Regrow Qld 23 March Issue 11 Vol 3
Pruning to suit your plant, microbat boxes now on sale, Good News for the Tequila fish, Arthur's Dream Car Blog, and Greg considers what might have been if EV's were encouraged.
Editorial
Anna Hitchcock
My friends,
I’ve been immersed in native plant details for the last few weeks as we start the process of setting up our community nursery.
One of the key things about selecting the correct genetics for your area is that the plants will survive (after establishment) with only rainfall. They will tend to sit dormant in dry seasons and put on new growth in the wet. This ‘purple vibey’ pictured above rewarded me this morning with its first purple flowers.
It’s quite ‘leggy’ at the ,moment so after flowering I am planning to prune the tips of the branches back to create a bushier plant. I will check with my supplier first though, as plants are very particular about how they like to be pruned, and I don’t want to ruin an established plant with poor maintenance.
I was annoyed recently when I purchased a jasmine plant at a commercial nursery. I had carefully selected a plant with a vigorous leader - that’s the long tendril on a climbing plant that ‘leads’ the rest of the plant up the tree or trellis.
Imagine my irritation when the sales assistant reached up and tip pruned my plant (without asking) as ‘that will make the plant bush up’.
Jasmine is a vine, not a bush, and any attempt to push it out of its natural form is doomed to failure. You can certainly prune errant tendrils, but I prefer to keep my plants happy, not tortured into a shape which doesn’t suit them.
Luckily, after all the rain we have received, my jasmine plant sent out another leader and it is off and racing up the almost dead tree which will provide support.
My front gate should be lavishly perfumed (with any luck) next year.
Anna
GCC Project Update
We now have microbat boxes and tubes for sale at $30 each, courtesy of Fraser Coast Microbats Inc. These are made by the Howard & Hervey Bay Men’s Sheds with re-used materials and profits will go to our Community Nursery Project.
Ideally, you should put a few of these boxes or tubes around your property facing different directions. The bats will choose which ones are more comfortable, depending on wind direction, time of year and sunshine.
Buy a box here: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/313913967775
Buy a tube here: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/313913970959
We are offering local pickup only at this stage, but feel free to contact gladconscouncil@gmail.com if you would like them posted, or if you would like to buy in bulk. We can also arrange installation of bulk arrays of these boxes to assist with insect control.
More information here:
https://www.allaboutbats.org.au/
Good News
For more good news check out https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews/ and sign up to the fortnightly newsletter.
Rewilding the Tequila fish
The Tequila fish has successfully been reintroduced the into the wild in Mexico, 18 years after it was declared extinct. In 1998, five pairs of fish were sent from a UK zoo to Michoacana University, where the population was protected and expanded. 1,500 fish were recently released into the river in Jalisco and the local community are playing a key role in monitoring the progress. BBC
"It's just a little fish, not very colourful - there's not much interest in terms of global conservation," explains Gerardo Garcia, a conservationist at the Chester Zoo.
The Tequila fish has now been returned to the wild after being declared extinct. "Missing" since 2003, it is back in the rivers of south-west Mexico.
The reintroduction is being held up as an example of how freshwater ecosystems and species can be saved.
Honduras bans open pit mining
Honduras has banned open-pit mining with immediate intervention for existing projects in areas of 'high ecological value'. It’s an unexpected win from a country that has a poor track record of threatening environmental defenders who oppose mining. Honduras joins El Salvador and Costa Rica as countries that have banned open-pit mining in Central America. Mongabay
The government is no longer granting environmental permits for open-pit mining projects, the Ministry of Energy, Natural Resources, Environment and Mines said in a statement. It also plans to shut down open-pit mines already in operation.
New Seed Vault donations
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic just received seed donations from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany, and Lebanon. The vault is located halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and holds over 1.1 million seeds from nearly 6,000 plant species. It was created in 2008 to preserve the diversity of the world’s crops from war, disease, and environmental threats.
Tesla Dream Car blog #25
Arthur Hunt
Editor’s note: this article was written in 2021
We have arrived safely back in Yeppoon after our trip down to Victoria (but not to Tasmania). After spending time with family in Sydney on our return journey, we continued up the Pacific Highway, enjoying the divided motorway. We made brief stops to see friends at Killcare and Newcastle where we used a free 22 kW charger in the city centre. We stopped again at Heatherbrae, north of Newcastle, at a Tesla Supercharger to complete charging. We headed north to Port Macquarie where we stayed overnight at a caravan park. We had arrived with only 17 km of range left in the battery but there was no external power point on our cabin. In the morning, we used our extension cord to connect to our room and added 11 km of range which was sufficient to reach a winery 8 km away where there was a bank of four Tesla Superchargers. While we enjoyed a delicious breakfast, the car was fully recharged.
We headed north again for an overnight stop at Brunswick Heads at a motel which allowed us to use a low power Tesla charger that still provided a full charge overnight. We spent time walking on the beach and visiting the NSW Marine Rescue base near the river entrance. The next morning, we headed north to Tropical Fruit World at Duranbah for breakfast and a walk amongst the wide variety of fruit trees. We continued north and crossed the Queensland border, but heavy traffic and road works slowed us down. For a new experience, we decided to stop at IKEA at Slacks Creek where the Plugshare app showed a new 50 kW charger, a new addition to the Queensland electric superhighway.
