Oriental or bread seed poppies, Papaver somniferum, are cultivated for their beauty, for seeds (as in poppy seed bagels), and in Afghanistan for their narcotic alkaloids, the active ingredients of opium. Beautiful and intricate in structure. Honeybees love the pollen.

There are 9 photos of these and similar poppies in our book, The Half-Acre Homestead.

• From @lloyd.kahn’s Instagram

Thanks to architect Rod Freebairn-Smith

See also: google.com/search?q=nashtifan+windmills

We discovered it on a hike recently.

• From @lloyd.kahn’s Instagram

The global, industrialized food system faces increasing scrutiny for its environmental impact, given its voracious appetite for land is linked to mass deforestation, water pollution and a sizable chunk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The implied trade-off has been that advances in agriculture have greatly reduced hunger and driven societies out of poverty due to improved productivity and efficiencies. But Mark Bittman, the American food author and journalist, argues in his new book Animal, Vegetable, Junk that these supposed benefits are largely illusionary.

In a sweeping deconstruction of the history of food, spanning the past 10,000 years of organized agriculture, Bittman takes in everything from Mesopotamian irrigation to the Irish famine to the growth of McDonald’s to posit the rise of uniformity and convenience in food has mostly benefited large companies, fueled societal inequities and ravaged human health and the environment.…

–The Guardian

www.theguardian.com/…

Sent us by Maui Surfer

This just came in from Anon:

Woman, 66, is ordered to demolish her £59k log cabin eco-home where she has lived for seven years after council ruled it was too big and breached planning permission.

The mother-of-three spent £59,000 of her life savings constructing the cabin from natural materials and applied for planning permission at the time in order to do so.

She was told she did not require permission as there was already a mobile home on the site in the quaint hamlet.

‘I was given this formal legal document dated January 23, 2014 that said ‘application not required’. ‘I built it exactly the same as it looks in the plans I submitted in 2013. It is absolutely identical.’

“But Herefordshire County Council has since performed a U-turn and told her the wooden structure is unauthorized and in breach of planning regulations.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9504475/Woman-66-ordered-demolish-59k-log-cabin-eco-home-lived-seven-years.html

If you run up against a firewall here, use Chrome Incognito Window (under “File” pull down window).