Song saturday..............and a lesson in sustainability.

I woke up still in work mode and thinking ‘sustainability’; what exactly does it mean and how to get this through to kids. I did what I normally do and drank my morning coffee at my the computer randomly dipping in here and there hoping to find something useful, and this is what I came up with.

The information on this web site is scary……………these figures are completely unsustainable.

http://www.worldometers.info/

Then I started reading about this guy………………….

 
Jaime Lerner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jaime Lerner
Jaime Lerner (born December 17, 1937) was governor of the state of Paraná, in southern Brazil. He is renowned as an architect and urban planner, having been mayor of Curitiba, capital of Paraná, three times (1971–75, 1979–84 and 1989–92). In 1994, Lerner was elected governor of Paraná, and was reelected in 1998.Lerner was born to a Jewish family originally from Poland in Curitiba. He graduated from the Escola de Arquitetura da Universidade Federal do Paraná; (Architecture School of the Federal University of Paraná) in 1964. In 1965, he helped create the Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano de Curitiba (Institute of Urban Planning and Research of Curitiba, also known as IPPUC) and participated in the design of the Curitiba Master Plan.
Also one of the worlds leading environmentalists, he believes ‘the city’ can be used as a solution not a problem
Here is how he gets his message across

 

And on the same subject…………..another song, neither song is the greatest music in the world but the message is sound.

 

A Farm For the Future..... HAVE FOUND THE MISSING FILM!!!!!

I’VE FOUND THE PERMACULTURE FILM ON YOUTUBE !!!!

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE….. even if you never manage to watch another documentary in your life watch this one. It will take a while, it’s an entire TV programme and lasts almost one hour. BUT, it is in 5 parts so you don’t have to watch it all together. This is the film I was raving about that I watched at my sisters (in this recent blog)

 http://forgetmenot525.multiply.com/journal/item/433/Update_gardens_fruit_jam_planting_and_my_fish._

and said I couldn’t find it on youtube…….. well, I was wrong and here it is.

This is for every one who cares about gardens, plants, our planet, our food, our farms, our future, and our huge horrendous dirty great big eco-footprint.

BBC documentary on the present global farming and food crisis, filmed in the UK.
Featuring Martin Crawford (Agroforestry Research Trust), Fordhall Farm, Richard Heinberg and others.

Topics covered are the influence of oil on the food production, peak-oil, food security, carbon emissions, sustainability and permaculture.

Update; gardens, fruit, jam, planting and my fish.

A Brief Update

My trip to my sisters was marred by the darn virus but we managed to get out and about a couple of times. It’s always good to see her, we live 500 miles apart and only get together a couple of times a year so we need to make the most of it.

Found this pretty forgetmenot broach in a second hand shop and just knew it destined to be mine.

There is a park with ancient woodland and it’s only a 20 minute drive from her house so off we went to walk her two dogs. Despite the chill in the air it was a beautifully clear, dry day and the autumn colours were beginning to come through. It was lovely way to spend the morning.
 
While away I watched a TV documentary about ‘Permaculture’, which fascinated me. In a nutshell Permaculture seems to be the practice of growing food in a way that does not require vast quantities of fossil fuels. Apparently conventional farming with all the high tec, fuel hungry farm machinery plus processed animal feeds and fertilisers means modern farming pollutes rivers, kills the land, burns fossil fuels, generally accelerates global warming and creates a massive eco-footprint. The ecological cost of our food is dangerously high but……. the good news is; there are other ways of doing things.
Seems we need to think smaller and more back to basics. Wandering ducks and chickens fertilise the land so efficiently manufactured fertilisers are not needed (free range duck eggs are a bonus), a wild life pond full of hungry frogs gets rid of slugs and snails, no more nasty insecticides.  Native trees with berries encourage song birds;  and allowing native wild plants (weeds to conventional farmers) to flourish ensures bees and butterflies return to the land in abundance.  Once there they pollinate and keep the whole thing ticking over nicely. 

The film also encourages what it referred to as ‘’vertical growing’’ as opposed to ‘’horizontal growing’’. Basically this seems to mean allowing fruit and nut trees to grow and then growing other things in layers downwards.

As well as maximising the use of land this prevents soil erosion and top soil blowing away. I have the film on DVD and if I had the faintest idea how to do it I would post it in YouTube for all to see. There are other short clips on YouTube about Permaculture but from what I can see they are not as good as the film I watched.

Anyway……………. I was inspired and had some small fruit bushes delivered almost as soon as I came home. How fortunate that this is the time of year to plant fruit. I have planted blackberries, blueberries, white currants, red currants and strawberries. I also have some tiny saplings bought back from my sisters garden, two Victoria plum trees and one damson Tree. When I say ‘’tree’’ I use the term optimistically; these saplings are barely two inches tall at the moment.

While out in the garden I had quite a lot of tidying to do before I could plant the fruit. There were fallen leaves every where AND; I couldn’t help noticing how well my small raised garden was looking, maybe you remember this was just a pile of rubble in the summer and look at it now.

Now I’m on the look out for a hazel nut tree, hazel nut seems to be the native nut tree that is the fastest growing and produces the best crop. My plot of land is tiny, but I’m going to give it a go.

I’ve already made blackberry jam this year (subject of previous blog) AND I picked a whole load of Rowan berries and made some quite sharp but delicious Rowan marmalade. I was a little concerned about using the Rowan berries due to their bad press and supposedly being poisonous. Seems the truth is that Rowan berries are indeed poisonous to humans in their raw form because they contain parasorbic acid, however…. Cooking the Rowan berries converts the toxic Parasorbic acid into harmless sorbic acid. And lets face it………….nothing gets cooked as much as a pan of jam on the stove!!

Anyway, my thinking is to get a Rowan berry tree of my own because you can never be sure what the wild berries are exposed to. The blackberries I picked this year came from the side of a railway line and the Rowan berries came from the same area. Soon I hope to be picking them from my own garden and away from any possible pollution from the trains.

One of my sisters has set up a fish tank and I told her once home I would take some pictures of my fish and send them to her, and here they are.Thought a couple of shots of my fish would be a good way to finish. 
And that concludes my ‘update’. I’m now almost over the cold or what ever it was and back at work, life has returned to normal and I’m
 already counting the days until the Christmas holidays.