Just this month the front cover of Forbes called Monsanto “Seed Heroes”.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash.

I may buy a copy just so I can frame that cover as evidence that Forbes has abandoned even the pretext of journalistic integrity and cannot be trusted to be truthful in any matter whatsoever.

The linked video, about the effects of chemical farming in India, is instructive. I know that your time is valuable. I’m asking for 30 minutes of it with the promise that I will not waste even a single minute. Start by viewing the video for the first 26 minutes.

Then, with the other 4 minutes, read and meditate on Revelation 11:18 — especially that last clause.

“But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

Look around you at the synthetic material in your home, your clothing, your containers, your car, your workplace, your places of worship and recreation and the vendors you do business with. And anyplace else that you can think of that I left off the list.

Most plastics NEVER biodegrade and putting them at curbside for pickup does NOT take care of the problem: the plastic is still on the planet … and so are you. Using them willingly makes us just as guilty of ruining the earth as their manufacturers, because we are the ones who provide the economic justification for their manufacture. No acceptance = no consumption = no sale = no manufacture.

As I write this, I move my plastic mouse around on a foam rubber mat and type on a plastic keyboard on my plastic laptop full of phenolic resin circuit boards and powered by a lithium battery. It’s sitting on a wood composition desk that contains, among other things, formaldehyde binding the termite puke together and some sort of vinyl, paper and ink fake wood grain surface treatment. Thank you, Sauder, for a desk that could have cost me thousands of dollars to have made in wood, but only a few hundred to slide out of a box and assemble on site.

Now, do you think you could do the same thing without the poisons?

I humbly acknowledge that the problem of getting plastic out of our lives and pesticide out of our foods is not a simple one; but somewhere along the line we’ve at least got to try. Pitching the existing plastic and using hemp grocery shopping bags is just a symbolic gesture, not the cure … the pitched bags have nowhere to go. But it is, at the very least, a start.

Do you remember when Madison Avenue was pitching us to change from paper grocery bags to plastic ones? We were told that the plastic was a lot cheaper to use and it was implied that this would favorably impact the cost of groceries. Well, the money difference is perhaps 3-5 cents per bag against the paper version which never seems to have shown up in MY grocery receipts, but the environmental difference is totally lopsided against the plastic. Paper versions decompose biologically … eventually becoming new trees. Or zucchini, or something else living. On the other hand, the plastic versions photo degrade until they are small enough to enter the food chain and then begin the march up that chain to your dinner plate. Even when they have degraded all the way down to the molecular level, that molecule is still an indigestible long chain polymer; some of which are mistaken by the endocrine system for the hormone estradiol.

Someone in Great Britain with too much time on their hands calculated that the average work life of the million or so plastic bags used in that country PER DAY was only about 7 minutes. Its lifetime after that is measured in millennia.

Plural.

I mention the plastic because we in America may be willing to accept birth defects in India as simply a sad fact of life … especially since it lowers the price of almonds for us. But are we willing to accept plastics in the edible portions of our own foods? The point being, we will not ‘get off the dime’ until we perceive a direct and significant threat to ourselves.

Monsanto makes the chemicals used in India. It also holds most of the GMO patents and sells roughly 70% of the world’s seeds. And it also makes a mountain of plastic each and every year. This DOES affect us and, unlike the people in India, we are actually in a position to take action against it.

– Bill

If you’ve read this far, you are probably also interested in at least a few of the additional videos at the bottom of the linked video page.

Would $20,000 help you begin organic farming? How about if you are transitioning from chemical means of production to organically certified?

If that sounds good to you, then follow this link and let us know how things turn out.

On Monday, December 20, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan announced $50 million in available funding for the 2011 sign-up of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) Organic Initiative. … The program provides up to $20,000 per year per person or legal entity, with a maximum total of $80,000 over six years.

The money is to defray 75-90% of the cost of conservation measures. While it won’t cover 100% of the cost, even the 75% is a big leg up.

Hurry … signup for 2011 ends March 4, 2011.

– Bill

Gardening is an opportunity for young ones to feel & be useful.

You can plant and you can forage and you can get-by. Those are positive things. You’ll probably lose weight you’ve needed to shed anyway and regain strength you thought was gone forever; you’ll definitely gain a new perspective toward food and you’ll likely taste wonderful things you would never have otherwise experienced. The taste difference between a pepper that was picked just this morning and one the grocer would have discarded tomorrow is difficult to appreciate until you’ve eaten a fresh-picked one. You won’t walk past grocery stores because you haven’t the money to shop: you’ll walk past them because your pantry (and your stomach) are already full and you don’t need to shop. Big difference.

