Permaculture Blog

This coming October 22nd I’m going to give a little 10 minute talk on my views of permaculture at the Ramona Harvest festival. There will be musicians and other talks as well. The particulars are as follows. And more information can be found on sustainable Ramona’s Facebook page. Or here. ramonaevents.com/events/sustainable-ramona-harvest-festival/
Sustainable Ramona and The Community Garden Present
Harvest Festival, Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022, 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Music and Speakers’ Schedule
11:00 -11:05 Opening Remarks
11:10–11:20 Bob Lloyd, PuraVidaAquatic
“Permaculture – What Is It & Why Should You Know About It?”
10 min Sound Check
11:30–12:00 Garden Variety Band (incl “My Favorite Vegetable” at noon)
12:00–12:10 Kids’ March of the Vegetables – (With GVBnd at noon)
12:15–12:25 Rene Roman, Certified Arborist, Member San Diego
Professional Tree Care Asso., San Diego Horticultural Society,
Calif. Native Plant
“Sustainable Fruit Tree Care and Harvest”
10 min Sound Check
12:35–1:25 Sentimental Journey
1:30-1:40 Kit Medina, I Love a Clean San Diego
“What to do with Halloween Pumpkins–& Other Food Scraps”
10 min Sound Check
1:50 – 2:40 Frank & Rob
2:50 – 3:00 Diane Stoltz, Ramona Municipal Water District
“Greywater: Save on Water Bill, Save Water!”
10 min Sound Check
3:05 – 3:55 The Waits
3:55 – 4:00 Closing Remarks. www.puravidaaquatic.com/ 310-429-8477

Hello my fellow gardeners, Most all community garden members are great, great, great neighbors. They are genuinely concerned about toxic chemicals, friendly, and happy to talk to you about what they’re growing, and how they are doing it. And I congratulate those of you who _work_ at being good neighbors as it does require work. And I would like to provide a couple of tips for maybe even being better neighbors. In my opinion a community garden is a small copy of homeowner neighborhoods.
A good neighbor doesn’t allow their behavior to impact their neighbor’s property in any way. While it may seem incredibly trivial to be worried about stepping quickly into another person’s garden plot to look at their beautiful flowers, or to allow the water you’re using to water to also spray into your neighbors plot. It should be. It is extra work to walk around with the hose to make sure to spray only into your plot but that is work to make a community.
Your neighbor may have very delicate seedlings planted in the ground and spraying with a hose (or looking at their flowers) tramples them. Maybe there are some who say that; “Well they shouldn’t have seedlings that delicate in their garden. They should start them in their own house or so.” But that is exactly the point of being a good neighbor. It is not our responsibility or right to say how others should garden on their plot. It is their plot and theirs _alone_ to do with as they want while they are a member. It is our responsibility to _work_ (even if it means 10 seconds longer and 4 ft to move the hose) at being good neighbors. The best to everyone. Bob

If we Google something like:https://www.google.com/search?q=hydrogen+peroxide+to+control+algae

We get a lot of pond and aquarium sites explaining how to use hydrogen peroxide to control algae. Some of these sites even explain what hydrogen peroxide is such as…

Hydrogen peroxide is a colorless natural liquid similar to water.
It’s made up of two molecules of hydrogen and two molecules of oxygen, with a chemical symbol of H2O2. [1]

They even give it a footnote to make it look scientific. It would actually be nice if the people that quote things like this had the first inkling of anything to do with chemistry.

This is just the first of several examples of extremely poor information on some of these websites. There are an awful lot of snake oil salesmen on the web selling you products through their links and affiliates.

My first comment about “natural” is that arsenic is also natural, and so is plutonium, and rattlesnake venom. Secondly if you paid attention in high school chemistry hydrogen is not a molecule it’s an atom unless you’re talking about H2. And oxygen is not a molecule it’s an atom, again unless you’re talking about 02. Hydrogen peroxide is not made up of molecules it is itself a molecule made up of atoms. If they can’t figure out that basic chemistry are you really interested in having them tell you how it’s chemically safe for your pond?

