I thought I'd post this picture just to alert visitors to this cool treehouse slide show I found online. Just to the right in "what I've been reading" links:

Lately I've been reading about Pyrolysis which is basicly a way of breaking down organic material that is carbon neutral at least and actually carbon negative at best. Yes, for all you green people out there even your compost off-gases (less with worms).
Many gardeners are already into this technology in the form of "bio-char" My link to the right takes you to a project where they are trying to make fossil fuels with rubber and plastics...I ran this by my friend Eddie Bernard a glass-blower and equipment builder who runs his glass studio off chicken poop
The doggie is from his site...
He mentioned "gasification" which is when you drop a piece of paper in a glass bubble you've just blown. The bubble is still quite hot so the paper combusts with a curious effect: because of lack of oxygen gas is released through the opening..


It is really winter here now, and I find myself doing what I did last year at this time: researching plants and planning gardens. It's a nice time since you cant do anything else...well, snowshoeing.

Channeling:

I've spent quite a bit of time since moving to Maine noticing how water moves. We live on clay at the bottom of a hill on the edge of a river. Whatever comes down that hill rolls right past us and off into the river. We also have a lot of roof area which means we could be letting 50,000 gallons of water run off our roof. That's a conservative estimate. I've been studying the way the water moves down the hill, and it's just amazing.



Since we have clay it just digs itself these super highways underground.The gound dries up suddely and then you see a little fountain shooting up somewhere lower down. I've started to do some irrigation and plan how to move all this water we have through areas where have plants that love water. I'm interested in lessening the run-off.
I'm very much aware of how many people in the world die because of bad water. We have this amazing amount of it that pours right past us.
I've been reading about how to move water around and store it. Most amazing are landscaping practices where with a berm or a swale you create and area that holds water (like a camel). It actually could be easily made by accident by someone making a swale to lead water off their land.
We have dug a ditch here to help us out with this river we live downhill from. It works hard and takes alot of water off our property. I'd like to feed plants with it. I've left the ditch open because I can see it working, and also it slowly fills with clay. There are ancient systems of french drains, and irrigation.
I think we will have ours be "living" Willows and other thirsty plants.