April Gardening

Some of the country may in fact be getting "April Showers" but not here in Houston.  YTD, we are now over 5" behind in rainfall.  

Normal rainfall by 4/17 = 11.82".  

So far, for us, 6.63".

Still, the Garden is growing like mad.  Tomatoes seem to be the easy #1 choice so far this spring planting season.  They are EVERYWHERE.  And we've only lost two so far to worms.

With that in mind ...

... and this is just a sampling

1%

While having a network of companies give 1% of their sales to environmental organizations is a great, practically painless and easy idea, the largest companies in the world are, naturally, nowhere to be found on the list of Members.

As I see so often, those that have the most, and could most-easily give to a group like this, don't, and are the most greedy and stingy. Those that don't have so much are the most generous. Fascinating, isn't it, Spock?

1% for the Planet is a growing global movement of 1427 companies that donate 1% of their sales to a network of 2,459 environmental organizations worldwide.

OUR MISSION

1% for the Planet exists to build and support an alliance of businesses financially committed to creating a healthy planet.

Check out their website here.

Speechless

Future farm

Farm indoors, with LED's! Brilliant! Now just cut the cost of LED's by a factor of 10, and we're getting somewhere.

It's really rather embarrassing and shameful that we actually have answers to so many of the world's problems, but we consistently don't have the will or willpower to make things happen.

Future farm: a sunless, rainless room indoors

DEN BOSCH, Netherlands – Farming is moving indoors, where the sun never shines, where rainfall is irrelevant and where the climate is always right.

The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker, or a sprawling complex in the Saudi desert.

Advocates say this, or something like it, may be an answer to the world's food problems. "In order to keep a planet that's worth living on, we have to change our methods," says Gertjan Meeuws, of PlantLab, a private research company.

The world already is having trouble feeding itself. Half the people on Earth live in cities, and nearly half of those — about 3 billion — are hungry or malnourished. Food prices, currently soaring, are buffeted by droughts, floods and the cost of energy required to plant, fertilize, harvest and transport it.

And prices will only get more unstable. Climate change makes long-term crop planning uncertain. Farmers in many parts of the world already are draining available water resources to the last drop. And the world is getting more crowded: by mid-century, the global population will grow from 6.8 billion to 9 billion, the U.N. predicts.

To feed so many people may require expanding farmland at the expense of forests and wilderness, or finding ways to radically increase crop yields.

Meeuws and three other Dutch bioengineers have taken the concept of a greenhouse a step further, growing vegetables, herbs and house plants in enclosed and regulated environments where even natural light is excluded.

In their research station, strawberries, yellow peppers, basil and banana plants take on an eerie pink glow under red and blue bulbs of Light-Emitting Diodes, or LEDs. Water trickles into the pans when needed and all excess is recycled, and the temperature is kept constant. Lights go on and off, simulating day and night, but according to the rhythm of the plant — which may be better at shorter cycles than 24 hours — rather than the rotation of the Earth.

In a larger "climate chamber" a few miles away, a nursery is nurturing cuttings of fittonia, a colorful house plant, in two layers of 70 square meters (750 sq. feet) each. Blasts of mist keep the room humid, and the temperature is similar to the plants' native South America. After the cuttings take root — the most sensitive stage in the growing process — they are wheeled into a greenhouse and the chamber is again used for rooting. The process cuts the required time to grow a mature plant to six weeks from 12 or more.

The Dutch researchers say they plan to build a commercial-sized building in the Netherlands of 1,300 square meters (14,000 sq. feet), with four separate levels of vegetation by the end of this year. After that, they envision growing vegetables next to shopping malls, supermarkets or other food retailers.

Meeuws says a building of 100 sq meters (1,075 sq. feet) and 14 layers of plants could provide a daily diet of 200 grams (7 ounces) of fresh fruit and vegetables to the entire population of Den Bosch, about 140,000 people. Their idea is not to grow foods that require much space, like corn or potatoes. "We are looking at the top of the pyramid where we have high value and low volume," he said.

