Imagine a Tasmania….

Imagine living in a place where 100% of the power generated was from renewable energy and owned by the state plus having spare to sell and send across an existing undersea cable to the mainland; where medicinal crops (including poppies and hemp) were billion dollar industries and outstripped the old income from forestry a thousand times over; where wind farm construction was on the cusp of employing the entire workforce (and more) from collapsed mining; where bio mass energy heated schools and pools and buildings all over the state; where dairy farms and vegetable farms were feeding the people near and far…..

Imagine eco-tourism, organic farms, in fact every industry, business and household being able to claim that 100% of their electricity came from sustainable sources…. imagine the tourist potential….. imagine the income from selling such technology and insight all over the world….. imagine the future….

Imagine governments being so ignorant that the mere mention of hemp had them closing doors to businesses ready to start planting; imagine governments taking away renewable energy targets and making the construction of all future wind farms, ready to start building in the next few weeks, impossible to finance…. imagine them not standing tall and claiming credit for tossing aside the woes of a crumbling Tasmania and grasping these chances that have fallen like mana from the heavens….

Imagine how sick we feel and how angry we are to see unsustainable fish farming practices and other ridiculous developments taking precedent. Imagine if they privatise Hydro Tasmania and, like the gas fields of South Australia, investors suck the state dry.

It is hard to write these words. It is incomprehensible that such opportunities are not being grasped. Tasmania has a chance to leapfrog much of the rest of the world but those in the hot seats of power seem incapable of understanding. Imagine how they will be remembered in history. Imagine how it could be…..

Rainy day musings and icy strawberries

It reached 7C for a short time, on my verandah today, with rain and hail lashing the windows first on the front of the house and then the back. The dairy cows in the paddock just beyond my lounge room window huddled under the oak trees that hang over the fence from my garden. As 8 sourdough workshop participants left my house, with bowls of dough to bake, thunder crashed and the wind howled like in an episode of Midsomer Murders, just before the first murder! Since then it has been a great day to be inside enjoying the warmth of a fire; after all, this is 43 degrees south; plumb in the middle of the roaring 40’s.

On such days it is nice to wander inside your head and hear what you have to say! It is also nice to listen to live radio or podcasts and hear what other people are saying about topics that interest you, all over the world. I listened to a lovely thing about a man who climbs trees and his expedition to Morocco to climb Atlas Cedar trees, under threat from over-grazing and an extremely dry decade. He took a hammock up 50m to the top of one tree and slept there. I love the bit about the tiny spider that let itself down its silk, next to him, and we both wondered about how that spider got up there and how long is its silk. It was enlightening to hear that fencing has been erected around some areas to keep sheep out. Is nowhere safe from destruction?

I listened to another about the inside of the heads of adolescents and what research is revealing. I wish I had known some of this when my sons were growing up!

My favourite, and the one that got me sitting here writing, was about vertical and roof gardens in Sydney and how the council even has an officer for such things whose job is to promote green spaces up and over as many Sydney buildings as possible. There is a lot more to it than you think so, if you can, have a look at the photos and listen to it here. In fact it was such a good, in-depth discussion that it brought a tear my eye to think that, amongst all the bad stuff we hear about these days, our very own large, Australian city of Sydney is reaching for some outside the square stars. Or maybe, finally, such innovative thinking is becoming mainstream in enlightened areas….. sadly not so here in the Huon Valley Council zone of Tasmania, however!

As I sat in front of the fire doing a bit of yoga and then started preparing dinner, I listened to myself. I said a lot of things and most of them were about 2 topics; relationships and food! If you can get them both right, you will be very healthy and very happy. I nipped outside during a patch of sunshine to pick some parsley and mint to make chermoula for my fish tagine and my eye was caught by a skerrick of red under a leaf; a luscious, late, deep red strawberry. The sky darkened again and it felt more like evening than 2pm but I stood and savoured that rich strawberry flavour, probably the best for the whole season. It felt so good, all over.

And to think that a moment before, I was listening to a woman picking strawberries out the window about 10 stories up a building in Sydney, with a smile in her voice. Snap. There is so much more to food gardening than just the food.

