Posts under ‘Permaculture’

After some thought and some research, I’ve changed my mind about buying lump charcoal. It really isn’t that hard to make your own but there are some “start-up” costs involved. Humans have been making charcoal for thousands of years and it is likely that the dark soils known as terra preta in the [...]

Biochar, as I wrote in the previous post, is identical to charcoal, at least when viewed under a microscope. What is different about biochar is that to be called that by the International Biochar Intiative, it must be used as a soil amendment for agricultural or environmental gain.
As I wrote in the last [...]

Erich Knight, who commented on my previous post in great detail, supplied some further resources to read and study so that I could better understand this phenomenon called biochar.
The first question that I had was really basic: what is biochar? Well, it isn’t terra preta (terra preta is an Amazonian soil that has [...]

Several years ago, I read an article on something called terra preta. Intrigued, I looked for information out on the Internet and found very little, other than the fact that terra preta is Portuguese for “dark earth” and that the pre-historic inhabitants of the Amazonian rain forest had manufactured it and used it as [...]

I’m catching up on my back issues of Acres, U.S.A. and read an interesting article about something called Conditioned Taste Avoidance (CTA) that can be applied to predators, including coyotes. The idea of CTA has been around for quite some time – it was apparently first investigated by Carl Gustavson in 1974. Because [...]

I first subscribed to Permaculture Activist in May, 1992 and it has proven to be a gold mine of information over the years about the philosophy of permaculture. What is permaculture, anyway? The most concise definition that I can think of is that it is a way of living that applies the rules [...]

I haven’t posted since April 26th, the longest since I started this blog back in September of last year. The reason is that I’m burned out — I’ve delved so deeply into the “conservative” mind that is so prevalent in the religious right that I’ve started to become tarnished by the narrow-minded, ignorant and [...]