Sunlight is not only unnecessary but can be harmful, says Meeuws. Plants need only specific wavelengths of light to grow, but in nature they must adapt to the full range of light as a matter of survival. When light and other natural elements are manipulated, the plants become more efficient, using less energy to grow.

"Nature is good, but too much nature is killing," said Meeuws, standing in a steaming cubicle amid racks of what he called "happy plants."

For more than a decade the four researchers have been tinkering with combinations of light, soil and temperature on a variety of plants, and now say their growth rate is three times faster than under greenhouse conditions. They use no pesticides, and about 90 percent less water than outdoors agriculture. While LED bulbs are expensive, the cost is steadily dropping.

Olaf van Kooten, a professor of horticulture at Wageningen University who has observed the project but has no stake in it, says a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tomatoes grown in Israeli fields needs 60 liters (16 gallons) of water, while those grown in a Dutch greenhouse require one-quarter of that. "With this system it is possible in principle to produce a kilo of tomatoes with a little over one liter of water," he said.

The notion of multistory greenhouses has been around for a while. Dickson Despommier, a retired Columbia University professor of environmental health and author of the 2010 book "The Vertical Farm," began working on indoor farming as a classroom project in 1999, and the idea has spread to several startup projects across the U.S.

"Over the last five year urban farming has really gained traction," Despommier said in a telephone interview.

Despommier argues that city farming means producing food near the consumer, eliminating the need to transport it long distances at great costs of fuel and spoilage and with little dependency on the immediate climate.

The science behind LED lighting in agriculture "is quite rigorous and well known," he said, and the costs are dropping dramatically. The next development, organic light-emitting diodes or OLEDs, which can be packed onto thin film and wrapped around a plant, will be even more efficiently tuned to its needs.

One of the more dramatic applications of plant-growing chambers under LED lights was by NASA, which installed them in the space Shuttle and the space station Mir in the 1990s as part of its experiment with microgravity.

"This system is a first clear step that has to grow," Van Kooten says, but more research is needed and people need to get used to the idea of sunless, landless agriculture.

"But it's clear to me a system like this is necessary."

Original.

Rush Hour!!

Obama budget speech

OK, so Obama said a lot of the right things today. I've heard lots of rhetoric, but seen little follow-through. My cynicism rears its ugly head again and wonders how long it will take Obama to compromise away everything he spoke about today? And I wonder how badly our "media" will twist everything he had to say today? POTUS REMINDS GOP WHO SPILLED THE MILK.... In addition to the debt-reduction plan, the rejection of the Paul Ryan proposal, and the spirited defense of progressive governance, President Obama's speech included one other thing that's worth noting: a reminder about how we got to this point. It's worth keeping in mind because there's apparently a widespread Republican belief that the large budget shortfall -- the ones the GOP claims to be desperate to address -- is Democrats' fault. Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) said last week of Dems, "It's their debt." Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) added soon after, "We're here mopping up their spilled milk, to be honest." With this nonsense in mind, I was glad Obama set the record straight today.

"As a result of ... bipartisan efforts, America's finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt-free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.

"But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -- but we didn't pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -- tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

"To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our national checkbook, consider this: in the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

"But that's not what happened. And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more. In this case, we took a series of emergency steps that saved millions of jobs, kept credit flowing, and provided working families extra money in their pockets. It was absolutely the right thing to do, but these steps were expensive, and added to our deficits in the short term. "So that's how our fiscal challenge was created. That's how we got here."

This isn't opinion; it's simply a recitation of recent history. Those who consider the deficit and debt a mess, and want to know who "spilled the milk," shouldn't have any real doubts. It is, ironically, the party that created the mess that's whining the most about the speed with which it's being cleaned up. Original.

Obama poker tips

Does Obama even realize how much of a joke he has become?