SPOT THE PROBLEM ! on a sixty minute trip to pick up raw materials from our suppliers, see above (I'm talking about manure) I thought it would be challenging to see how many environmental problems I could capture on the way there and back with my camera. I will post the snaps below, and wonder if you can guess what I was seeing as a problem, if you are inclined to post comments.... and offer solutions. I really look forward to some fresh perspectives
I have to take a ten day break while I finish another project that has been long in the making. Should you happen to browse through this blog, I have left this picture to meditate upon... hoping in so doing not to lose you.... depending on your mood, you may think of white wine or fresh cream, or a blazing day at the edge of the ocean, and being burned to a crisp in coconut fat, or about people long vanished, who harvested these rocks like a garden, or you may wonder if your fishing license has expired, or what to do about the ultraviolet light you can see bristling at the razor sharp cracked shells of these water creatures, and about walking over them with wet bare feet.....or you can think about the hunter mollusc and the furious small wars of the intertidal zone or the history of the exploitation of this narrow strip of oceanic oscillations running like a ribbon around every kink and curve of the coast.... and that is a winding story that deserves a chapter of its own... in this manner the picture will last you ten days till I've done what must be done... I will miss blogging, even for this short time
For me this was a success story. Its part of the zero budget garden idea. I had a problem with design in the back yard, there was an old cracked concrete slab surrounding the house (probably from 1940's knowing this house's vintage) and then there was brick paving surrounding the pond, on a slightly higher level. So I made a small step with brick sized salvaged cobble stones, and then dug out and flattened a half circle and paved it with broken bits of concrete I hauled out of the dumpsters at the local refuse collection depot. I found some nice thick, textured bits which must have been for a slab rather than wall plaster. Eric Ngara, who works with my husband on his worm farm, laid them for me because I found he just had such a good eye, he even inserted tiny slightly different coloured flat pieces in the cracks and hammered them down, which really looks great. The grey concrete chunks allowed the cracked concrete slab to blend in with the garden paving, and then the smaller pieces leading up to the slight step lead into the brick paving in terms of size, if not colour and it all now looks like I planned it that way, rather than being a 'problem'. After several months the paving looks like it has always been there. Recycled materials have this wonderful way (as did the bricks in the front garden which were also salvaged from the dumpsters) of looking instantly aged as if they have been in place for decades.
,An idea for a meeting house in the eco village. It has a parapbolic suntrap for a roof made of a stretched sail coated with metal foil that bounces light into the top of the glass boiler and distilled water condenser shaped like a goblet. This drives power production for the meeting house, such as the internet cafe for distance learning on the left, and the pumps for the water systems. On the right some elders meet to discuss how they could enrich language learning in the village, as they probably have have the richest discourse strategies, gesture and vocabulary, being old, which complements the linguistic inventiveness of younger people. All the houses are shipping containers sheltered from the sun by sails, grey water runs into the moat surrounding the meeting house through tomato and yam fields and then rice paddies that purify it of organic elements and phosphates. Tomatoes grow best with their roots in nutrient rich water, yielding tastier fruit and lasting for longer before dying off, In the relatively clean water that finally reaches the pond live some telapia or carp, or catfish. The distilled water from the boiler is for growing large disa cultivars for sale, and could also trickle through a mineral bed to supply drinking water without any chlorine in it.
