Our permaculture-garden project has come a step closer. The many square meters of yellow sand have shrinked a bit after the planting of several trees and plants. At De Batterijen (the best, experts say) we picked up the following:

• 1x apple tree Notaris
• 2x pear tree Doyenne du Comice
• 12 x Raspberry (framboos) Glen Moy
• 4x Ray (Braam) Jumbo
• 1x Black Berries Tsema
• 1x Red Berries Jonkheer van Tets.

For our memory, they have been arranged alongside the fence as depicted. The pear and apple trees will be bown to lay-shapes.

Starting off to turn our garden into a permaculture heaven, the plan is first to remove the square pond where nothing ever lived except for the koikarpers a previuos owner kept there and the waterplants that did not die in the underwater baskets. Luckily Edward came in to help a big bit. In a single day we did:

• remove the walls from the pond. They were filled with that terrible white foam we call peep-foam. The pond foil was hard to get out, but when pulled to the side, the rest of the pond lost its water.

• plants and conifers around the pond have been moved to the small garden in front  of the house. There was nothing but bricks.

The next thing is to fill the pond with the bricks and whatever we have. There will always be a hole, but, it may be okay for some animals and plants to actually live there.

We want your  GFT! 

If anyone has any garden cuttings left, we are interested to compost them - with EM it’s actually fermenting - to fil the garden and make our garden more healthy and living.

Maybe 8 or 10 weeks, that is the expected time of arrival of the Bries. It’s a hybrid of a bike and a bullit, built by Fietser.be Dries.  My bike will have the following specs:

• 2 front wheels, 1 rear wheel, all 20”.
• color: super yellow ral 1016
•  9 Speed Shimao Tiagra
• Dual Control shifters
• Shimano Flight Dech bike computer
• Son nave  dynamo

Rgboog.nl is a new market place for a sustainable living. Anyone can join in, place ads and make a booking to any of the other participants. We use the RGB-unit of value, which is as simple as nature itself. this way is called Rainbow Trading and is explained at http://kleureneconomie.nl. Sorry, the English site is not yet ready but you may peek at http://rgbtrade.org .

That site will also be the home of the system behind Rgboog.nl. It is given out for free and has gotten some bit of response through sites like freshmeat.net and sourceforge.net, sites where software is exchanged. On sourceforge, our rank has improved from 67.519 to 1.014 today. But, it is not a competition!

Rgboog will do a test-year now, which is actually just the first year. We take the time to make it better.It works, but the road may be a bit bumpy. Whatever. The first users have already registered. Why don’t you register right now?

In an old box I found a power meter: a small device to measure power usage for electric equipment. Currently: 158 W for a pc, a monitor and a audio set. Okay. Could be better maybe, nevertheless. Once I switched everything off, 52W was still in use. Huh? All devices off and still eating power at 1/3 of the in-use rate? What’s this.

A little more research showed that the home equipment has a pretty large ‘24×7 power usage’ . As long as the power cord is plugged in, the devices are still in use. Okay, some devices don’t even have an ‘off’ switch, such as a network switch (strange word joke, a switch without a power switch!). But the other systems are totally off usage and still burn. What did I find out?

Personal Computer

Even when switched off, the computer eats 12W. The lights inside, on the motherboard, are lit. The machine has built-in functions such as wake-on-lan, which can turn the machine on with a special sign on the network. So, the device is listening on the network waiting for a command to re-awake.  The 90-120W’in-use’ power is depends on the work it has to do: reloading a web page will increase the usage with 10W.

Monitor

Don’t know why, but the monitor still eats 7W for doing nothing. Okay, there is a USB connector inside. Is that the real cause? Can’t sure.

Switch

The network switch can’t be switched off, but is of no use when all devices are down. It uses 10W, under any usage.

 Printer

The above are things I was more or less (pc) aware of. But this printer is the absolute top: it uses the same 16W, when it’s on or off.  Only during printing the usage increases, but I just haven’t measured that. It’s hardly relevant, probably. The damn is in the 16 W 14×7 usage.

Solution

The only way to ged rid of this is a big power switch on the  power distributors. And put it off every night!