These hummingbird favorites are easy to plant and they will animate your garden in the most delightful way.

Agastache: Quickly becoming a summer favorite, this perennial has fragrant foliage and spiky flowers of pink, purple, blue, red and orange.

Hollyhock: Plant these and you’ll have sensational spires of flowers. A classic cottage garden plant that’s very easy to grow.

Alstroemeria: A favorite cut flower because they last so long. Lots of colors and plants of different sizes. Leave some for the hummingbirds!

Milkweed: Colorful and easy to grow. Yellow and orange/red are most popular. You’ll get lots of butterfly visitors, too.

Lion’s tail: Tall spikes of orange flowers appear on this shrubby perennial. Easy to grow.

Salvia: Lots of choices — all with colorful flowers. Many with richly fragrant foliage.

Pyrostegia: You’ll have cascades of orange flowers blooming fall through winter. Sometimes called flame vine.

Abutilon: Flowering maples produce beautiful bells of red, yellow, white, salmon and pink. They tolerate some shade.

Butterfly bush: Spectacular spikes of purple, pink, white and lavender. Cut back after blooming to get more blossoms. Of course butterflies love this shrub too. Plant the new dwarf forms if you have a small space.

Hibiscus: A favorite shrub in San Diego. Gorgeous, shiny, evergreen foliage and stunning flowers in warm weather. ‘Tradewinds’ is a new dwarf shrub reaching only 3 feet in height.

Lantana: So many colors, so many forms—from low, trailing types to small rounded shrubs. So easy to grow, too. Cut it back every winter to keep it clean and tidy.

Lavender: Take your pick; they’re all good. Fernleaf, Spanish and French lavenders bloom almost year-round.

Leucophyllum: Texas ranger, an evergreen shrub, has gorgeous silver foliage and violet or magenta flowers. If it begins to look a little rangy, cut it almost to the ground.

Rosemary: Bulletproof plants that trail, mound or grow upright, depending on the variety. You must let them bloom if you want hummingbird visits.

Trumpet vine: Included here are blood-red, vanilla, and royal trumpet vines—three different species of distictis. All have glorious trumpet flowers on beautiful, rich green foliage.

Large, centralized irrigation schemes, often built around big water storage dams, were a major component of the Green Revolution that helped boost food production and reduce famine risks for millions of people, especially in Asia. But they have often proven environmentally destructive and, especially in Africa, expensive.

By contrast, decentralized irrigation – small individual systems designed to serve a single or community farm – can often be better tailored to local conditions, purchased and operated by private farmers, and avoid the environmental and social downsides of big dam-and-canal systems.

The emergence and spread of affordable pumps and other technologies that enable farmers to irrigate their small plots has begun to boost harvests and family incomes in some of the world’s deepest pockets of hunger, including parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

For millions of poor farm families in sub-Saharan Africa, access to water makes the difference between hunger and a full belly, between a well-nourished child and one stunted by malnutrition, and between a productive livelihood or one mired in poverty.

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

According to a new report, Wind Power – Global Market Size, Turbine Market Share, Installation Prices, Regulations and Investment Analysis to 2020, by research firm GlobalData, installed capacity increased at a compound annual growth rate of 25%. This translates into to a jump from 73.6GW in 2006 to 280.6GW in 2012.
There was a 7%, fall in annual additions in 2010 as major wind markets such as the US, Germany and Spain, faced economic problems following the global economic crisis.
China was the global leader in wind power in 2012 with the US coming second. The US lost out on the top spot due to the economic slowdown and uncertainties relating to the future of the industry because of a lack of long-term policies supporting the wind sector.
Offshore wind power installations accounted for 1.9% of the global wind power market in 2012.
GlobalData’s forecasting from 2012 to 2020 sees the share of offshore wind in the global wind power market reaching 8.4% by 2020.
Consider the Source

 Consider the First Source!

“The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” and so it is today for many of his followers. Despite all the warnings about the snares laid by moneylenders, despite the fact that gage mort is literally translated as a pledge to give up one’s life, millions have lost their homes through mortgage exploits, and their quality of life through the service of debt.

Find Out How to Get Your Life Back!

The angle or pitch of your roof actually has less impact on solar panel performance than the direction it faces. In general, optimal production occurs when solar panels face south at a tilt equal to 30°. But what happens if your roof is flat? Lowering the tilt all the way down to 5° only decreases production by about 10%, regardless of where you live. The difference in production for steeper roofs is barely noticeable. Increasing the tilt from 30° to 40°, for example, results in a negligible decrease of about 1%.
Looking at data from six cities- Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., Energy Sage estimated the production levels generated at various tilt angles. They held the azimuth constant at 180° which in laymen’s terms means they always assumed that the roof faced directly south. What they found was consistent with their investigations into the effects of other variables.
Consider the Source

 Consider the First Source!

“The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” and so it is today for many of his followers. Despite all the warnings about the snares laid by moneylenders, despite the fact that gage mort is literally translated as a pledge to give up one’s life, millions have lost their homes through mortgage exploits, and their quality of life through the service of debt.

Find Out How to Get Your Life Back!

