BRISBANE’S SUSTAINABLE HOUSE AND GARDEN

Darwinia polychroma

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:46:06 +1000

I’ve finally found the original slide I took when I discovered this new species of Darwinia (Myrtaceae) whilst in Western Australia on the Thornton-Smith Scholarship in 1982.

Each year the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew funds a botanical expedition for one of its students on completion of the Kew course. I spent six months travelling, collecting and photographing the wildflowers in the south west of WA, following spring from Exmouth to Esperance.

During that time I exported over 450 species of wildflower to Kew, many of which had never before been grown in Europe. For each specimen collected for export I kept photographic and botanical collection records and also provided the Kew and Western Australian herbaria with voucher (pressed, dried) specimens.

In October I was collecting with Charles Chapman near Winchester. Charles had previously been a sheep and wheat farmer in that area, and had long been a passionate and very knowledgeable self-trained botanist. Charles had also discovered new species of Hibbertia, Darwinia and also Corynanthera flava, a new genus in the Myrtaceae.

Just before returning home for the day on 15th October, I discovered this plant, and Charles and I knew it was distinctly different from all the other known species of Darwinia. We decided we’d call it the Winchester Bell.

It is now formally identified as the Harlequin Bell, Darwinia polychroma, and like many Western Australian plants that survived clearing for agriculture, only three small, scattered populations exist along roadsides. It’s classified as an endangered species.

I’ve just sorted through my huge collection of slides from that trip and found the original slide. Now all I have to do is to find the botanical notes I made of Collection Number 148!

Jerry Coleby-Williams
10th January 2010

Sustainability Beyond Traveston Dam

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:42:53 +1000

The Queensland government has been humiliated by the rejection of the proposed Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River. But in proposing the dam the government has also ignored key opportunities for sustainable, responsible development.

Instead of squandering over $500 million of taxpayers money on an unviable dam project, the state government instead could have invested taxpayers’ money in small to large scale businesses, securing our environment and boosting the SE Queensland economy and local jobs.

The first step in reducing medium term demand for water involves turning on the tap.

Having spent almost $3 billion on the SE Queensland water grid, we could now be drawing on as much pure, recycled water that Traveston Dam potentially could have delivered. But the brand new infrastructure of the water grid is currently mostly laying idle, merely supplying two coal fired power stations with water.

Resources are being wasted on an enormous scale. All the premier need do is to turn on the recycled water tap and top up our dams.

The second step to reduce potable water use involves wisely investing the same amount of money set aside for building Traveston Dam for retrofitting domestic homes for sustainability.

The $500 million spent on pre-planning for Traveston could instead have retrofitted 20,000 homes, including rainwater harvesting and domestic waste water recycling using existing ‘off-the-shelf’ Queensland technology. What would 20,000 retrofitted homes offer SE Qld? Around 200,000 megalitres of water would have been left in dams for other people to use over a five year period.

My Brisbane home, ‘Bellis’, was retrofitted for sustainability in 2003. At the time I paid the highest possible price for this - $25k from my life savings. My home is a Queensland government project and we use recycled water to grow 70% of the fresh produce this family of three need, which also cuts shopping bills.

'Bellis' (www.bellis.info), my 813 sq metre, award-winning* property has eliminated stormwater generation, harvested 7 megalitres of rainwater, and recycled 3 megalitres of waste water over five years of drought. This means one water-efficient family house has, over five years, left 10 megalitres of water in a dam for someone else to use.

Using economy of scale and incentives, a state government could roll out the same package for around $20k per household at current prices.

Had Traveston Dam been built, this would have cost taxpayers well in excess of $2 billion and Stage 1 could only yield 70,000 megalitres of water a year.

Invested in retrofitting, $2 billion could retrofit over 100,000 homes and save over 160,000 megalitres a year, more than double the projected yield of Stage 1 in a year of good rainfall.

When small, economical, practical and meaningful projects like using recycled water and home retrofitting are widely applied, suddenly the argument for building more dams in SE Qld evaporates. And the community, businesses and the environment need not suffer.

Jerry Coleby-Williams RHS, Dip. Hort. (Kew), NEBSM, MAIH
16th November 2009
Executive Member, Queensland Conservation
Save the Mary River Alliance

* Winner, National SaveWater! Awards, 2009 (built environment)

HONEYBEE COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER = BAYER = YATES = CONFIDOR

Thu, 4 Jun 2009 13:58:50 +1000

It has recently been reported that due to the rise of colony collapse disorder in honeybees that within five years this insect will be extinct in England.

Read on...

“Insecticides banned in bee emergency, by Jo Immig, National Toxics Campaigner

The mass death of hundreds of thousands bees in Baden-Wurttemburg, one of Germany’s prime agricultural states, and subsequent finding of insecticide residues in 99% of the dead bees, has prompted the German government to suspend the registration of eight seed treatment products used on canola and corn.

The suspended products contain the insecticides clothianidin, imidacloprid (sold in Australia by Yates as Confidor), thiamethoxam and methiocarb. These insecticides are all currently registered for use in Australia on a range of pests and crops.

While methiocarb is a carbamate insecticide, the other chemicals all belong to a new class called neonicotinoids, which are based on the nicotine molecule. Neonicotinoids are systemic nerve poisons and kill insects on contact or ingestion. Exposure to sub-lethal doses causes behavioural disturbances and disorientation, which is ultimately fatal for beehives.

Beekeepers have suspected insecticides played a role in the mass death of bees and their concerns are vindicated. "It's a real bee emergency," according to Manfred Hederer president of the German Professional Beekeepers' Association. “50-60% of the bees have died on average and some beekeepers have lost all their hives”.

This latest occurrence in Germany follows the worsening situation in North America, Asia and other parts of Europe, where mass bee deaths have been occurring for several years.

