Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Whenever I go to a big supermarket that carries fresh food, I always find these long, wrinkled, ugly, rooty-looking things called parsnips on display. Someone must like them or they wouldn’t be there, but I can’t find anyone who admits to eating them, or anyone who knows what the attraction might be. It certainly isn’t phallic, as carrots sometimes get portrayed. What is the allure of parsnips?
I do not believe that most Americans — and that includes most policymakers and the media — understand the convergence of the recent scientific literature on the extreme threat posed directly to this country of Dust-Bowlification…
The California farming community is facing a demographic crisis. The average age of a California farmer is 58, and nearly 20 percent of them are 70 or older. As these farmers approach retirement, California needs to train new ones if we are to continue to feed our country and keep a healthy rural economy in the decades ahead. And with farm internships in California subject to strict labor laws, opportunities to get a hands-on farming education have become even fewer.
The local Transition group’s brand new community garden needed raised beds. So we tried a couple different ways to get them.
Germinating your seeds is fun and easy, however methods vary by plant type. Seeds of annual plants have a shallow dormancy and do not need a winter to germinate, they only live one season. Annuals generally are buried to a depth equal to the size of the seed in moist well drained soil. Some, like tomatoes and peppers, require warm soil or a heat mat to germinate.
-Government backtracks on fracking
-Investor’s concerns lead to calls for fracking changes
-Fracking In New York: For Farmers, Gas Drilling Could Mean Salvation– Or Ruin
A new USAID project, Permaculture Design for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, is focused on providing long-term food security solutions to orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC) that are coping with the challenges of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Permaculture is their means to achieving this food security.
What happens next in the economy — the nation’s, the state’s, and Seattle’s — no longer lies in the hands of Capitol Hill politicians, the Federal Reserve, or even the boards of companies like Microsoft and Starbucks. It depends on entrepreneurs like Jason Brown, who has big ambitions for his small business. Jason recently opened a grocery store in the heart of downtown Bellevue called Your Local Market. It combines the best features of Whole Foods, like high-quality local and organic products, with down-to-earth prices and familiar brands of low cost cleaning products.
– The Chelsea flower show is nature for the 1%
– Randers: “Don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Discuss
– Don’t Put Monsanto in Charge of Ending Hunger in Africa
– The power of bread: let us eat politics
– Kenyan TV show ploughs lone furrow in battle to improve rural livelihoods
– The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
– How to Change the World. The School of Life.
– How to Grow Perennial Vegetable
– 2052: a global forecast for the next forty years
– Visualising Climate Change
– People and Permaculture
– Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world
– Local Dollars, Local Sense
– The Fruit Tree Handbook
– The House of Silk
“In the first world, we have been fed a false sense of security that is imploding,” says Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, recounting her family’s experience with the militant experiment in collective governance and self-sufficiency. “On Earth Day, our families were a part of manifesting a collective vision for a better way forward—that the land be a community educational center. We have planted strawberries in the children’s garden and feed the chickens with snails that we collect from our own garden. My partner, a cook, brings us food regularly. We are making that vision real.”
Bruce Dunlop was an engineer before he became a farmer on a picturesque island off the coast of Washington in 2002. This technical background turned out to serve him well in producing pork and lamb to sell from Lopez Island Farm. Faced with the financial and logistical difficulty of transporting his live animals 200 miles to the closest USDA-permitted slaughterhouse on the mainland—a trip that included a 45-minute ferry ride—he began designing the nation’s first mobile slaughterhouse, in cooperation with Washington State University extension and Lopez Community Land Trust.