Farmers as energy producers: World Bioenergy 2014 conference

An email I just received has highlighted the dichotomy of 20th century progress vs  21st century progress. Australia has sadly just voted in the former, while many European countries, including Sweden, are leading the way in the latter. The information below shows just what can be done and is worth reading. I did not know any of this before. We are very lucky that one of the 4 Australians going to this conference lives in Cygnet!

While we should be hearing from government and media the good facts on development elsewhere of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the jobs and benefits that can come from this, it is unfortunately rarely the case.  Granted ABC radio carries the occasional story, and the regional press, but by comparison with coverage of football, movies, fashion, or pop celebrities, it is as nothing.

Consequently, Sweden is not a country we hear a lot about in regard to its achievements in reducing national and per-capita greenhouse gas emissions by development of renewable energy, public transport and energy efficiency. We don’t hear about the simple and effective carbon tax implemented in 1991, we don’t hear about the 2003 legislation banning landfilling of municipal waste, and we don’t hear that now biomass is the greatest source of the country’s final energy (the combined total of energy utilised across electricity, heat energy and transport fuels), significantly exceeding either fossil or nuclear energy.

We don’t hear that in this country, that is double the population and the size of Victoria, that the per-capita GHG emissions are only about 6 tonne CO2-e, about half that of Europe (11 tonne) and a quarter that of Australia (about 28 tonne). We don’t hear that almost half of all new cars sold in Sweden are able to run on the low emission fuels of ethanol, bio-methane or biodiesel. We don’t hear that of Sweden’s final energy (energy actually utilised), renewable energy currently makes up over 46%, with 34% of this from biomass, 10% from hydro and only 2% from wind.

And we don’t hear of Sweden’s target for cessation of imports of fossil fuels of any type by 2030. This includes coal, fuel oils and fossil-sourced transport fuels. Already in Sweden’s largest cities of Stockholm, Goteborg, Malmö and Uppsala, municipal fleets run on upgraded biogas, and city buses are running on either 100% ethanol, or biomethane, or in some cases, a methane-natural gas mix.

In early July the World Bioenergy 2014 conference takes place in Sweden. No Australians from state or federal government departments are likely to be there (none have attended this biennial conference since the first in 2004), or from conservation groups, energy companies, consultancies, universities or manufacturing industry. However this year Australia will be represented by three or four people. These are the writer of this piece (who has got to the last four), a local government councillor from Tasmania, and a person involved with community, farm forestry and landcare in northern Victoria.

The most energy-efficient way to access the conference city of Jönköping (pronounced Yernsherping) is by train from Stockholm. The first part of this four-hour journey is in an electric intercity train cruising smoothly at about 160 km/hr and tilting on the curves. If you don’t know when to look you would miss seeing the new biomass and waste-fuelled combined-heat-and-power (CHP) plant just south of Stockholm at Södertailje. One of many in planning or being constructed, this is fuelled by chipped forestry thinnings and residues and municipal solid waste. As well as putting 88 megawatts (MW) of electricity into the national grid it provides up to 200 MW of district heating into southern Stockholm’s apartment buildings and industry.

The train passes through a number of cities of under 100,00 population, each of which has power and heat coming from woody biomass, or from combustible non-recyclable municipal wastes, or with separate furnaces designed to be fuelled by each but supplying a common turbine-generator setup.

The oldest of these CHP plants is where you change trains at Nassjö to the train on the spur line to the conference city of Jönköping. This small CHP plant built in 1984 was Sweden’s first purpose-designed woodchip-fuelled plant. It supplies this small city of 20,000 with all its electricity and heat needs, and the ash from the furnaces is spread back in the forests where the fuel of woody residues came from. In smaller and larger cities, the putrescible (wet organic) wastes including sewage go into anaerobic digestors, which might produce only upgraded biogas for transport fuel or to go into the natural gas grid, or only heat and electricity, or both. At Linköping, one of the cities we pass, upgraded biogas fuels a regular freight train service.

The 3-day conference at Jönköping is widely known as possibly the best of its type in the world, attracting up to 1100 people from up to 60 countries. Presentations cover the full array of bioenergy technologies at all scales, that utilise one of the many feedstocks to produce electricity, heat and transport fuels, and other products, and cover all aspects of economics, environmental benefit, policy and sustainability. This year there is a parallel conference on bio-refineries, and so the products being talked about will include industrial chemicals, including substitutes for most petrochemicals.

