jump to navigation

Surfing the Collapse October 26, 2007

Posted by Graham in : Environment, Food, Peak Oil , 2comments

Three important reports out in the last week highlight how utterly unsustainable the current human system is, locked in as it is to a process seeking the impossible, the unnatural and the undesirable: unending growth. (more…)

Pumpkin Seeds October 14, 2007

Posted by Graham in : Food, Gardens, Permaculture , 2comments

If I were only to grow one vegetable, I think it would be pumpkins- easy to grow, nutritious and delicious, many of the smaller varieties- like Pompeon or the orange-fleshed Uchiki Kuri are as sweet as sweet potatoes and store really well- until March or even April. This year for the first time I grew a variety more know for its naked seeds- Lady Godiva. This variety is grown for its seeds which are “naked” ie they dont have husks so can be eaten straight out of the fruit, or dried and stored. A neighbour gave me some seeds late in the season, so I didnt start them until late June but they still did quite well.

Here are the seeds from one of the pumpkins. Highly nutritious in themselves, being rich in magnesium, manganese and phosphorous, and a good source of iron, copper, protein, and zinc, pumpkin seeds store for even longer than the fruit and are well worth growing for this reason.

Book Review: Peak Everything October 4, 2007

Posted by Graham in : Food, General, Peak Oil, Permaculture , 9comments

Peak Everything- Waking up to the Century of Declines By Richard Heinberg 224 pp New Society (2008)

“Our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels— and to do this as peacefully, equitably, and intelligently as possible.” (from the introduction.)

Richard Heinberg is the acceptable face of Peak Oil. His uncompromising message of the impending collapse of modern society due to resource depletion in his previous books The Party’s Over, Powerdown, and The Oil Depletion Protocol is delivered with too much eloquence and compassion to earn the sobriquet “doomer” and yet he is not afraid of taking on the “difficult” issues of population and collapse. (more…)

Cool Earth August 28, 2007

Posted by Graham in : Environment, Food, Permaculture , add a comment

At the weekend I attended the Cool Earth Fair in Dun Laoghaire, part of the Festival Of World Cultures, organised by Cultivate and the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Environment Department, giving a couple of short talks on Peak Oil, and then Permaculture Gardening,

Left to Right: Gavin Hart (seated) Trevor Sargent, Graham Strouts, David Strahan

and participated on a panel discussion on Reducing Food Miles and Carbon Footprints, with David Strahan, journalist and author of The last oil Shock, and the Green Party’s Trevor Sargent, Minister for Food and Horticulture.

(more…)

Bamboo Shoots June 26, 2007

Posted by Graham in : Food, Gardens, Permaculture , 2comments

What edible perennial is guaranteed slug-proof, completely hardy in Ireland, grows into an elegant screen, can be used as a climbing support for your beans and also will feed your pet Pandas? The answer to this can only be bamboo, one of the most exciting and beautiful plants you could grow.

But isn’t bamboo invasive? This is the most common concern, but in fact there are hundreds of varieties of bamboo each with widely varying growth habits: some indeed have highly invasive habits that send out runners sometimes meters away from the original clump, and quickly colonise a whole garden. These are to be avoided! (more…)

Bitter-sweet Harvest May 17, 2007

Posted by Graham in : Bees, Food, Gardens , 3comments

West Cork bee-keeper Tim Rowe kindly sent me this article he has written highlighting the plight of bees and bee-keepers on account of widespread Colony Collapse Syndrome:

BITTER-SWEET HARVEST – a beekeeper’s year.

It’s been a strange year. Last summer the honey harvest from my bees weighed over half a ton. That’s stacks and stacks of wooden boxes all stuffed with dripping honeycombs, gloriously pungent and sticky. It came as a culmination of a whole lot of work – some of it by me. below: Tim at his house near Bantry

The bees had been collecting nectar from early spring, increasing in numbers in time for the main flows of clover and blackberry and heather. At the peak we all worked from dawn to dusk, they in vast numbers frenetically hurtling back and forth, me struggling round in my sweaty bee-suit controlling swarms and adding supers to hives as tall as me. (more…)

Back to the Land March 29, 2007

Posted by Graham in : Food , 5comments

First published in Sustainability March 07

Food, Climate Change and the Coming Energy Crises. by Graham Stouts

Some years ago a friend in Mayo told me she had been visited by a neighbour of hers, a farmer, who was curious to see what she was doing planting potatoes in her garden. Apparently the neighbour farmer could not understand why on earth she was going to the trouble and hard manual labour of digging beds and setting seed potatoes when they were so cheap to buy. In recent years farming has become defined more and more by the availability of grants and subsidies, and by the dictates of international trading agreements. One of the consequences of this is that individual farms are producing an ever diminishing range of products for an increasingly global market.

Simultaneous to this, the home garden has become a fashion extension of manicured lawns and clipped shrubs.Growing food has become a special interest hobby or is viewed as some kind of regressive primitivism which swims against the tide of lawnmower culture now becoming prevalent in the suburbs. (more…)