A few years ago I blogged about hobo stoves. Remember those? You can make your own in minutes out of a big tin.
Well. The penny alcohol stove is another camp stove you can make, and for this all you'll need is a pocketknife and three beer cans. And you know, it looks most impressive - much more advanced than the hobo stove thing.
Link found here at Lonita's Links Log.
Related Mirabilis.ca content
The weirdest stove
I love snow, so I was thrilled the other day when we got a happy amount of snow in Vancouver. Off I went for a walk along Kitsilano Beach and around Kits Point. Here are some photos I took.
Now this is one thing I hope will never happen to me when I'm kayaking. Yipes! Do watch the astonishing video.
From Steve Cochrane's article in The Guardian, The outdoor gym:
I'd like to be fitter, honestly I would. I'm 37 years old, and a three-minute kickabout with the kids renders me a red faced, gasping wreck of a thing. The obvious answer is to exercise more, which is to say at all, and the obvious way to do this is to go to the gym. But - and I know I'm not alone in thinking this - gyms tend to be full of the kind of people who go to gyms. I know the exercises would be "doing me good" but the thought of being a bloke in shorts moving various bits of complicated metal to and fro, over and over again, in an effort to work up a sweat has me falling gratefully on to the nearest sofa.
Which is where the Green Gym comes in. Run by BTCV (the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers), the UK's largest practical conservation charity, Green Gym groups offer a way of keeping fit in the open air by engaging in a wide variety of activities, from clearing woodland to building dry stone walls via repairing footpaths and creating community gardens. They are supported by the Department of Health and work in partnership with the likes of the relevant primary-care trust and local authority, to make exercise and improved fitness accessible to people who wouldn't want to set foot inside a gym - like me.
It's a fine idea on many levels. And coming up with a phrase like "green gym" to describe hard work outdoors? That is marketing genius.
Related:
BTCV Green Gym -BTCV.org
Kew Gardens has an interesting project underway. It's the Electronic Plant Information Centre, and The Guardian has just published an article about it:
Kew scientists are compiling the first volumes of the cyber book of life. In the next few years — in some cases already — researchers, farmers, foresters and gardeners anywhere in the world will be able to click a mouse and call up via the internet a high—resolution image of a rare plant preserved in the herbarium of London's Royal Botanic Gardens for more than 200 years.
They will also be able to study plants in the garden's living collection, examine the field notebooks of Victorian botanists or rare pages from 18th century collections of plant paintings, sift a collection of plants adapted to survive in arid lands, comb through the flora of the Zambesi Valley, sample the economic uses of flax, cannabis or willow, or compare the DNA of orchids.
"What we want to do is make all of the information that we have — an enormously wide and varied amount of information about different types of things to do with plant science — available," says Mark Jackson, architect e—PIC, Kew's electronic plant information centre. "Once you start totting it all up you do get into some pretty big figures. Someone coming to the site may only have a plant name, and that may be all they have. They may wish to know what it was used for; they may want to know if we have any specimens of it." [continue]
Duchess's poison dell will lure visitors. From The Guardian:
Provided that a duchess can see eye-to-eye with the Home Office on growing cannabis, strychnine and cocaine, Britain is about to get the most venomous and hallucinogenic garden it has ever seen.
Harking back to medieval times, but with a toxic arsenal that a witch or apothecary could only dream of, the project includes shrubs and creepers so potentially nasty that the designers have suggested growing some of them in cages.
Visitors will be kept at a distance from the flowerbeds, with marked boundaries and supervisors enforcing a no-touching policy.
The dell at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland will lie under a perpetual miasma of "deliberately spooky" mist, enlivened by a copper snake rearing from a grotto and hissing vapour, triggered by sensors as visitors creep past.
"It should be quite an experience," said Caroline Holmes, the garden's poison plant consultant, who takes a gleeful relish in her subject. [continue]
Related:
Alnwick Garden - AlnwickGarden.com
Weird plants in everyday gardens. From National Geographic:
Some smell like putrefied meat, others have stalks reminiscent of male anatomy, and others are outrageously big, or black, or carnivorous, or explosive. The world is full of weird plants and more and more people are encouraging them to take root in their gardens.
