…and lessons shared

Blogging has been a bit of a learning curve. It is easy, in the throes of enthusiasm, to just post pictures and text and not worry too much about stuff…until a good friend contacts you with some sound advice. So a big THANK YOU to Justin, web guy extraordinaire, for telling me I need to resize my pics for each post to be 440 px wide. Seems like the big ones straight off my iPhone are a bit ginormous and take an age to load if you have a slower system. Sorry about that folks! I will try to be more regimented in my use of images and mindful of their size.

The other thing I need to do is to name and tag all of my pics. I have adopted a policy of only using pictures I take so as not to fall foul of any issues with copyright. I was amazed the other day when I went searching for Barramundi pictures, and in the fourth row of the Google image search, up popped one of MY shots (the only one I had named and tagged)! That my pics turn up in a search I think is  a good thing and will maybe help the blog spread a bit—as people search for things on gardens, veggies, aquaponics et al.

Over the weekend we had some ‘long-lost’ friends of Chris’s came to see how we were set up in the garden, but particularly with aquaponics. It was a great meeting of minds, as they are very much interested in a sustainable system and voiced concerns about the carbon footprint of our food AND the sovereignty of a lot of what we purchase from the shops.

In many cases, our ‘fresh’ food is trucked in from all over the place and in the case of nuts, many varieties sold in the big supermarkets are imported from countries like Vietnam—sadly one of the most heavily herbicide and defoliant bombed country in the world, with God know’s what level of residual toxins. Believe me when I say how awful I feel that this is the case, that the Vietnam War caused this and God know’s what the effects continue to be for the locals.

But, if we have a choice, and often we do, then we should make that choice, and we should consider the provenance of our food…where it has come from, what pesticides and other possible toxic substances it has seen in its growth phase and how far it has had to travel. One of my constant whinges is that we import lemons from the other side of the world, and as a nation we are on the brink of ploughing in whole orchards of local fruits because of low demand.

As a nation and yes, as a species, what the heck are we doing?