Portable Jar garden for camping

I found an article about sprouting jars for carrying on camping trips from Lip smacking backpacking- how to cook on your travels book and thought I would share it with you.

Also a nice recipe using the sprouts in pulp patties:

ani's vegan green (some of the time raw): Pulp use (burger) and sprout update.

Mike Feingold's Permaculture Allotment

Mike Feingold guides us around his permaculture allotment in Bristol.

Future of degradable petroleum plastic goes up in smoke

So the organic additive I thought as being the holy grail of making petroleum plastic degrade turns out to have rather negative consequences.

Fish seem to rather like the look of degradable plastic flakes as they look allot like Plankton.

Defra has shown concern "that these particles of plastic may be ingested by invertebrates, birds, animals or fish".

After contacting The Coop about using bio plastic I received this message:

"Until recently, all our carrier bags and some other plastic wrappers were degradable which meant they were not suitable for recycling as general plastic.

DEFRA commissioned a report that said that degradable additives in plastics offer no environmental benefit and therefore we have stopped using degradable additives in carrier bags, and we are running through the old stock.

Research casts doubt over green credentials of "degradable" plastics - 11 Mar 2010 - News from BusinessGreen

http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=EV0422_8858_FRP.pdf%20

So there goes that plan of saving the world from the curse that is petroleum plastic. It seems to suggest any sort of throw away petroleum plastic is a curse.

So what now?

Maybe Its time to introduce corn starch and potato starch plastic which is food safe.

New Plastic Bags Biodegrade in Four Months | Popular Science

Polylactic acid is a polyester derived from corn starch which decomposes in 4 months and mineralizes into water and carbon dioxide when composted.

biodegradable plastic

The past few weeks Ive been disturbed by the amount of waste in my bin which is just plastic packaging. So I spent a week or so seeing how easy it would be to shop for food without plastic packaging, which proved very challenging and restrictive, I thought vegan's had it hard.

I began to look at alternate forms of packaging and discovered plastic can be made with starch, so I set out to make plastic from potato starch, vegetable oil and water.

I had varying successes but it did make me think that producing plastic from potatoes would mean wasting an awful lot of food although a better option than having petrolium based plastic lying around for decades.

I also discovered that designers have started to produce disposable cutlery made out of potato starch and from the shells of cashew nuts which is great as it is a bi product as apposed to using food. Designers have also been making shopping bags made of a biodegradable polymer derived from lactic acid( the bi product of anarobic respiration in humans and animals).

Then I stumbled across D2W(metal salt) and eco-one which are organic additives which can be added to all petrolium based plastics and make it biodegrade into organic units which can be digested by bacteria.

http://uk.ecologic-llc.com/

The icing on the cake is that with D2w depending on how much you add you can set an expiration date on how long the plastic lasts for before it decomposes e.g. 5 months, 4 years.

Which is great because it means depening on the products life cycle it can be given an expiration date or controlled life and begin to decompose after it has been disposed off.

The plastic can also be recycled if it is gathered before the d2w has taken effect.

Plastic is designed to completely degrade between 60 to 90 days once the d2w has been activated and then breaks down in the soil releasing its carbon and nutrients to the plants.

D2w can be added to any plastic and doesn't even require changes to designs or suppliers techniques or machinery.

If you wish to understand the chemistry behind d2w check out the link below:

Symphony Environmental - What is d2w?

Cycle Powered Cinema

So a project I was working on a while back was a bicycle powered station which could be used to play films, power smoothie makers or any other fun bit of tech you can think of.

Here is a video by WeeFeet of us building our fantastic invention in Tayside Recyclers:

Thanks to electric pedal and Dundee Solar Cities we created this fantastic gizmo which enables us to power appliances up to about 200w by hooking it up 1 to 4 bicycles and pedalling.

We had an event showcasing our new cycle cinema for the students but children started turning up and loved it so much that they wanted to keep cycling even when the film was finished, great success even with the horrid weather.

So far this wonderful invention has been used all over Dundee to showcase films and to get people to think about how much energy they actually consume in a fun way.

The next steps are to have a month of films all round Dundee with site specific films, who knows we might be having a film showing in your garden :)

Skill Share Dundee

Skill Share Dundee is a group helping to inspire and empower students and members of the residential community by sharing skills and crafts.

Skill Share Dundee's aims are to bring generations together and maintain skills and crafts that might be lost.

Over the past few years I have seen the loss of practical life skills within the student community, currently universities prepare students academically but miss out on practical life skills which students require in later life, skill share dundee hopes to provide these in fun and informative ways.

Skill Share Dundee has now been running for two years now and is going from strength to strength by learning lessons from last years classes.

The initial concept came to me while I was volunteering in tayside recycler's fixing bicycles, i've always loved building things and when people came up to me asking about how to repair bicycles, I thought maybe I could share my other skills too.

I put the idea to Jonathan Baxter and he shared that he too had a similar vision so off we set to create skill share dundee in the rather dimly lit cavern that was the bicycle area of tayside recyclers.

Allot of skill share dundee's principles are bases on the likes of Tinkering School: Think, Make, Tinker!

and also Men's Sheds - MensShed Australia AMSA.

Bicycle building/maintenance

Gardening

Wood work (Cold frame building)

Planting seedlings

leather work(15th century flacket bottle)

Wine making

Electronics(tag tool)

Wood work

Rocket Stove construction

So what have we learned from last semester:

-less technical classes are easier for people to engage with and hold their concentration

-we need to teach less and give one of the greatest gift to empower people to understand what skills and strengths they already have and let them share them.

-We hope to use a questionnaire like the one below to enable people to easier answer the question "what skills do you have?"

-The greatest gift is allowing others to give so rather than just teaching all the classes, we will try to open the space up for more participants to share.

---This Semesters classes on offer this semester are loosely based around vintage skills---

This is just a rough breakdown of possible classes that will be run.

-Vintage photography-taking photos using vintage cameras and also guide through development process- leave with a nice negative as a keepsake

-Vintage bicycle maintenance and also how to make one of a kind bike baskets

-Leather work- one of a kind leather objects-belts, bags and other objects

-Upholstery of furniture

-Welding projects

-building bicycle trailers

-wilderness walks

-wine making courses and tasting sessions

-Tinkering events- think Macgyver, you will learn how to solve problems and repair your own objects by good old tinkering and putting your knowledge into practice.

-Bring your broken items events- where you will learn how to repair everyday objects

--Plans for the future--

-to bring more young people and bring skill share to schools

-to integrate more elderly people into skill share

Catalyst Quest

At the end of July, I once again said goodbye to Embercombe to take 2 other fellow catalyst on a quest for ourselves to engage with living in the moment and become more in touch with our instincts.

So much happened in those few days that I can't share it all now but here is a little bite size chunk of our journey back into the wild.

We three warriors struck out into the unknown, it felt like a proper quest and we experienced many magical moments throughout: all three of us sang harmoniously under a bridge in an ancient Sequoia forest, the gurgling of the stream under our feet and the sound of our temple like songs echoing off the sides of the walls and other magical moments in the mist cliffs up in Dartmoor as we sat in our cave, the fire blazing and the rain falling outside our door.

More stories of our quest to come...including how we gathering this food on the road, glow bugs at night, hunting ducks and the Templars way.