This article from the December 2013 issue of Interdisciplinary Toxicology and archived by the National Institutes of Health makes the case that glyphosate herbicide applied to wheat could be the cause of the rise in celiac disease, non-celiac gluten intolerance, and intestinal infection. The mechanism is "leaky gut syndrome" combined with an imbalance of gut bacteria and enzyme depletion. The authors go on to suggest that glyphosate may be causing a variety of other disorders as well.

For years I've been demonstrating the UC Davis SoilWeb site as a way to get official USDA information about the soil in a particular location. At last night's class, one of the students pointed out that there's now a SoilWeb app for Android and iOS that will show the data for your current location -- but only for your current location.

A few years ago I contributed a section to an article on Wikipedia, but the editors felt it was not sufficiently notable to keep it in the article, so I'm sharing it here instead.

This article is from 2017 but deserves reading: for years we had been told that plants only fed simple carbohydrates -- what Dr. Elaine Ingham likes to call "cakes and cookies" -- to their symbiotic fungi, but it turns out that the mycorrhizae actually alter the plant's biochemistry so that the plant feeds them fatty acids as well. So put some cream cheese frosting on those cakes and cookies!

Back when I was a home energy auditor for Efficiency Kansas, we were given a crash course in "building science" that made a lot of assumptions about how buildings are built and what they're made of. While those assumptions were safe for the houses I was auditing, I couldn't help wondering about the naturally built structures my friends had made from strawbales and cob and such.

This is an in-depth analysis by the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta) on the desirability of separating wastewater nutrients at the source -- that is, at the toilet -- rather than mixing them together with greywater and processing them into sludge. The report was prepared in 2015 for the Irish Environmental Network, and as such some of its analysis is specific to Ireland, but most of the conclusions are applicable to the US and elsewhere.

This excellent and detailed report (PDF, 2.5 MB) by David Buck of the King's Fund, under commission of the National (UK) Gardens Scheme, looks at the impact of gardens and gardening on health and well being and explores what the National (again, UK) Health Service and the wider health and social care system can do to maximise this impact.

Last week I presented a stand-alone version of the soil class I normally present as part of Kansas Permaculture Institute's certification course. It was very well received! Here are the slides: https://tinyurl.com/soil-city-sprouts

Over the years I've ordered seeds from a variety of companies, some more responsible than others. For future reference, here are some of the best I've heard of:

In researching design options for clients over the years, I've looked into what's involved in building natural swimming pools -- that is, ponds that stay safe enough for swimming without the use of chemical inputs. Here are some of the best links I've found on the subject:

Organic Pools DIY Manual by David Pagan Butler (PDF, 1.2 MB, 2013)