Links WORLD ORGANIC NEWS in the Australian Podcast Awards Click here   Urban wheat crop grown on Narrabri footpath provides bumper harvest - Rural News - ABC News http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-dXH   The Benefits of Perennial Wheat – Permie Flix http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-e2D   Why a Topbar Beehive? – Bee Conscious http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-dY3   Where did Nature go? – human meets nature http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-e0A Rachel Carson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson   **** This is the World Organic News for the week ending 23rd of January 2017. Jon Moore reporting!   This week begin a man who took steps to save himself time and grow food in one action. Suburbia is known for its nature strips or lawns from the fence to the road. We can either turn these into food forests or mow them to comply with the middle class, lawn is king paradigm. Guy Roth from Narrabri in western New South Wales had a problem.   Quote: I had nothing but khaki weed, pig weed and bindi-eye. End quote.   I might add here the Guy Roth is also known as Dr Roth cotton researcher.   So faced with this the Roth family ploughed and planted wheat! That was back May 2016. In December, they harvested. The crop took some losses from cockatoos and other parrots but in the end he harvested 20 kilos of grain. That’s about 44 pounds in the old money. The good Dr plans to make some bread from the harvest. A link to this story is, of course, in the show notes.   Staying with wheat, the blog Permie Fix has a video post from Washington State University on that little known variation of wheat, Perennial Wheat. This is something that’s come up in an early podcast, I’m sure but this post let’s you see the stuff. Kevin Murphy, Assistant Research Professor narrates the video and explains the benefits and the drawbacks of this plant. The benefits? Less ploughing, fossil fuel usage, spraying and fertiliser use. The drawbacks? Mainly yield. The video is about the need for further research to increase yields through crop selection, testing in different climates and so on. A quick two minute video, so worth a look.   While we’re on the subject of slightly out of the box ideas, The blog Bee Conscious brings the post: Why a Topbar Beehive? Topbar? I hear you ask. Yes. We are, I’m sure all familiar with the Langstroth hives dotted around the globe. It is the favourite of commercial beekeepers. A mature technology, it’s limits and strengths are well known. The great advantage of the topbar design is its closer approximation to natural conditions. That said, the greatest worry with a topbar is the possibility of cross combing. That is each vertical sheet of comb not remaining independent of its neighbour. If the space between cobs exceeds the “bee space” the bees will attempt to fill the space with comb. So the initial setup and measurements for a topbar are critical. That done, the output from a topbar hive is different from the langstroth. The latter is designed for honey production and very little else. The top bar still produces honey but also beeswax. In the langstroth the comb is supplied and the bees fill it. In the topbar a line of wax is provided and the bees build the comb of this. It also then available for harvesting. In the langstroth system the comb is uncapped and left in the frames after the honey is spun out.   I have read that it is possible for the langstroth frames to accumulate pesticides in the “permanent” frames whereas this can’t occur with the topbar system as the wax is replenished each year. But having to build combs means less energy/time for honey collection. You makes your choice and lives with the decision.   human meets nature brings us a post of great import: Where did Nature go? The image of Rachel Carson at the top of the post sets the tone. For those of you who may not have heard of Rachel Carson, she published Silent Spring back in the 1960s which showed the reality of the bioaccumulation of DDT in the environment and its effect on eggshell thickness amongst other things.