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Autumn Solar: What Happens When Those Brilliant Summer Generation Figures Disappear?

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Autumn Solar: What Happens When Those Brilliant Summer Generation Figures Disappear? “Solar doesn’t stop working in autumn—but the way you use it needs to change.” There is something very satisfying about owning solar panels in the middle of summer. The sun comes up early. Generation starts while many of us are still asleep. By breakfast the panels may already be producing useful amounts of electricity. During the middle of the day there can be more energy available than the house needs, the battery fills, and the figures on the monitoring app look wonderfully impressive. Then autumn arrives. The mornings become darker. The evenings draw in. The sun sits lower in the sky. Grey days become more frequent. Suddenly those enormous summer generation figures begin to disappear. It can feel as though something has gone wrong. Usually, nothing has. The solar panels are still doing exactly what they are supposed to do. The problem is simply that the amount, timing and reliability of the availab...
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America’s Reservoirs Are Filling Up — With Dirt

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  America’s Reservoirs Are Filling Up — With Dirt Drought is shrinking the water supply. Wildfire is stripping the landscape. Then extreme rain arrives and washes part of the hillside into the reservoirs designed to protect us from drought. Before worrying about whether a reservoir is half empty or half full, perhaps we should ask another question: how much of it is now filled with mud? When we think about drought in the American West, the images are familiar: exposed reservoir banks, dry riverbeds, struggling farms, shrinking snowpack and arguments over who should receive the remaining water. But an article from Bloomberg recently highlighted a much less obvious problem. Dirt. Wildfires burn vegetation from hillsides. Intense rainfall then falls onto those damaged watersheds. Instead of being intercepted by leaves, roots and forest litter and gradually soaking into the soil, water can rush downhill carrying ash, sand, soil, stones and even trees. Some of that material event...
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Your Garden Is Not Untidy—It May Be a Wildlife Hotel

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  Your Garden Is Not Untidy—It May Be a Wildlife Hotel Before putting the garden to bed for winter, remember that something may already be sleeping in it. For generations, autumn gardening advice has often followed the same pattern. Cut everything down. Rake everything up. Clear the borders. Remove dead stems. Sweep the leaves. Make everything look neat and tidy before winter arrives. There is certainly nothing wrong with maintaining a garden. Paths need to remain usable, diseased plants may need removing, gutters need clearing and lawns cannot necessarily disappear beneath a thick blanket of wet leaves. But perhaps we have taken tidiness a little too far. What looks untidy to us can look very different to a beetle, butterfly, bumblebee, hedgehog or small bird. A pile of leaves can be shelter. A hollow stem can become a winter refuge. A seed head can become a food store. A pile of old logs can become an entire miniature ecosystem. Perhaps the autumn garden doesn't always need clean...
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What Should You Do With All Those Autumn Leaves? Don’t Throw Away Free Fertiliser

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  What Should You Do With All Those Autumn Leaves? Don’t Throw Away Free Fertiliser Every autumn, nature delivers tonnes of free soil improver—and we spend money getting rid of it. Autumn leaves can be irritating. They blow across the lawn, block drains, collect on paths, fill gutters and somehow appear again five minutes after you have finished sweeping. The obvious response is to gather them into bags, put them in the green-waste bin and let somebody else deal with them. But perhaps we should look at fallen leaves rather differently. A tree has spent an entire summer using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to construct those leaves. When autumn comes, the leaves fall naturally to the ground, where fungi, bacteria, worms and countless other organisms gradually break them down. In a woodland, nobody arrives with a leaf blower and a council green-waste bin. The leaves become part of the soil. So instead of asking: "How do I get rid of all these leaves?" perhaps we should ask:...
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