Xylem in us all.

Example of a cross section of a (woody) stem. Used with permission from Hydroponics - Indoor Horticulture by Jeffrey Winterborne. http://www.hydroponicist.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Xylem is one of the two types of transport tissue in vascular plants (phloem is the other). Its basic function is to transport water, but it also transports some nutrients through the plant.

If the xylem is the conduit for passing water and nutrients within plants,  this and any blog are also xlyem. We are the roots drawing nutrients from the soil and our thoughts to transport them to you, the flower.

I had the good fortune to take a class with a video professor in the early nineties that influenced me deeply.

Paul Ryan taught an upper level Field Production class that went beyond the traditional scope of using video cameras and microphones properly. He introduced us to the use of Ta'i Chi to control our bodies while shooting 'hand-held' cameras. Professional cameras you see news photographers lugging on their shoulders are pretty heavy. This approach, lowering your center of gravity and shifting your weight consciously from leg to leg, allows one to walk with a smooth glide producing less camera shake. You get a freedom of movement that a tripod cannot emulate. Your shots gain a fluidity that you can only draw on a storyboard as a curve. 

The other major focus of Ryan's class was to bring in the concept of Earthscore to video production. He has several video examples at his site, earthscore.org.

While at the Sequatchie Vally Institute a few weeks ago, I thought of Paul while shooting this video. The camera was much smaller than the one we used back then. This video doesn't have a lot of camera movement in it, but is full of movement. What I'm doing here is describing the water.

This is a bit of a stretch, but conceptually, the stream bed, this medium and this conversation with each other is a fluid transfer of nutrients, ideas, stories, experiences. 

Oh, these orchids!

Red2 has a green thumb. Grandma gave us these orchids 2 years ago. Red2 kept them alive and they even bloomed again. How awesome is that? 

She has a little spritzy water bottle and everything. 

{Clue from yesterday's post: The flowers were not in the box.}

G Gingerly Germinating Ideas for Growth - The Seed Swap 2.0

Grow! Part of the effort to create a wildlife garden full of bird feeding, seeding producing, flower-popping, goodness, is to grow some seedlings from scratch. From seeds.

Label This

Red3. Red4. Red5, Standing by.

Mrs. SF Daddy wrangled a large collection of seeds this year. Almost every year for a few years now, she'd started trays of seedlings, popped them into the ground and bam, we have tomatoes, daisies, bachelor buttons, echinacea, peppers, cucumbers, blah, blah, munch, munch, munch.

Plant this.

This year, she decided to start, not just a seed swap, but a seedling swap. She conned--I mean--enlisted her friends to start their own trays of seeds. They'd return to their own homes with trays of seeds ready to sprout. In a few weeks, they all return to the scene of the crime and trade little baby plants. Then instead of 20 or 30 of the same plants, they all leave again with a wide variety.

The plan was fool proof. Almost. The first batch of seeds was shipped to the wrong address and the seed starting party had to be postponed. (And all the way to the next full moon, if you're following along with the posts.) 

While the first batch sprouted, we had a few intrusions! Ants in the trays!

Now that things have calmed down and we're in April, we have lots of little babies almost ready to share and pop into the ground around the tulips. Surprise! Red2 and I planted tulip bulbs and they're almost ready to pop!

This video will walk you through the seed starting process. Join us as we prepare to plant some seeds.

What's growing in your garden?

Environmental Eleanor

Image via Wikipedia

Loved the stark look of the film adaptation.

Little did I know that while watching Katherine Hepburn in "The Lion of Winter", portray Eleanor of Aquitaine, I was seeing the story of my children's greatest grandmother. If the family histories recorded at ancestry.com are to be believed, their family links all the way back to the Grandmother of England.

I suppose there are truly thousands of descendants by now, so we'll work our way slowly back up the line with the magnifying glasses to inspect a little more closely at those little waving green leaves on the family tree at ancestry.com.

