Tag Archives: summer

Get a Head Start on Planning Your Organic Salad Garden

by AureliaMargolin Posted on March 4, 2016

You don’t need to wait until the spring thaw to start planning your summer garden. In fact, now is a great time to get the process going so you can beginharvesting and eating vegetables and herbs you grow yourself in as little as two months. Here’s how:

1) Make a plan. Keep it simple, and focus on vegetables you actually like to eat. For example, don’t grow broccoli if you hate the stuff. If you just want a salad garden, consider different lettuces, spinach and other greens. Cucumbers, tomatoes and onions are all easy options depending on where you live. And don’t forget herbs like basil, oregano and thyme.

2) Select your growing space. Is it a garden plot, raised beds or containers on a porch or patio? The amount of space you have will determine what you can grow, how much you can grow and how much variety you can have.

3) Knowhow muchdirect sunlight you have. Most vegetables need at least 4-6 hours of direct sunlight to thrive. You may have a lot of sunlight in the spring before shade trees leaf out, but come summer, not nearly enough sun. Plan accordingly, so that when you transplant your seedlings, you’ll be putting them into a space where they can thrive.

4) Pick organic, non-GMO seeds.Companies like High Mowing Seeds, the Sustainable Seed Company and Seeds of Change offer seeds for any vegetable or herb you’d want to grow. Consider heirloom seeds while you’re at it; they often have a deeper flavor than more conventional veggies. Plus, heirlooms may be more resistant to pests and drought conditions if they’ve evolved in the region where you’re planting them.

5) Start seedlings 6 weeks before you can put them outside, which in most locales is the day of the last anticipated frost in your region. Fill plantable peat pots with compost-rich soil and plant a seed in each one so you can plant them directly in the ground when they’re ready. Keep them moist to the touch; you don’t want to overwater. The seeds will need to be placed in a very sunny window or under grow lights to sprout and develop strong enough roots sothey can easily be transplanted when the time comes.

6) Get your garden soil ready with compost. At the same time you plant your seedlings indoors, start adding well-decomposed compost to the soil outdoors. The richer your soil is with biological nutrients, the better your seedlings will thrive.

7) Be vigilant. Nature has a way of surprising gardeners with an unexpected frost. Once you do transplant your seedlings, be on the alert for temperatures that unexpectedly drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit overnight. You can protect your seedlings with a lightweight garden tarp suspended over the plants so it doesn’t crush them, empty and clean glass jars that create a little greenhouse over each seedling,

8) Harvest young plants. Don’t wait until a head of lettuce or a crop of spinach is “full size” before you start enjoying it. One of the benefits of planting seedlings is that they’re pretty tasty when they’re young; in fact, for some plants, the earlier you harvest and eat them the better. If you wait until the weather gets really warm and the greens “bolt” and start to flower, you’ve waited too long.

Related
The Art of Composting
Start a Bag Garden

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Get a Head Start on Planning Your Organic Salad Garden

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Here’s the Latest on Flint’s Water

by LemuelForster5 Posted on February 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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How is Flint doing these days? Here’s the most recent report from Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services:

Blood lead levels tend to be seasonal, going up in the summer thanks to old lead in the soil getting kicked up during dry weather. As you can see, those summer peaks have been higher than normal since 2014 thanks to the ongoing contamination of Flint’s water supply. However, the 2015 summer peak was below the 2014 peak, and the Q4 level for 2015 is below the Q4 level for 2014. This suggests pretty strongly that Flint’s water pipes are returning to their pre-crisis state.

And how many houses still have lead concentrations above the EPA’s “action level” of 15 parts per billion? According to the residential testing report through Sunday, 786 out of 11,785 homes tested had levels above 15 ppb. That’s 6.7 percent. About 140 homes had levels above 100 ppb and 19 were above 1,000 ppb.