Jönköping is a great place to have this conference for other reasons. Conference participants can visit the modernistic Torsvik waste-to-energy plant located 13 km outside the city. This annually turns 160,000 tonnes of sorted combustible municipal waste into 30% of the city’s electricity and 50% of its peak winter heat needs. Within the city they can visit the anerobic digestor that converts the population’s putrescibles wastes into upgraded biogas for the municipal fleet and private vehicles. Or they can take an afternoon bus tour to the nearby city of Växjö, rated as ‘Europe’s greenest city’, with its per-capita GHG emissions of under 3.5 tonne. Here over 80% of the municipal population’s domestic, commercial and industrial energy needs, including transport fuel and cooling, are sourced from biomass and waste streams produced in the municipality. Other afternoon excursions go to other bioenergy plants of all types, from small pellet producers to anaerobic digestors converting cow manure to biogas.

While I realise that not all of this biomass in Sweden is coming from farmers (much is coming from urban housholds), in Australia farmers would be a major source for much of this, just as they are in Germany and many other regions (i.e., China and India).
So to help fund the people going to the conference I have entered a project called ‘Farmers as energy producers’ into a competition to win $10,000. I ask all who have read this to go to the website http://www.greatstateofag.com.au/coles-seed-fund/farmers-becoming-energy-producers and vote for this entry. While three of us are presently going I hope it becomes more, and I am looking for others from among renewable energy groups, the Greens, EPA, Sustainability Vic, or local government.

Day 2: A new way of thinking about community gardens

Community gardening is changing. Young, creative, energetic people from all walks of life are taking the bull by the horns and bringing outside the square thinking to the whole idea of what a community garden is and whose it is.

In Australia, people have seen grants from all kinds of government, local, state and/or federal, as the way to get a community garden going and keep it funded. The recently elected Liberal Government  has closed this option and many at the Food 4 Thought conference are now without any funding.

Our Cygnet community garden does not work this way, although someone in its history did get a grant to build a green house and 2 rain water tanks for which we are very grateful. We rely on our own initiative, fund raising in small amounts such as selling to the local grocer when we have excess, having a pancake stall at the Folk Festival and selling plants at the Cygnet Market from time to time. We use water for some of the garden from an adjoining house for a small fee (water is cheap in Tasmania!). The local hardware shop gives us a 10% discount when we shop there, which we often do as it is just across the road. Although this is working well for us, we have not gone any further, unlike a small group in Darwin.

The Darwin Garden Education Network has evolved under the outstanding and creative leadership of Lachlan McKenzie and Emily Gray, both of whom look to be in their 20’s. In essence what they have done is simply link all interested parties. So, local businesses, chefs, schools, councils, health departments and commercial kitchens have been linked with community gardens, sharing events and facilities to promote one another.

For example, in order to teach people how to use a particular seasonal vegetable growing in the community garden, they invited a local chef to run an after school workshop for anyone interested. The chef promoted his restaurant, the community garden provided the vegetables and promoted their garden and the school made use of their facility and encouraged students and parents to join in.

At their annual fair, community gardeners from all over Darwin collaborated in running a pop-up cafe, with all food cooked beforehand by the gardeners, tables and chairs provided by a local business, straw bales by a garden supplier, all of whom could have their own stalls. The profits were shared by all participating community gardens. Schools were given the job of decorating a combined zone with anything they chose to promote their schools in exchange for each running a 1/2 hour workshop on something garden related. Businesses were encouraged to have a stall, the payment being simply a gift voucher which was then given as payment to anyone who ran a workshop, thus reducing the need for book keeping on the day.

On Friday afternoons, a local seedling nursery gives all its leftover punnets of seedlings to any group that shows up at the gate and also offers work experience to local schools. People talking and connecting really make things happen.

By being in touch with local health authorities and councils who are keen to promote such self-motivated and healthy events, compliance fees and rentals could be waived. And so the linkages have extended until now there are about a dozen community gardens, some in very close proximity to each other, where only a couple of years ago there was only one. Working together to achieve common aims is far easier than everyone re-inventing the wheel and competing for limited funding.

These are real community gardens, linking every level of the community with every other under the umbrella of encouraging local, organic, affordable, home grown food with associated education and workshops; using common land to connect people of all cultures, ages and abilities with nature, each other and their food, in a full circle.

Interestingly they don’t have a website!

