consequences?

i was on campus last night for an environmental action committee meeting and i took a stroll past the garden before i left and it startled me. we had some significant snow last week and i expected the garden to be covered just like it was last time, but it wasn't. the black landscaping fabric i used to secure the straw mulch was visible as could be , even in the dark. i was concerned that on sunny days it might generate enough warmth underneath that mulch to fool the yams into coming out of dormancy. they are the only plants with any portion above ground in there right now. so when i got home i fired off an email to joe hollis at http://www.mountaingardensherbs.com/information.html
to get some difinitive information from someone who knows more than i do about chinese yams. i haven't heard from him yet, but will i am sure. anyway...i went back this morning to have a daylight look and i'm not sure but that i overeacted a touch. the last snow we had came out of the north and was followed by a period of strong north winds. the garden is on the south side of hawthorn hall and you can see in the picture a wide swath of bare ground that lies west of the garden. snow might have blown off the fabric, not melted. either way i will follow any advice joe delivers just to be on the safe side. stay tuned.

okay...it's 10:05 in the morning and i just opened an email from joe hollis who tells me not to worry. chinese yams emerge from dormancy late and are cold hardy. he tells me he doesn't even remember any of his being damaged by a late frost. so wind or melt-off the uncovered fabric is a non-issue.

agribusiness

here's a graphic (admittedly a bit blurry) that illustrates the consolidation of control over seeds by corporations like monsanto and the lesser entities in the agriculture business. the use of patented, trans-genetic seeds in a monoculture of crop production both weakens genetic diversity in the plants and constrains the farmer's choice of crops to plant [brush 2004]. chemical inputs further weaken genetic diversity. when seed "designers" see a genetic defense in a plant that can be replaced by a chemical input they can remove that defense making both the plant and the farmer more dependent on agribusiness ( a nifty deal for some corporation like bayer that produces liberty herbicide and liberty-link corn that can withsatand its application) and leaving entire strains of crops vulnerable if the chemical inputs become over-costly or unavaialble [jackson 1980]. this is the reason all the plants (except the elephant garlic which came from burpee seeds because they were the only ones who could get it here in time for fall planting) and seeds in this garden were procured from heirloom seed companies, organic growers, or public access seed banks like j.l. hudson, an underlying philosophy of organic diversity we will maintain throughout the garden's existence.

it's definitely winter

winter has arrived and so much so in "his sternest shape" that even de quincey must approve...i was on campus today to pick up my books for the spring (ha!) semester...inopportune the bureaucracy to change a 200 level course to a 400 level ( the people at the registrar's office were kind and helpful...so much so that i hesitate to tar them with the epithet "bureaucrats"...so i'll just call them workers instead since that has so much more currency where i come from...whatever they are, they were helpful and cheerful, so thanks!)...and pay a visit to steve mcshane in the calumet regional archives ( third floor of the library...tucked away in the back...you should stop by sometime...neat place and steve is cool) so i stopped by the garden to see what was what and take a few pictures....clearly nothing much is shaking...except maybe the cold working to break the dormancy of the gamagrass seeds...i'm just reading and writing and mulling over my teosinte problem...i did order the potatoes which will be here sometime in late march or early april and the asparagus crowns are next ...then all i have to do is procure earthworms, lady bugs and bird tape...then the real fun starts

albert howard

"...this development is based on the transfer of food from the regions that produce it to the manufacturing centers which consume it and which make no attempt to return their wastes to the land. this amounts to a perpetual subsidy paid by agriculture to industry and has resulted in the impoverishment of large areas of the earth's surface. a form of unconscious banditry has been in operation: the prosperity of generations to come, in the shape of soil fertility, has been used, not to bebefit the human race as a whole, but to enricha dishonest present,"
Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture. by albert howard p.193

