Humble Garden

Meet Nibblet! One of our new LaMancha baby goats.

Our goats have begun to deliver their babies. We had 3 arrive yesterday alone. Sort of tiring! I have posted a Flickr slideshow below for your viewing pleasure.

To get rid of the tiny thumbnails along the bottom of that slideshow, just pass your cursor over the display.

If you can not see that, click here to go to that flickr set.

I thought I would share a little about this guy Jean Pain who completely and most effectively hacked the DIY energy thing some time back! Obviously, the world has NOT been paying attention (as old timers know well).

In a nut shell, Pain was a forester in France who noticed the mighty thermal output of microbial action on composting materials. He proceeded to harness this heat by rigging large mounds of shredded brush (from his management of the forests) with an internal methane producing biomass bioreactor and heat capture coils built into the mound structure.

[A winner was selected, congrats Genevieve! I wish I could send each of you a copy!]

I got to know the author of Grocery Gardening, Jean Ann Van Krevelen, a little bit via twitter (she is @jeanannvk). With a few 140 character strings and lots of other people also tweeting, she brought my awareness to this great book.

The premise of the book is to help people gain the knowledge they need to begin to grow their own food.

[If you would like to volunteer for this effort, please drop me an email at nika dot boyce at gmail dot com and I will get you into our PermaCorp volunteer database and keep you up to date]

Like you, I have been simply swept away by the brutal earthquake that has subsumed Haiti into a hell that gets worse by the day.

I have been mostly learning about it via CNN and on twitter. I have been pouring over the satellite images of the destruction as seen in Google Earth.