Dear Folks,
• Be willing to face life squarely.
• Realize that every problem impacts growth to the degree that it is attempted to be solved. — Steps Toward Inner Peace, Peace Pilgrim
Many things are Compelling: monetary or emotional security, Robust health, natural beauty, elegant truth, personal goodness. These appeal to us because they have intrinsic value. Appreciate and enjoy them in yourself, others, and Ma Nature. If you look even higher and harder you will find them revealed in and by your Spirit self.
Peace,
Jim
COMPELLING
Definitions: (1) demanding attention; drawing notice because of interest or beauty; having a riveting or an irresistible effect; (2) very powerful; forceful <a compelling personality>
            ROBUST
Definition: having or exhibiting sound health or great strength; vigorous; hearty; strongly built; sturdy; muscular
Derivation: Latin, “oak strength”
Synonyms: hale, lusty
Consider the Source

Even as more U.S. restaurants list nutritional information on their menus, less than half of Americans, 43%, say they pay a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of attention to it. Americans are much more likely to take note of nutritional labels on food packages, with 68% saying they pay at least a fair amount of attention to this information.

These data, from Gallup’s annual Consumption Habits survey, conducted July 10-14, come as some restaurants in the U.S. take steps to comply with a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires restaurant chains with 20 or more locations to list calorie information on menus and menu boards by 2014. Other restaurants added nutritional information to their menus prior to the Affordable Care Act’s passage in 2010 to meet city or state requirements, to be transparent with their customers about the nutritional content of their food, or to respond to pressure from health groups.

While menu labeling in restaurants is a new federal requirement, the federal government has required all packaged food to have nutritional labeling since 1990. As a result, Americans may be more accustomed to looking for nutritional information on packaged foods.

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Not long ago, it was common for children under the age of 5 to receive treatment for severe malnutrition in this Ethiopian community. Today, a community-based nutrition programme is keeping children strong and healthy, and families resilient.

Weighing children monthly is one of the pillars of the Ethiopian Ministry of Health’s Community Based Nutrition Programme (CBN), which is designed to prevent malnutrition by building the resilience of communities to shocks such as food insecurity.

Members of the health development army are women selected from the community to assist health extension workers to deliver their integrated health, nutrition, hygiene and sanitation services in the rural community. Each woman is responsible for five families.

According to the zone health office, over the past three years, malnutrition rates have dropped from 20 per cent to 5 per cent, and severe malnutrition rates have dropped from 5 per cent to about 1 per cent.

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Dear Folks,
John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success (1910 – 2010) American Basketball Coach
• 6^th Level : Industrious; Friendship; Loyalty; Cooperation; Enthusiasm
• 5^th Level : Self-control; Alertness; Initiative; Intentness
• 4^th Level : Conditioning; Skill; Team Spirit
• 3^rd Level : Poise; Confidence
• 2^nd Level : Faith; Competitive Greatness; Patience
• 1^st Level : Success
It is not obvious to an immature person how they are Special in a good and unique way. Instead they think of their difference as being a drawback. Once we begin to celebrate our special personalities we get the point that our distinctive physical features are only skin deep; that our emotional proclivities can be modified; and that our intellectual boundaries can be breached. But most of all we begin to learn how to grow our soul. The most Straightforward and successful method is through the acquisition of values.
Peace,
Jim
            SPECIAL
Definitions: (1) possessing extraordinary or uncommon characteristics; exceptional; unique; (2) particularly valued <a special friend>; (3) appropriate; proper
See also: Important
Synonyms: distinctive, distinguished, individualistic
            STRAIGHTFORWARD
Definition: possessing undeviating rectitude; upright; honest; open; frank; candid
Quote:
You can run faster if you don’t run into walls. — Jerry Downs (1949 – ) American Sage
Symbol: a straight line
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Nuand has employed Lime Microsystems’ programmable RF silicon for its bladeRF, which – the two companies say – takes open-source RF hardware into the mainstream
Lime’s field programmable RF chip, the LMS6002D, has been adopted for Nuand’s bladeRF, a Kickstarter-funded open source software defined radio.
Following Myriad RF and Fairwaves, this is the third open source RF board to have been launched in 2013. Highlighting the importance of such technology, the project received over 500 backers on the social funding platform, KickStarter and raised almost twice the requested funding.
bladeRF is the first open source RF project to bring USB3.0 onto the board and combines the Lime chip with an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA. This combination allows it to create exceptionally complex networks on any mobile communications standard or frequency.
The $420 board has been designed for both the hobbyist and the professional developer and is USB2.0 compatible, allowing it to connect directly to the Raspberry Pi and the Beagleboard.
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Aston Martin only made about 1,200 DB4 cars back in the day, and today some versions can fetch millions at auction. Ivan Sentch of New Zealand has printed about three-quarters of the mold parts for his handmade Aston Martin DB4. The resident of Auckland, New Zealand, has printed nearly three-quarters of the sections for his replica of the classic sports car.
Sentch is recreating a 1961 series II Aston Martin DB4 by 3D-printing plastic plugs for the car’s fiberglass body. The mechanical bits will come from an old Nissan Skyline. He’s using a Solidoodle desktop 3D printer to print out roughly 2,500 pieces to use as plugs for fiberglass molds. The plugs are the basis on which the fiberglass is formed.
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