Insect pollination puts every third bite of food in your mouth.
Here is another reason to keep your bees in town. Dennis Murrell of BeeNatural talks about being Malathioned. I remember our bees getting overspray from soybeans planted across the road when I was growing up and the resulting pile of dead bees in front of the hives was heart wrenching. Crop dusting specifically and chemically addicted agribusiness in general is bad news for everyone in more ways than just the obvious. Stopping this sort of madness is a matter of survival for humans, not just for bees. About one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the USDA.
Will gulf shrimp boats become museum exhibits?
Downstream, the agricultural chemicals threaten the human food supply again. It may not make for specatular news footage, but the biggest threat to the Gulf of Mexico long term is not oil but hypoxic (low oxygen) water. The Gulf of Mexico dead zone is bigger than ever before because of more nitrogen- and phosphate-rich sewage, fertilizer and other agricultural runoffs flowing from the Mississippi River. In combination with the BP oil spill, 2010 is not likely to be a banner year for fishing in the Gulf.
This is a great article from the BBC on the better diet that bees in urban and suburban beehives have access to. It talks about research into my long held suspicion that bees, like humans, love the variety that urban life has to offer.
Q: What is the benefit of having a compost bin over just a pile? I ask because it seems like it would be easier to turn a pile than compost in a bin.
A: An attractive bin is nicer to look at and is a preemptive strike at better relations with neighbors who might otherwise object if it is visible to them. Some bin designs (very few) help with air circulation and speed composting.
It is easier to turn a pile. Some bins are so poorly designed that they should be tossed or relegated to finishing. My working pile is an open pile, my finishing pile is a basic (slightly undersize) bin that works fine for finishing but would be a real pain for the active turning stage.
Q: What are the benefits/downsides of keeping a compost pile in a relatively sunny area versus a relatively shady area and why?
A: Sunny vs Shady does not really matter. More important is a balance between ease of access (getting compostable waste to the pile), access to areas where finished compost will be used, and being unobtrusive to visitors and neighbors if that is important to you. The final and possibly most important tip about pile location is that the pile must be in contact with the ground. All of the microbes, insects, arachnids, and worms that drive the pile get there by moving in from the ground up. This is one of the reasons rotating or tumbler bins are useless, the compost ingredients are not in contact with the soil.
Bonus tip for open piles: The pile should be covered to prevent overwatering in rainy areas/seasons and over-drying in dry areas/seasons. A 14×14 foot tarp should work well for a 3x3x3 foot minimum sized pile. An open pile will really be more of a pyramid shape when freshly turned and closer to 5×5 at the base.
This is an idea that is long overdue. The key to recycling anything on a massive scale is to make it easy. Landfiling should be hard. Recycling should be easy.
In a large office there should be a recycling bin at every office or cube. You should have to walk to a central area to reach a trash can. Make it easier to do the right thing than it is to landfill. Don’t let a whining minority hold you back.
Here in Denver we have a purple bin for recycling that the city picks up every other week and a black bin for trash that is picked up ever week. Reverse the pick up and only pick up trash every other week and recycling rates would soar because it would be easier to recycle than to landfill.
It is easy to save the world, but it becomes even easier if you make it harder to not save the world.
The best tool for saving the world (and your garden).
I really want to know. You compost now, but it might not be going so well. Or You know that composting is one of the easiest things you can do to save the world, but don’t know how to get started. Or You have been composting for years but you wanted to know if… You get the idea. Vermicomposting questions are also fair game. Continue reading
This was written the first week of May, when swarms start flying things get crazy.
Monday Night…
Today Natalie and I rescued two swarms from the fence of my friend Paige here in Denver. I learned about the swarms from a post Paige put up on Facebook with a video of one of the swarms. Some emails and phone calls followed, we packed the car with some equipment including a nuc and raced over. (A nuc is a small hive used for capturing swarms and creating splits of existing hives.)
Pictured above are four options, an open pile (with pitchfork in the foreground), a commercial bin (with a Nuc – a small beehive for swarm transport sitting on top), a leaf mould pile (behind the movable wooden fencing), and a plastic garbage can containing weed tea.
If you want to buy or build a compost bin, here are the key features you need. Anything else is a waste of time and money.
1) The single most important feature of a bin is its size. A 3x3x3 foot cube is ideal. A few inches short isn’t a big deal, more than a few inches too small and the pile will not heat up properly.
Since our short to middle term plan involves living on a sailboat in the Gulf of Mexico current events have real meaning to us.
While the video is certainly funny we are talking about the ecological death of an entire ocean. The Gulf of Mexico is an irreplaceable ecosystem the loss of which cannot be measured monetarily. This is an ecosystem we (the human species) might not be able to live without. Plankton are one of the most important sources of oxygen on the planet. Killing a measurable percentage of the plankton worldwide might be considered a bad move for our survival in the very near term.
The best scientific models suggest that very soon now the oil will circumnavigate Florida in something called the loop current. The oil will join the Gulf Stream affecting the entire east coast of the US and Canada and shipping British petroleum back to Great Britain.
Not pretty, but very effective. A basic enclosure would retain the composting power and dress up you backyard.
The spinning (sometimes called a barrel) or tumbler composter is a commercial gimmick to convince you that anyone, including small children or pets, can turn the whole pile at once in a few seconds. Most are too small to heat up properly, can’t be turned when full or nearly full, do not provide enough ventilation, do not let the compost contact the soil, and are just generally gimmicky, expensive, and useless. Continue reading
That is right, I said protect you from identity theft. Increase your safety. Do you think having paper documents mailed to you increases your security from information theft? Do you refuse to conduct financial transactions electronically because the internet isn’t safe? How sad for you. You are taking tremendous unnecessary risks every day because you have been misinformed.
Thanks to news media sensationalism one of the best ways to protect the planet is ignored, even feared. Continue reading