This is….sort of normal, actually. The number of homes with very high lead levels is unusual and needs to addressed immediately, but the overall number of 6.7 percent above the action level is well within the federal limit of 10 percent. Flint’s water appears to be in fairly good shape, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the 2016 summer spike is no higher than it was before 2014.

But nobody trusts the EPA or the Michigan DEQ, so probably none of this matters. If I lived in one of the 11,000 houses in Flint that tested below 15 ppb, I’d drink the water. But it’s hard to blame the residents for feeling otherwise.

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Here’s the Latest on Flint’s Water

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The New Jason Bourne Trailer Just Premiered During the Super Bowl. Here It Is.

by BorisCritchfield Posted on February 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The new Jason Bourne movie stars Matt Damon again. Will Hunting took a break from the series a few years ago and the last one starred Jeremy Renner, but he’s back now because money can be exchanged for goods and services. This one looks pretty good! It comes out this summer.

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The New Jason Bourne Trailer Just Premiered During the Super Bowl. Here It Is.

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Factoid of the Day: The IMF is 0 for 220 In Predicting Recessions

by DomingoHeidelber Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Larry Summer points us to this remarkable statistic:

Forecasts of all sorts are especially bad at predicting downturns. Over the period 1999-2014, there were 220 instances in which an economy grew in one year before shrinking in the next. In its April forecasts the IMF never once foresaw the contraction looming in the next year. Even in October of the year in question, the IMF predicted that a recession had begun only half the time.

I guess no one likes to be the skunk at the party, even the IMF. But I wonder who did better at predicting recessions? Goldman Sachs? The CIA? A hedge fund rocket scientist in Connecticut? Whoever it is, it sounds like the IMF might want to look them up.

UPDATE: It gets better! Via Twitter, Mark Gimein points me to Prakash Loungani’s article 15 years ago about recession predictions during the 1990s:

How well did private forecasters do in predicting recessions in these cases? Quite simply, the record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished. Only two of the 60 recessions that occurred around the world during the 1990s were predicted a year in advance.

….If private sector growth forecasts are of little use in spotting recessions, why not use the forecasts provided free by the official sector?…There is not much to choose between private sector and official sector forecasts. Statistical “races” between the two tend to end up in a photo-finish in most cases.

Loungani doesn’t provide a precise number for IMF predictions, but he implies it’s roughly the same as private-sector predictions: 2 out of 60. If that’s the case, the IMF has gotten even worse since then. A hit rate of 3.3 percent might be pretty lousy, but at least it’s better than 0 percent.

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Factoid of the Day: The IMF is 0 for 220 In Predicting Recessions

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Jeb Abandons Jeb!

by wlqclksxq Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Perfect last-minute Christmas present for the low-energy person in your life who needs an extra exclamation point: Jeb!

Not the candidate, just his name—upbeat punctuation mark and all. The word has apparently lost its appeal. Even to the candidate.

Last winter, months before Jeb Bush announced he was running for president, a Miami intellectual property attorney filed a trademark request for the word “Jeb!” on behalf of a mysterious Delaware corporation called BHAG LLC. As we discovered this summer, BHAG was an acronym for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. This phrase came from one of Bush’s favorite business management books, and when he was governor he used this term to motivate his underlings. It wasn’t until Bush, as a declared candidate, filed his financial disclosure form in July that the world learned he directly owned BHAG.

One of BHAG’s few activities was to trademark “Jeb!” As is par for the course, the US Patent and Trademark Office accepted the submission and requested additional information before it would grant the trademark. But according to that office, on November 9 Bush’s application was officially abandoned. Technically, Bush has until January 9 to restart the process, but for now the name is not trademarked and open for anyone else to try to grab.

According to the original application, Bush wanted the name reserved for use on leather key chains, stadium cushions, stemware, stuffed toys, hair bands, and other cool stuff. In April, the USPTO asked BHAG to provide, within six months, written consent from Bush himself to use his name. Bush never responded. So the USPTO issued an abandonment notice regarding the trademark request.

