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I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Archive for “Chicken Greenhouses” category
Showing 5 results for the category: Chicken Greenhouses.
1 Apr 2011
I want to tell you about a rather exciting new plant I am growing in the garden this year. RELATE, the marriage guidance and relationship counseling organisation last year launched a range of specially bred plants designed to overcome many of the challenges which their research showed most often led to conflict among gardening couples. The one I am trialling (see above) is the ‘Flowering Lettuce’, designed to support couples where one partner wants to grow food at the expense of growing vegetables, and the other only wants to grow flowers. Apparently this is responsible for 28% of all the disputes RELATE work with. I was dubious, but last week, after 3 weeks of just looking like a normal lettuce, it burst into beautiful flowers! I’m impressed. You can also eat the flowers, which are said to have a slight taste of malt, but they are so beautiful I can’t bring myself to.
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14 Dec 2010
I do quite a lot of interviews, but nothing like the one I did with Henrik G. Dahle (see left). He calls himself “a writer, artist, director of theatre and film, anxty environmentalist and social engineer”, and he is currently doing a project called UpTrees, where every day for a year he is climbing a different tree and interviewing someone. He has climbed trees in 8 countries now, and talked to a fascinating diversity of people. He came to Totnes, we went to Vire Island and climbed a tree and chatted for an hour. It was all quite random (at one point my son and his new girlfriend walked by and, understandably, asked “Dad, what are you doing in that tree?”) and getting down again was much harder than getting up, but you might enjoy the transcript of our chat which is here.
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28 Sep 2009
Last year I grew fantastic leeks that stood tall and proud in the garden through the winter months and underpinned many a meal. This year I got them in good and early, and they were looking wonderful. This week though, something has gone horribly wrong. From being proud columns of dark green leeky goodness, they have begun to crumble before my very eyes. Starting somewhere around the middle, they are being turned into slimy ribbons, eventually being reduced to stumps. This is not good. What ails my leeks?
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20 Jul 2009
You may remember the piece I wrote a while ago about my plans to build a chicken greenhouse, and my realisation that, in spite of my having spent years teaching this design classic on permaculture courses, nobody I had spoken to had actually seen one. The comments that followed were fascinating, although mostly they concurred, or mentioned ones that people may have glimpsed some time ago, somewhere or other. Well, although I still don’t yet have a functioning chicken house, or even any chickens for that matter, things have moved along a bit, and I thought this would be a good time to bring you up to date with developments at the cutting edge of chicken/greenhouse research.
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20 Oct 2008
For many years I have taught permaculture courses, and like many who do so, I start my courses with the Tale of Two Chickens. This is a very useful way of looking at inputs, outputs, and the science of maximising beneficial relationships, and it concludes with describing one of permaculture’s Holy Grails, The Chicken/Greenhouse. However, now, as I stand on the verge of actually trying to make a chicken greenhouse, I am finding it very difficult to find actual working examples of chicken/greenhouses. Might I have spent years unwittingly promoting a permaculture urban myth?
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