along.

Looked again and saw the ground squirrel behind it pushing it as fast as it could go. Now the grapefruit certainly outweighed the ground squirrel. It looked like someone trying to roll a 55 gallon drum along the ground. I kept walking and the ground squirrel tried to go faster. I was getting closer, it was trying to go faster. Finally it ran for the bush and the grapefruit rolled to a stop. I picked up the grapefruit and put it with the other one and went to look at something and about 5 minutes later saw the ground squirrel run for the grapefruit tree. Now the tree is not very big so the lower branches are only about 2 feet off the ground. Well the ground squirrel leaped up and grabbed the lower branch, wiggled up in the tree, and worked around, and worked around, and worked around, and finally a small grapefruit fell out of the tree, followed by the ground squirrel. This fruit was only about the size of a small orange. And so the ground squirrel grabbed it in its teeth and ran off, holding it off the ground instead of rolling it.

The image of that poor ground squirrel rolling along the giant grapefruit and trying to go faster was definitely worth the price of the smaller fruit later.

I am perfectly happy to share with the critters. Pretty darn cheap entertainment when you think about it. Cracks me up when people buy bird seed to feed the birds but they hate it if anything else gets it. And they throw a fit if the birds eat any of the fruit from their 1 fruit tree. While they’ve planted 5 other fruitless trees (fruitless mulberry, a fruitless olive, a fruitless pear, fruitless this and fruitless that). Cause the fruit gets in the way when it falls :-( And they will plant a lemon tree. They probably will only use at most 5 lemons in a year but by god at least the squirrels won’t steal their fruit. It will instead, just lie under the tree all summer. Geez Louise people — grow up :-)

Well apparently a great horned owl has taken up residence. From the pictures on Google it is not a barn owl it is a great horned. That’s cool! A friend of mine suggested that I see if I can collect some of the pellets under where it is regularly roosting. That is a great idea! Wish I had thought of it first :-)

It has been there at least 4 days and I have already bothered it 2 of those days taking pictures so I think I will leave it in peace for a week. Since I now know where to look, I can see it from way down below and don’t have to bother it. If it’s still there after a week maybe I will see if I can collect some pellets without disturbing it too much.

Ohh my gosh this great horned owl was sitting about 3 or 4 feet off my driveway. This is the area that I let the spare Gophers go in. Maybe he/she is looking for them :-)

by voice recognition on bob’s droid. Sorry for the Weird capitalization. Website http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/

Okay, the mice are not getting blamed this time :-)
I have seen birds come down and eat the leaves off the pea plants. Two different kinds of birds I have seen do this. One of the birds, a Towhee, in the summer hops up and down my rows of vegetables eating bugs. I really appreciate this and I would speculate that there are not a lot of insects to have as food as it goes into winter.

I guess if I want to have lots birds hopping around in the summer eating bugs I need to feed them in the Fall and Winter! They’re insectivorous but at least people are beginning to realize that animals don’t eat one type of food their entire life. But they are probably not big seed eaters and so I shouldn’t limit myself to bird seed and I ought to plant a few more (salad) peas for them in the fall. And not worry about them eating a few. They will repay me tenfold in the summer. I have also decided to plant my peas earlier so that they are a little bit bigger and thus can withstand the damage better by the time the “bugs run out”. Californians have ripped out all the native plants that used to feed our native animals and planted that one lemon tree in our yard and then are furious that the squirrel gets a few of _our_ lemons. Try planting back some native food plants too. Best to you all!

Couple of requests for pictures of the Gopher moat. So the picture shows on the left 2 apple trees and all the way down at the end a fig tree. Each of the trees used to have a trench dug around it. That trench has now been filled in with compost etc. But it makes the trench on the left a little ragged. Doesn’t bother me and I think the trees will be happy with the compost. Down the center is my tractor path. To the right is the outside trench and the Gophers au natural area. There is also lots of mustard that I am pulling out and it is where I let the Gophers that I dug up go. Well two of them, the other two I let go up where I had seen the bobcat and her kittens. She had two this year and from the internet the suggestion is that they often have two but 1 doesn’t make it. So I hope if the extra Gophers were caught and eaten it allowed both the kittens to make it. It is an ecosystem people please don’t kill everything.