Having accepted partially an eco-challenge and picked up the guantlet for a year, I find this blog useful….woe to those who will be trying to get me down to the communal allotment or whatever they call these things in urban areas…..in Australia, we just call it a garden! …I’ve never had to think about how to grow anything if there was no space….it will be interesting to learn and plus I already have friends in Canada who is part of the Lasqueti island off-grid eco-living community with their Ph.D’s in Eco-something or other….
While it is fun…some of them get a bit Serious!!!! As in Eco-Fascism serious…though…when they get all gun-ho and then I end up getting blasted for not feeding the wood-fire hot-tub one twig at a time and threw the whole log in….:) blah-blah something about it produces less CO2 that way if you put one twig in at a time…but it takes freaking 5 hrs to heat up that giant eco-hot-tub….one twig at a time! Blah!

Then there was the slight hernia I caused when I picked some clams from the beach which may or may not be in protected season or something…hmm…so I ATE the oysters with fresh soya, ginger and spring onions while the rest of them went nuts on me for picking the clam while googling the site of the Canadian Environmental protection official website…and No…the clams were edible after all that….so I ate them anyway! So there!

It gets so much worse…..some wind energy expert tried to explain to me something about blah-blah conversion…blah….

Then I go,”So have you been to Windchester?”

He goes,”Look, I’m not explaining agina if you are not listening..”

And I go,” I was listening….I merely wanted to point out to you that the youth hostel there is one of those old examples of the use of Windmill…above a river to push around some stuff…energy..blah-blah…english pre-industrial revolution blah. :)”

He looked shocked at the relevance of what I just said…hahaha…..I thought it was a good save…

The technical bit was still boring!
I will post some photos of what I can pull out of the urban garden they’re trying to lure me into…..rue the day you give me the key! hahahha. I am going to be like Peter Rabbit and just scoff all your veges and RUN!

I’ve killed fig trees in Greece AND the only thing I ever grew successfully was Mint in Australia..because they grow like Weeds in the Aussie Sun and Roses too…but actually I did not grow them…I just told someone I wanted some grown…big difference!

But seriously we were making this kind of planter (see below) in Primary school in Australia….it is “hardly” new! I’m not sure it warrants giving someone an honorary Ph.D though…but goodluck to you and seriously, you could make the bottles look a lot prettier!

Actually it is the only reason I agreed to even go down to that weird Pommie place called an urban allotment for people who don’t live in a country the size of North America and have to go around scrounging little bits of land to grow stuff….hey what’s wrong with Hydroponics? You can set them up weirdly in your flat in Melbourne and they sort of water themselves….problem is they cost more than a few years supply of veges! They had some momentary trendiness in Australia along with bloody people’s parents deciding to buy hobby farms that no one ever really know what to do with except they always end up renting out bits for the fields to real beef farmers who keep their pet cows there to rotate….that’s the ones they don’t eat, just keep them ‘cos they are cute!

In fact it is my personal experience that everytime people around me go “Boohoo, Permaculture or Hydroponics or Hobby Farm… or whatever…” all it ever does is cost Yuppies’ money; growing things that if they just spent that money on buying cheap vegetables would keep them fed for years!

I know it is a lifestyle choice and stuff but lets be honest…sometimes there is a bit of utter self-indulgence to it that makes me scoff at it quite a bit. I’ve seen real people doing rice paddies in Nepal. It sucks! It is not that romantic…it is messy and makes you knee deep in eeek and then if you are unlucky you still don’t get enough food to feed your own family!

I think a better use of all this money would be for Yuppies wannabes to just spend the money and “Adopt a farmer” somewhere in the 3rd world. Shut up, stop wasting stupid money buying crap over-priced hydroponics technology for farming in your walk-in wardrobe! Seriously.

Then you get the usual nuttiness  from NASA who has done extensive hydroponic research for their Controlled Ecological Life Support System or CELSS. Hydroponics intended to take place on Mars are using LED lighting to grow in different color spectrum with much less heat. Yeah of course! Because clearly I’m going to move from growing stuff in a pair of plastic gloves to growing beans in Mars! Naturally….as if! Though I like Hyroponics….it is not messy…no soil…so my Cat won’t tip it over!

Here’s a picture of one of those Bloody Hippies/Eco-Fascist house on Lasqueti….oh , I hope they’d be too busy growing bizarre endangered species of little lambs/goats/sheep or whatever to google me and read this….well, at least they’ve all boycotted facebook so maybe it will be years before they find this blog! hahahaha.