Showing posts with label food webs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food webs. Show all posts

16 Oct 2020

Learning About Gardening

 by Margriet Ruurs

There’s nothing like a pandemic to make people want to be more self-sufficient.
First, everyone stocked up on toilet paper and flour. You never knew which shelves would be empty the next time you ventured into a supermarket. It even became difficult to buy new laying hens since, suddenly, everyone wanted chickens. And everyone, it seems, wanted to grow their own food to be on the safe side.

Once school was discontinued, my ten year old grandson Nico watched more movies than normal. One of them was a fabulous documentary called Biggest Little Farm which you can find at this link. The film follows ten years of a young couple who buy an acreage and, never having farmed before, turn dead soil into a gorgeous lush farm. The film is inspiring on so many levels, and not just to adults.


Three days after viewing it, Nico came to get me. “I want to run my own farm,” he announced, asking if he could use a flat piece of land on our 5 acres. The piece of our acreage which he selected was outside our deer fencing and thus not a good choice. But we soon found another, better suited piece of level land which is protected from the many deer that roam our island. He staked it off and, after promising to do all the weeding and watering, it was his.


His dad happened to own an old-fashioned plow so he turned the grass. Nico spent the next week on his knees, pulling grass and weeds from clumps of clay.


He designed a garden plan with beds and paths.
Friends donated berries, seeds and seedlings. We also made a trip to a local organic farm for some seedlings which he nurtured in a bay window until the weather turned warm enough for planting.


By early May, in the Pacific Northwest, it was time to plant. Nico chose his own crops: corn, peas, potatoes, squash and more.


He planted, pulled more weeds and watered. He also had to put up a small fence to keep rabbits from helping themselves to his hard earned veggies. All of the weeds he pulled, sometimes helped by his younger brother, were donated to the chickens who munched happily and turned the greens into eggs.


In turn, we put egg shells, coffee grinds and vegetable waste into our composter and mulch compost into the soil. Growing veggies is a never ending circle.


By June, the potato greens were up and the peas were climbing the bamboo stalks. In July the corn grew over his head and the tomato plants had yellow flowers.

By early August Nico was able to harvest the first huge zucchini and share it with his family for dinner.


Hopefully 2021 will be a better year for the world, without a pandemic. But the science of producing your own food is here to stay. And hopefully Nico will be inspired enough to keep growing his own vegetables and munch on snacks that he nurtured himself, from seeds to fruits.

 

Here are names of two books to consult if you want to start your own garden:

Watch Me Grow! and
Up We Grow! by Deborah Hodge.




7 Apr 2016

Another Book Birthday!



Have you ever wondered what to feed a platypus? Or how to keep a lion from getting bored with a never-changing menu of antelope, antelope, antelope? Zookeepers certainly have, and for them it's literally a matter of life and death.

Keeping hundreds of different animals fed and healthy is a mammoth job. And I wanted to know how they did it. Do zoos have boxes of index cards with favorite recipes? And if so, what are they?

The answer is yes, they do, and all last year I chatted with animal nutritionists at zoos all over the world to find out their go-to recipes and secret ingredients. I also found out more about the issues zoos are facing:  about whether or not animals should be kept in captivity, and what to do for animals whose habitats are disappearing. I learned about best practices in animal and habitat conservation, breeding and more.

For example, do you know how  - or why - it is important to hand-rear flamingo chicks in captivity?
You'll find the answer, and a recipe for a yummers smoothie here! You'll also find out why pandas get birthday cakes and tigers get popsicles ---really.



Worms for Breakfast: How to Feed a Zoo is published by Owlkids Books and is a Junior Library Guild selection. You can find the book at your favorite bookseller anywhere in North America.

11 Mar 2013

Over, Under, and On the Arctic Sea Ice

By Claire Eamer

The shrinking sea ice of the Arctic Ocean has been in the news a lot lately, along with photos of polar bears stranded on ice pans or wandering hungrily along bare shores. But what does the disappearing ice affect, apart from polar bears and some shipping companies that see a shorter sea route opening up?

Claire Eamer photo
Arctic sea ice supports a huge and complex ecosystem that ranges from polar bears, birds, and humans down to organisms too small to see without a microscope. Here are a few sites about that world - and a lot of gorgeous photographs!

The Census of Marine Life's Arctic Ocean Diversity website has great information and amazing images. Click on Species to see some of the creatures that make use of the Arctic Ocean and its ice, from top to the ocean bottom.

The US National Earth Science Teachers Association’s page on Arctic Marine Life gives a quick overview of Arctic Ocean biology, from algae to polar bears.

A young Russian scientist and photographer, Alexander Semenov, has been photographing Arctic sea life and sharing his photos with the world. There’s an article about him (with lots of lovely photos) and here's his own website and gallery.

How about the people who live with the ice all their lives? What can they tell us about it? The Inuit of northeastern Canada have been collecting traditional information about sea ice and sharing it at Inuit siku (sea ice) Atlas.

What does it really look like up there, around the Arctic Ocean, both above and below the ice? The photo galleries of Canada’s ArcticNet research program can give you a good idea.

And if you’re a student or a teacher and you want to see the Arctic for yourself, it just might be possible. Check out ArcticNet’s Schools on Board program.