Looking back at my posts on the environment, you might get the impression that we're some sort of urban hippy wannabe's, well then I guess you'd be right. We do have worms in the backyard making good earth for the garden, or should I say Yarden? We planted edible shrubs in the front yard. We're not going to be eating the azaleas, we planted blueberry bushes. We were pleased to find out our neighbors had some already and more neighbors are interested in growing tomatoes and fig trees.

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Water water every where

Image via Wikipedia

At our house, we drink a lot of water. We drink it filtered from the refrigerator dispenser. You press a cup up against a lever that releases chilled and filtered drinking water into your glass.  It's lovely. We wanted more.

We change the filter in our refrigerator on schedule, but having the option at the tap appeals to us.  Ms. SF Daddy installed a PUR water filter a the kitchen sink a few weeks ago. After a couple of weeks, the thing started to completely fall apart.

It started out slow. Instead of a clean circular jet of water pouring down into sink we had a spray shooting down like the spokes of a twisted umbrella.

"We'll just have to take this back and get a new one."

We lived with it for about a week before the filter part litterally exploded on me. Water shot up at my face and  hit the ceiling.

I do not claim to be useful with a wrench by any means, but soon after that--I had to let my kids get sprayed a couple of times--I took the whole thing off and found a big gaping whole in the metal mesh that aerates the water. It looked like it was rusting.

I found the original hardware for the faucet and it's all back to normal.

In the United States, "normal" means I could drink the water straight from the tap. Sure, it's full of fluoride and chlorine, but it's quite drinkable. I'm told the chlorine keeps it from giving you gunk from the pipes. See: http://environment.about.com/od/earthtalkcolumns/a/chlorine.htm
The fluoride (See: http://kidshealth.org/parent/growth/feeding/fluoride_water.html) is good for you teeth.

(Insert debate about these chemicals here if we want to start missing the point.)

Image via Wikipedia

Excellent. Isn't that great? Even though I have a few stumbles with a few pieces of plastic we picked up at The Home Depot, we don't have it that bad. I don't have to walk miles with a  vessel of contaminated water everyday to ration out to my cooking, cleaning and drinking.

This post was inspired by Blog Action Day. I hope you get a chance to read more about the state of Water in the world.  http://blogactionday.change.org/

Do you enjoy clean, drinkable water from your tap?

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Blog Action Day 2010 Prep

Image via Wikipedia

Blog Action Day 2010  October 15th

I'm preparing an entry for Blog Action day. Have you heard about it? My kids try so hard to conserve water they rarely flush and have to be sent to the shower. Do we take our access to water for granted? In the US, we absolutely do. This year the Blog Action day theme is water. I bet we'll learn a lot.

This week I learned that there are people in the United States that don't have access to other basic services we take for granted.


A fire rescue team let a man's house burn to the ground because he failed to pay his fire service fee. They had abundant water to available to wet down the perimeter to protect his neighbors from the flames. The neighbors were all paid up.



Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

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Geoengineering or the Genesis Wave?

Image by ozgurmulazimoglu via Flickr

Real research is going on to determine if we should really start shading our Earth to cool it down. We are living in Science Fiction Horror Shows. It's crazy-hot. Your damns are bursting. Lakes are disappearing. Sink holes are swallowing your car, your horse, your house.  {You made up the one about the horse, right?} {Yes, but...}

The alligators are working together to plot against us.

The bears are so #melgibsonmad that they are tearing up your car for a pb&j sandwich.

A new modelling study shows that deploying a stratospheric sunshade to cool the planet would have hugely varying consequences for different regions. What's more, although the sunshade could be tuned to adjust global average temperatures or rainfall, it couldn't fix both at once.

Geoengineering fix won't suit everyone - environment - 18 July 2010 - New Scientist

 

 

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LA Times photo essay on the oil spill.

