Earth Battery-Joule Thief Runs 48 Inch Tube (40 watts)

New Invention - Flow: Honey on Tap Directly From your Beehive

Mosquito One: 2015 Season is about to start

Mosquito One: 2015 Season is about to start: We've started a new year and leaving behind a successful 2014 at Mosquito One. With our amazing team on the start and the great amount o...

California Plastic Bag Ban. What do you think?

California Plastic Bag Ban

All I have is my feelings about the subject. So, agree with my thought or not that is okay with me. I hate to say that I don't have all the information about this bill, but I don't. I opt for plastic for produce and meat's. Why you might say. Well I don't want any cross contamination. My thoughts are if I am going to use cloth bags for meat, I will have to have a designated bag just for that. Making sure to wash after every use. For me it is about health. But, how much saving the planet am I doing by washing my bags. Or even sharing my feelings about it and others start washing more often.

May be there should be a plastic bag ban, with an exception on items that can cross contaminate.


Live Life Love Life

7702 what is tthis?

This is off topic but I found it interesting.

Life Insurance Retirement Plan (LIRP), under Internal Revenue Code Section 7702

• 
• 

Will you have enough retirement income?

If you’ve caught yourself wondering whether or not you will have enough income at retirement to continue your current standard of living, you are not alone. In fact, having enough retirement income is one of the leading concerns facing Americans today. Due to the limits on contributions to Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA), Qualified Retirement Plans, and the uncertainty of Social Security retirement benefits, individuals earning high incomes may find that a diminishing percentage of their current compensation can be replaced at retirement through these traditional sources. This is where Life Insurance can help combat the reverse discrimination that hurts successful people.

Learning more about this myself. If you are interestead I can forward information and help find someone to personaly advise you.

Health Freedom Expo 2013 - Chief Scientist "Thunder"

This information ws shared with me. Anyone have any ideas to share....

2014

Been a while I know. Much going on for me andI haven't had time to be on the computer. New garden comming soon.
Live Life Love Life

garden tips

Find your Master Gardeners in your community.

snow peas

http://sjmastergardeners.ucanr.edu/?newsitem=49723


You can find lots of information and even classes by connecting with the community.

Happy New Year! We hope you enjoy this issue of Garden Notes. Happy gardening! 
INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Garden Chores              
Lockhart Seeds              
Pests and Plants-amping Off, Citrus Leafminer, Creeping Bentgrass, Golden Chain Tree, Lenten Rose, Nandina
Growing Knowledge   
Taste, Memory, Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors and Why They Matter
Native Bees
Building a Home for Native Bees
Local Garden Clubs
The Help Desk
Protecting Stormwater
Recipes
Coming Events
2014 Weekend Workshops


Download and view the newsletter here.
HTML Link: http://sjmastergardeners.ucanr.edu/?newsitem=49723

Resources

Planting Guide - A useful chart that shows planting and harvesting dates of warm and cool season crops that do well in our area.
Vegetable Planting Guide (From Master Gardener Handbook)
Vegetable Garden Basics - ANR publication #8059 (PDF 86kb), is a 7-page document that covers planning and planting a home vegetable garden.

storing power and battery break through

Found this article and I would like to thank  MIT for allowing me to share.

Help Wind and Solar Power Go Big

Low-cost materials could make storing hours of power from a wind farm economically feasible.

• By Kevin Bullis on January 8, 2014

Why It Matters

The intermittency of renewable power limits its use.

Liquid energy: Novel energy storage materials flow from the white containers shown here into a fuel-cell like device in the foreground, where they generate electricity.

Utilities would love to be able to store the power that wind farms generate at night—when no one wants it—and use it when demand is high during the day. But conventional battery technology is so expensive that it only makes economic sense to store a few minutes of electricity, enough to smooth out a few fluctuations from gusts of wind.
Harvard University researchers say they’ve developed a new type of battery that could make it economical to store a couple of days of electricity from wind farms and other sources of power. The new battery, which is described in the journal Nature, is based on an organic molecule—called a quinone—that’s found in plants such as rhubarb and can be cheaply synthesized from crude oil. The molecules could reduce, by two-thirds, the cost of energy storage materials in a type of battery called a flow battery, which is particularly well suited to storing large amounts of energy.
If it solves the problem of the intermittency of power sources like wind and solar, the technology will make it possible to rely far more heavily on renewable energy. Such batteries could also reduce the number of power plants needed on the grid by allowing them to operate more efficiently, much the way a battery in a hybrid vehicle improves fuel economy.
In a flow battery, energy is stored in liquid form in large tanks. Such batteries have been around for decades, and are used in places like Japan to help manage the power grid, but they’re expensive—about $700 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity, according to one estimate. To make storing hours of energy from wind farms economical, batteries need to cost just $100 per kilowatt-hour, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The energy storage materials account for only a fraction of a flow battery’s total cost. Vanadium, the material typically used now, costs about $80 per kilowatt-hour. But that’s high enough to make hitting the $100 target for the whole system impossible. Michael Aziz, a professor of materials and energy technologies at Harvard University who led the work, says the quinones will cut the energy storage material costs down to just $27 per kilowatt-hour. Together with other recent advances in bringing down the cost of the rest of the system, he says, this could put the DOE target in reach.
The Harvard work is the first time that researchers have demonstrated high-performance flow batteries that use organic molecules instead of the metal ions usually used. The quinones can be easily modified, which might make it possible to improve their performance and reduce costs more. “The options for metal ions were pretty well worked through,” Aziz says. “We’ve now introduced a vast new set of materials.”
After identifying quinones as potential energy storage molecules, the Harvard researchers used high-throughput screening techniques to sort through 10,000 variants, searching for ones that had all the right properties for a battery, such as the right voltage levels, the ability to withstand charging and discharging, and the ability to be dissolved in water so they could be stored in liquid tanks.
So far the researchers are using quinones only for the negative side of the battery. The positive side uses bromine, a corrosive and toxic material. The researchers are developing new versions of the quinones that could replace the bromine.
The Harvard researchers are working with the startup Sustainable Innovations to develop a horse-trailer sized battery that can be used to store power from solar panels on commercial buildings.
The Harvard researchers still need to demonstrate that the new materials are durable enough to last the 10 to 20 years that electric utilities would like batteries to last, says Robert Savinell, a professor of engineering and chemical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. Savinell wasn’t involved with the Harvard work. He says initial durability results for the quinones are promising, and says the new materials “without a doubt” can be cheap enough for batteries that store days of electricity from wind farms. And he says the materials “can probably be commercialized in a relatively short time”—within a few years.