Bush’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

To be fair, Bush has had many other things to worry about these past few months. But his chief antagonist, Donald Trump, did find the time to re-up his hold on “Trump,” and he added a trademark claim to cover the use of his name for books on how to succeed in business and politics.

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Jeb Abandons Jeb!

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Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

by RefugioDurbin Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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After four years of drought, Californians are bracing for another potentially destructive weather event: El Niño. Earlier this week, FEMA released a disaster plan including what to expect from the upcoming rainy season. Here are the key takeaways:

This may be the strongest El Niño on record. Weather reports indicate that this year will be warm and wet—perhaps even more so than the winter of 1997-1998, which is currently the strongest recorded El Niño. That year, California evacuated 100,000 people.
The dry conditions mean more flooding. The lack of soil moisture has made the soil “harden and act like cement,” making it, paradoxically, less likely to soak up the rain. The chance of flooding is far higher than usual, especially in the productive farm country of Central Valley and the surrounding area—including America’s the state’s capital. “The primary risk areas are in populated areas mostly notably in Sacramento,” the report reads—and because of that, “a major flood situation would have significant impact on the economic, cultural, and political life of California.” Additionally, a catastrophic levee failure in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta would jeopardize a major source of water for 60 percent of California homes and for a portion of the state’s agricultural industry.” One in five Californians lives in a flood zone.
Wildfires in the summer mean more landslides in the winter. The wildfire season this year was devastating in California, scorching more than 300,000 acres. Mudslides are common in these scorched areas, called “burn scars,” because water quickly runs off and there aren’t trees to keep the soil, rocks, and other debris in place. Southern Californians got a little taste of what this might look like when rain led to severe landslides in October.
King Tides, El Niño, and the Blob mean higher sea levels and more potential damage. Sea levels typically rise a few inches during El Niño, but this winter, scientists predict that the giant swath of warm water off the West Coast dubbed the Blob will lead to a rise of between 8 and 11 inches. State officials are particularly concerned about the potential damage caused by storms towards the end of both December and January, when the highest tides of the winter, called King Tides, are expected.
The rains may ease the drought, but won’t solve it. All this water will certainly ease the drought and raise levels in the state’s depleted reservoirs. But because the state is so behind on precipitation, it’s very unlikely that it will make up for the state’s now four-year water deficit.

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Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

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We need better home energy storage. These companies are working on it

by DorthySilver Posted on September 17, 2015

We need better home energy storage. These companies are working on it

By on 17 Sep 2015commentsShare

Earlier this summer, serial game-changer Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Powerall, a home energy storage device designed to give people energy independence and thus usher in the solar age. The announcement came only after Musk first revealed his deep distaste for existing batteries — namely that they “suck,” tend to be “stinky,” “ugly,” and are just “bad in every way.”

But Musk isn’t the only one who feels this way. Practical home energy storage, while not the sexiest of technologies, is crucial to the very sexy concept of off-grid living. And with more and more households installing solar panels, the home battery market is only going to get bigger. MIT Technology Review has the scoop on some other companies getting in on the action:

This week at the Solar Power International show, in Anaheim, a company called SimpliPhi Power is unveiling a lightweight battery system for homes and small businesses that offers a longer life span than other lithium-ion batteries and doesn’t require expensive cooling and ventilation systems.

SimpliPhi’s bid comes a few weeks after another energy storage provider, Orison, released its design for a small plug-and-play battery system that, unlike the SimpliPhi and Powerwall options, does not require elaborate installation or permits for a home or small commercial setting.

Orison will be launching a Kickstarter campaign to produce its first batch of batteries, which it plans to start distributing sometime next year, Technology Review reports. The unit will cost about $1,600 and have a 2 kWh capacity, compared to the $3,000, 7 kWh Powerwall (the average household in the U.S. uses about 30 kWh per day). Both of these options are pretty expensive, but the hope is that home storage costs will go down over time. SimpliPhi hasn’t revealed prices yet, but according to its website, it has residential units with 2.6 kWh and 3.4 kWh capacity.

