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notices and features - Date published:
6:00 am, August 20th, 2016 - 44 comments
Categories: open mike -
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Nice story in alignment with many comments on here over recent weeks.
“Urban Food Street began in 2009 in the leafy green Sunshine Coast suburb of Buderim, and now acts as a blueprint for the nation to give purpose to the great Australian nature strip.
“It started with us deciding to plant limes, and then it evolved into this notion that if we put the limes out on the nature strip people could pick a lime for whatever they need it for,” graduate architect and one of the masterminds behind Urban Food Street, Caroline Kemp said.
What began with one citrus-lined street has grown into an 11-street suburban enclave, paved with seasonal fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, that encourages growing, sourcing and eating fresh food in the public realm.”
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-22/food-street-feeding-off-the-kerbside-creates-close-community/7343456
This could be a biggie.
“A national day to commemorate the battles of the New Zealand Wars 150 years ago has been approved by the government.
Deputy Prime Minister Bill English made the announcement at Turangawaewae Marae today, where he and Arts, Culture and Heritage and Conservation Minister Maggie Barry handed back the land titles to Rangiriri Pa and Te Wheoro’s Redoubt in a special ceremony to the Māori King today.
Children from local schools in the Waikato area were witness to Waikato-Tainui and the Kiingitanga being gifted back the land titles to the two significant sites.
One of the bloodiest battles between Māori and colonial soldiers took place at Rangiriri Pa in 1863. It was the start of a series of battles in Waikato, which would lead to over 1 million acres of land being confiscated.”
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/311414/govt-backs-national-day-to-mark-nz-wars
IF this was done correctly with consultation and so on then it could actually be a turning point. I am hopeful but not confident that that will occur.
Yeah this could be really poignant, but I guess we need to see how serious the Government takes it or if they take a more hands off approach.
I’m also interested to see if the day chosen favours Waikato-Tainui.
Edible fruits in the nature strip! Citrus too, fantastic! It’s pip and stone fruits for us, a little too cold for lemons and oranges to survive down here without special provisions. Mind you, the changing climate is presenting all sorts of possibilities for the South, at least in the short term 🙂
As much as I like natives I find the lack of diversity in nature strip disappointing not to mention that our streets have the potential to be a most diverse arboretum if only the powers that be had some imagination…
We, Cricklewood, are the powers that be. Let’s get planting! Those who have appointed authority will just have to accommodate us 🙂
Aren’t we the ones who appointed authority? 😉
Using garden-designed native town plantings to nursery fruit and nut trees, now there’s a plan 😀 A whole body of knowledge to develop there. I’ve seen wild apples amongst kanuka.
We voted them in but are negligent if we don’t continue to press them to do what we want and respond to new situations as they arise. A vote at the start of a three year term isn’t the only input we can have, by any means.
The separation of native trees from useful exotics is a mistake, in my view. Too late now, for purity.
Completely agreed on the democracy thing.
I like native only spaces, and support the protection of them where that’s doable and makes sense. No reason we can’t have native, exotic, and mixed spaces.
Ka pai ki ahau i te ngahere tūturu , weka, – I was meaning spaces planted by humans.
Lawrence is fronting the resistance to National’s most recent and most serious attack on local government.
Ooh, what are Lawrence up to?
Planted spaces, I would largely agree, although I know lots of people/spaces that are focussed on natives and I enjoy that too. The ones that trouble me are the eradicate for the sake of it ones eg wilding pines. Or councils planting natives instead of food plants.
Loaded question of the Day: What has Lawrence Yule done to upset the powers that be?
Well, his arrogance in the Napier-Hastings amalgamation debate got up a lot of people’s noses. Yule has probably just been in the job to long.
What happened today?
Yesterday he released the finding of an interim report stating the contamination came from “ruminants”, i.e dairy runoff.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/311415/campylobacter-most-likely-from-livestock-yule
I imagine the farming lobby is livid that the appropriate spin hadn’t been applied by the National government first!
I doubt there is much dairy in that part of the hawkes bay , it’s a very dry climate ,
and how a rain event caused it when their water comes from a deep aquifer with 50 year old water is hard to fathom.
Canterbury is dry as and is full of dairy.
It is also massively full of irrigation schemes.
Livestock is not always dairy.
Yeah I think Yule said sheep and cattle. I took that to mean not dairy (and someone on ts said the other day there is only one dairy farm in the area).
Somehow the Tukituki and Ngaruroro rivers, I mean drains, got heavily polluted, and now we wonder why the aquifers below are potentially fucked…
+ 1 Yep that stands out for me too – the disconnect…
The closest agriculture upstream of the affected bore is a piggery and a mushroom farm (which could use animal manure in its compost). The most likely event appears to have been the very recent heavy rains and the likelihood that the infection entered into the aquifer during that event.
These factors were discussed on Katheryn Ryan’s programme earlier in the week.
