The Tide Turns

An Indian alternative energy company has been crowned energy champion of the world by a British environmental organisation for its ultra-efficient wood burning stove which will reduce fuel use by 30 per cent.

Bangalore-based Technology Informatics Design Endeavour (Tide) was awarded the title along with a prize of 40,000 pounds by Nobel laureate and environmentalist Wangari Mathai at a ceremony in London.

Another Indian group, the Aryavart Gramin Bank, was among six other international bodies whose schemes were awarded 20,000 pounds each Thursday night by the Britain-based Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy - the so-called Green Oscars.

Many of southern India’s small businesses rely on wood as their main source of fuel, causing pollution, deforestation and uncomfortable and dangerous working conditions when boilers and stoves are badly designed. (more…)

By : Harwood E Woodpecker  

The way that we look at food has changed over the past 10 – 15 years, for many people cheap mass produced fast food is just not acceptable in their diets any longer as they now understand more about the implications of how the food was produced, what it does to our body and the ethics that have gone into the production of the food. For this reason more and more of us are turning to growing our own vegetables and even having a go at rearing our own animals for meat and food. This all ties in very nicely with the boom time that cookery is having at the moment due to the increase in cookery programs on the television. We are more educated about food and how to cook it than ever before and with the help of the inter web we are never far away from some exotic recipe or another. So what can you do to join the growing number of people that are becoming self sufficient and more educated in what we eat and the way we produce our food?

Growing your own vegetables is pretty simple stuff really; all you need is the correct tools of a spade, a fork and a hoe and then a plot of land in which to grow your crops. It really is that simple; many of the everyday crops such as potatoes, carrots, beans and cabbage have been cultivated over hundreds of years and developed into crops that are usually pretty hardy and easy to grow. Certain things are important to ensure that you get a plentiful crop such as a good fertilizer, a good compost and good pest control all of which are easily sorted but decisions have to be made at an early stage as to which way you would like to go, organic gardening or conventional gardening.

The trend at the moment is leaning towards organic gardening for the simple reason that you have gone to all of the effort in deciding to grow your own vegetable crops so you might as well go the whole way and produce your crops in an organic way. Organic gardening is not that much more difficult than conventional gardening, it only takes a little more research and time to carry out but the rewards make it all worthwhile.

Rearing your own meat is a little bit more tricky than growing your own organic vegetables but after the initial settling in period where you are learning the basics it is relatively simple to have your own little farm going that takes up very little time. The most popular animals to raise on a home farm are chickens and pigs, chickens take up less space and are a little easier to look after and pigs need more space and take a bit more of your time up. The extra work that is needed to look after the pigs is more than rewarded by the amount of food that the pigs produce but depending on the space you have available both animals are more than manageable.

Both chickens and pigs are fairly low maintenance and the benefits of rearing these animals far out-weighs the disadvantages, as well as the effort that is put into keeping these animals for food you will have the added advantage of being educated about how to keep the animals in a humane way which will help you and your family understand the true value of meat and food.

Keeping chickens and pigs has other benefits such as the manure that they produce can be used to fertilize your garden and help your vegetables to grow, helping you to have a truly organic gardening experience.

 Author Resource:- For more info on organic gardening and organic compost please visit our site - www.organic-baby-toys.com

Rx red pepper

You probably already use these ingredients in your home,but they can do more than just making meals tastier. Here are some common foods that do double duty as effective herbal treatments with impressive health benefits.

Fits in nicely with the organic gardening tips and recipes in the book, Grow Your Own Pharmacy. (more…)

By : Glenn Bronner

If you have heard of hydroponics or other methods of growing plants without soil and want to try it out at home, you can. Sometimes people get a misconception about hydroponics in reality it is really not as mysterious and complicated as it seems. A simple hydroponics system is easy to care for and set-up at home. There are materials you can buy or some you may be able to find around the house.

Hydroponics are most often times associated with the productions of food plants. This is a great way to have fresh vegetables year round but hydroponics are not necessarily limited to food plants. Many house plants lend themselves well to hydroponic culture.

The dirt or soil that you use to grow plants in a traditional method is substituted for a growing medium (full of nutrients the plant needs to grow) in hydroponics gardening. Using hydroponics means there is no soil the plants are grown in a liquid which is the growing medium. The growing medium is fed directly to the roots by method of a drip-feeder.The system can be completely automated and the gardener can control how many drips the roots receive in a specified time frame. The more of the growing medium the faster the plants grow.

