Cork: reusable & sustainable

I inherited 3 cork trees with my little house, they are so beautiful … I love them! I also do not like plastics, the Gulf Oil Hemorrage would not be happening if we were not addicted to petroleum & most of its toxic uses.

Cork – One of the most renewable and ecologically friendly materials found anywhere in the world

CORK
Cork is the bark of the cork oak tree (Quercus suber). After the cork bark is harvested from the tree, the bark immediately begins to renew itself. Not a single tree is cut down during harvest. Generally, after nine years of growth the bark is two inches thick. It is often at this point when the tree is re-harvested. Cork trees live 200-500 years.

MORE THAN RENEWABLE
Cork not only begins to renew its bark immediately after harvest but during the trees entire lifespan it is filtering carbon dioxide thereby reducing greenhouse gases. Furthermore, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) “cork oak forests support one of the highest levels of biodiversity among forest habitats, as well as the highest diversity of plants found anywhere in the world”.

NOT GOING EXTINCT
Despite rumours, cork is not going extinct. However, some winemakers are causing the cork habitat to be threatened by converting from real wine corks to synthetic and screw caps. Because of the decrease in use of real wine cork, the value of cork as a raw material has gone down. This may cause cork forest owners to sell their land, which in turn may be converted to alternative use (such as real estate development).

BY USING CORK YOU ARE HELPING OUR PLANET
The more cork that is used, the more value the farmers who own the forests get out of their land, making it less likely they will sell their land for development. By using cork you are helping to preserve the forest habitat and thereby reducing greenhouse gases and contributing to biodiversity among plant and animal life. There are many other benefits, including poverty alleviation (many cork forests are in rural North Africa and are critical to their local economy) and employment.

The construction industry has been quick to embrace cork as an acoustic underlayment in multilevel units and for flooring. The interior design industry is also on the cutting edge with unique uses of cork. Both industries also recognize that cork contributes favorably to the LEED rating system. Please encourage your favorite winemaker to support the natural solution and think how you can integrate cork into your home or office.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Please visit this cork website or this link to the World Wildlife Fund:
http://www.jelinek.com/wwf

Here are some facts I’d like to offer:Less than 1% of all plastic closures in the US are recycled. Plastic closures are not bio-degradable; they are made from petrochemicals, which are neither renewable nor sustainably sourced. Solvents cause leaching in petrochemicals, wine is a solvent. There is an island of plastic …garbage, twice the size of Texas, floating in the Pacific.Screw caps are not recycled in the US, the mechanism used to sort metals eliminates them, and they end up in landfills. Bauxite mining, from which aluminum is made, remains one of the most toxic and environmentally hazardous mining practices.Harvesting of cork is the most environmental and sustainable forestry practice on earth. Natural cork can and is being recycled here in the US; it is not being reused in for wine closures. Opting for screw caps and plastic closures directly causes the loss of sustainable livelihoods as the cork forests are a vital source of income for thousands of family farmers.

So – support the cork forests, buy only wine using real corks. I understand the argument for using synthetic corks since I avhe some 50 year ports where the corks have deteriorated, however the cork forests provide greenery and help our environment. An occasional spoiled bottle of wine due to a bad cork is still better than the plastic world of technology.

Bees in trouble – Mea Culpa!

BEE UPDATE – MAY 23^rd, 2010

Mea Culpa!  I opened the new hive today… and they are starving to death…I think.

They were just lying around on top of the frames, or hanging to the frames, holding each other up, and had no energy even to hardly move; in all it was the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen during a hive inspection.

My excuse is that I haven’t done a split or gotten a nuc in years, & literally forget to feed them!

(I don’t think we even fed the swarms last year.  I hope I wrote up the details anyway…)

I honestly didn’t think to feed them because the first weeks they were very busy going in & out & getting honey & pollen stored up – or so I thought.  This last week of alternate cold & rain was not good for bee flights, so they probably ate everything they had, and today when I opened up the box, there was no honey is sight.

My action plan today was this – to feed them & to add another deep box below that initial super.

I made some sugar syrup, set up the top feeder near the new hive, then I opened the big hive “Queen-of-the-hood” in order to steal a honey frame …But, funny – as I went in – and let me just say that this big hive is stacked high with 2 deeps, then 2 supers on top…well – I couldn’t find hardly any honey in the supers either.  The top super was almost empty – a lot of comb being built with masses of bees working on that project.

The lower super was a brood chamber with very little honey in it!  How did I find that out?  The hard way – there was a lot of hardened propolis holding each frame in & I had to pry hard to get them out,  outer frames full of mostly finished & ready to go wax cells – then when I got near to the center I saw the first batch of closed brood cells, with lots of bees in attendance so I wondered at that – but – kept going to the center 2 frames, where – instead of it being yet more tough propolis holding them in, I made a huge effort to free the frame & behold!…(there was a too-big space between those 2 frames) & the 2 frames were actually stuck together with rogue brood comb built sideways!  Yikes, big plump white larvae now broken open all over… and as I pulled that frame out to look closer, I realized that I was not seeing any big honey stash areas anywhere.

