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Gardening in Jefferson County
Jefferson County welcomes you to explore our gardening tips, ideas and troubleshooting tools.
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 The conservation district’s 2012 sale offers 37 varieties of natives, including deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs, and some ground cover and low growing species. Sale day is February 25th at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds Horticulture Building. Pre-orders will be taken until February 10th. For more information contact the district office by phone at 385-4105 or email at info@jeffersoncd.org. Download the order form.
Biogas Cook Stoves and the Earth Healing Potential of  Biochar
Monday, February 6, 7:30pm
Quimper Grange
1219 Corona Street
(End of Sheridan)
The program starts at 7:30 pm and is preceded by a potluck dessert/fingerfood social half-hour from 7pm to 7:30pm. Suggested donation: $5-$10
Quimper Grange will host engineer and technology enthusiast, Francesco Tortorici. He will be talking about a revolutionary clean burning cook stove that can use anything from small twigs to peanut shells or even straw for fuel and he will also speak about biochar, the carbonaceous material formed by burning these fuels. Micro-gasifier stoves, as they are called, separate the generation of combustible gases from their subsequent combustion to create cooking heat. Heat is produced from burning gasses and vastly reduces emissions compared to conventional wood burning.
Attendees will be given simple instructions on how to build a small efficient biogas stove from found materials and will see a demonstration of its use boiling water. Additionally they will learn about experiments being done locally using biochar as a soil amendment for growing organic crops, and will learn how biochar not only improves garden soil but can sequester carbon for up to a thousand years. Biogas stoves are a valuable addition to an emergency preparedness kit.
Francesco‘s interest in appropriate technologies led him to attend the ETHOS (Engineers in Technical and Humanitarian Opportunities of Service) conference in Kirkland last year and through that experience he now works with several NGOs in the northwest that are focusing on promoting clean cook stoves. What Francesco finds most exciting about micro-gasifier stoves is that they are simple to build, easy to use, and can begin to address the issues of poor indoor air quality caused by cooking over open fires which is done by perhaps a third of the world’s population.
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