Of course, it’s no good having batteries that solve an environmental problem, if they’re just going to cause another. Back in 2013, the EPA did a life cycle assessment of lithium-ion batteries — the kinds that all three companies are using — and found that the lithium-ion batteries that contain nickel and cobalt tend to have the most environmental impact:

These impacts include resource depletion, global warming, ecological toxicity, and human health impacts. The largest contributing processes include those associated with the production, processing, and use of cobalt and nickel metal compounds, which may cause adverse respiratory, pulmonary, and neurological effects in those exposed. There are viable ways to reduce these impacts, including cathode material substitution, solvent-less electrode processing, and recycling of metals from the batteries.

So before any of these emerging companies take over the market, it’s worth asking what kinds of materials they use in their batteries and what impacts those materials might have on the environment. Technology Review gets us part of the way there:

Orison’s products will use a lithium manganese cobalt battery from a supplier that CEO Eric Clifton declines to name. SimpliPhi, on the other hand, is using a relatively new battery chemistry known as lithium iron phosphate. The absence of cobalt in the cathode makes lithium iron phosphate batteries less subject to material shortages (cobalt is scarce and expensive) and, more important, less prone to heating up—a problem with lithium-ion batteries, which have shown an alarming tendency to go into thermal runaway (uncontrolled heating that can destroy the battery) or even catch fire.

In the meantime, we can all fantasize about a day when low-cost clean, efficient batteries are the norm, and living “off-grid” won’t mean having to settle for ugly batteries or life in one of these super low-energy hell-pods.

Source:

Home Energy Storage Enters a New Era

, MIT Technology Review.

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Sorry, I Don’t Know Why Murder Rates Are Up In a Bunch of Big Cities

by TKICheriugkxd Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve gotten enough requests to comment on this piece from the New York Times that I guess I’d better do so:

Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year — after 86 homicides in all of 2014.

More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago. In New Orleans, 120 people had been killed by late August, compared with 98 during the same period a year earlier. In Baltimore, homicides had hit 215, up from 138 at the same point in 2014. In Washington, the toll was 105, compared with 73 people a year ago. And in St. Louis, 136 people had been killed this year, a 60 percent rise from the 85 murders the city had by the same time last year.

Law enforcement experts say disparate factors are at play in different cities, though no one is claiming to know for sure why murder rates are climbing. Some officials say intense national scrutiny of the use of force by the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals, though many experts dispute that theory.

The reason I haven’t said anything about this until now is that I had nothing to say. I have no more idea what’s driving this increase than anyone else.

But what about lead? Here’s the problem: gasoline lead explains one thing and one thing only. And that thing is the huge violent crime wave of 1960-1990 followed by the equally huge drop of 1990-2010. But that’s over. What we’re left with now is the baseline level of violent crime, which obviously wouldn’t be zero even if there were no lead in the environment at all. And the causes of this baseline level of violent crime are all the usual suspects: poverty, race, drugs, policing, guns, demographics, and so forth. A more detailed explanation is here. At this point, lead is a very small contributor to the crime level.

It’s also worth pointing out that crime figures, and murder figures in particular, are extremely noisy. Lead explains long-term shifts. It doesn’t explain short-term spikes or (in most cases) differences from one city to another. The current increase in murder rates could be due to lots of things, or it could just be the usual noise in the numbers. Maybe they’ll go right back down next year.

But I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that lead is playing no particular role in this, either good or bad.

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Sorry, I Don’t Know Why Murder Rates Are Up In a Bunch of Big Cities

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Mutant Super Lice May Be Coming to a School Near You

by ReganV32die Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the summer closing out its final weeks, kids around the US are packing up their book-bags, collecting their colored pencils and heading back to school. But, amidst the excitement, parents have a new worry: super lice.