Enough about the quote. Here is a reason why you might not want to use hydrogen peroxide in your pond or aquarium. Hydrogen peroxide generates reactive oxygen species. Similar to ozone generators and other systems that generate toxic oxygen radicals. Hydrogen peroxide kills algae by being toxic. My PhD was on how these same chemicals damage DNA and are thus mutagens and carcinogens. So the long-term effect is that you are increasing the mutagenic and carcinogenic processes in anything that lives in, drinks from, or bathes in your water feature. This affect may be relatively small. Algaecides and other commercial toxins are far worse IMO. It also may be more dangerous for a bird to have The neighbors cats in its environment then to drink from your system. There is just no way to do a cost benefit analysis for every living organism that might drink from it. It is probably more important at this level for animals to have water in their environment then that water be entirely non-toxic. That said there might be other ways of approaching that water feature down the road.

Snails and other aquatic life that actually eat the algae instead of kill it might be an answer _if it does not dry out or heat up_ in the afternoon sun. If it does tend to dry up or heat then finding something to shade it might be part of a solution. The permaculture point of view is to not decide you have to kill _everything_ that’s in your way. And bees really don’t care if there’s a little bit of algae and are happy to use it as a landing pad.

There are ways to outcompete the algae. But also, IMO hydrogen peroxide is much much better than algaecide (AKA algaefix). Be well!

The dragonflies in the pond of one of my clients are dying. Not just dying but they are failing to molt into adults correctly. This looks to me like they are being poisoned by molt inhibitor pesticides. This client would never put anything like that into their pond. The most likely possibility is that they were sprayed by Los Angeles vector control.

We were looking at all the dead and crippled dragonflies (see the video and pictures)

https://youtu.be/ivVOXITt17o

and he seemed stunned that Los Angeles is actively aerial spraying molt inhibitors to protect us all from dragonflies (sarcasm intended) and so I told him that I would send him some links and then decided to do this blog post.

LA county very carefully does not say that they won’t aerial spray mosquiticides (likely molt inhibitors) when and wherever they feel like it. Link1

And LA spent $461,820 in 2021 and $492,300 on 2022 on Chemicals & Compounds.
— Nearly half a million dollars on biocides at the wholesale price. I wonder where it’s all going. Link2 click on the PDF for the current year and for 2022 it is down around page 28. Account number 5210 Chemicals & Compounds

Molt inhibitors are completely safe for humans right? Link3
Link4

Molt inhibitors target only mosquitoes right? Link5

I believe that the residents of Los Angeles and in fact all the counties of Southern California need to find an environmental reporter who has the willingness and the clout to obtain aerial spraying documents from Los Angeles Vector Control. Vector Control obviously has a database of the chemicals, prices, amounts, and locations where they have been used and it would not be hard for them to publish the list and amounts . Yet try googling that. It would be nice if the Sierra Club would assist or participate.

I am a fan of community gardens!! Community gardens are a library of information about how different people, and even ethnicities have found ways to do a variety of different gardening activities and grow food that work for them.

Community gardens provide permaculturists a way of interacting with the environment in a healthy beneficial way even if they only rent a small apartment.

The smartest thing you can possibly do in first getting a plot at a community garden is going to any work days with a plan to work at improving your community as a whole -not _your_ plot- and also talking to other gardeners about how they garden. If you’re an introvert with difficulties in initiating conversation the only thing you have to do with a gardener is simply walk over and say; how did you grow that? It’s not hard :-)

I like raised beds. If you are interested in raised beds, I would suggest putting wire mesh down on the ground in just the footprint of the bed. I don’t like burying sheets of wire mesh in the ground! It’s impossible to get out. If you lay the wire down on top of the ground and then put some stuff over it like described below, if you move the box you can just pick the wire up and move it too.

Place your raised bed frame on top of the wire mesh. That saves you wire mesh material as you are not putting the mesh down in your paths, only where you are planting. Use mesh of a size less than 1 inch. Young gophers, mice, and voles can use the gopher tunnels and then get through 1in mesh. Make sure your wood frame sits on the wire so that things can’t get through around the inside edge. I also like raised beds that are high enough that I don’t have to crawl around on my hands and knees too much but in my opinion it must sit on the ground and not have legs. If it’s too high up in the air it’s just going to have the water sucked out of it by the breeze and sunlight.

Then put old clothes (that are too beat up or stained for Goodwill), cardboard, old mail, house plant trimmings, anything organic. Several inches of his material will also act as a sponge to help keep your water in your raised bed. In 2 years it will pack down and decompose to half an inch or less.

Now put your planting material in. Some people buy a lot of bags of material from Home Depot, but try to make sure that it’s organic. If you buy bags of material try to also take dirt that’s in your area to about 10% of the volume of your box and mix it in. Some of you will think that it is crazy to do this because of weed seeds but the soil will contain bacteria and fungus native and endemic to the micro climate zone and will be a benefit to your garden box. And it’s really easy to pull out a few weeds that have come up from seeds and you don’t have to do it year after year.

