Eat More Organic! Four Corners TV programme .. on Dioxins, dangerous chemical crop spraying, in Australia ...

Am watching a vitally important programme on 4 Corners about chemical 2,4-D and its effects on health, our crops and the astounding fact that this well-known dioxin is still being sprayed as a herbicide and I believe as a pesticide in Australia.  Many of us were wrongly of the belief that dioxins had been banned long ago, in this country. Not so, it seems.

The point of the programme is that unsafe chemicals are still being used within our environment without our realising and that we are continuing to imbibe them whether through breathing the air, eating produce grown near where they've been distributed, drinking water seeping through from contaminated groundwater or directly by the people spraying the chemicals and their families who are then exposed to the chemicals as well.

Ten kilometres of chemical drift are occurring on to market gardening properties affecting the sex of the crops, causing two cobs to form and other types of plant deformities. When flowers and fruit form this is a particularly volatile time of impact.

One company had announced it was going to review the use of the chemical back in 1995 but as still taking action on the matter 11 years later.  The stories of Australian men back in the 1970s spraying  both 2,4-D and agent orange (that was banned) on to crops and weeds without protective masks, footwear and clothing who are deceased or dying from dioxin poisoning still all theses decades later are horribly shocking but must be seen, to convince us of the power of the chemicals industry and how we are still today so compliant in their every day administration.

Am watching this programme whilst typing, therefore some details need to be verified by watching the programme back on I View (given that I'm typing this in somewhat of a hurry).

http://www.abc.net.au/iview/?series=2303988#/series/2303988.

One really insidious aspect is the lack of information about the source of 2,4-D and insufficient testing and regulation abut the presence of dioxin, and the fact that toxicity can be minimised with enough care and attention.  What is astonishing is that the substances supplied by China, and being tested by 4 Corners representatives are allegedly of higher toxicity levels than were being used 20 years ago!

Go to the ABC - 4 Corners link above to watch back this compelling and shocking story.

If this is not sufficient food for thought to get more of us growing our own, or eating organic food, I don't know what is.

At CERES making sustainability fun

T'was a gorgeous mid winter day at CERES today, (for those who don't know it's the local centre for energy research and environmental studies) having lunch with some people.  I learned it's possible to get sun-burnt even in the winter. My friend was clever enough to remember the sunscreen but not I. Was reminded that I must post another blog on to my bloomingandbold blogspot, as it's been a while!

Learning welsh, work,  plus house maintenance (an 80 year old house does keep you occupied keeping everything opening and shutting) plus family commitments mean that one has to scratch a few extra minutes to write on my Converse Conserve.com website and of course here.  Having a firm interest in the ways we share our green messages, I was reading the Age and discovered a band who are off to the Glastonbury festival, who refer to themselves as Eco Minstrels.

They are called the Formidable Vegetable Sound System  (see You tube video) and theirs is a very unique way of promoting permaculture in the form of vegie growing antics, swing, acid jazz and funk.  They speak about their sound and presentation as yet another way of making sustainability fun.  And I think it works! Speaking of home grown produce, tried some persimmons today from a friend's garden - they are very tasty but leave a strange sensation in the mouth.

Bee Sustainable

As my opening lines on this blog are .... without the buzzards and bees where would we all bee .... seems fitting to mention this great shop in 500 Lygon St Brunswick East. called Bee Sustainable, owned by Robert Redpath.

Stocks all manner of bee keeping equipment, products of the hive including a wide array of honeys,  and equipment for domestic food production, plus a plethora of home sustainability books, and gifts. With all the aromatherapy oils in home made soap, and the scent of the beeswax candles you feel like you've left the Garden of Eden, as you exit. They also run workshops concerned with domestic sustainability such as the art of bee keeping, and sourdough bread making.

At that top end of Lygon St precinct there are other seemingly top establishments concerned with sustainability including a couple of organic grocers, a yoga lab, and a vegan meals destination - Vege To Go, Melbourne Food Ingredient depot, plus a vintage bazaar. This strip of shops would rival other shopping strips for having the most shopping options concerned with sustainability, by a long shot!

Best in Show Chelsea Garden Show - Well Done Australian representatives!

Been a while since I posted anything on here.

Congrats are in order for Wes Fleming, and Phillip Johnson who I had the pleasure of meeting at one of our site visits (as part of my Sustainable Landscaping course) on their immense win at the Chelsea Garden show - Best in Show recently.

I remember hearing Wes Fleming on the radio being interviewed and they seemed to be putting weeks of work in to the installations of a garden that is effectively a billabong.

The footage I saw on the above link and at Google Images for the Best In Show garden look interesting - but don't seem to do full justice to the details of the garden itself - they probably need to show more photographs so that the public can fully appreciate the native garden aspects (I believe Western Australian natives were used) and wild-flowers which create wonderful pollination plants. I'm hankering for a close up of the wildflowers.

I take it the boulders are in true Phillip Johnson style going to be reused so that fresh froggy habitats may be created in new locations - but we all need to be mindful of the carbon footprint in transporting these huge boulders.

