ecosistency

The virtues of no-till raised-bed gardening are widely documented.  Here’s a small tip to avoid stepping on your beloved garden soil in beds that are too wide or large to reach properly.    Here i am planting a 4′ wide bed and using a (curb-shopped:-) 4’9″‘ long piece of 2×10 to kneel on and a smaller piece of plywood to spread out the lesser amount of weight from my feet.  This arrangement gives a surprisingly ergonomic posture and can easily be shifted as you plant along the bed.

Thanks to Chris for suggesting i draw this in Google Drawings which exported the drawing above as a common SVG file 🙂

Update:  Unfortunately, WordPress wouldn’t let me include an SVG image due to security reasons… huh?

Here are a few Earth-themed musings originally published on Oct. 15, 2007  when ecosistency was on blogger.com.  They are still (if not more ) relevant today!

Earth, our home vs. “environment”

We should no longer refer to the Earth, our home, as the “environment”!   It may seem like a trivial matter of semantics, but it isn’t!  The “environment” sounds like some distant third party “thing”.   Referring to the Earth, our home (or the Earth for short)  on the other hand is much more personal and meaningful!   We tend to take better care of things we love and relate to.

Please Capitalize the E in Earth

Please capitalize the e in Earth when referring to Earth, our home!   Our Earth is a living breathing organism,  so we should refer to it by its personal name, Earth.   We give more respect to John Doe or Mars, Jupiter and Pluto than we do to the Earth when we don’t capitalize the e.   This is lunacy.    No wonder we don’t take very good care of the “earth” or the “environment”.    Humanity’s home will be the Earth for a long time,  so let’s take better care of Her, ok ?

We’re All In This Together Earthlings !

Finally, a nice side effect of changing how we refer to the “environment”, is that the label “environmentalist” will fade away. The new term will be Earthists! It won’t be as easy to “pigeon hole” people that love the Earth by calling them “those darned Earthists”! We could simply reply ,”Who are you,  an alien,  perhaps a Marsist ?  If you don’t like it on Earth,  go back to your own planet.   Don’t trash our home!”. QED

…in a gentle Spring rain.

Shrubs were ordered from http://honeyberryusa.com
Thanks Chris for taking the lead!

i’m convinced that plants do better with rainwater than hose water!   So i built this system from a mixture of upcycled and retail parts.    Current capacity is 165 gallons with plans to double both capacity and water pressure by adding a second layer (vertically).  Come for a visit sometime and i’ll show you the details and we can discuss it.