In 1999, after being disappointed by the poor selection of plants sold at the big garden centers in the United Kingdom, Diane Halligan created The Weird and Wonderful Plant Company in East Lothian, Scotland, to source, produce, and promote plants that are different than the ordinary. She reports solid business.
"Any keen gardener with a bit of rebel in them — including me — is driven mad by the rows upon rows of pastel colored bedding plants offered by garden centers and some nurseries," she said. "In today's society when land is at such a premium, gardeners want to grow something a bit more special in their borders." [continue]
I'm amused by the giant rhubarb plant down the block, but I think that's about as strange as it gets in this neighbourhood. But you want weird? These plants are rather unusual.
Oh, and don't miss the weird plants photo gallery at National Geographic.
Related links:
Weird plants from gridclub.com
Weird and Wonderful Plant Company
Is there one in your garden shed? From the Christian Science Monitor archives: A Time Machine That Also Cuts Grass.
Before I knew it, I was a grown-up with a lawn of my own. My husband mowed it once a week with his consumer-magazine-researched power mower. It was a sporty-looking thing, red and gray, reeking of gasoline and ear-blastingly loud. But efficient, of course. Very.
One day, in a yuppyish gardening catalog, I happened upon a person-powered push mower. My ears seemed to hum with the long-ago, gentle whirring of Dad's ancient push mower. In a flash I was a drowsy young girl, stretching and blinking awake to the sweet, green-scented promise of summer mornings. For a moment, I believed that if I were to press my face to the window screen, as I did on those Saturday mornings, I would see Dad following Rickety Green up and down the backyard as he shaved the grass in methodical, overlapping stripes.
It was irresistible, that memory, and soon a sleek reincarnation of Rickety Green squatted in our garage. Each Saturday when my husband headed out to mow, I'd say hopefully, "Are you going to use the new mower?" And every Saturday he'd say, "I'm in a hurry today. Maybe next week."
It rained one weekend and the lawn couldn't be cut, and the next week we were out of town. One weekday morning, very early, I went out to look at the ankle-tickling tangle. "Hmm," I said. And then a magnetic force yanked me toward the garage and the gleaming push mower. [continue]
Link found at Metafilter.
Related:
Lee Valley Traditional Reel Mowers
I've met some remarkable kayakers, but the woman I heard inteviewed on CBC Radio this afternoon tops them all. Audrey Sutherland is 81, and goes for long kayak tours all by her lonesome. (This woman's no fool: read about her pre-trip preparation.) Here's a bit about how she got started on these solo adventures:
Raised in California, Audrey moved to Hawaii in 1952, and has lived there ever since. When her husband decided to return to the mainland, Audrey stayed on in her adopted home. She found a job as an educational counselor and raised her four children there. One day, on a flight from one island to the next, Audrey became intrigued by the folded-up coastline of the island of Molokai. She wanted to explore it all, but the cliffs were accessible only by boat (which she didn't have) or chopper (which she couldn't afford). So, in 1962, she decided to tour the coast by swimming along it, towing an inflatable raft with supplies. She has since refined her mode of travel, and now uses an inflatable kayak because it is transportable, light enough for her to handle comfortably, and relatively inexpensive.
This summer Audrey's paddling in Alaska, and then of course she'll write a book about kayaking solo in Alaska. Of course.
So. What are you doing on your summer vacation?
More on Audrey
An excerpt from The Perfect Boat and the "If Only..." Trap:
At an age when most of us would regard wrestling with the TV remote to be a pretty good work-out, Audrey Sutherland was paddling her 9 1/2-foot Tahiti Sport inflatable kayak along the west coast of Chichagof Island in southeast Alaska. Off hand, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a less-suitable craft for such a venture, but that didn't bother Audrey. It was the boat she had. Moreover, she'd already used it to explore the northern coast of Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands. It had just worked fine there, thanks, and it was working just fine in Alaska. End of story.
