Transition Culture

It’s certainly good to see traditional industries such as carp farming beginning to make a comeback. (I’m vegetarian, so I won’t be sampling carp any time soon, unfortunately) I wonder if we’ll see any traditional sea-salt pans reappearing too…?

Certainly, if planned correctly, then they could be operated with little or no effort – except for collecting the salt, or course! Simple windpumps could be used to pump the seawater into the pans, where it could be evaporated either by the sun’s heat, or by burning driftwood.

Well, it would be nice to see it anyway.

Thanks Rob! I was wading around in our big pond today wondering if carp would be a good addition to help control the algae and get something useful out of the water… so the timing of this has inspired me! Time to do some research and then get the pond stocked. I’m not sure about the anti-predator nets… although I can see the local herons having a party down there without them. Fionnuala will be very upset as she’s so scared of fish being in the water that she says she’ll never swim there again 😉

we in Bedford have got a whole area set aside as a heritage site of archilogical interest. No one in the town really knows what it’s all about, they just know it’s a green area near the river that’s not been built up. but turns out the monks had fish farms there for centuries. would be nice to get that space used again. i’ll add it to the EDAP.

A system such as aquaponics is also worth promoting. It closes the loop on any waste water created in aquaculture by filtering the water through vegetable grow beds.

This article triggers a very interesting train of thought for me. As we need to guard against rising tides because of climate change, parts of the UK which are now land may become covered with water either temporarily or permanently. There are already moves in Eastern counties to make this happen, of course, by allowing the sea walls to be breached in places and salt marshes re-established as buffer-zones in times of flood. At the same time there is an increasing need for water storage facilities in times of drought.
This could lead to a trend towards more aquaculture and water-based activities of all kinds in Britain – more watercourses and canals, more boat-travel, more ponds and lakes, more marshes, more creeks and a more indented coastline.
Permaculture loves edges, because they are zones of high biodiversity which offer opportunities for all kinds of yields. The longer and wigglier the edge, the better. And everyone loves waterfronts whether for dwellings and businesses, play and leisure areas or places where people and things can be transported by water.
So I would see an EDAP for more ponds as a very positive part of all this. Carp is a very popular fish in Eastern Europe, I believe, and in Poland was traditionally on the menu for Christmas dinner.

If you travel through most of southern China there are hundreds of ponds for fish farming. I think most of the fish on menus there come out of the bottom of one or another of these ponds. Maybe we need to import their know how.

This article triggers a very interesting train of thought for me. As we need to guard against rising tides because of climate change, parts of the UK which are now land may become covered with water either temporarily or permanently. There are already moves in Eastern counties to make this happen, of course, by allowing the sea walls to be breached in places and salt marshes re-established as buffer-zones in times of flood. At the same time there is an increasing need for water storage facilities in times of drought.
This could lead to a trend towards more aquaculture and water-based activities of all kinds in Britain – more watercourses and canals, more boat-travel, more ponds and lakes, more marshes, more creeks and a more indented coastline.
Permaculture loves edges, because they are zones of high biodiversity which offer opportunities for all kinds of yields. The longer and wigglier the edge, the better. And everyone loves waterfronts whether for dwellings and businesses, play and leisure areas or places where people and things can be transported by water.
So I would see an EDAP for more ponds as a very positive part of all this. Carp is a very popular fish in Eastern Europe, I believe, and in Poland was traditionally on the menu for Christmas dinner.

I had the pleasure of listening to Jimmie talk one morning as part of the Sustainable Land Use course I did earlier this year.

He certainly knows his stuff. We could’ve happily listened to him for a lot longer: everyone on the course want more time with Jimmie 🙂