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5 gardening tips to keep your plants healthy

5 gardening tips to keep your plants healthy

Sometimes, it may be difficult to know the best ways to keep your plants healthy, especially if you’re not a gardener by profession. We aim to have a highly productive garden that fulfils our needs, natures needs, is energy efficient and low maintenance. If you’re struggling to maintain the health of your plants, don’t worry – this guide can help get your plants flourishing in no time at all, expanding nature for both its beauty and eco-friendly benefits. Read on for more discussion!

Water

Telling you to water your plants may seem very obvious, but you should never underestimate the significance that water has in a plant’s growing cycle. Making up a high percentage of an entire plant’s weight, water is crucial for delivering nutrients from the soil to the plant’s cells, keeping them healthy and strong. It can be a challenge sometimes to know how much water to give your plants, so you need to consider the conditions. Thinking about the climate and soil type can help you with this. It is important to get the balance right since too little water causes plants to stop growing and die, whilst too much water can create soggy roots, resulting in the plant becoming oxygen-starved. A good estimate for most gardens is supplying your plants with around one inch of water a week, whilst gardens in hot climates may need two inches of water per week due to the loss of moisture. Water aids plants in their critical life processes, including photosynthesis, nutrient distribution, and transpiration. Therefore, one healthy soak a week should be enough to keep your plants alive and healthy, helping your garden to blossom with minimal effort!

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Dark Days For German Solar Power, Country Saw Only 10 Hours Of Sun In All Of December!

What follows is a chart showing the measly amount of power that Germany’s more than 40 gigawatts of installed solar electricity capacity actually managed to produce (yellow) in December, 2017 (you may have to squint):

Germany’s more than 40 gigawatts of installed solar capacity barely produced anything in December 2017. Curved line shows German demand. Chart source: Agora.

Now that you’ve fallen on the floor with laughter and managed to get back on your chair, you can understand what is going on in green la-la-land.

This is the story of Germany’s Energiewende: install as much capacity of each type renewable energy as possible, and hope that one of them works when the others don’t. Currently Germany has well over 40 gigawatts of installed PV capacity, enough to power half of the country at lunchtime on a sunny day. But it all does nothing at night, or in the wintertime when the sun stays blotted out by Germany’s notoriously cloudy climate and short daylight hours.

This past December in Hanover the the sun shined a mere 10 hours over the entire month. In Lüdenscheid the sun was seen less than one hour!

Michael Kruger writes at Science Skeptical:

Photovoltaic: 10 hours of sun in December 2017

Sonnenstunden-Hannover-Dez2017

Image: NDR German Public Television – “Hallo Niedersachsen”

Weathergirl Claudia Kleinert of NDR television above showed on ‘Hallo Niedersachsen’ [Hello Lower Saxony] the number of sunshine hours in December 2017. Hanover reached a whole 10 hours for December. The average value for December in Hanover is 39 hours, thus this past December reached only a quarter of the sun’s usual output.

The operators of photovoltaic systems have not seen any real output at all. Imagine if the coal power plants had operated only 10 hours for the whole month of December, and only a bit over the daytime. They’d be mothballed immediately because of lack of economy.”

How Sustainable is Stored Sunlight?

How Sustainable is Stored Sunlight?

Tesla_power_wall

One of the constraints of solar power is that it is not always available: it is dependent on daylight hours and clear skies. In order to fill these gaps, a storage solution or a backup infrastructure of fossil fuel power plants is required — a factor that is often ignored when scientists investigate the sustainability of PV systems.

Whether or not to include storage is no longer just an academic question. Driven by better battery technology and the disincentivization of grid-connected solar panels, off-grid solar is about to make a comeback. How sustainable is a solar PV system if energy storage is taken into account?

In the previous article, we have seen that many life cycle analyses (LCAs) of solar PV systems have a positive bias. Most LCAs base their studies on the manufacturing of solar cells in Europe or the USA. However, most panels are now produced in China, where the electric grid is about twice as carbon-intensive and about 50% less energy efficient. [1] Likewise, most LCAs investigate solar PV systems in regions with a solar insolation typical of the Mediterranean region, while the majority of solar panels have been installed in places with only half as much sunshine.

As a consequence, the embodied greenhouse gas emissions of a kWh of electricity generated by solar PV is two to four times higher than most LCAs indicate. Instead of the oft-cited 30-50 grams of CO2-equivalents per kilowatt-hour of generated electricity (gCO2e/kWh), we calculated that the typical solar PV system installed between 2008 and 2014 produces close to 120 gCO2e/kWh. This makes solar PV only four times less carbon-intensive than conventional grid electricity in most western countries.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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