Renewable Energy: Solar

nmsuaces video: Renewable Energy: Solar Panel System Components Using a demonstration model, NMSU Professor Thomas Jenkins describes the different components of a home photovoltaic system that also includes battery storage. More

Step By Step Aquaponic Greenhouse Trickle System.

This is a unique, attractive aquaponic system, designed and built by miotch007. The Step By Step Aquaponic Greenhouse Trickle System is unique because the grow bed is a greenhouse/aquaponic bed all in one. Watch the video on YouTube.

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Fighting for Scraps

... illustrates why we cannot let the "market rule" or ourselves become too busy, self-preoccupied or ambitious to forget ~ cooperation, communication, outreach, human solidarity ~ and let survival, in Primo Levi's words, become a defining "Gray Zone" ~ or, for that matter, tolerate a social system that encourages it. Levi's concern remains real: what has happened once (somewhere else), can happen again (anywhere). It is also why we must remember and tell the stories: the "saved" mus speak for the "drowned." Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times writes about lives reduced to Fighting for Scraps:

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi describes an experience that fatally undermined many of his fellow condemned at Auschwitz. Entering the death camp, he had hoped, he wrote, "at least for the solidarity of one’s companions in misfortune." Instead, there were "a thousand sealed-off monads, and between them a desperate covert and continuous struggle." This was what Levi called the "Gray Zone," where the "network of human relationships" "could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors," and where "the enemy was all around but also inside."

It may seem grotesquely inappropriate to recall Levi's struggles for survival in a Nazi camp while thinking of the apparently self-reliant individualists of a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai's airport, the setting of Katherine Boo's extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family. After all, these plucky "slumdogs" may be ~ in at least one recent fantasy ~ India's next millionaires, part of the lucky 1 percent able to savor the five-star hotels that loom over Annawadi. Certainly, as noted by Boo, a staff writer at The New Yorker who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000, when she was a journalist at The Washington Post "they are not considered poor" by "official" Indian benchmarks; they are "among roughly 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991," when the central government "embraced economic liberalization," "part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism," in which a self-propelling economic system is geared to reward motivated and resourceful individuals with personal wealth.

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#Mountainair #CommunityGarden meeting

Sat Feb11, 10am, Alpine Alley

 

Visit and "like" the Mountainair Community Garden on Facebook 

To Discuss: 

What will we be planting next year?

Medicinal garden

Starts for resale

Adopt-a-plot progress and future

Other?

Contact Addie Draper, addiemdraper@wildblue.net.com, for information or to add items to agenda. 

(x-posted to Mountainair Announcements and iCreate, NM)

Video: A Community Garden for Refugees in Atlanta

When traveling through Atlanta, The Perennial Plate stopped at a very diverse community garden called the Jolly Avenue Community Garden run by the Friends of Refugees. The collaborative garden allows refugee members to grow their own food and till their own land. You'll find vegetable patches of Iraqis, Burmese, Nepalese and many others, including a lovely Bhutanese family that shared their story and a home cooked meal with us.

by Daniel Klein, at Serious Eats, February 7, 2012. For more videos and recipes visit www.theperennialplate.com

#Mountainair Music: iCreate violin & guitar lessons & more

iCreate violin & guitar lessons return to the Shaffer Hotel Tuesdays and Thursdays 4-5 pm. Unfamiliar with the music outreach program? Simple: music for everyone. Lessons are free (donations welcomed) for local students of all ages, loan instruments available. Earn a certificate and instrument or music paraphernalia by completing a course, learning pieces, creating one of your own and performing at an iCreate recital.

Mountainair Arts: #Mountainair Music: iCreate violin & guitar lessons & more

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Winter #gardening to do list & tips

#Mountainair gardeners are getting ready for spring. So are the Community Garden and Farm & Garden Market. Both have scheduled February meetings with the community garden scheduled for February 11, 10 am, at Alpine Alley and MFGM for February 25, 4 pm, at Mountain Arts on Broadway.

In the meantime, here are some tips and information for the winter gardener dreaming of spring ~ and a source worth bookmarking for future reference.

It's dark, it's cold, but that doesn't mean you can't work in the garden! GardenWise Online provides you with a to-do list to get you started on your garden for the new year.

FOOD GARDEN, GREENHOUSE/SEEDS, COMPOST, TREES, FRUIT TREES, SHRUBS & PERENNIALS, SHRUBS & PERENNIALS

Start creating your garden for 2012. Beds should run north-south for best exposure; a little planning for what you will grow and where increases yields and you won’t be running around in May shoe-horning plants willy-nilly!

To get the most out of your space, think about how much zucchini you will use and what vegetables and fruits you and your family actually eat. How much time will you spend growing food? A few things for you to ponder:

Now read about GREENHOUSE/SEEDS, COMPOST, TREES, FRUIT TREES, SHRUBS & PERENNIALS, SHRUBS & PERENNIALS and the rest of the January garden to-do list: Winter gardening tips from GardenWise

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