The other bores are around 200 and 400 m away from the initially affected bore. A microbiologist who studied these aquifers wrt to water borne infections noted that the bacteria could survive up to 3 days in the aquifer and could travel up to 1 km from the initial infection entry site over that time.
http://extension.arizona.edu/sites/extension.arizona.edu/files/pubs/az1486c.pdf
ta I found this while i was mucking around today , might be of interest to you
US Army cannot account for several trillion dollars in previous spending – has had to make US$6.5B of poorly substantiated ‘accounting adjustments’ to its books this year.
Making tax payers money which could otherwise go into schools, healthcare or welfare disappear is the strategic objective of the massive military industrial complex, of course.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-19/government-report-finds-65-trillion-taxpayer-funds-unaccounted
Helen Kelly has more guts and compassion in her little finger than the national government put together
Garner being even more of a jerk than usual;
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/83329544/duncan-garner-hard-working-us-we-dont-know-how-lazy-we-are
Oxygen thief.
I think it’s a projection of Garner’s 😉
Mind you, he does seem to think that being hardworking equates to being willing to work long hours on minimum wage with poor conditions, which as you say makes him a waste of O2.
Listen to Garner talking to the whining prick who can’t get staff and it’s not hard to guess why nobody wants to work for him.
http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Are-young-kiwis-lazy-and-dont-want-to-work/tabid/506/articleID/127185/Default.aspx
Maybe he is trying to adjust to the idea of having to get up really early soon.
Apparently NZers are lazy because they want a 2 day weekend, or lunch breaks, or a reasonable finish time, or a reasonable wage, or a wage at all…
A good ten days for Andrew Little:
10 out of 10
[The link goes to a WO trolling post about Andrew Little. Ben, the usual go round here when posting links is to give a reasonably clear explanation of what readers can expect to find if they click on it. And it’s preferred if readers are warned if the link is to the sewer. Cheers. TRP]
If you are going to link to Whale Oil please don’t hide the URL and entice them there. People have good reasons for not going there.
Roger that.
Great interview with Helen Kelly on the Nation today.
Last week:
‘U.S. Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons The Justice Department plans to phase out its use of private prisons after they were determined to be less safe and less effective that …’
Next week?
‘U.S. Education Department says it will end use of charter schools The Education Department plans to phase out its use of charter schools after they were determined to be less safe and less effective that …’
Oh look we are following the USA in medicine so much, at least our doctors don’t cut off the supply…
p.s. I’m going to miss Larry Wilmore so much- is his axing revenge for the whole dinner thing?
All Blacks bugged in hotel ahead of Wallabies Bledisloe Cup test in Sydney http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11697828
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear – right?
My first guess was that it was there to overhear previous occupants and not the All Blacks.
But then I remembered the Aussies are pretty despondent about their Olympic team and how they are doing so maybe they wanted a win over the All Blacks as a diversion.
That bloody Tony Abbott !
Hastings and Flaxmere water supplies also contaminated:
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/hastings-flaxmere-water-supply-found-contaminated-infections-rise
Edit : Council says water was already being chlorinated so is safe
I assume the tests for ecoli are before it is chlorinated.
Yes I’m very concerned about these contamination’s, plus
“Scientists are warning that our aquifers, the reserves of water under New Zealand’s land surface, are being poisoned by intensive farming…
Although some aquifers are already contaminated, they say the worst is yet to hit because pollutants like nitrate, can take decades to get down to the drinking supply…
Pregnant women and mums with young babies on private bores around Ashburton are advised to use bottled water as high nitrate levels can block oxygen in babies and cause the potentially fatal blue baby syndrome…
Dr Webster-Brown says with the dairy industry now using nitrogen, levels will rise distinctly. “We know that dairy as an industry tends to leach more nitrogen into the groundwater systems,” she said. “So we fully expect to see the nitrate in the groundwaters increasing markedly.”
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/scientists-warn-nz-aquifers-being-poisoned-farming
Yes we worry about the earthquakes, the storms, the tsunamis – and maybe it will be the contaminated water that sneaks under the radar.
NZ selects Russia to oversea SC poll for next secretary general.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/83377293/New-Zealand-has-made-waves-on-the-UN-Security-Council
I see Fran’s noticed all those cash buyers.
POLICE have detained 31 suspects for running an underground banking racket in Shanghai that involved foreign currencies worth over 2 billion yuan (US$300 million) in the past three years.
The gang, led by a 60-year-old local woman surnamed Sun, provided the service to about 100 people. Most of them exchanged Chinese yuan for foreign currencies to purchase real estate or pay for their children’s tuition in foreign countries.
[…]
The cap for foreign currency purchasing for individuals in China is US$50,000 per year.
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/metro/society/31-held-for-running-underground-banking-racket-in-Shanghai/shdaily.shtml
grrr, mods, left an open tag and the machine won’t let me edit, could someone close the damn thing for me