And here's the start of A kayak, a free spirit and decades of discovering The power of one:
Wind and driving rain were beating against the Alaska Discovery kayak tour Ken Leghorn was leading on the outer coast when he spotted a lone kayaker ahead.
The inflatable kayak had no spray skirt and was being half-paddled, half-blown toward them. The paddler, a white-haired woman, was singing.
"She looked like a total free spirit, completely at home in her environment," Leghorn said of the 1981 meeting. "There was water below her boat, water in her boat and she was completely happy, with a great big aloha smile."
The lone kayaker was Audrey Sutherland, the Grandma Moses of paddling. In 1978 her first book, "Paddling My Own Canoe," opened the way for kayakers to explore Hawaii's wild and woolly coast. Sutherland was in her late 50s then and had been paddling for 10 years. [continue]
Books by Audrey Sutherland:
Paddling My Own Canoe
Paddling Hawaii
About the radio show:
Audrey was interviewed on the July 21st edition of the Richardson's Roundup show.
Update
I get lots of email asking me for Audrey's contact details. I don't have them. I haven't a clue where Audrey is, whether she has email, or where her daughter is. If you're still tempted to write and ask me for details about Audrey, please read this.
From the National Geographic: Ice Bikers Follow Frozen Trail of Gold Rush.
During the long, cold winter the wilderness of Alaska and the Yukon is typically dog-sled country. It's also bush-plane country, snow-machine country, and snowshoe country. One thing it is not, at least not usually, is bicycle country. Yet as the northern spring approaches, the "Bikes on Ice" adventure is re-enacting two amazing cycling feats from the region's hectic gold rush past.
Three expert cyclists with extensive arctic travel experience, Andy Sterns, Frank Wolf, and Kevin Vallely, are currently in the midst of a demanding adventure they've dubbed "Bikes on Ice." Wolf, a writer, and Vallely, an architect, are both from Vancouver, British Columbia. Sterns is a teacher from Fairbanks, Alaska. Their mission: complete a 1,200-mile journey down the frozen Yukon River and up the Bering Sea coast from Dawson, Yukon to Nome, Alaska-on a bicycle.
One of the members of the "Bikes on Ice" adventure pedals along the Alaska landscape. The 1,200-mile journey began in Dawson, Yukon and will end at Nome, Alaska.As crazy as the idea may seem, it's not exactly original. The group was inspired by a pair of century-old bicycling feats that became a colorful part of gold rush legend. [continue]
Related Mirabilis.ca posting
The rest of us are wimps
I just discovered that a gardening book I like (Square Foot Gardening) has its own website. If garden planning is on your spring agenda, this is worth checking out. The author's method worked perfectly for my veggies.
"The sun is out. The powder is fresh. The slope is clear. Meet the ice men trying to keep you alive on your next killer run." From Wired's Avalanche article.
Years ago I read about Steve Roberts' bicycling adventures, in which he equipped a recumbent bicycle with a computer and satellite internet connection, then became a technomad. A friend mentioned that Steve has now taken to the water with his microship project. From the Microship FAQ page:
The Microships are a pair of canoe- scale amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimarans, intended for open-ended exploration of coastal and inland waterways. Extensive computing and communication gear allows them to be connected more or less continuously to the Internet and to each other, as well as controlled by wireless handheld computers when the pilots are not on-board. Each boat is designed to carry one person, and with a brief conversion can enter "road mode" for human-powered overland transport.
An outdoor adventure with a constant internet connection would be quite pleasant, I think, particularly if one could hang out with sea otters.
Related links
photos of Steve with his bikes and boat
The Microship runs on Debian Linux.
From Behemoth to Microship: A Technomadic update - from mbari.org
Tech Nomad - from Wired.com
Here. See if these polar bear photos don't make you want to be a bear for a day, or at least play in the snow like one. The same site, travelmaniac.com, has other bear photos, too.
From a Vancouver Sun article, 60-acre spider web baffles biologists: [Update: Vancouver Sun article no longer available.]
A warning: If the thought of tens of millions of tiny spiders spinning a web 24 hectares — 60 acres — in size and crawling all over it scares the wits out of you, you might want to tread carefully over the following.
