I've had several flocks of guineas over the years, and I too love them enough to put up with the loud noises they can make....my experience is that they calm down greatly when they get out of their teenage time. In fact, my last adult guineas hardly ever said anything unless something startled them. And how I loved their bug-eating ways ! My 2 hounds never,ever had ticks, nor did I see those huge, ugly lubber grasshoppers in my flowers. I also learned never to buy adult guineas if I wanted them to stay around (all my flocks have been free range). I wish I lived near someone who wanted to give away the fresh eggs or keets ! Would love to have some guineas again.

Hey, sorry to bring up this dinosaur thread, but I was toodling around looking up H. pauciflora and found this. I got a few cuttings of this a couple of years ago, and it is my second best grower. No die back or leaf loss. I kept lopping the long vines in two and popping them back in the pot with a smidge of rooting hormone, and now have a full little 4 inch pot that will likely need a 6 inch this year. I have to celebrate my successes with hoyas, as I have a boatload of failures (serpens, curtisii to name a few). Here's what I provide, and it seems to really like it. I grow mine cool and bright. House gets down to 15 or 16 at night (winter temps). It seems to tolerate drying out well, and grows in spurts during the summer and fall. No growth in winter, while my others hoyas give the odd bit of growth. I'm hoping for some flowers and googled what they look like. How lovely!

I don't think a computer fan running on a cheap variable voltage wall-wart is very complex, and it's reliable, cheap and effective :) I also very much doubt that the heating due to friction is significant for ceiling fans. A more likely reason is that a low speed breeze is just as effective as a fast one for cooling, and obviously uses less energy. You can make a computer fan go slower by dropping the voltage, or putting two in series. Bigger fans move more air for a given voltage. Ok, having got the negatives out of the way, I like your ideas - you are thinking outside the box (does that make sense for a terrarium?). Let me share a few things with you. Firstly, there are two general kinds of fluid flow we can talk about: Laminar and turbulent. Laminar is 'more efficient', in that you can get more airmass moving (momentum) for a given input of energy. Turbulence chews up a considerable amount of energy, you can see this if you compare the water flowing out of a tap with a hose connector at the end, vs one without. The hose connector reduces the turbulence, increasing the rate at which the water can escape. However, if you want to get the air close to a surface you need turbulence. Without the turbulence the air forms a boundary layer (on a windy day you'll notice that the air is more still closer to the ground, even in the middle of a paddock). In your example of stomata breathing you wanted to get the air closer to the leaf's surface, this would require turbulence. (Having said that, I think the gas diffusion rate for CO2 in air is faster than you'll be able to blow air, so I don't think this is really a problem.) To get turbulence you are better off with a narrow stream of fast moving air hitting some kind of obstacle. This leads on to "matching". In electronics we have an idea called 'impedance matching', the same idea appears in fans and ducts, in water flows, in sound systems, pipe organs and car engines. The idea is that if you directly connect a thin tube with high 'whatsit' to a large tube with low 'whatsit' you'll get a reflection occuring at the boundary. This reflection causes signal loss, or energy loss (the same thing really :). In the little gramophone that we wound round and round we used an exponential horn to match the sharpish needle's high pressure, small volume sound to the room's low pressure, large volume. You have the same problem with your fan. Water falling is a relatively high pressure, low volume fluid flow. We want to match that to the low pressure, high volume fluid flow of air. There are many simple ways to do this. All of your nifty ideas have been mechanical (converting the falling water to mechanical motion, and then back using a primitive fan (propellor type fans are vastly more efficient than ones that work by flapping, or by impulse means, btw). Can we do the impedance match any other ways? When I go and visit

Welcome back!! The quotes were very enjoyable. Sorry for your experience, but glad you are ready to "get back out there"! Nature and life march on. You have lots of empty space to fill (and nature abhors a vacuum). You don't have to fill it all at once, but do as little or as much as you feel like........on whatever budget you want and can afford. Show photos of what survived and is thriving. Gardening is good for the soul, although you get the occasional curveball thrown at you. My Hostas were thriving and I had some big beautiful clumps of 'June', 'Great Expectations' etc. along with some rare streakers I was propagating and multiplying. One winter, a combination of voles and just odd weather caused many of them to "Dissapear" over winter (and this included some BIG well established clumps). Actually I am not totally sure what happened...............it has been a few years and things are recovering nicely. Around the same time I had a couple years of SEVERE drought.....one summer seemed like EVERY storm went north or south of me. Even some big old trees in the neighborhood succummed to drought. I do have problems with a heavy soil and tree roots that is somewhat a battle. However we had fairly regular rain the last two-three years and things are doing really well again.