cheers

Luke

“He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”

I have a very large south-facing window at around 43deg N lat. I have just started what I’m calling “vertically farming my living room.”

I selected plants that allegedly grow well in pots and installed some metal shelves directly in front of the window. So far, I have some lettuce sprouting, but I’m hoping that the beets will do well. Bush beans, peas, tomatoes, bush cucumbers and peppers are the experimental pots (I expect at best half will survive and I’ll keep notes on what does).

I’ve got a florescent “grow light” tube in reserve as well as the incandescent fixture from two old fish tanks in case I have to give supplemental light in the winter (I’m hoping to avoid this, but if I can come up with some clever system by which I can turn those on on a timer and NOT use the overhead lighting in the living room, I’ll feel like that’s an acceptable energy trade-off).

Wish me luck!

And everyone has windows, something on the inside windowsill can be nice. Bathrooms with good skylights or windows can have ferns. Obviously you’re not gong to feed yourself out of those things, but a few plants can be cheering.

About a week ago, me and my husband attended Reef Fest Curaçao (we live on Curaçao). It was a small educational festival to raise awareness of reefs and corals among local teachers, who often can’t even swim. Curaçao is surrounded by the most beautiful diversity of corals, plants and fish, but its glorious beauty is slowly fading because of pollution. (the teachers didn’t know that either…)
A US professor (don’t remember his name) showed the teacher the meaning of ‘environment’ through a very simple game and it was this game that came to mind when I read your post about diversity. I’ll try to explain the game and maybe you can use it…

About twenty people make a circle. Everyone gets to be a certain species (in our case, it was all reef and underwater life, from plankton and anemones to sharks to crabs, etc.). Somebody also played the sun.
Now the professor stood in the middle of the circle with a very long piece of string. He gave the sun one end and asked her: “Who do you ‘feed’? Who grows on you?” She answered: “algae” and the professor connected her string to the man who played algae. From him, the string went on and on via all sorts of species, including bacteria. Most species received the string a couple of times, for example the plankton and the bacteria, but also the smaller fish and the coral. (You were also allowed to go ‘back’ in the food chain: what do you grow on?)

In the end, a giant web was formed (it was a very long piece of string). Then the professor asked us all to pull the strings tight and to level the web, so that every string touched another. He was standing in the middle of the web and then pulled one string up. “Watch how the web shakes,” he said and he let go. Indeed: the entire food chain, the entire environment, was disturbed by his one touch. Immediately everyone, even the dissatisfied woman who played a very rare species and had received the string only once, understood the meaning of this game.
“Now watch what happend if I cut the string in just one place,” the professor explained. “Let go of if you feel your string going loose.” Within seconds, the entire web was down on the ground. The professor didn’t have to explain much more…

Cariad