I particularly advocate raised beds of this type in areas with gophers as I am against killing them. http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/?s=Gopher I much prefer the red-tailed Hawks and the owls and the coyotes and the weasels. Even herons and roadrunners will catch gophers. I like the biodiversity. If you can’t outsmart an animal whose brain is the size of your thumb and you have to kill everything that’s in your way you may have a small problem.

So that’s my two cents for now on community gardening with raised beds.

Oh and one other thing you might look at this information as well
https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=C1027-3&title=Raised%20Beds%20vs.%20In-Ground%20Gardens

The best to you all

The movement to bring DDT back after its ban found a curious ally: Big Tobacco. But the endangered industry was after something bigger.

Source: How the Battle Over a Pesticide Led to Scientific Skepticism

” according to Bate. A revision of its history would accomplish what few other stories about science, health, and the environment could.

“You can’t prove DDT is safe, but after 40 years you can’t prove it’s guilty of anything either,” he wrote. Yet DDT had remained “such a totemic baddie for the Greens” that if you could pin a moral dilemma to it, it would pit liberals loyal to the environment against those devoted to public health, he argued.

It was, he said, an issue “on which we can divide our opponents and win.”

There is a science to logic. It is provable that a statement to the effect that without DDT we must have malaria is faulty logic. The entire argument by big tobacco is faulty logic. But it sounds good to sheeple. I have said it again and again that big tobacco will never again try to prove that tobacco does not cause cancer but that so many other things “might” — they will simply muddy the waters. Put advertising budgets in the millions of dollars into paying off researchers desperately looking for funding that suggests that any of 15 other things might be the cause of cancers as well. Generate as much mud as possible. Make anything a reasonable doubt and thus impossible to stop it in a court of law. Oh my.

Then she convinced phage scientists around the country to hunt and peck through molecular haystacks of sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria and their viral opponents.

Source:https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-life-itself-wellness/index.html

There are so many subtle ways the biomedical industrial complex manipulates language in order to convince us that all bacteria are bad and that even their habitats are bad “breeding grounds”.

Natural habitats of bogs, ponds, and other areas –that we look at from our “the sun revolves around the earth (us)” standpoint –are not just breeding grounds for bacteria.

Instead: look at these systems as natural environmental resources. Environmental resources that we desperately need to protect. California has lost 98% of its freshwater biological resources. Yet it is becoming clear how important those lost resources might be as more and more scientists begin studying the bacterial diversity found there and the benefits that those bacterial ecologies can give us.

This is an awesome article and illustrates again the point of old growth ecosystems. We need the biological diversity found in these old growth systems. Most of us have no idea what an old growth wetland is \and or\ looks like. As I have said in other places most of us would scream bloody murder if a developer wanted to destroy an old growth redwood forest. Plow it under, stick a few branches in the ground in another location and say “trade you”.

Yet that is exactly what our city county and state governments are doing with wetlands. The developers are trading 1X old growth wetland acres for 2X old golf course. It is not a fair trade and is not sustainable. The tie in back to the article is that the bacterial diversity in an old growth marsh is mind bogglingly more diverse than the microbial diversity in a golf course that has been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides multiple times a year for a decade.

It is not sustainable to destroy our old growth microbially diverse habitats.

I would like you to take away three points.
1) There is a a huge amount of microbial diversity that we are bulldozing away.

2) This microbial diversity could have moon landing benefits to us if we put in the time to study it.

3) As the phages in the story show; using the permaculture ideals of learning about our environment and using it is a model for bettering our systems is a far more sustainable way of approaching a variety of medical issues then simply spending billions on a new chemical cocktail biocide.

The best to you all my friends.

Interesting commentary on drought conditions and public policy. And if you convert your swimming pool to a non-chlorinated system you have a mini dam in your backyard. You then have that water available for your use, in addition to the benefits you do for the environment.
www.puravidaaquatic.com/ 310-429-8477

Here’s why.

Source: Agriculture Is Killing Way More Bees Than We Realized, Huge Study Reveals

Source: Glyphosate is toxic to aquatic invertebrates and human reproduction

The European Chemicals Agency classifies glyphosate as being toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects but the available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria to classify glyphosate as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or as toxic for