Unlike the North American experience where bees mysteriously disappear from the hives without trace, German beekeepers found dead bees enabling researchers to investigate them.

Initial tests by the German Research Centre for Cultivated Plants found dead bees were killed by contact with the insecticide clothianidin, a Bayer Crop Science product.

The US Environment Protection Agency’s fact sheet on clothianidin, says the pesticide is highly toxic to foraging honeybees and other pollinators, and there is a risk from chronic exposure because the systemic poison finds its way into the nectar and pollen of treated plants.

Dr Simon Cubit, Public Affairs spokesman for the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA), confirmed there are two clothianidin products registered in Australia which are likely to come into contact with bees, but they carry warning labels advising users not to spray any plants in flower while bees are foraging. Clothianidin is registered for use on cotton, bananas, apples, pears, peaches and nectarines to treat a range of pests.

According to Dr Cubit, “a seed treatment is unlikely to come into contact with bees” but added the APVMA is “interested in having a look at data that suggests a link between the application of a chemical as a seed treatment and its translocation to flowers some weeks or months later”.

It’s not the first time neonicotinoids have been in the spotlight. The French government banned imidacloprid, Bayer CropScience’s top selling insecticide as a seed treatment for sunflowers in 1999, and for corn in 2004, because of its link with mass bee deaths.

French regulators recently rejected an application to register clothianidin and have also banned fipronil for its role in killing bees. Fipronil is currently under review in Australia.

Scientists and beekeepers are scrambling to find out what’s causing mass bee deaths or, ‘colony collapse disorder’ as the phenomenon is called in North America. A number of theories have been proposed. Along with pesticides, other factors include climate change, genetically engineered crops, overworked hives, poor nutrition and pathogens, or, possibly a combination of all these stress factors.

Australian regulators must do whatever they can to protect bees as they provide an irreplaceable pollination role in our food production. Without bees we would likely not survive ourselves”.

Jo Immig is right to be concerned. Forty percent of crops grown in Australia are dependent on honeybee pollination.

But the situation is likely to worsen in Australia. Currently Australia is the only continent free of varroa mite, a major pest of honeybees. Varroa mite weakens bees and hives and apart from quarantine, control involves the use of pesticides, which means organic honey production is doomed.

Equally doomed are Australia’s feral honeybees, which are major crop pollinators. Once varroa mite is introduced into Australia, the feral honeybee population will crash. Conservationists might be happy that in future native bees are likely to be winners when feral honeybees cease competing, but what will the price be?

In every country infested by varroa mite, control measures increase the cost of honey production. Rising costs are driving many small to medium scale apiarists, and organic honey producers, out of business.

Tomorrow’s famine: proudly profiting Yates’ and Bayer Crop Science.

Jerry Coleby-Williams
4th June 2009

Bellis.info is back! - Well, Almost...

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:15:14 +1000

After a frustrating long weekend taking one step forward and two steps back the bare bones of bellis.info are now working. I’ve still got to upload about two thirds of the site including most of the picture galleries and most of the blog. I’ve also got to recreate the ‘House’ and ‘Garden’ navigation pages. It’ll be a couple of weeks of a spare hour here and there before all the info on this sustainable house and garden project is back online.

Once again the upgrade to iWeb broke everything - this is the third time that Apple have buggered up iWeb for a multitude of users. Its a great pity because this is probably the application that best encapsulates Apple’s old slogan “... for the rest of us” it’s by far the simplest way to blog or create a full multimedia site. It’s also a pity because in seven years of running a Mac every single operating system upgrade, every single application update has gone like clockwork - only iWeb continues to remind me of the nightmare days of Windows (95, 98 & XP) where I’d be scared to upgrade in case I was making days or weeks of unnecessary and frustrating work...

Unfortunately the RSS feeds and all the comments on the blogs and images have been lost - again. If you were a subscriber please delete your previous RSS bookmarks and use the new ones, and I’d appreciate any comments from people who’ve used a third-party RSS feed with iWeb, I’d like some kind of ability to rebuild the subscribers when Apple screw it up again...

One good thing has happened - the search facility on the blog, which was broken at the previous upgrade, is now working again. Just type a few words into the white box by Jerry’s photo and if it’s in the blog it will appear... Well it will once I’ve finished manually rebuilding all the pages.

Cheers
Jeff

THE FIRST DIGGER WAS A GREAT GUERILLA GARDENER

Thu, 2 Apr 2009 12:56:23 +1000

360 years ago on April Fools Day, Gerrard Winstanley, became a very influential guerrilla gardener when he planted vegetables on an English hillside. The repercussions live on.

In 1649 Winstanley became a founding member of the ‘True Levellers’, later to become known as ‘Diggers’, an English group of agrarian communists.

In that year on 1 April, Winstanley led a group in Surrey to plant vegetables on common land. Food prices were high, Winstanley was redundant and he despaired of the injustice of so much land being owned by so few. With the rallying cry that the earth should be 'a common treasury for all' he established a community of Diggers and passionately pamphleted his visions for a new society.

Other 'colonies' sprung up but after eighteen months the movement disbanded. Gerrard's ambitions went well beyond growing on neglected land and his legacy lives on amongst political radicals as well as those with a streak of horticultural mischief.

His determination that ordinary folk should be able to dig for dinner is an inspiring legacy. It's time to challenge conventional land use - even the US president’s family has dug up their lawn to grow food.

For a couple of months now Australia’s Digger’s Club has asked this question in its adverts: “Will Obama plant vegies at the White House?” Now they have, I guess the unanswered issue is - are the Obamas ‘Digger’s Club Diggers’ or ‘Diggers’?

Jerry Coleby-Williams
2nd April 2009