Archive for the 'environment' Tag

Community Garden, Part IV

The Garden of Rowham is now, officially, a vegetable garden. This week, we’ve been picking our first succulent zucchinis. Lots has happened as the garden has grown (and as we’ve kept adding more plants to it). Here’s a snapshot of the whole garden:

If that enticed you, read on to see all of our recent photos, or look at the whole, ongoing photo gallery.
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Community Garden, Part III

It’s an exciting time at our community garden (now dubbed The Garden of Rowham). Plants are sprotung, leaves are growing, and we’re learning more about the rest of the community gardens (like the super tasty lemons from the shared lemon tree). As always, read on for exciting new images, or review the Garden Photo Album.
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Community Garden, Part II

The gardening has continued. Once we cleared all of the weeds, our next task was to make the soil rich again. I’m not going to lie, this involved shoveling a loot of poop. Ten wheelbarrows full of manure, to be exact, plus a few more full of fresh compost. Since the community garden doesn’t allow roto-tilling (the oil on the blades can get in the soil), it also involved a lot of spading. After that, we just needed to do some planting, and then I spent some time setting up a drip irrigation system. New photos in the main Garden photo album, and highlighted photos below!
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Community Garden, Part I

We just got a plot in a UCSB community garden! Today we picked out our spacious plot and spent almost an hour with shovel, gloves, and wheel-barrel to take out the forest of weeds — it had a garden in it a year ago, but has completely gone to seed since then. There were many humongous thistle plants, mustard, clover, and other gigantic weeds that we did a good job clearing out (but still a long ways to go!). We only took “after” pictures and wish we had taken some “before” pictures, but we were just too eager to get started!

Here’s a little album of garden pictures (and I’m sure more will be added). I talk about a few of the individual pictures below.
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Conservation

There is something that has been weighing on my mind more and more with everything that has been going on.  Everything I see on TV, internet, anything else is all about how to make life more “sustainable.”  While yes I do understand the need to become far more ecologically friendly it seems to me like putting a bandaid on a shotgun wound.  To me new fuels are needed, however I think that the ethanol craze is part of the skyrocketing food prices, and that fuel cells while efficient are still based on using fossil fuels. (continued)