I am REALLY excited to say that Emily was voted in as the new president of the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network, the body that gave us this fabulous Food 4 Thought conference. I can’t wait to see what she and Lachlan come up with!!

Pulp the Mill….. again

 

Seed: The Untold Story

Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being. – Vandana Shiva

The third film in a trilogy that began with the award-winning films Real Dirt on Farmer John and Queen of the Sun, SEED: The Untold Story unearths the dramatic story of seeds and the global struggle to preserve them. “The very diversity in our seed stocks, of the plants we depend on to stave off hunger, are is as endangered as a Panda or a Golden Eagle, or a Polar Bear right now.” Says Gary Paul Nabhan, featured in the film.  SEED also  features well-known voices ranging from Jane Goodall, Vandana Shiva, Raj Patel and Winona LaDuke.

SEED: The Untold Story, a feature-length documentary film, tells the harrowing and heartening story of humans’ 12,000-year relationship with seeds. As many irreplaceable seeds are nearing extinction, SEED unveils a David and Goliath battle for their future. The film follows an absorbing journey into “doomsday” seed vaults, the colorful dedication of seed savers, and the world of indigenous tribes, who strive to protect our sacred seed ancestry. SEED celebrates the mystery, power and essential nature of seeds. Entertaining and engaging, SEED will ignite the imagination of audiences, inspiring them to be part of a brave new movement dedicated to safeguarding our world’s sustainable future.

Through the filmmakers unique way of funding this film, largely through Kickstarter, they have been more public, building together a vast community around the film to start creating a dialogue. Says Jon Betz, who is directing the film with Taggart Siegel.

“The seed issue is changing every day, and from research to funding, our community and our audience has been a very key part of creating the story for SEED.”

SEED is on Kickstarter, Facebook, and Twitter.

Summer …….. or what?

Nothing illustrates the topsy turvy summer we are having in Tasmania more than the confusion in my garden and hot house. At last the basil has moved on from being only millimetres high to being centimetres but at the same time and less than a metre away there is self-sown miners’ lettuce germinating and growing fast. Normally miners’ lettuce germinates well into autumn and grows through the coldest time of the year!

I absolutely LOVE the red amaranth but have struggled to get it going here. Right next to the self-sown miners’ lettuce this year are a dozen or more magnificent, self-sown amaranth (and a few tomatoes too). Why would these things all come up within the same square foot of soil and, so far, no where else?? The most annoying bit is that this is where I planted 2 eggplant seedlings which are now totally outgrown by all this self-sown stuff!

I dare not shift the amaranth as it is the first sign that it is possible to grow good, strong plants of the green and the red amaranth here in southern Tasmania. I have shifted some the tomatoes away though. Interestingly the self-sown tomatoes, that only appeared a week or 2 ago, look fabulous compared to those I sowed months ago and nurtured through spring. I think I will have to shift the eggplants. Oh lalalala, gardening is so incredibly unpredictable and consequently it is never boring.

Side by side on my lunch plate are basil and miners’ lettuce!	Amaranth are just the prettiest  of vegetables
The square foot of multi-seasonal vegetables	Here, basil is best sown in December but it is soooooo tempting to sow it before
Full germination of some old Bari cucumber seeds. Only 1 germinated last year and this was to be their last chance!	I have a crop of 2 cranberries!!!!
….and about a dozen blueberries. Ok for their first year.	I can’t resist putting in another photo of the amaranth!

Water…. like it is meant to be

If you imagine Tasmania, you probably conjure up pictures of glorious forests, pristine, stony rivers edged with tree ferns and a coastline of hidden bays, far removed from the rush of most of the rest of the world.

It is hard to think of a less frantic place to spend Christmas. I set up my market stall tent by my pond and 4 of us had lunch there yesterday, cooled by a light sea breeze and surrounded by the sounds of frogs. I was the only person who knew each of the others! All residents of Australia now, the 3 of them came from different lands originally…. One South African woman, one German woman and an American man. Perfect. Paradise. No photos.

I think I live in paradise. But today I went to the core of paradise, only 10 minutes or so drive from my house. It is a long and complex story but the gist of it is that the town water supply used to be a gravity fed, mountain spring but now the water is pumped from a busy river and then treated. Some of us would prefer to gather water from a pristine river where no humans or farm animals live upstream, and such places still exist near my home in Tasmania. So we headed to a secret location today, armed with buckets and jugs.