published in 1947...precient...the proponents of sustainable anything owe a large debt ( which is widely recognized by most) to albert howard and his interpretation of soil as an organic whole made up of multiple components, and the delineation of the processes which were destroying it. he saw agriculture as a crucial component of the industrial revolution, but i don't think he could forsee the extent to which agriculture would be colonized by industry. chemical fertilizers were destroying the life in the soil even in his day and still are ( anhydrous amonia, the major nitrate fertilizer used in growning industrial corn , for instance kills 15% of the earthworm population in a given field with each application by drying the soil and changing its chemical balance) but he didn't have to contend with trangentic seed produced by agribusiness limiting the diversity of crops or monsanto and archer daniels midland patenting seeds in an effort to aggressively control diversity's re-introduction into the monoculture of corn and soy beans....fast food and industrially processed food were probably unknown to him as well, though it most likely would not have suprised him...it's taken most of the 63 years since the publication of Soil and Health for any sort of widespread realization of the impact of agricultural industrialization to come about..in that time the system has become second nature and has spread around the world limiting or destroying traditional agriculture wherever it has gone...resource depletion will make us change our ways...the sooner the better...there's a lot to figure out.

this is what mentors are for

these are pictures of a Zea mexicana seed that i popped this evening. yesterday i soaked it in hydrogen peroxide for twenty minutes, drained it, and added boiling water to the container. i let them soak for twenty-four hours and then dropped them into two-and-one-half tablespoons of HOT vegetable oil. thirty seeds in all. one popped completely and two seeds tried. their cases split, but they didn't have enough mositure in them yet or the case was leaky, or they just didn't get hot enough. so ten percent of the seeds made an effort. but not half the effort dr. kathleen forgey has made in all this. she's adopted me intellectually in an effort to get me somewhere coherent, and i could not be more fortunate. we have been brainstorming, networking, reading, talking, and making failed attempts at this for a few months now. i succeeded this evening, but only because i stumbled into her physical anthropology course at indiana university northwest in the spring of 2008. thanks dr. forgey.

diversity

three crops account for 71% of arable acreage in the united states...and the three agribusinesses in the graphic, along with bayer and my friends at archer daniels midland, probably supply most of the seed used to plant those three crops...the constraint this places on crop choice should be obvious, but what may not be so obvious is the impact agribusiness is having on plants' genetic diversity...industrial food wants as much as it can get in the way of cheap raw materials, and the folks in industrial agriculture are doing their best to see they get them...in order to do this they have been genetically modifying agricultural plants (particularly corn)...they have increased the plants', tolerance to living closer together...they've genetically "linked" plants to certain herbicides (liberty link corn from bayer for example) so the plant can withstand the application...but another trend is more disturbing...because of the abundance of pesticides and herbicides over the recent decades plant engineers have reached the conclusion that natural plant defenses are uncecssary...if there is an application that will eliminate the pest agribuisness will remove the genetic defense from the plant so that the energy that the plant would have devoted to defense will be transfered to growth [jackson 1980]...fine, i suppose, as long as the applications based on petrochemicals are abundant enough and cheap enough to do the job...since oil is finite you have to think that eventually those applications won't meet either criteria...then what? hope that human ingenuity comes up with a response as cheap and as effective a petrochemicals? maybe...but what if we don't? then you have a staple crop facing nature in a genetically weakened condition without the cover of a manmade defense...sounds like a disaster to me...unless we start to save the diversity that's left...one reason why all the plants and seeds in the garden are from organic growers and heirloom seed companies...i'll be saving seeds as well and am currently searching for area seedsaver groups and seed banks to share with.

hope you all have a great christmas and that we all weather the new year.

Roots

the roots on the left in this series of photographs are those of the annual winter wheat....the ones on the right are the perennial intermediate wheat grass ( which we will be planting in the spring...i've got something like 120,000 seeds...there will be wheat grass at home and anywhere else i can get away with it as well)...a graphic demonstration of why perennials come back every year...above ground dies back, but the roots are deep enough to survive most cold...it's also a graphic demonstration of one possible reason why early agriculturalists anuualized staple crops during the process of domestication...a lot of energy that could go into producing seeds goes to developing the roots instead ( the gama grass we planted isn't supposed to seed until the end of its third season...until then everything goes into the root system)...so, perhaps, there were more calories per unit of work with annuals...and perhaps that made saving and preserving seeds for the next planting season an attractive alternative to a less work/ less production of a perennial based agricultural system...the folks at the land institute ( which is where i lifted the photograph from) are trying to breed perennials with the grain yield of annuals in an effort to overcome industrial farming's dependence on huge infusions of petrochemicals...i'm curious to see what they'll find. http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v