19 Jun 2008
Here’s just a quick and not really fully-formed thought for a Thursday morning. I have finally, as part of the Transition Town Totnes Solar Hot Water Challenge‘, signed up to get solar panels put on our roof. Took a while, but I am going for flat bed panels rather than evacuated tubes (to see why read this). The plan is to get them up while there is still some summer sun to take advantage of. The question I find myself asked though when I tell people about it is “but what is the payback on them?” Now I have to say honestly that I have no idea, I haven’t sat down and worked it out, but what intrigues me is that nature of that question.
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16 Jun 2008
I guess, as what Albert Bates terms a ‘post-petroleumologist’, you would imagine that I would be philosophically opposed to diggers, earthmovers, and other forms of fossil fuel powered equipment. I think it would be fair to say that until I encountered permaculture, I saw them, mostly due to seeing the extraordinary damage that such machines can wreak on road-building protests, as inherently wicked. When I sat down to read Bill Mollison’s Permaculture, a Designer’s Manual, I was surprised to find that a book on earth repair had an entire chapter dedicated to earthmoving. Seemed somewhat incongruous. Now, however, I am a convert, and I was honoured that my garden was visited by one this weekend.
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2 Jun 2008
A few days of warm, moist weather and the great slug armies are massing on my garden. Although the sizes of them have been increasing as these slug-friendly conditions continue, it is actually the smallest ones that seem to do the most damage. The tiny ones, that look more like something that comes out of your nose than something you’d find in the garden, do an astonishing amount of damage, rather like me chewing my way though a couple of limbs of an oak tree in a single night. Anyway, as you can tell, slugs are rather on my mind at the moment. Which gives me the opportunity to tell you my favourite slug story…
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26 May 2008
I had the enormous misfortune on Saturday to visit a garden centre. You might think that an avid gardener like myself would feel as home in a garden centre as I do in a record shop. However, modern warehouse-like garden centres have as little to do with gardening as Virgin megastores have to do with music. They are crammed with the most pointless unnecessary clutter, very little of it of any use to anyone who actually wants to garden, to grow anything useful. They are temples to a lost generation so removed from the land and from seeing gardens as something essential and as something productive that it beggars belief.
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22 May 2008
On Wednesday night, on the same night as the rather wonderful Champions League Final (which some idiot timetabled for the same night.. oops it was me… doh) and on the evening oil began touching $135 a barrel, Transition Town Totnes held an evening called “How Are We Doing?”, an opportunity for TTT to update the community on how it is doing, and on all the range of activities and projects underway, as well as getting feedback. In the event over 100 people came, and the evening was very positive and constructive.
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