Lice infestations typically affect up to 12 million kids ages 3 to 11 each year. But, in 25 states, the blood-eating parasites that make their homes in hair and are commonly spread in classrooms have become resistant to most over-the-counter treatment methods, according to a new study.

Lice populations in the states in pink have developed a high level of resistance to some of the most common treatments. Kyong Yoon, Ph.D.

“We are the first group to collect lice samples from a large number of populations across the U.S.,” researcher Kyong Yoon said in a statement published with the study, which was presented at the American Chemical Society. “What we found was that 104 out of the 109 lice populations we tested had high levels of gene mutations, which have been linked to resistance to pyrethroids.”

Pyrethroids, insecticides that can be bought in FDA-approved shampoo-form from a pharmacy, have long been go-to treatments for lice infestations.

Overuse, Yoon found, could be to blame for the loss in the insecticides’ effectiveness — and the problem has been growing for years. While the latest study used the largest survey of the data on lice in the United States, the super lice problem was identified back in the 1990’s.

Still, Yoon’s study—and the alarm that resulted from it—has been scrutinized by other scientists who say it’s not time to panic yet. While Yoon concluded many of the lice had genetic mutations that made them less sensitive to the insecticides, traditional treatment methods may still be enough to kill them. As Medpage Today reports:

“The relationship between clinical and genetic resistance is still debated,” said Rémy Durand, PharmD, PhD, HDR, a researcher in the Department of Parasitology and Mycology at Hôpital Avicenne in Paris, France. While kdr mutations are well known for their effects on insecticide resistance in many insect species, Durand pointed out that some limited studies have actually reported that the presence of these “mutant alleles” in lice did not correlate with clinical failure.

Should we fear the rise of mutant lice? The good news, health officials report, is that the critters aren’t dangerous and they don’t spread disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends the over-the-counter treatments, followed by prescription-strength remedies if that doesn’t knock them out.

Still, Yoon’s findings serve as an important warning that extends beyond louse-removal:

“If you use a chemical over and over, these little creatures will eventually develop resistance,” Yoon says. “So we have to think before we use a treatment.”

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Mutant Super Lice May Be Coming to a School Near You

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Republicans Is Weird, Summer 2015 Edition

by KishaLeatherman Posted on July 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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No, this isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about Sen. Mike Lee of Utah—who plans to offer yet another amendment to repeal Obamacare, but this time with a special super-duper secret sauce added to the upcoming highway funding bill:

Lee said he will try to re-offer the Obamacare repeal as a special amendment that is directly related to highway funding. Under Senate rules, amendments that are directly related, or germane, to the underlying legislation can pass with just 51 votes.

Lee knows that the chair of the Senate is likely to reject his logic that Obamacare repeal is germane to highway funding, so he plans to use the nuclear option. That means he will formally object to the ruling of the chair, which requires a 51-vote simple majority — then he plans to move on to the coveted simple majority vote.

….If his plan works, Lee gets to tell his supporters that he’s responsible for a major vote to kill the health care law he reviles. The House voted to repeal the law in February, so the two chambers could then theoretically conference the bills — leaving it up to Obama to veto a bill to kill his own signature policy achievement.

So the plan is simple: have Republicans declare ex cathedra that repeal of Obamacare is germane to highway funding, and then pass Lee’s amendment with 51 votes. It’s brilliant! All that’s missing are the sharks with lasers attached to their heads!

Aside from being mind-numbingly stupid1, it also won’t work. Democrats will just filibuster the entire highway bill, or else they’ll vote for it and then Obama will veto the entire mess. Result: Obamacare stays in place but our highways continue to crumble into dust. Nice work, Senator! It’s good to see that the Republican Party remains committed to the sober, responsible kind of leadership that makes our great nation the envy of the world.

1It’s times like this that I regret the recent banishment of “retarded” from polite conversation. Because I think we all know that it’s the word that really fits here.2

2Though I suppose there’s no reason to insult the developmentally disabled by comparing them to Mike Lee.

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Republicans Is Weird, Summer 2015 Edition

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