Since the system can be automated, the amount of time and energy that is required to maintain a hydroponics garden is less than with a traditional garden. Because the system is automated the biggest requirement is that the gardener assures that the systems contains enough water and growing medium is present in the right amounts. With this taken care of then the plants can be left unattended for a longer period of time.

A home-based hydroponics garden can grow vegetables or house plants year round.The concern about soil borne pests and the composition of the soil are not an issue with this type of gardening. You still will need to pay attention for leaf attacking insects but it will be a lot less of a problem with out the soil for the insects to hide and hatch in.

Another bonus with this type of gardening is how fast you can have mature vegetables indoors(by increasing the amount of growing medium).

The types of plants that are best for hydroponics are ones with thin spider-like roots. Plants that have a bulb root system are still best grown in the traditional soil method inside a pot or outside.When you are ready to begin, germinate the seeds for your plants like you normally would.When the seed has started to sprout and has approximately 2-5 millimeters of growth it is ready to transplant to the hydroponics container and begin
growing.

There are many great tutorials, books and resources on the Internet that can give you complete instructions and sources for formulas and growing mediums. The best thing about this type of indoor gardening is that you can start small with a simple system. As you experience success you may quickly get bitten by the hydroponics bug and expand to a bigger more sophisticated system. The choice is yours but I would suggest at any rate you give hydroponics a try.

Author Resource:- Glenn Bronner has been a professional grounds keeper for over 30 years. Glenn Has published hundreds of articles on the internet and owns several websites including Gardening Article Site.Com  Garden Blog Directory.Com and Glenns Garden where he offers free resources and advice for gardeners around the world. 

 

Mohammed stays cool

With summers getting steadily hotter, food storage is an issue. Pictured is Mohammed Bah Abba’s Pot-in-pot invention, which won a Rolex Award of $100,000 –a refrigerator than runs without electricity. (more…)

“Let them eat cake”

Wheat corn and rice have tripled and quadrupled in price over the past year, leading to fears that basic staples will no longer be affordable within weeks. The developed countries face similar problems as the developing ones — that a proportion of their populations will not be able to afford food in a few weeks time.

Rising food prices will be the focus this week of the US Department of Agriculture annual outlook conference, the main gathering of the industry. Since last year’s edition, food inflation has surged around the world.

William Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a Nebraska-based food consultancy, said that one of the key themes of this year’s conference would be the realisation that the price surge was not a temporary hump but rather a structural change. (more…)

Moakler: food is a four letter word

If there are little ones in the room, you may want to turn their eyes away for this one. Ready? There’s a new publishing sensation, a veggie cookbook called Skinny Bitch in the Kitch. Its really a piece of publishing hype, subtitled, “Kick-Ass Recipes for Hungry Girls Who Want to Stop Cooking Crap (and Start Looking Hot!).”

An indication of what a low level it is pitched to, is ex-beauty queen Shanna Moakler (pictured) who has jumped on the Skinny Bitch bandwagon, joining other skinny bitches like Spice Girl Victoria Beckham. The authors Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin just gave a pitiful interview to Natalie Morales on NBC TV’s Today show. here’s an excerpt which we are sorry to say shows that “Silly Bitch” would have been a better title. (more…)

Dandelion…yummm!

If you go down to the woods today . . . be prepared to find them heaving with proto-hunter-and-gatherer types, not to mention the occasional itinerant film crew, crashing though the undergrowth in search of nuts, fungi and Wordsworth’s “lurking berries, ripe and red”, or snuffling out edible plants, herbs, bark and roots, along with the occasional trapped rabbit, in a kind of gonzo rustic rite of passage. Free food has become the most precious commodity of all.

Although mushroom-picking has long been a serious weekend pursuit elsewhere in Europe, the occasional blackberry ramble has tended to be about as far as most of us go in our back-to-nature moments. (more…)

Rebuilding his life

Paul McCartney advocates vegetarianism as a way for everybody to “do their bit” for the planet.

In a letter to the UK Press Association, he outlined the dramatic effects eating meat has on the planet.The musician drew attention to a United Nations report which found that the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions than transport.

“That this message comes directly from an authoritative body such as the UN (whose member states, it should be remembered, are not generally considered vegetarian) rather than an organisation committed to vegetarianism is significant.
“What I think is especially compelling is that this report should now encourage everybody to ‘do their bit’ for the planet (more…)