The track was rough but manageable and when we arrived at the end we heard the sound of the rush of water cascading over some rocks into a large, deep pool. After filling our containers, we took our shoes and socks off and sat on a rock with our feet in the icy water, hoping to see a platypus. None appeared but the 10 minutes of silence filled my head with tranquillity. I didn’t take my camera but it looked like the photo below, only the river was not quite so wide.

So, I now have a few weeks’ supply of water the way humans evolved to drink it; full of minerals form the rocks and filtered by nature with no added chemicals. I will keep it stored in a large, ceramic urn (that I found at the tip shop).

How many places are there left where you can find total wilderness so close to home but also, a short walk to the shop and you can buy St. Agur cheese!?

Growing buckwheat between the vines in NZ

Managing biodiversity when growing a monoculture crop is not something every vigneron thinks of doing but there are benefits for the quality of the crop, for the farmers and for those who drink the final result.

This piece is taken from an excellent website called stuff.co.nz

At Te Whare Ra Estate in Renwick, near Blenheim, (north east of the South Island) owners Jason and Anna Flowerday have found an innovative way to use the space between their vine rows - they've planted buckwheat.

Although a strange sight to visitors driving past the rows on the way to the cellar door, growing buckwheat on alternate vine rows had a range of benefits and was a natural way to glean optimum conditions for grapegrowing, Mrs Flowerday said.

The vine rows had about 3 metres of space between them, about 10 hectares of land.

"For us, it's a big area between the vine rows," Mrs Flowerday said.

"So it's about creating something effective for the best use of the land."

Among other species, buckwheat attracted small native wasps by the name of Dolichogenidea tasmanica, which helped get rid of the leaf roller caterpillar pest.

The technique, adopted from what began as a research project nearby at Seresin Estate, allowed them to avoid using chemicals on the vines, Mrs Flowerday said.

"It's about looking for a natural solution to a problem."

Other plant species did a similar job to the flowering buckwheat. However, buckwheat had increased the abundance and longevity of the wasps, it had a short sowing to flowering time, could be managed to produce flowers over the entire grape-growing season, was relatively cheap, and could be killed by frost, which prevented it from becoming a weed.

Buckwheat also attracted a number of other beneficial species including hover flies, lacewings, and ladybirds.

Mr Flowerday said biodiversity and working with the environment naturally was key to maintaining a good vineyard.

Re-inventing the art of sock making, in Tasmania

I have seen Mongrel Socks in a local shop in Cygnet but had no idea about the story behind them until now…... I bought some for my mother last winter and she LOVES them.

A couple of pre-World War Two era knitting machines, a cappuccino steamer and some experimentation can make a business.

Helen and Laurie Timms used to sell woollen socks in Hobart that had been made in Launceston at the Tamar Knitting Mills.

When that factory closed down, rather than buy socks from interstate, the Timms decided to have a go with making the socks themselves to sell.

To do this, the Timms needed some knitting machines. So they bought two old models from the Tamar Knitting Mills.

"We got friendly with the manager and we used to sell the socks they made on the machines," says Laurie.

The Timms bought two of the machines, one made in 1927 and one in 1930.

"Took us two years to get the second one going and it turned out to be a very simple small part," says Laurie.

The machines chug away in the Timms' shed in Cambridge now, making a pair of socks in 10 minutes, producing the socks a string, like sausages.

When they took the machines the Timms knew nothing about making the socks.

"We thought 'How hard could it be?' and it was really, really hard," says Helen.

The socks they make are made with pure wool with some nylon in the heel to make them long wearing, but other than that the socks are pretty much just the same as when the machines were new, close to 100 years ago.

Once the socks are knitted, there's a bit of sewing around the toes and the socks are steamed, to shrink the wool so the socks don't shrink when you buy them and wash them.

The steaming is done by hand, using a coffee machine they bought in Hobart.

The name of the Timms' company, Mongrel Socks, has come to have two meanings.

"The name for the product came about because of the nature of the multicoloured knit, so it's a real mixture, a mongrel," explains Helen.

"But actually it has turned out to be much more descriptive of the machinery. It's given us merry hell."

Despite the problems the Timms had in the first two years, and the fact that replacement parts have to be improvised or custom made, they have no plans to modernise the machinery.

