Book Twenty-Eight

Book #28: Landscaping With Nature: Using Nature's Designs to Plan Your Yard by Jeff Cox

Highly recommended for anyone with a yard.

The key to this book isn't to go out and loot our state parks, roadsides, and private lands to swipe what's growing there and transplant it in our own yards. The key is to go to state parks, roadsides, and other natural places and swipe ideas and concepts and apply them to our own home landscape. The color photo section near the center shows many pictures with a scene from the wild and another showing how that can be interpreted on a home scale, or how the idea can be transplanted from one region to another with entirely different plants.

I've read this book twice this year, cover to cover, as well as referred to small bits and pieces of it a number of other times. In a year or so, I will be implementing the fire pit. I have - and will - use the natural stairway project. And watch out for some melodic stone arrangements down by the meadow, and maybe more along Stone Stream, or on the back bank. In addition to projects and raw ideas, the book also serves as a source on various plants - I refer to it for supplemental information quite often. It's not intended to be an exhaustive list of plants that can be used, but it does provide nice collections of trees and shrubs with interesting bark or berries, as well as group plants by habitat and bloom color.

If I could only have one book on gardening, this would be it.

Cross-posted to 50bookchallenge and me own journal

Fuelling the Fire

Okay.

First off, mandatory reading: Kurt Vonnegut's article Cold Turkey from May 10, 2004.

Next, cheap gas: yesterday at 5:15pm or so, $2.49; same station today $2.64. There is no way that the gas costs that much more to produce - it costs the same. What changed is the demand. Five cars deep today, lots of demand. Zero to one cars deep yesterday. People are afraid that the supply is gone - and it will be, not too far down the line, and it will be in shorter supply on a smaller time scale due to the effects on the supply chain down in the Gulf. Two things can raise the price of a commodity: one, lots of people wanting it - which happens when everyone rushes to the station to fill up quick, before the price goes up! Nice job, panicking masses! and two, lack of supply, and that part is going to get hit while we're waiting for them to spin some of the drilling rigs and refineries back up - and figure out ways around the gaping holes no doubt left by loss of Gulf coast facilities.

Some Snopes reading:
-- Pain in the Gas - 1-3 day boycotts can bring down the price of gas (false)
-- Katrina and the Waves - Hurricane Katrina impacting the price of gas (multiple)

I haven't done the math, but I know in some international discussions, that gas is routinely four or five dollars a gallon in other parts of the world, without any assistance from hurricanes and Oil Market Voodoo. I'd like to take the time to do a comparison - what is the price of regular gas, in US dollars, here and in a handful of other countries; along with the price of other commodities (sugar? bread? any ideas?)

I have a significant commute and I go through a tank of gas every three or four work days. I plan - and it's a very loose, open plan, subject to much change - to get an additional vehicle in Fall 2007. That vehicle will use some form of alternate fuel - most likely it will be a diesel pickup truck that I will convert to biodiesel, but time will tell.

I will also be looking into several means to reduce reliance on electricity - not just to go it on our own in power loss, but to help reduce the amount of money spent on electrical generation, which comes mostly from fossil fuels. I don't have the cash to fund this outright and do what I'd like, but I'll certainly be keeping it in mind as a goal, and using the principles of reducing the amount of fuel we require.

Sooner or later, we'll all have to do that. Might as well work towards it with purpose.