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Just one look at the above photo gives you a sense of just how large a 3.6MW wind turbine really is. The image comes to us from Eurocopter — who were just contracted to be used exclusively for wind farm maintenance in the UK. Apparently, these 3.6MW monsters are so tall that it’s a bit quicker to get up there via helicopter and make emergency repairs than to try and scale ‘em through the internal ladder system.

Called the “Greater Gabbard wind farm” near the East Anglia coast — the 140 turbines will be located 20 miles from land in the North Sea. When completed in 2010, it will be the largest wind farm in the world.

Flightglobal via Gizmodo

This book is a one stop shop about how to be a homesteader when you live in the city.  The authors of this book live in LA, but they are able to grow a good portion of their food, raise chickens, bike as their transportation and find the space to make a lot of natural foods.  It’s a great read and is a must have addition to your reference library.

In the book they have a chapters devoted to gardening, foraging for food in the city, raising livestock in the city, home economics (which covers canning, root cellering, drying, pickling, making cheese, yogurt, etc among other stuff), being your own utility which talks about saving rainwater, generating energy, saving energy and other topics like that.  The final chapter is about transportation.

This is a fantastic book and is soooo useful and full of information.  You must have it.

P.S. I love the take off American Gothic on the cover.

Eating local is an obvious way to reduce the impact your palate has on the planet. You can’t get any more local than you backyard garden or window sill, but have you considered the acorns that fall outside your window? Or perhaps there is something growing in the greenbelt near your home that would make a nice addition to your salad. Can you eat the weeds? Green Deane of Eat the Weeds takes us on a journey of wild food foraging. Green Deane presents his message in video form, he does a great job helping you in identification of the plant as well as its habitat, and use.

Be sure to check out all of his video’s on Youtube and visit his website, eattheweeds.com, for detailed information.

In the mean time, how about those acorns?

The idea of purchasing “organic” foods depends a great deal on trust.  I trust the farmer has taken numerous steps to grow food without artificial or chemical products, uses natural pest control versus pesticides, etc.  He in turn trusts that the products that he is buying to fertilize his fields are based on organic standards.  Without that trust, an “organic apple” is just an apple, a head of “organic lettuce”, is just lettuce, and so on.

Some argue that the government should set standards so that those farmers practicing organic methods of farming and husbandry can be monitored and those standards enforced.  Others (myself included) would like the government to stay out of it (mostly).

A recent article brings to light a breach of that trust.  It reveals that several seasons worth of organic food were grown using a fertilizer that included ammonium sulfate - which is made from fossil fuels.

Sacramento Bee:

For up to seven years, California Liquid Fertilizer sold what seemed to be an organic farmer’s dream, brewed from fish and chicken feathers.

The company’s fertilizer was effective, inexpensive and approved by organic regulators. By 2006, it held as much as a third of the market in California.

But a state investigation caught the Salinas-area company spiking its product with ammonium sulfate, a synthetic fertilizer banned from organic farms.

As a result, some of California’s 2006 harvest of organic fruits, nuts and vegetables – including crops from giants like Earthbound Farm – wasn’t really organic.

It goes on…

State officials knew some of California’s largest organic farms had been using the fertilizer, the documents show, but they kept their findings confidential until nearly a year and a half after it was removed from the market. No farms lost their organic certification.

To me the best way of insuring that you have fresh healthy food that is grown with care for the environment and for the consumer is to know your farmer.  Nevertheless, one should realize that even Farmer John can get duped.  Another reason to start up a compost pile, and start growing your fruits and veggies in the back yard.

So last week my local NPR radio show had an economist on to talk about the recent meltdown of our economy.  To the credit of this particular radio station they were having this particular economist on the show again because earlier this year he said that the economy really wasn’t in that bad a shape and that the media and their gloomy reporting was due a large portion of the blame.  Of course he turned out to be totally wrong and to his credit he said so.  As to the question of whether or not the mainstream media is being too gloomy I think the opposite is true.  MSM is still quite optimistic in my opinion.

I didn’t have time to call into the show and walk around my home with the phone to my ear in hopes that I might be allowed to ask a question in person so I emailed my question to the station.  It read something like this,

Would you ask your guest about a steady state economy as an alternative to the growth economy we now currently rely on?  Infinite growth in a finite system is impossible.  Thanks.