There's little point, explains Laurie, as the newer machines work in rather than same way anyway, only using computer programs and perhaps working a little faster.

But the Timms don't plan to mass produce their mongrel socks.

"Tasmania can't compete on mass produced items, so we really have to target niches," says Helen.

It did take the Timms a bit of searching to be able to find a Tasmanian wool supplier, becase all the best wool was sold overseas before local producers could get it.

But they've currently got a local wool supplier, producing certified Tasmanian, non-mulesed merino wool, adding to the Tasmanian nicheness of the socks and small business.

Interview with Helen and Laurie Timms by Jo Spargo, featured on Your Afternoon.

Raw Milk…. a heart-wrenching look at why people want it

Watch the first bit and, if you don’t want to watch all 41 minutes then skip to 33 minutes and watch to the end.

The best 3 minutes of my day… or maybe even my week!

Enjoy and share!

Seed Freedom Fortnight

October 2nd – 16th is when the world of thinking eaters join forces to proclaim their right to grow and eat food from seeds that have been saved and sown by farmers and gardeners for thousands of years, not from seeds that are genetically manufactured by large petrochemical companies and must be bought annually by farmers.

You can read about Seed Freedom here. And you can see on this map the actions being taken all over the world for this incredibly important issue. This link will take you to the online map where you will find all the details of these actions by hovering your mouse over the pin. If you know of others, you can add them to the map.

Currently Tasmania is GM free and profits from this in its sales of clean, green foods to countries in Europe and Asia. Let’s keep it that way!

Carl Barnes and Glass Gem Corn

….. truly an inspiration to all who save seeds.

A stunning variety selected by Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee farmer and breeder, from several traditional corn varieties. Produces a diversity of gorgeous translucent, jewel-colored ears, each one unique. A popcorn, the kernels may be ground into cornmeal or popped….

…..For millennia, people have elegantly interacted with the plants that sustain them through careful selection and seed saving. This process, repeated year after year, changes and adapts the plants to take on any number of desirable characteristics, from enhanced color and flavor to disease resistance and hardiness.

The bounty of genetic diversity our ancestral farmers and gardeners created in this way was shared and handed down across generations. But under today’s industrial agricultural paradigm of monocropping, GMOs, and hybrid seeds, this incredible diversity has been narrowed to a shred of its former abundance. A 1983 study compared the seed varieties found in the USDA seed bank at the time with those available in commercial seed catalogs in 1903. The results were striking.

Of the 408 different tomato varieties on the market at the turn of the century, less than 80 were present in the USDA collection. Similarly, lettuces that once flourished with 497 heirloom varieties were only represented by 36 varieties. The same held true for most other veggies including sweet corn, of which only a dozen cultivars were preserved out of 307 unique varieties once available in the catalogs. Though this data leaves some questions around actual diversity decline, the trend toward dwindling crop diversity is alarming. In just a few generations, both the time-honored knowledge of seed saving and many irreplaceable seeds are in danger of disappearing.

Though much of this diversity may be gone, all hope is not lost. The emergence of a breathtaking heirloom variety like Glass Gem reveals that the art and magic of seed saving lives on. It reminds us that we can return to this age-old practice and restore beauty, wonder, and abundance to our world. Indeed, this renaissance is already underway. The rising seed library movement is encouraging local gardeners to become crop breeders and empowering communities to reclaim sovereignty over their food. Our pioneering Seed School program at Native Seeds/SEARCH is training people from all walks of life in building sustainable local seed systems rooted in ancient traditions. And as eye-popping images of Glass Gem continue to spread around the world, Carl Barnes’ kaleidoscopic corn has become a beacon—and perhaps an inspiring symbol—for the global seed-saving revival….

Copied from “Native Seeds”, an American native seed company.

Seed Freedom Fortnight

I cannot understand people who are not interested in where their food comes from and swap stories on Facebook about where you can get really cheap ‘food’. We live in different worlds, them and me, but are neighbours. They would rather drive half an hour through rural Tasmania to a cheap shop, than spend half an hour in the garden, sowing a whole season’s food or shopping at the market on a Sunday.

This video says it better than I can…. join with Vandana Shiva and take up one of the actions she mentions, to save your freedom to choose what you eat, now and forever.

