The Edible Plant Project

The Edible Plant Project is a new organization in Gainesville to help promote "edible landscaping and local food abundance in North Central Florida."

I'm ready to raze my camellias for some fig trees, now.

Hankie-Pankie -- Not Just for Presidential Candidates Anymore!

Just a quick post about this hankie holder I made awhile back. My original intention was to use it with cloth handkerchiefs. It's cloth on the outside with a plastic liner. I made the holder and then used it with paper tissues instead! I'd take tissues from the box and fold them up. I didn't have the wherewithal to make any hankies for it.

Then, the other day I had an epiphany. I already had the hankies, they were DJ's old diaper wipes when I did cloth diapers for about 5 minutes when he was a baby. These are really nice, organic flannel squares, serged all around. They're really sturdy, and are the perfect size. As you can see in the photo, I have them rolled up on one side and as I use them, I place them in the other compartment, and then from there I just dump the whole thing into the wash.

How am I doing with them? The results are mixed right now. Not being the season where I'm sniffling constantly, and I'm still reaching for toilet paper or napkins when I need to use a hankie. It's a habit I have to break, and I think as the winter comes and I start needing to use handkerchiefs, the true test of whether I can successfully switch from paper hankies to cloth will occur.

More on Trash Vortex/Garbage Gyre/Great Pacific Garbage Patch

During a recent trip to the gym, DG and I discussed my recent post about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP, but known affectionately by readers of the AE as the Garbage Gyre), and we decided that what was needed was to band together a couple of thousand volunteers, a couple of thousand kayaks made from recycled plastic, and some big 0l' sugar mommy/daddy with the capital to ship us all over to the drop spot with 10 or so garbage barges that we can use to clean up the dang thing. I really think that's the only way this is going to happen, since no country wants to claim ownership of this monstrosity, yet every nation has probably contributed to it.

I'm not a big fan of TreeHugger.com, because they contribute to the whole notion of saving the environment through buying more junk you don't really need, because it's "green" junk. But, having said that, they have a couple of really great pieces about the GPX2. The first is something they did in February titled "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Out of Sight, Out of Mind," that describes what it is very succinctly. One commenter even links to a Flickr photo of the GPX2 which is mind-blowing in size. Then, in April of this year, they did another article about the gyre, "VBS.tv Sails Out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," and had links to the videos. There are 12 episodes in all, and I encourage everyone to watch at least the first episode of "Garbage Island."

Photo is of VBS.tv correspondent Thomas Morton with the catch of the day -- plastic garbage-- via Treehugger.com

Trash vortex

I finally connected with Jane Genovese of Live the Solution.com and she stated that the photograph of the poster from Fremantle was not hers, either. Too bad! I thought I'd solved the riddle.

Anyway, so I was hunting around on the internets for another clue to solve this Scooby-Doo mystery of the Fremantle poster photograph and stumbled on This Way Up e-zine, a site that "prompts the positive, kindles the constructive, highlights the hopeful and leaves you feeling - well, up!" Besides the fact that that in itself makes the site kind of annoying, they did have a good article on the Trash Vortex, something DG and I have been trying to get information on. Two years back, DG posted on what she called "garbage gyres," a supposedly enormous island of plastic garbage floating out in the Pacific. When we started the Need-a-Bag? Project we looked for information for our educational literature on the garbage gyre, but found nothing. So, imagine my happy surprise when I discovered an article on This Way Up about it, entitled "Do Something Drastic, Cut the Plastic." I'm really falling in love with that phrase, by the way.

Here's a pullout from that article:

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting 'soup' stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' or 'trash vortex', believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: 'The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size of the continental United States.'

So, doesn't that make you want to take up the oar of a kayak and go out and start cleaning up? It does to me. Why aren't we doing anything about this???

I looked around some more and found this interview from The International Plastics Task Force with the oceanographer who discovered the trash vortex, Charles Moore. He has a very good explanation for this:

We can't regulate it any of us on our own. The center of the
oceans, no one owns it and it's very difficult to get the nations of the
world to agree on a protocol for rehabilitating a place where theirs no
fishery.

Well how about this for a reason to agree on a protocol: IT'S KILLING THE OCEANS!!!

The search for the source of the Fremantle poster continues...

Got the picture from This Way Up e-zine

Need-a-Bag? Project Update 08.02.08

Note: The Need-a-Bag? project was created to promote sustainable bagging at the Hwy 441 Alachua County Farmer's Market each Saturday morning. We supply reusable tote bags reclaimed from thrift stores and garage sales. The Need-a-Bag? project also utilizes old tank tops as tote bags by sewing up the bottoms (these are called t-totes). We invite you to read the other posts on the project by clicking the "Need-a-Bag? Project" label at the bottom of this post.

The summer has been really rough on the project; between our family taking trips and my having to work some weekends and DG visiting with various peeps, it feels like we haven't been at the farmer's market at all. Last week was probably the worst it was going to get; I went to Seaworld with the fam, and DG was in Tampa. Neither of us showed up at the farmer's market, something that has never happened in the almost-year we've been doing this project. DG felt that we had betrayed the Need-a-Bag? Project promise, but I chalk it up to summertime, especially in Gainesville, where people operate in a different time zone, anyway (and, no, that wouldn't be the 4:20 time zone).

We put out 12 bags, most of which DG procured while in Tampa, and some kind soul left us 3 bags from last week. Or maybe it was the week before, because we didn't come last week...

Got the photo of the Believe Shamu show at Seaworld from nowt2do.com
and yes, I really do believe a person can get tossed 20 feet in the air by a killer whale

Americans Drive 9.6 billion miles less in May, Nova: Car of the Future, and ZipCar

There is this freaky story from Monday on MSNBC about Americans driving less with gas prices skyrocketing. Americans are driving 9.6 billion miles less this past May than a year ago at that same time. Nine point six billion miles. I don't know if that blows your mind but it certainly does mine. That, to me, seems huge. This is major adjustment for a lot of Americans. We've been doing pretty well with one car, but we basically live close enough to most of places that we can bicycle.

I haven't watched the recent Nova series, Car of the Future with the Tappet brothers from NPR's Car Talk, but I thought anything that stars Tom and Ray Magliozzi has to be funny, entertaining and, if it's on Nova, educational. Okay, maybe their cartoon, As the Wrench Turns, leaves something to be desired, but whatever.

I was cycling to work yesterday afternoon and on my usual route I happened to notice a Honda Element that was designated as a ZipCar. I found this rather exciting because I wasn't sure we had ZipCars in Gainesville. ZipCar is a car sharing operation where you can get a car for about $7/hr or $70/day, and that includes insurance, gas, 180 miles, and reserved parking. Gainesville is apparently one of the places in the United States where you can reserve ZipCars for personal use. I think it's run through the University of Florida; I found a page on the UF webite here detailing the monetary breakdown for the university, and it does state that private citizens can use this service. How cool is that? As an experiment, I might try to use one; I think the old man has a ZipCard through the university.