This was possibly the most frustrating experience of our trip due to the location of the charger which was located in an underground car park. First, we had to find the charger in the huge area, then we found that there was no mobile phone coverage next to the charger. Since the Chargefox app must be used to open and start the charging session, this was a problem. About 20 m away, out of sight of the charger, there was an opening to the sky that gave a mobile signal after my wife climbed onto a raised garden bed. We eventually got the charger working after some unkind thoughts about the people who installed the charger there. Then we made the mistake of visiting the IKEA store while the car charged. What a labyrinth! Eventually, we found our way out again as this article proves.
We headed north again on the motorway, bypassing Brisbane, to reach Golden Beach near Caloundra to stay with another of our good friends. The next day we faced a long haul of 576 km to Yeppoon and lots of road works. The first part on the motorway to Gympie was easy and we stopped briefly at the Tesla supercharger in the Coles underground car park. Tesla cars are connected automatically to Tesla chargers so there was no problem about a mobile phone signal there. We continued north, with lunch and toilet stops at the highway chargers at Childers and Miriam Vale. We arrived home in the late afternoon with 31 km of range left.
On our trip, we travelled 6,377 km in 26 days including 11 lay days. The longest day was 640 km from Albury to Sydney. The longest stage between charges was 307 km from Wolumla, near Merimbula, to Lakes Entrance. We had 46 charging sessions in total. Due to the generosity of friends, motels, caravan parks and the NRMA in NSW, we paid for only 18 out of 46 charging sessions. The car is averaging 14.2 KWh per 100 km. The cost per KWh varies, but probably averages 25 cents (only 17 cents at home). So, if we had paid for all energy, the trip of 6,377 km would have cost about $226 but the actual cost to us was less than $100.
The car has now completed just over 20,000 km in a little under 12 months without any maintenance, apart from a tyre rotation before the trip. We hope that this account will encourage readers to investigate whether their next car could be electric. My next blog will provide information about models and test drives.
More in a fortnight.
Arthur
Editor’s note: We estimate that the same trip in a petrol vehicle of similar size would cost around $1200 at today’s fuel prices.
Opinion
Greg Bray
It’s a Race Now!
Folks, I was startled to hear someone in a V8 doing a lengthy burnout last night.
Clearly, I’m surrounded by hi-vis, rev-head, millionaires who can afford to waste fuel in this manner.
You see, in my neck of the woods, the V8 is still King of the Road, and jacked up 4WD’s rule the offroad, carparks and school drop off zones.
We also love our hi octane motorsport. Mind you, these days, it’s more hi-cost octane. Because the last race I watched, each touring car used 240 litres of fuel to complete a 300 km circuit.
That’s 1.25 litres to travel 1, that’s right, ONE, kilometre!
Frankly, I’d prefer my ‘touring car’ to be a tad more economical on the go-juice.
By comparison, my 22-year-old Camry, gobbles up a single litre of petrol to travel 10 kilometres around town (which is as close to race conditions as that ancient chariot will ever get).
Around here 4WD’s and SUV’s outnumber low slung sedans…
But speaking of races, Australia is currently getting lapped on the Electric Vehicle sales circuit by the most of the developed (and some developing) countries.
The following stats will give you some idea of how much harder we need to start pedalling:
There are 18 million licenced drivers in Australia and 20 million registered vehicles.
15 million are cars, 3.5 million light commercials, 130,000 trucks, 900,000 motorbikes and 86,000 buses.
20,000 vehicles, an underwhelming 0.1 percent of the total, are EV’s, (and half of those are Teslas).
(By the way, there are 669,000 caravans dotted around the country, and 90% of them can usually be found puttering along Queensland’s highways and byways during winter. But, with fuel prices rocketing northwards too, I predict there’ll be a lot less vans choking our roads this year.)
Anyway, back to our slow uptake of EV’s...
Imagine if, 10 years ago, the current mob governing us had ignored the bags of cash from oil lobbyists and decided transitioning to renewable energy and EV’s was actually a race we could take part in, and win?
Just think where we’d be if, even five years ago, they’d scrapped import duties on EV’s, increased emission standards to stop manufacturers offloading dirtier cars here and legislated all commonwealth government vehicles would be EV’s by 2025?
By now, we’d be much less reliant on overseas oil price fluctuations, car manufacturers would be flooding our dealerships with affordable EV’s and the motoring public would buy more of them, trade them in, and eventually, cheapskate canny purchasers, like myself, would be able to buy a decent second-hand one at a price that wouldn’t give my inner-Scotsman conniptions.
If our current ‘leadership’ wasn’t so determined to race full steam ahead back to the gas-guzzling 1950’s we’d be well on track to achieving net zero by 2030, and the air in our cities and towns would be much cleaner and a quieter.
Especially around my hometown, because, while I’m fairly sure EV’s can still do burnouts, they’ll definitely be a lot less noisy!
Greg
gladconscouncil@gmail.com 0466 396 388