 

Gardening Australia gets to the core and soars to the stars….

"Meet Joost Bakker - artist, florist, inventor, architect, builder, landscape designer, restaurateur and eco-entrepreneur. He's a big ideas man."

 

I have been getting a little tired of Gardening Australia but this week hit the spot for me, with some amazing innovations that really are world firsts. Honestly, each segment was not just interesting but so inspiring and creative that I wanted to jump up out of my chair and go and join in. If you can, watch it on iview.

 

It started with this wonderful man…. Joost Bakker…. who has ideas and just gets them done…. "I just believe that we don't need to generate any waste in any of the things that we do in everyday life," says Joost. "We can live in a world that is sustainable and doesn't need to have an impact and we don't need to put anything in landfill. Everything endlessly reusable and recyclable - that's my philosophy."

Sure we’ve heard that all before but Joost is a BIG ideas man…..he designs recyclable houses, he recycles buildings, he turns 100% of his cafe waste into compost on site. He is just simply wonderful!!

"In this cafe, we don't have any rubbish bins," says Joost. "We don't accept anything in cardboard, we don't accept anything in glass - so our milk comes in stainless steel vats, our whiskey comes in wooden barrels, all the produce comes in black returnable plastic crates.

And there’s so much more!

"Well, if you look at Sweden, they've decided that by 2020 they're going to be totally self-sufficient in fertiliser. So every new house that gets built there has a urine-harvesting toilet with a tank and the government comes and empties the tank once a year. Urine is sterile*, so you can store it for a long time and they have equipment that injects it into the soil," says Joost. "So, rather than using chemical-based fertilisers they want to use natural fertilisers."

And I bet he gets this one done….

"I'd love to put a farm on top of an office tower in Melbourne. That's my goal. I actually want to show how much food we can grow with the waste that the restaurant generates. I want to have a restaurant, a farm, a composter and use things like olive pips to generate energy and have a completely enclosed loop of a supermarket at the base, where people can buy the produce that we've grown. Anyway, I'm working on it. It's a big dream. It'll happen. I'll make it happen!"

Suddenly the rest of the world seems so small.

Seed Freedom Fortnight is coming

Go to Vandana Shiva’s Seed Freedom website and facebook to see how you can join forces with your neighbours…..

Humans are 90% bacteria…. but which bacteria are you?

It is so obvious really, but sometimes breakthroughs and discoveries are like that. We all know that probiotics are helpful bacteria that live in our digestive system and many people buy certain yoghurts and supplements that contain a very particular range of probiotics.

It is also well known that an acidic diet, one high in sugary foods for example, is not friendly to these bacteria….. hence people try adding them to their diet (instead of removing the sugar!).

But, take this one step further and ask another question “What other bacteria live in our bodies and what are they doing?” Well, it seems that the answers are quite amazing and many diseases and conditions are being linked to the absence or presence of certain bacteria. Moreover, it is the food we eat that feeds these bacteria, so if we eat a good diet, our range of bacteria stays in harmony and we stay well. If we have a poor, highly processed diet then this feeds a different range of bacteria which upsets the balance, our immunity is compromised and our health suffers.

You can listen to a brief explanation here. Another study looked at fasting or calorie restriction and found that this promotes beneficial bacteria. Read more here.

So, get out there and grow mountains of delicious greens!!

Making holes in an old bench for a new tool….

I am not anti-technology at all; otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here at my laptop writing this! I have all kinds of nifty gadgets and as many cables cluttering up my life as everybody else….. BUT there is a craze at the moment that I don’t like. It is the noisy kitchen machinery craze.

Everyone has a fan-forced oven and a rangehood and everyone is getting vitamixes and thermomixes, which whizz up everything in a matter of seconds and will even cook it for you. But these things are all soooooo noisy, even if only for a few seconds or a minute or two. I do not like noise. I love peace and quiet, especially when I am enjoying myself preparing food in the kitchen. I really love the gentle sound of grinding spices in my stone pestle and the hands on action means I can get the spices just how I want them, whilst getting some small amount of arm exercise too! Why go to the gym when you could be grinding spices instead?? (Looking at that photo I have now found the washer I thought I had swept up with the sawdust I created whilst drilling holes in my old bench to bolt down the new addition….)