Green vegetables, vitamin K, candida, vegetarian diets and the need for a professional opinion

This blog isn't usually about diets and our eating habits, but as I am on a paleo/anti candida diet for the forseeable future, I thought I should share my experiences detoxing and with the foods I have been avoiding. As one who has had a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) I feel a duty to share what I know, as I could have died, and I do know someone who died from a DVT at a young age. The problem with the internet is we are all saturated with information which we need to go away and digest (pardon the pun!) and should not necessarily assume that the information applies to all of us. At least you can take away from this post a warning for readers to go and get dietary advice before launching blindly in to a new lifelong diet.

As good little greenies and dieters we are constantly being reminded to eat our vegies and our greens - for lunch and dinner, and how for good health, we just can't get enough of them.  Some of these diets recommend having breakfast with eggs and spinach, salads with tuna, and skin free chook with broccoli for dinner.

Well, my experience with eating loads of leafy greens, broccoli raw, soy foods, and spinach salads is that by the next day I feel very sluggish - so going on to vegie detox will usually make my legs feel 'woody' and that I can't move as quickly as usual. In short I feel like rubbish, and it's different from other detox (flu) symptoms, in that I just feel that blood isn't flowing properly in my body. For someone who likes to keep ultra fit, feeling ordinary and sluggish is always something to be avoided.  So the warning here is that some diets are encouraging us to eat high volumes of green vegetables as well as other foods which are high in Vitamin K. But what people don't realise is that these foods are blood coagulating foods, and therefore if we eat amounts that are higher than the recommend daily allowance, we are possibly contributing to blood clotting issues, especially if we lead a sedentary existence, which in turn can lead to a higher incidence of strokes, dangerous blood clotting and heart attacks. That's why professional advice from a dietician or other professional is so important before switching to any new diet.

The last couple of weeks I had forgotten this mantra and had resumed eating the high 'green' diet that I love as you are not allowed to eat the usual range of foods on this diet and you need something to fill you up apart from salads, fish and meat. Having now researched again that three times the daily allowance for vitamin K can be consumed by having as little as one cup of certain vegetables, I have now adjusted my paleo/candida diet and only having one meal of mixed vegetables per day (whereas previously I was having at least two).   I'm sad to say I'm opting to avoid spinach, broccoli, cabbage and stir-fryable greens. Even one cup of coleslaw is around the recommended daily allowance of vitamin K for women which is 90 micrograms. It is around 120 micrograms for men.  Just a few tablespoons of tabouli (made with parsley) will send you right over the allowance recommended. Egad I love coleslaw and tabouli.  So on this diet I'm temporarily staying off most dairy, bread, most fermented foods, deep fried foods, sweets, cakes, most biscuits and so the list goes on, I also have to give up my favourite vegies!

Here's a link which is mostly written for people taking blood thinning medication but really is something every one consuming a high amount of vegies should be aware of and should do further research about.

Green Roof Basics - beginners classes have arrived

Andrew Ioannidis (architect/builder) and I, Nicolle Kuna (Sustainable landscaping consultant) are planning to run Do It Yourself Build a Roof Garden classes for beginners in coming weeks/months depending on the level of interest. We would anticipate having 6-8 people per class, so not a large group.  It's a great time of year to be thinking of planting up a green roof or roof garden (as it's also known) now that the harsh summer has past.

The contact us feature on this blog doesn't seem to be working so it's best to click on to this contact us address connected with the converseconserve website, for those who are interested. The cost of the classes will be around $12 per hour per person, and the workshops will probably run over 4-5 hours on a Saturday, so we will try to keep the cost to about $60 per person.  The aim of the class is for participants to go away with the basics of building a small roof garden, the materials required, where to buy them, and also a step by step approach to practicing building a green roof. The classes will probably be held in Doncaster East, Melbourne.

The trick with building a green roof is to ensure that you build on to a small surface which no one (dear to you!) is going to be sleeping under, owing to the high chance of leakage! Then once you have constructed your first impermeable roofing layer, and tested it out for water-tightness, perhaps have more than one go at it, and only then consider retrofitting a roof which is intended for human habitation.  The intention of these workshops is to get people familiar with the basics of building a practice green roof.

It's a lot of fun, and in fact the one below only cost around $100 including all materials, but we took care of the labour ourselves.  One tip is to consider creating your first small green roof on a low-lying/ fairly ordinary looking structure where the roof will be visible so you can pretty it up with plants.

This blog comes with a serious warning! Before you can even think of building a green roof on to an existing dwelling in Melbourne,  the roof will need to be retrofitted to bear the weight of the media plus equipped with extremely effective waterproofing layers normally constructed by professionals. Therefore beginners are advised to start with a smaller outdoor structure - and in my case my first green roof was built on to a shed, or another option would be to create a green roof over a sturdy garage. Here are some photos from a green roof which we created on the chicken shed, planted up with a variety of sedums, which are ideal for green roof planting in Australia.

This is how two layers looked: the frame encasing the waterproofing layer and drainage layer.

Here is the green roof with the substrate added on top. Then the next photos show us planting up the green roof and shows you a close-up of the sub-strate (consisting of scoria, sand and organic matter).