Oh, yes, indeed. "Peak soil: unless we act now the very ground beneath us will die" - so says the Soil Association's Helen Browning. And we reckon she's spot on. As she says, "As a farmer, my foremost responsibility is to protect and enhance the soil in my care. It can take more than 500 years to generate an inch of soil, yet our farming activity can erode or degrade it in a decade or two if we are not careful. Even as an organic farmer, where the system is designed to protect and build soils, I’m aware that the move to bigger machinery, the need to cultivate and plough to control weeds, and our seemingly ever more volatile weather can put soils at risk." She remind usthat "trees are incredibly important when it comes to protecting soil" and so urges us to take action such as to "develop more agroforestry systems (mixtures of productive trees or shrubs and crops), so we have the yield, biodiversity and soil protection benefits of many more trees in our landscape" and say that "We also need to start doing more of other things, such as experimenting with growing perennial crops and trees, and recycling sewage sludge safely back to soils"....well, she's got our vote. Check out her full article on the splendid FORKED website: http://forkedmagazine.org/2013/11/08/peak-soil-unless-we-act-now-the-very-ground-beneath-us-will-wither-and-die/
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Yup. We can vouch for this. Next thing on our list to do: help everyone SEE the connection, and do what they can in their world (health, planning, child care - whatever it is!) that makes this happen. :) "The Woodland Trust's chief executive has said increasing people's access to green spaces could cut billions of pounds from the NHS healthcare bill. Sue Holden said it had been calculated that the NHS could save £2.1bn a year if everyone had access to green spaces. She made the comments at an event to mark the culmination of the five-year Visit Woods project. Ms Holden added that only an estimated 14% of the UK's population had "easy access to trees". She told an audience of invited guests at the Houses of Parliament that the link between "healthy woods and healthy lives" was a "connection that really has to be made much more and much more often". She added: "It is a connection that we know intrinsically, we believe it to be true but - increasingly - it is something that evidence is backing up as well. It has been calculated, for example, that £2.1bn of healthcare costs could be saved if everyone had access to green spaces." Oh. And we'd be happier, too....;) "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24806994 I've watched this (three times, for the sheer joy of it) and joined up. You? :) (Oh...and it's coming to Cornwall - Launceston and Lostwithiel. Huzzah! I shall be trying to get it further west, too - too good not to! Check out the screenings here: it's all over the UK - as of this month... https://projectwildthing.com/film. Walking onions. What a joy. :) They "walk" - and grow themselves. They grow little bulblets instead of flowers at the top of their stalk, droop onto the ground, and then start all over again. You get to eat the stalk (like chives), and the bulbs (like an onion). Leave enough to start again, and you have a perennial onion. That is cool. Thanks to Otter Farm for their splendid package with my walking onions revving up inside...planted within hours in the newly mulched perennial veg bed. I can sleep easy as my onions are now in bed, building their strength up over winter to start their endless gorgeous oniony march for us...:) The Great Molt has begun. Spice (the Grand Mama) has begun first - she has a Very Bare Bottom. When you look after your hens with love and know them all individually, it's always a bit of a shock (it can be a quite atrocious sight...not, as my teenage children would say, A Good Look!..) and as our friends below say, it's like walking into the aftermath of the mother of all pillow fights going into the coop every morning...ouch! But it's all part of the process - a bit like shedding leaves and investing in yer roots, if you're a tree. I'm coming to see this time of year more and more as a Time To Pay In...feed the soil, bed down, lay good foundations, invest in next year. It's almost as exciting as spring...a deliberate investment in our natural asset. Good on you, Spice...you need a quick protein boost to help you grow 'em back (feathers are over 80% protein!) - so a good handful of sunflower seeds are coming your way this morning...) . Lovely explanation of this process is just here, from fellow chook lovers in Boston, US: http://hencam.com/faq/the-molt Been living in a cloud for the last three days. I mean a real one. I stand on the doorstep and feel like the entire world has left, and there's only us and a Huge Cloud left on earth. Mist so absolute you feel like you can stretch out and grab a whole wispy armful. Like silvery candyfloss. Got lots and lots of water (all tanks busting full) but our solar panels busting a gut to give us the energy we need from under a thick duvet of mizzle. We're just being very very careful, which is not difficult as it's just a matter of being sensible, and it's amazing to watch the numbers shoot up the nano second the sun comes out; pump up the volume! We've started making daily readings of our Resource Inflows (rain and sunshine) and our Resource Stocks (how full our tanks are and how much energy we have in store). Starting to look really interesting. And we hope will help us use our resource wisely. Wisely -ness. There's a thing we could all do with using a bit more of. Especially those Very Odd Blokes in Downing Street. Boy, they don't half have some odd ideas about the world. They should try living in a cloud for a few days. Or maybe that's all there is between their ears...might explain such a lot... A weekend of many, lovely visitors...and multiple and detailed conversations about our energy bills, in a week where the average energy bill is forecast to reach £1,500 a year. Eeeeouch. Our wee solar array would already have paid for itself three times over; and with a little care, even on misty autumnal days we generate enough free power from the big round geezer in the sky for all our needs - even the tappy screeny digital ones. :) The 1kwh/day house rocks. :) This weekend sees galactic levels of cardboard, horse manure and compost mulching. After much hunting around, our local surf shop (hurray!) has offered us a fabulous mountain of cardboard, and our local stables the same in manure. And I have made our first order of seeds from Higgledy Garden to sow a veritable feast for the senses come the spring and summer...I can't wait. Have decided it's an early birthday present. For my garden, not me. I think it might have to have more than one. I'm recycling this blog - because it's ace. This guy here wrote it. He's ace too. His name is Richard Heinberg. "You and I consume; we are consumers. The global economy is set up to enable us to do what we innately want to do—buy, use, discard, and buy some more. If we do our job well, the economy thrives; if for some reason we fail at our task, the economy falters. The model of economic existence just described is reinforced in the business pages of every newspaper, and in the daily reportage of nearly every broadcast and web-based financial news service, and it has a familiar name: consumerism. Consumerism also has a history, but not a long one. True, humans—like all other animals—are consumers in the most basic sense, in that we must eat to live. Further, we have been making weapons, ornaments, clothing, utensils, toys, and musical instruments for thousands of years, and commerce has likewise been with us for untold millennia. What’s new is the project of organizing an entire society around the necessity for ever-increasing rates of personal consumption. This is how it happened:" CardGloriousCard. I can take all your cardboard, use it well and ask for more. By the time I'm finished, bracken will see me and quake. In a low impact, permacultural sort of way, of course. I am The Empress of Mulch. And of course, if it's been used to ship something pointless and high impact from a long away way, there's a sense of from swords to ploughshares. As it were. |
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May 2016
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