Because that's exactly what happened last month on a farmer's field near McBride, about 220 kilometres east of Prince George.
Just what are those spiders trying to catch, anyway? Sheep? Here's more from the CBC News website: Spiders weave huge natural wonder.
A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders and the results of their efforts.
Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.
"When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field," Thair told CBC Radio's As It Happens.
A typical barbwire fence on wood posts surrounded the field about six kilometres east of McBride in the Robson Valley. Thair said it looked like the whole area was covered with an opaque, white plastic grocery store bag.The thin, elastic coasting was not soft and fluffy like webs built by individual spiders. There were about two spiders per square centimetre laying the silk, which first appeared in early October.
Thair said the web showed great tensile strength– enough to put a handful of coins on it without them falling through.
Here's the web of mystery photo gallery.
You know, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
Saturday seemed like a good day to get out of the city for a ramble through the woods and along the cliff. Here are a few photos taken on that ramble.
Oh! I've come across the perfect swimming pool. It doesn't need chemicals, because micro-organisms and plants clean the water. Just imagine having a mini-lake in your back yard, complete with water lilies, rushes, and space for swimming.
I failed the birding by ear quiz, but I don't mind. The quiz answers gave me the information I've been hunting for: the name of the mystery bird I hear every day. (He's a white-crowned sparrow.)
While browsing around on some bird-related websites, I learned about pishing, sucking, and squeaking, and about memonics for remembering birdcalls.
Related links:
Watching birds with your ears
Birding info for visitors to Victoria, BC
How to remember birdcalls
The songs and calls of more than 550 North American birds (uses popup windows)
Birding.com
Early one morning I watched a skater being pulled down Alberni Street by his dog. Since then I've seen several dogs in harnesses, pulling their owners around the Stanley Park Seawall and along the Vancouver greenway streets. The dogs seems to be having a blast. They get good excercise, their owners enjoy the ride, and you just know it beats waiting for the bus.
Maybe this'll become the standard way to excercise large dogs. Today's Pittsburgh newspaper mentions training sessions for people who want to try this "dog sledding on skates" thing. Instructional pages are popping up on the web, too. If you've got an energetic dog and a pair of inline skates, check out How to In-Line Skate with your Dog, and Dog Powered Inline Skating.
Anybody want to lend me a Husky?
Related:
Dog-powered scooter - dogpoweredscooter.com
When pesky slugs and snails helped themselves to veggies in my garden, I did the traditional thing and trapped the pests in beer. This worked, although it did seem like a waste of perfectly good stout.
Maybe I should have used coffee instead of beer. Staff at the Agricultural Research Service in Hawaii have been busy testing caffeine sprays on some garden pests. An article about their research, Coffee breaks slugs, says that they "...noticed that a 1-2% caffeine solution killed nearly all the slugs and snails within two days."
Related links:
Caffeine repels and kills slugs (newscientist.com)
Slugs flee from a dose of caffeine (Guardian)
Caffeine 'repels slugs' (BBC)
There's a very serious way to build a kayak, which involves many pieces of wood, glue, epoxy, clamps, and lots of time and effort.
The other approach is to build a simple kayak in four hours, using willow shoots, a tarp, and some clip things. It's not nearly as fancy, but it works, and it's cheap.
Years ago in Girl Guides we learned how to make cheap and simple camp stoves. The stove part was called a hobo stove or a vagabond stove, and it was made from a large tin can. The fuel part, called a buddy burner, was a tuna tin filled with a coil of cardboard and wax. Our stoves worked perfectly, and cost almost nothing. It's a perfect solution for people who don't want to spend 50.00 to 150.00 for a camp stove, and making these stoves is a fun thing for adults and ten year olds to do together. (Directions are here.)
Now Ron Moak has come up with a similar, though more advanced idea. Using three tin cans, a bit of wire mesh, and a few inches of insulation, he's come up with the The Fallingwater Multi-Fuel Stove. While the design looks too complex for kids, this might appeal to budget-minded adult campers.