The researchers face competition from other startups developing cheaper flow batteries, such as EnerVault and Sun Catalytix (see “Startup EnerVault Rethinks Flow Battery Chemistry” and “Sun Catalytix Seeks Second Act with Flow Battery”). Sun Catalytix is developing inorganic molecules to improve performance and lower cost, although it isn’t saying much about them. EnerVault uses iron and chromium as storage materials and is developing ways to reduce the cost of the overall system.

wood stove hot water

Zen forest house: 11K, handcrafted, small home in Oregon

saving flower seeds

iframe width 459 height 344 src //www.youtube.com/embed/LHYxYlC9m-E frameborder 0 allowfullscreen> /iframe>

Living Off Grid Self Sustainable Living

http://www.youtube.com/v/3cHkfi1-KoY?version=3&autohide=1&showinfo=1&autohide=1&autoplay=1&feature=share&attribution_tag=nxEUMDV8bqQtu6ZyeDDHxA

The beginning of my adventure to living off grid and becoming self sustainable.

pumpkins

Preserving Squash and Zuchinni (+playlist)

This site was shared with me so share on.
Little House Living blog
http://www.littlehouseliving.com

Brazil Iguazu Fall's what a sight

I know this is not sustainable living or organic gardening but it is beautiful.
In South America, Brazil you can find this amazing waterfall. You can wikipedia it to learn more about the falls.

Iguazu Falls

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

 

Bloom Fuel Cells new eBay Data Center

New eBay Data Center Runs Almost Entirely On Bloom Fuel Cells

http://www.forbes.com/sites/heat...

The Salt Lake City installation includes 30 Bloom Energy Servers arranged in five racks. eBay is raising the bar (again) when it comes to sourcing power for massive data centers. Its massive new facility in Salt Lake City – the main hub of technology powering more than $175 billion in annual e-comme...

Repel animals from your garden

Not much time lately to blog much, sorry about that. I took a class with Master Gardeners, last weekend took some notes I would like to share. The day started with a wonderful speaker Shayne Zurligen, from the Boggs Tract Community Farm, about the Food Forests.
So, you may say to yourself what is a food forest. It is really about the layers of trees and plants that create a sustainable living environment. Spacing the layers helps each group to thrive and provide for the others.

• Tall Tree
• Low Tree
• Shrubs
• Herbal
• Ground
• Vine
• Root 

Each providing for protection from evaporation and replacement of nutrients into the soil, such as leaves and grass into nitrogen.

Bulbs like Daffodils can help repel animals such as deer and gofers. The bulbs release  a smell that keep deer away. Daffodils are not only beautiful but help sustain your garden from wild life.
Also needed in the garden plants that attract birds and insects.

• queen ann's lace
• cosomos
• zinia
• fennel
• yarrow
• maples
• butterfly bush
• rasberry
• blackberry
• blueberry

Important to share the harvest not only with people but the animals and insects in your garden community. When I find that the ants have taken over one of my eggplants, I leave it in the garden for them. Taking a loss on one eggplant means they have what they want and only take what they need.

Providing habitat nooks for garden creatures provides them with a place to hide while staying near the garden to create the life cycle to sustain the garden. Placing ladybug houses in the garden protects ladybugs from birds and provides them a place to come back to.

Grass and herbal ground cover provide protection from evaporation saving on water usage.

There was so much information to take in from the Master Gardeners Class, that one day was not enough time. I suggest that if you ever get an opportunity to attend a Master Gardeners, to do so.


thanks for reading
Please share any additional information you may have.

Master Gardeners Stockton 2013

There was so much information to obtain from this years Master Gardeners in Stockton. At a latter time I will update the information to share with every one. For now I am posting some photo's of the reuse ideas for your garden.

September 1st 2013

I haven't been very active on my blogg lately. Quick up date.

Working on garden and actually getting things started for the winter garden.

Did a review on earthship homes so here is a youtube:

LiveLife

Love

Life