I went further in & worked the top deep box a bit – looking for honey stash, but again – so much propolis to unstick & tough to move carefully with the effort required to pull a frame apart…and, because I had now killed both brood & bees, they were all fighting mad.  Nervously I began to close it all up, leaving out 2 smaller frames with some brood & lots of bees clinging.  I put those into the weak new hive, laid the feeder on top, filled it with syrup & closed it up.  I also fed them from the bottom with honey on a stiff plastic “tray”, which I slid into their open door.  I think I may have seen their queen, looking very weak, and she is not looking healthy.  Bigger than the rest with a long black abdomen.  Geez, what a sad & exhausting day’s work.  If I was a drinking woman, I’d be having a shot right now!

So – Tuesday – before I leave on my vacation, I’ll recheck that hive (hope it is warm enough) – at least I’ll feed them again.  Fingers crossed, head bowed, I ask for forgiveness from the Queen & Her colony.

Monday – May 24^th – The day after heartbreak…

I closed the entrance up last night with a reducer, and today there is a lot of activity out front – it is robbers & fighting & hopefully – the hive springing to life.

This morning also at least one disappointing discovery – the top feeder is leaking…yes, you know the signs-  syrup running down the side of the hive, making an attractive pool of sweet on the ground – attractive to ants, that is!  I sprayed the whole area & around the base of the hive stand with my garden spray – Neem Oil & Dr. Bronners.  So far (it is now 2pm) there are no ants around the hive, and no dead bees in the sprayed areas, so this is a good measure to remember!  Today is warm & dry, so I am happy about that.  There appears to be nectar somewhere around because a lot of flights are taking off in the general westerly direction.  The other 2 colonies are making their tidy take-off’s & landings all this warm day, while the Newhive fights & tumbles off  their landing board…

The other worry is that there appears to be bright yellow bee diarrhea running down the front of the hive as well as many large spots of it on the top.  Is this because they were stuck inside until they got fed, or do they have some disease?  Gosh, I hope not!

As I prepare to leave for 2 weeks, I am making some more syrup, got the extra feeder into the hive & will double their food up for this week – expected to be cold & rainy yet again…it is clouding up right now!  Got to go and feed my girls…

Why Planting Farms in Skyscrapers Won’t Solve Our Food Problems

Why Planting Farms in Skyscrapers Won’t Solve Our Food Problems

By Stan Cox and David Van Tassel |

Agriculture in America has become an ecological, social and nutritional disaster of sufficiently huge scale to inspire a frenzy of book-writing, filmmaking, conference-holding and project-initiating in recent years. The critiques that emerge are often right on the money, highlighting pesticide and nitrate pollution, soil erosion, the consequences of meat production in feedlots and confinement sheds, the destruction of rural communities and the poor nutritional quality of food. But the solutions being proposed have not, for the most part, been of the same scale as the problems; most would do little more than nibble at the edges of America’s long-running agricultural fiasco.

A striking example of such ill fit between problem and proposed response can be found in the November 2009 issue of Scientific American, where Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health and environmental health sciences at Columbia University, made his case for what he calls “vertical farms,” a vision he promotes through his site verticalfarm.com.

After doing a very good job of describing the terrible toll that agriculture takes on soil, water, and biodiversity across the globe, Despommier’s article lays out a proposal to replace soil-based farming with a system of producing food crops in tall urban buildings-to, he writes, “grow crops indoors, under rigorously controlled conditions, in vertical farms. Plants grown in high-rise buildings erected on now vacant city lots and in large, multistory rooftop greenhouses could produce food year-round using significantly less water, producing little waste, with less risk of infectious diseases, and no need for fossil-fueled machinery or trans¬port from distant rural farms.”

Despommier describes how one of his scenarios-which are based on the use of hydroponic or “aeroponic” methods of growing plants without soil-might work: “Let us say that each floor of a vertical farm offers four growing seasons, double the plant density, and two layers per floor-a multiplying factor of 16 (4 _ 2 _ 2). A 30-story building covering one city block could therefore produce 2,400 acres of food (30 stories _ 5 acres _ 16) a year.” By extrapolating numbers like those and assuming extraordinary leaps in technology, as well as the repeal of Murphy’s Law, he has made such a convincing case for vertical farms that, he claims, “many developers, investors, mayors and city planners have become advocates.” Time magazine has run a generally positive story on the concept. And an Australian architect is currently planning to build the first full-scale vertical farm, in China.

The idea for vertical agriculture grows out of the realization that there are not enough exposed horizontal surfaces available in most urban areas to produce the quantities of food needed to feed urban populations. Although the concept has provided opportunities for architecture students and others to create innovative, sometimes beautiful building designs, it holds little practical potential for providing food. Even if vertical farming were feasible on a large scale, it would not solve the most pressing agricultural problems; rather, it would push the dependence of food production on industrial inputs to even greater heights. It would ensure that dependence by depriving crops not only of soil but also of the most plentiful and ecologically benign energy source of all: sunlight.