At one time, I was a confused and spontaneous blog starter. No longer confused, I now do all my writing over at Moonlight Micro-Farm. I’ll leave this blog up for the time being as I like to refer back to my previous writings when I need a good chuckle. I’ll post a link every so often if I’m feeling spritely. Otherwise, see you on the bad side of the moon.
Introducing Eco Design + Living! Please visit www.ecodesignandliving.com for the metamorphysis of this blog. Posts here will continue to dwindle as I’m narrowing the focus on where I want to direct my energy. This new website will be an information resource for living lighter on the planet in the Northwest Florida region and beyond.
Live well.
…that’s what I’ve been calling it, that thing a lot of us seem to be experiencing as we watch our assets shrink, our liabilities increase, and our networks deteriorate. At times, it can seem a sad state of affairs, at others, it feels like we knew all along that the ever increasing, hyper-complexity of our lives could not continue. It was a distorted game of musical chairs, and many secretly sighed a sigh of relief when it started to unravel. Continue reading
The data now backs up the belief I’ve long held about those individuals at the lower end of the affluent and higher education spectrum and their impact on the planet. It doesn’t take a graduate degree in systems design to understand that more education and more wealth OFTEN equate to more spending and a larger ecological footprint. I know and work with many highly educated and wealthy individuals who express their status through vacations, multiple cars, large houses, boats, etc. Continue reading
I receive a tremendous amount of “call to action” e-mails from organizations I belong to, most of which I skim through for juicy tidbits. Sometimes I may forward them to another friend, but mostly, I like to live and let live. I have a friend that e-mails me updates on local environmental news as it’s unfolding. He/she is a dear, but it doesn’t take too many of these e-mails and I feel overwhelmed and/or helpless. Living in Florida with a depressed economy, the e-mails are mounting, as one program after another is being slashed. Continue reading
I’m finally getting around to doing the foraging that I talked so bravely about at the beginnings of 2008. I dragged the significant other along for company and we headed over to the Pt. Washington State Forest just a short walk from out house. I took note the other day of two guys getting out of a pick-up truck, dressed in camouflage, along side the road. I surmised it’s still hunting season and best to don my bright orange bicycling jacket. I carried a backpack with water, my Leatherman, clippers, gloves, plastic bags and my plant identification books. The Sig. brought his camera and off we went to forage. Continue reading
oh, there’s just something righteous about harvesting your own food for lunch. The mini-hoop house is working out splendidly. The only exception is that the collards are stressed, though, the peppers are loving it. Today I harvested a head of buttercrunch lettuce, three radishes, a pepper and a salad spinner full of collards. I also started a flat of cress and a flat of rocket, which I’m intentionally calling ‘rocket’ instead of arugula. Maybe ‘rocket’ will become the new must-have salad green. I know, that’s already a reality, it just goes by the name of arugula.
Rocket is in the mustard, cabbage, or Cruciferous family. When learning about plant families, they are easier to remember when you can start to identify patterns of the different families. As example, flowers of cruciferous plants have 4 petal flowers, resembling a cross and the seed pods always form in a radial pattern around the stalk. Anyhow, if you grow you’re own rocket or other greens from the mustard family, let them go to seed and check out the flowers and seed pods.
We’re ready for cool weather now, except we’re one week into January and it’s not here yet. My goal is to get a jump start on some seedlings. I am also experimenting with over-wintering a couple of heirloom Red Marconi pepper plants. The peppers are in the cages, in the bed just past the collards.
I’ve been lurking around my own blog lately, wondering what happened? We were so close. Then school came between us and things were never the same.
Truth be told, I think I have my blog to thank for providing a forum from which my true path was revealed.
While writing on (is it “in” or “on”?) a blog may encompass relevant course work, it is still another thing “to do” that takes away from the doing of other things. When school work inundated my life, I thought I could keep it cohesive. Then the prospect of shifting my career crept onto the scene, the garden expanded, community projects developed and something had to go. It wasn’t going to be my sleep.
The blog will stay for now and I may even pick it up on occasion. For the curious, I’ll be spending some of my free time contributing to or maintaining these other sites:
elitrope 