today I took care of the environment with a duster and a broom, to keep the domestic ecosystem in balance. My family came to tea, we're a small eco system of another kind...not sure what my niche is
take a second hand fibreglass swimming pool (I've seen them for R500
dig it into the ground lay a concrete slab around it place 2 parallel shipping containers on the slab with the pool inbetween place two containers at right angles to these, on top of them add windows, stairwell in the middle, railings, wooden platform over the containers and over these a pyramidal tin roof, cover with solar heaters and solar panels, add gutters which lead into the swimming pool with overflow into a seep at a safe distance. you can cover the outside of the cube with a framework into which you back bales, or from which you hang aqua-ponic vertical vegetable gardens ordinary biofiltration to purify the pond in the middle with fish in it is an alternative to aquaponics, or it can just keep it as rain water, a reservoir for heating up and using in the house. This is one of the models of house for the zozo village I want to live in as soon as I can get partners to buy some land with me. I would like Phillipi, maybe buy with a trust....so that the land can remain vegetable producing land for posterity instead of being sold for the types of development planned at Muizenberg and already seen in Wynberg, vast barracks of little rectangular pidgeon holes. I personally don't need a house as grand as the zozocube. I'm thinking of one container with a pitched roof... and will put up drawings, of possibilities for a 1,2, 3, 4 and more container house. I'm writing a blog on http//:curvedgrowth.weebly.com, today's feature was a for me unique experience with self governance, so if you want to read it you're welcome. Its not expert as in studied and degreed advice, more like 'old lady' as in fallen again and again advice actually. Sometimes I write there to blow off steam and to dump mother loads, so don't go there if negativity and helplessness annoys you. its an experiment in dark (depressed) (ir)rationality, that from time to time I erase entirely.
today I dare add no more, much as I'd like to, because I'm working on my thesis corrections. it is THE most boring thing I've ever had to do.. making sure commas and fullstops, page references and such are all in place, and sometimes, to move forward one paragraph, hours of work are required, and I've said what I have to say, its out there and its really out there, what can I really add or subtract... but there we go, dotting i's, crossing t's and putting beige paint and floor polish in the passages (take a walk through academia and you'll smell it too)... but here I am doing it, and EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe is more attractive and interesting... so ... I've just noticed I've been blogging since 1 o'clock and its 3 now. till tomorrow.. or sometime This is blueprint for my ecoblogazene, a form of one author magazine, hoping to feature more than my personal ramblings as it develops, A blog should be more efficient than this website form and I'll be writing here and at http//:thebiosquare.weebly.com from now on, until the best form gels and I buy a domain name. The 'bio' in the name I chose for obvious reasons. It comes from the Greek word for life. Square I chose because sphere was taken, it sounds like sphere but isn't, and is also less metaphorically tired in combination with bio and blogo, and so forth. Sphere connotes the natural world and the shape of the earth, as well as an ephemeral bubble, but square is more frequently the shape of something humans have built, its three dimensional form, cube, is rather unfortunately occupied by game shows, leaving the label for human manufacture of a more earthy nature bound nature the square. Its real, as I cannot pretend to be the creator of the 'natural'. The garden plot is square, the suburban block (in South Africa at least) is square, the computer screen is square (ish), so is the television screen, the curtained stage, the book, the frame of a painting, and in the village square, the villagers of the good old days congregated, traded the surplus from their gardens, socialised, politicised, drank, gossiped, pontificated and had ceremonies, duels, trysts and therefore... square has more real connotations for me of human involvement, if a little nostalgic, it still lacks the extreme nostalgia of idealisation in the perfect, seamless, self contained, edgeless sphere, by which an ideal of pure and unspoilt "nature" is dissociated from "man". I go there, but in my head, not with my hands, in fiction not in non fiction. The straight edged geometry contains greater implications of responsibility (hence the so called 'square' was so called by the so called 'hippies' ! ) and I am sure that's enough of a justification. This sketch shows the grey leaved desert plant called an aloe, opening towards the sun, so that working with light alone, it can create the raw materials to make a waxy candelabra. I photographed it and moved on, much later I painted it, and never saw what would become of what it was then. Life seems furious, as in angry, and so fast we seldom finish anything, so milled by experience, on the immovable things needing our total dedication, that witnessing the completions that we don't bring about ourselves is not on our list.
Starting small and keeping going in hope because when its busy happening we don't know we're growing, we only feel torn ! |
Authordraftswoman, recent student of Linguistics, Jill of all trades, planner of green new world.. Archives
October 2017
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