The host did ask my question and the response of this guest, who teaches economics at a local university was to bring on the pies. He said, “If we want more people to have a larger slice of the pie without taking it from others than we must grow the pie.” Grow the pie!  That’s all we need- more bakers!  I’ve heard this colourful suggestion used dozens of times and frankly I’m sick and tired of it.  Of course it made me wish  I could have posed a few follow questions to this particular economist.  I’ll have to settle for doing so here and now.

Question Number 1. What planet do you live on? Read more »

The Guardian in the UK featured a story yesterday about a new type of font that is earth friendly because it uses less ink.

From the article:

The Ecofont saves on printing ink by … well, using less of it. Letters in the freely downloadable typeface contain multiple small circular holes, meaning that each letter requires less ink to be printed. As the designers put it: “After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well.” Quite.

Though rather striking, the typeface is wholly readable (no pun intended) and is, apparently, most effective at nine or 10 point. It’s also sans serif, because, of course, the little flourishes on serif fonts will use up more ink when being printed.

It sounds interesting.  What do you think Groovy Greeners?  Is this something that may make us all a little more green?

Back in Summer 2007, I gushed over wireless hardware provider Meraki and their announcement of a solar-powered repeater. There are several scenarios — from college campuses to farms — where expanding wireless coverage is limited based on access to electrical outlets. Unfortunately, Meraki’s product wasn’t quite ready for prime time and I was left wondering if it would ever see the light of day.

Well, never underestimate a company partially backed by Google. Their new solar-powered repeaters are now for sale and look more robust and ready for Mother Nature than ever before. From the site,

“Each unit is completely self-contained and ready to mount on roofs, poles, or anywhere else the sun shines. The Solar is completely energy independent and runs on its own state-of-the-art solar-charged battery.”

Also particularly cool is how they’ve catered several different setups depending on what part of the world you reside in. Using the chart on their site, you can easily see if you need a 20-watt, 40-watt, or perhaps your own custom panel to get the bits flying. Those of you living in Northern Alaska appear to be out of luck — perhaps a wind solution?

Jump over to take a look at the various solutions. True innovation — and a product that can deliver a lot of good in areas lacking access to the web. Kudos, Meraki!

EDAR (Everyone Deserves A Roof) is a 501(c)(3) charity that provides unique mobile shelters to those living on the streets all around us. Each EDAR is a four-wheeled mobile unit which carries belongings and facilitates recycling during the day and which unfolds into a special, framed tent-like sleeping enclosure with a bed at night.

EDAR

With enough abandoned lots to fill the city of San Francisco, Motown is 138 square miles divided between expanses of decay and emptiness and tracts of still-functioning communities and commercial areas. Close to six barren acres of an estimated 17,000 have already been turned into 500 “mini- farms,” demonstrating the lengths to which planners will go to make land productive.

I have a question.  How much bailout money will the gardeners and farmers of urban Detroit receive?  As it turns out I have more than one question.  When will this country recognize that we must make a fundamental shift in our way of life to continue as a society.  When will we face facts and realize that throwing good money after bad is stupid?  Consumers are turning back into citizens.  It’s becoming harder to make them buy stuff they don’t really need.  This is a good thing in the long run but in the short run it will derail our consumer-based growth economy.  The big question we should be asking ourselves is how much longer are we going to continue wasting our wealth on a failed reality and when will we wake up?  It’s time for real, fundamental change; whether we like it or not.

More on the Detroit food revolution

I had a chance to look through two books focused on Stevia, one about growing the plant and another about using the plant to replace sugar when you are cooking.   I found them to be quite interesting. While I can’t follow along with everything in the books, I can follow along with the idea that we should grow and harvest our own sweeteners, if we can. Honey, molasses, sorghum would be three good options. Planting these is a great option.

Stevia can be added to the list of plants that can be grown in your backyard and used as a sweetener. These two books will show you how. If you live in the southern part of our country this plant is one that you should be able to leave outside. If you live in the northern part you could put in a planter or two and carry them back and forth. Either way, it wouldn’t be too hard to grow some of this for yourself and remove your dependence on cane sugar. You could even go so far as to add local honey and maple syrup and have all your sweeteners be local.

If this sounds interesting to you I would check out these two books. One will give you information on growing it and the other is full of recipes. Good stuff.

Information about Stevia

Information about ordering the books.