Gulf oil spill - latimes.com

Still alive but almost unrecognizable, a sea gull is paralyzed by oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island in Barataria Bay, La.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / June 4, 2010)

This is why photography is so important. All the debate, all the prayers, all the plans, all the finger pointing, all the regret, all the best intentions. They all stop here. For this image. For all of Ms. Cole's images and the other photographers documenting this epic event. Thank you.

I can see the impact we have on our world.

A Sarlacc Pit opens in Guatemala: Giant Could Get Even Bigger

Guatemala City is growing it's own Sarlacc Pit

It's starting with the pit first, which doesn't seem to be the best route for attracting such a creature to our planet. They aren't exactly the first stop for most tourists.

Attempting to attract the sarlacci (or space traveling spores) by creating a large pit for them to roost in just seems a little self-destructive to us.

This hole, currently believed to be void of any sarlacci,  has already eaten a three-story building and fortunately, as far a we know, no people yet. Good thing, too. It would take an agonizing thousand years to be digested.


Sarlacc photo from Wookipedia - http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sarlacc

Photos below are from National Geographic. Please explore their amazing collection of this phenomena.

Sinkhole in Guatemala: Giant Could Get Even Bigger

Pictures: Giant Sinkhole Pierces Guatemala

Wormy update

On Earth Day,  2010, I went to St. Anne’s Day School All Stars class and we went out for a nature walk. The intent was to collect objects from nature to build letter sculptures from found materials.

I suggested that we take out a few trash bags to pick up litter too. Even though the grounds are very well kept, my lovely teachers were skeptical about being able to find anything.

We won't find very much trash...

We found more trash than we expected. Unpopped balloons, church bulletins, even a very nice metal reusable coffee mug that must have been accidentally knocked off of the ledge overlooking the bushes.



We brought it all inside and sorted out the items we wanted to keep for the art project, what was recycleable, compostable, and just landfill bound.

We had been talking about my worms and our composting habits, so my little one volunteered to bring home the items that were compostable. Just the great kind of stuff our worms would eat.




I shredded it all up and added my family’s kitchen scraps. Placed the new mixture in the worm bin.


"Yummy," the worms will say. Then we’ll add some more Georgia clay and dirt to the mix and put into the garden.

Keep a box of spent batteries

Image via Wikipedia

Battery Recycling! Now here's a bit of info for you on what to do with these batteries that you know you shouldn't be tossing into the trash.

Lookup a recycling center near you!

Earth911.org has given itself a really nice sprucing up and looks gorgeous.

Our batteries died in our cordless phone and I went out to buy new ones. Well I brought home the wrong kind. They're expensive little suckers. Mrs. SF Daddy went out and just bought a new set of phones! (Not as great for the environment.) So now my errand of returning the wrong batteries is expanded to also collecting up the old phones and either recycling them, or finding a person who can REUSE them. Finding people is easy for us, but a great way to get rid of the 'still usefull' stuff you don't need anymore is FreeCycle. People in your area will come to your house and take it from you. No money exchanges and it's beautiful.

FreeCycle "Our mission is to build a worldwide gifting movement that reduces waste, saves precious resources & eases the burden on our landfills while enabling our members to benefit from the strength of a larger community."

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Flying Green

We can all say we're going green, but there are a lot of folks that still need to catch up. We're using cloth shopping bags, driving a hybrid and replacing light bulbs.

These girls are also getting more modern chores: Feed the worms (the kitchen scraps), and take out the Recycling. We recycle so much stuff it's almost a shame that we have to pay extra in our county for trash collection at all. We only have 2 bags a week for a family of 4.

J the gardner arborist

A TV program in 10 minutes just made it click for a 3-year-old. A plant gets water from the ground through its roots; air from under its leaves; and with sun from the tops of its leaves it turns it all into food!
After watering the flowers on the porch we pulled weeds and found some baby pine trees growing at the mailbox. Maybe we'll watch them grow up into big trees. We'll have to ask mommy if that would be okay. She doesn't really love pine trees very much... but they do grow fast!