01 May 2009 by Tristan Gooley
I try not to let politics enter my mind too much when out walking, but sometimes it helps to be aware of some of the tinkering that the political animals are up to. In the interests of the environment farmers are discouraged from working the land right up to the edge of woodland. They can set some of this land aside, typically a strip up to 8m, and be compensated for it through the government’s Entry Level Stewardship scheme. 
The farmers are finely tuned into what is and is not productive land, they know from experience the parts of their fields that are not high-yielding. This will very often coincide with the areas that the sun does not reach fully, the shadows on the north side of tall trees for example. There is a bias towards finding these ‘buffer strips’…
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Tags: buffer strip, environment, nature navigation, shadows, sun, trees |
17 September 2008 by Tristan Gooley
When talking about heat and wind in the context of chillies, there is a risk that we might start to think some very un-navigational thoughts…
… however, this is a risky business, so here are two jalapeno chillies. One lived its life in a south-facing greenhouse, the other lived near it, outside near a south-facing wall. They both received identical amounts of sunlight. They both grew in the same soil and received plenty of water. The only serious differences to their environments were the temperature and wind exposure.
It is not too hard to see that nature is quite fussy about its environment and it is this fussiness that can give us a helping hand. It is sometimes possible to deduce useful things about the elements from two examples of the same species. One big example of this can sometimes be found in the different look and feel of two…
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Tags: environment, exposure, heat, hill, mountain, plants, south-facing, water, wind |