Moreover, neither the vitamix nor the thermomix GRINDS things, it just cuts them up really small. Grinding has some health benefits, over cutting and the result of grinding is a much more natural food for our gut to deal with.

I also have a fruit, vegetable and wheat grass juicer which lives permanently attached to my kitchen table. It is really solid and an absolute delight to use. Being always there means I can grab an apple or 2, a couple of carrots and handful of wheatgrass and in a couple of minutes I have a fresh juice. It is really easy to clean too.

 

 

Well, now I have something new! A Retsel Little Ark seed, grain, coffee and spice mill. I am not going to grind kilograms of grains to make flours but rather do smaller jobs, like make fresh oatmeal, grind and blend spices for the market…… and grind coffee.

I am planning on doing all kinds of exciting things with this mill so stay tuned!!

And it makes a pleasant, natural sound as I turn that very long handle, well designed for human use. Again, it is  also excellent upper body exercise and the results are gut-friendly!

So, while I cook, whether I want to listen to wonderfully interesting podcasts or hear the birds outside the window or a friend knocking on the front door, it will all be lovely and quiet in my kitchen.

Life is yours to define. Get there fast then take it slow.

‘Daily Good’– providing solutions to the ‘news’

Local, Australian news services have become the lowest of the low, in terms of providing factual, real news. There is rarely anything worth mentioning as it is all cheap and easy daily details on rape, murder and political unrest, at home and overseas. Where has intelligent journalism gone?

I know there are terrible things happening in the world but seeing children covered in blood in Syria or a man being taken to court for rape or one politician slinging off at another is not telling me anything NEW and doesn’t NEWS mean something new? For every bad piece of news, they should show one of the millions of people who are trying to do something about it, thereby adding hope and education to the very poor presentations.

I get my news elsewhere. One place is Daily Good which inspires me to get out and do more to change the way things are and puts me in touch with so much NEWS that is really happening, in every corner of the world where people are endeavouring to overcome the horror of what our local news keeps telling us is there.

Like with Jamie Oliver and his passion for school lunches and children knowing and growing food so they can be healthy, there is a link between how children play and how children behave. Creating green spaces for the poorest and most disadvantaged children, often living in big, grey cities, has the chance to stop some of those horrific American shootings we are told about. The excerpt below is from “Daily Good: news that inspires”

….Charlotte, 4, has two 20-minute recess breaks each day. Her teachers wish they could spend more time outside with their young charges, but they have to rotate usage with other teachers, and the playground is also small and somewhat unwelcoming. It's surrounded by eight-foot chain link fencing and features standard-issue swings and monkey bars on blacktop. When she doesn't feel like chasing her friends, Charlotte sits with her back against her school's brick façade and watches cars pass on an adjacent freeway….

 

 

….Ivy's preschool recently added an outdoor classroom. Fencing created from natural materials conceals a hidden wonderland divided into intentional learning and play areas. In one part of the classroom, Ivy and her friends can get their hands dirty with "messy materials." Across a mosaic stone path, they can snip samples of organic greens grown in their own raised beds. There are weatherproof marimbas for the musically inclined—and really, aren't all preschoolers musically inclined?—and "tree cookies," rough wooden building blocks, for use in elaborate building projects…..

Creative, hands-on outdoor experiences like those Ivy is exposed to are an essential piece of the child development puzzle. Research reveals that contact with nature may be as important for children as good nutrition and sleep…..Most children have more options for solitary play provided by electronics and child-targeting technologies. This lack of time outdoors contributes to childhood obesity and increased reliance on behaviour-regulating medicines. While many educators recognize these connections, they may not possess the tools or resources they need to actualize nature-based learning in their schools.

“Nature Explore” can help bridge this gap. In outdoor classrooms, children develop a sense of wonder and respect for the natural world. They solve problems, experiment, engage, and explore. Globally, there are already 170 certified Nature Explore Classrooms, with many more underway. Based on field-tested guiding principles, these spaces have been developed for schools, early childhood centers, domestic violence shelters, military bases, parks and museums. While each design is unique, the underlying philosophy remains the same: Connect kids with nature and amazing things happen.

Want to introduce the kids—or educators—in your life to a Nature Explore classroom? Visit www.natureexplore.org for virtual tours of certified classrooms, details on upcoming workshops, an overview of the design consultation process, and other resources that can help you launch a Nature Explore space in your community.