Solar Design and Botany

An amazing evening last night. Spent 4 hrs talking in spanish with Francisco and Jorge, the architects for the new Patagonia National Park in Chile. Doug Tomkins, founder of The North Face and Esprit, and Kris Tomkins, former CEO of Patagonia clothing company own the estancia, all 151,000 acres, which they would like to join with the Tamango Conservation Area and HeniMeni Park to create a new Park with the Chilean Government. Doug hooked me up with the architects to go over potential solar designs for the new buildings. My spanish was challenged with teaching mass to glass calculations and design priciples, along with energy efficieny, heat storage, air leakage ratios, insulation types and ratings, green materials, technical building techniques and plan design. Needless to say, my spanish reached new heights, and it is exciting to help with such a huge and gallant project.

The evening before, I was also challenged with another task, calling my Botany degree into action. I research the invasive plants that we are controlling to determine their exact species identification, their reproductive cycles and therefore determine if the methods we were using to control them were correct. Little research has been done here in Chile on invasive and native plants, so I left the spanish websites and started on American ones. UC Davis had some of the best info, along with hundreds of others, and I was able to identify three of the plants and determine that the plants are biennial not annual as previously thought here. This has changed our control methods as they had been ignoring removing the first years growth, a basal rosette of leaves, and were only removing the second years seed pods. Also interesting to note, was the Hierba Del PaNe, or so called Mullein in the US, has between 100,000-240,000 seeds per plant and the seeds will live for 35-100 years! It doee, however, make simply the best toilet paper in the world.

Hopefully our work will start to show as the sheep are slowly taken off the fields, the natural grasses start to recover and slow down the exotic plant invasion. There is also a particularly thorny prehistoric yet beautiful plant, the Neneo, which is native, but tends to spread with overgrazing like sagebrush in Colorado and Wyoming.
This plant is particularly offensive when rolling fence or trying to take a cat nap.
The piminelas, or stickers from several plants here, migrate everywhere, even managing to somehow get inside bras and socks. Top it off with Stinging Nettles, Calafata (tastes like a sour blueberry but has 3/4¨thorns), and thistle, and you have quite prickly adventure whether you are hiking working, or feeding the cat.