Radio Blue Heart is on the air!

Apr 06

itsrosewho: “ FAMOUS AUTHORS • Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte. • The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database. • Project Gutenberg:...

itsrosewho:

FAMOUS AUTHORS

TEXTBOOKS

MATH AND SCIENCE

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

PLAYS

MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

HISTORY AND CULTURE

RARE BOOKS

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

MYSTERY

POETRY

MISC

(Source: iheartintelligence.com, via )

Voice of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy reproduced by 3-D printing a vocal tract

(via casketbug)

Big buzz about program to turn lawns into pollinator habitat -

hope-for-the-planet:

The Lawns to Legumes program will be holding at least 20 workshops around Minnesota to teach landowners how to make their yards more pollinator-friendly. Efforts are also being made to change local ordinances that require short, grass-only lawns.

The program also provides funding to homeowners within the habitat of the endangered rusty patched bumblebee, who can apply for up to $500 to help convert their yard to bumblebee habitat.

According to Dan Shaw, senior ecologist for the Board of Water and Soil Resources:

“There is research showing that even small plantings can provide a lot of benefit for pollinators, especially if we have enough of them and can create a matrix of the habitat, it can provide a lot of benefits for different pollinators.”

Thanks to @quantumzoop for sending this in!

(via )

[video]

[video]

Apr 05

galadhir:

aesthetically-shitposting:

This reminds me a lot of this video

I think we’re really ready to enter a new age for gardening and agriculture

ecohygge:

Forest Garden With 500 Edible Plants Requires Only a Few Hours of Work Per Month
You can now support EIC on PATREON   Mother Nature has been growing plants for 460 million years and trees for 370 million years. According
Educate Inspire Change

“Martin Crawford, a forest gardening pioneer, based in the UK, explains in a short film by Thomas Regnault, ’What we think of as normal, in terms of food production is actually not normal at all. Annual plants are very rare in nature, yet most of our agricultural fields are filled with annual plants. It’s not normal. What’s normal is a more forested or semi-forested system.’

Forest gardens mimic natural ecosystems by using perennial plants and trees, which live for a long time and/or reseed themselves. The garden would have various vertical levels of growth such as tall canopy trees, shorter trees, shrubs and bushes, vines, consists of various vertical levels of growth, from canopy trees to shorter trees, to shrubs and bushes, vines, herbs, ground cover and roots. The levels work together, offering shade, wind protection, support and nutrition. Starting a forest garden from scratch will take time, work and money but once done, it will basically take care of itself for years with very little maintenance but plenty to harvest.”

I’ve just finished reading ‘Rewilding’ by Isabella Tree, which is the story of the project at Knepp. There, they are only focussing on trying to improve exhausted farm land into a state of maximum biodiversity. They’re not trying to grow food, but they’re finding that using animals to control scrub and increase biodiversity has automatically lead to them having high-quality pasture-fed meat to sell. So that’s more of a by-product of a nature-reserve rather than a serious attempt to produce food.

As far as food goes, though, I am currently reading ‘Restoration Agriculture’ by Mark Shepard who is working on permanent agriculture in Wisconsin, similar to what Martin Crawford is doing up there but on a farm-size scale and focussed on growing staple food crops in a perennial, sustainable way by creating edible eco-systems.

And yeah, the take-away is that nature is perfectly capable of recovering its complexity and diversity AND feeding us, and it will be capable of doing it without fossil fuel inputs, but we will have to start growing our food crops in a very different way.

(via )

plantyhamchuk:

martinihomestead:

Basic Homesteading Skills

Crafts

Cooking and Baking

Canning

Gardening

Animals

Outdoors

Medicine

I’m gonna take a moment to talk about the greenhouse link above. Greenhouses can be quite a bit of work, time, and money to build - and they take up space - so some thoughtful planning and research can ensure that whatever you build you’ll get the most out of. 

Most people, when first approaching greenhouses, just build a generic shed that has clear walls and a roof. That’s what you see in the blog post above, while the author kept mentioning how incredibly hot it is. The author is located in central Washington state, USA.

image

Greenhouse with no ventilation/cooling or heating or electricity or gas, in a hot climate summer climate, cool winter. While conventionally attractive, it is not particularly functional, and is only useful for a relatively short period of the year.

How best to design a greenhouse can depend on factors like climate and latitude. 

If your greenhouse is located someplace very cold, you’re looking at issues with heating it, or else not using it at all during that time. There’s multiple ways to heat greenhouses, traditionally methane or propane gas, although in emergencies, and if it is wired for electricity, electrical heat may be used. Some people have even used wood furnaces (this is less than ideal) For any place with long winters this quickly becomes very expensive. Thermal mass is the clever trick to solve most, if not all, (depending on climate) heating issues in winter - no fossil fuels or deforestation required.

If your greenhouse is located someplace very hot, you’re looking at issues with cooling it, or else not using it all during that time. There’s multiple ways to cool greenhouses - fans/vents and shade cloth being the most common. Thermal mass can also help with this issue too.  

My favorite website on greenhouses (which longtime readers may recognize) is Penn and Cord. Heating and cooling greenhouses so you can use them for more than 6 weeks a year can be very expensive and very energy intensive - unless you start looking at passive solar greenhouse designs, such as those by Penn and Cord. You do sacrifice some space in the back greenhouse for the thermal mass aka giant barrels of water.

image

Can be built out of used or scrap material.

image

Above, barrels are on the left, hidden behind the plants. Below, this is what the wall of barrels looks like before plant beds are installed.

image

These 55 gallon drums filled with water and painted black, all along the north wall, are the “battery” that keeps these greenhouses usable year round. The roof angles are designed so that these receive direct sunlight (hence why they are painted black) in the winter, the sun heats the water, and they help keep the greenhouse warm all winter long. They’re working at high elevations in Colorado which means 1) wild temperature fluctuations 2) it’s pretty cold in winter there, down to -30F/-34C. The barrels also modulate the hot temperatures in summer. There are variations around this idea, but hopefully the concept makes sense. Sometimes people will create the northern wall out of concrete, and then put the barrels or bottles of water in front of it, for a similar “battery” or modulating effect. The interiors are painted bright white, to reflect as much light as possible to the plants.

Granted, this extremely energy efficient and far more sustainable greenhouse style does not have the same “aesthetic”, but the space is actually far more usable. Penn and Cord and their crew are growing 365 days of the year, in greenhouses mostly made out of used materials. None of these greenhouses obviously have electricity or gas installed, but they don’t actually need it either, thanks to their clever and regionally-appropriate design.

(via )

“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs: when he first appears, he is a protector.” — Plato, Republic (via philosophybits)

(via philosophybits)

US surgeon general warns of 'Pearl Harbor moment' as Americans face 'hardest week' -

merelygifted:

The US surgeon general warned the country on Sunday that it will face a “Pearl Harbor moment” in the next week, with an unprecedented numbers of coronavirus deaths expected coast to coast.

“The next week is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment. It’s going to be our 9/11 moment,” Jerome Adams told NBC News’ Meet the Press.

“It’s going to be the hardest moment for many Americans in their entire lives, and we really need to understand that if we want to flatten that curve and get through to the other side, everyone needs to do their part.”

Adams’ thoughts were echoed by Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s foremost infectious diseases expert, in a White House briefing on Sunday. “This is probably going to be a very bad week,” Fauci said.  …

(Source: theguardian.com)