When the welfare of our family is at stake, we tend to take whatever deal we are offered in the way of work. But what would your bargaining position look like if you didn’t have to worry about feeding yourself or your family? For many people that would cut their cash needs by $100-$200 or more per week. With that burden off, they could have kept their homes. You could live on savings a lot longer while looking for quality employment or survive just fine on a lesser (cash) income indefinitely.

A well-tended garden this size will provide food for four and pay the house note, too.

You can plant on land you own, land you lease (on the cheap) and, on the sly, you can plant on public land. There are people all over the world who are already doing it. It’s called “guerilla gardening”. It’s illegal: but do it right and it will fill your stomach.  Oh, and don’t forget the overlooked plots of land at the edges of fields and woods that you can see from the freeway. It would be a hard-heated farmer who would begrudge the use of a narrow strip of land at the edge of his fields too small for him to plow with his tractor. It might happen, but most farmers are wired to be hard-working, not hard-hearted, and they tend to appreciate others like them.

You can even plant on the side of walls using a series of slightly inclined rain gutters that criss-cross and drain into each other. This could help you gain the exposure to light you need, the square footage you lack, or just getting the most good out of every drop of water. Perhaps all three.

Ding, ding! Ingenuity is rewarded at the dinner table.

Depending on your tax situation, every $1.00 of groceries you can grow is roughly $1.35 in wages that you don’t have to earn. If you grow, then, $100 worth of groceries a week (taking care of most of the essentials for a family of four), you can live on about $2.50 an hour less in wages. Do the math for yourself. You may never have looked at gardening in this light. This is why, when the layoff notice came, you didn’t have enough food in your house to last even a few months. Avid gardeners might easily manage a year or more with only minor trips to the store.

Unemployment benefits, welfare or even odd-jobs are sufficient to pay for those.

This exercise works just as well with Euros, Yen, Rubles or whatever name your currency is given and whatever tax rate you face. When you contemplate your grocery bill, keep in mind that every single bit of the protein you buy can be replaced by a vegetable source and a change in eating habits. Simply put, I don’t care what you are accustomed to, you don’t need to eat meat. One fourth acre can feed a family of four for an entire year with enough produce left over to generate ~$10,000 USD cash income and all for about 20 hours work a week … less than half of what most folks put into their jobs. In most cases there is no commute.

Too, at least at present, all the expenses of the garden go against the cash income … so the food you eat is neither taxed nor does it cost you anything out of pocket.

SSI pays ~$900 per month, or about $10,800 per year. With food stamps and Medicare, you can just about make it.

But add in the value of the cash crops from that 1/4 acre and this is nearly doubled. Add in the value of the food consumed ($5,000 – $10,000) and, rather than living from month to month you can be living rather well. Many who are on SSI can handle the light work of maintaining a garden as it can be spread throughout the day and the hot parts of the day skipped altogether. I like to start my day, coffee cup in hand, shortly after dawn, pulling a few small weed sprouts and looking for signs of slugs. I might do some watering and, as the sun dries the last of the dew, apply some mulch, pick whatever is ripe enough (or, in the case of tomatoes, still green but big enough) and just get a general sense of what might need to be done later today. I’m out there for 30 minutes or an hour and walk back into the house in a very calm mood, ready for some breakfast. If I miss a few mornings, I can just do more in the afternoon and evening. It doesn’t hurt to completely miss a day or two from time to time.

Counting pathways, I have 600 square feet. One acre = 43,560 square feet. One fourth acre, then, is 10,890 square feet. Unless you are trying to grow livestock, I don’t see the need for even 1/4 acre. My wife and I do just fine with the 240 square feet (not quite 1/64th of an acre) we actually have planted.

Proverbs 6:6-11 "it prepares its food even in the summer; it has gathered its food supplies even in the harvest"

Because I’m out there so often, (And because I’ve just watered) the weeds I pull are tiny, slip easily from the soil, and I can just toss them on top of the mulch to dry out. That’s hard on the weeds, but easy on me. All in all, not a bad way to add to my earnings while sipping a cup of coffee.

This is not what being self-sufficient is all about.

With unemployment benefits running out for a staggeringly huge number of people in the United States and elsewhere, it looks to be a long, cold, winter. For many, it will be a hungry one, too.

But it didn’t have to be that way this year and it doesn’t have to be that way next year.

If you have a backyard, or just know of an undisturbed place in an alley or alongside the road, you can grow enough food to feed at least two people, probably more. If you add in the front yard, you can likely feed more people than you can house. If you live in the warmer parts of the world (roughly 40-45 deg. north and south latitude and some areas outside of that warmed by coastal currents or favorable winds) you can plant and harvest all year around. Sometimes seeds, sometimes bulbs, sometimes plants, depending on the local weather patterns. But you can plant. And, if you can plant, tend, reap and prepare, you can eat.

This is the first post of a multi-part series (with the first 8 parts essentially complete) and marks a new, more aggressive, editorial direction. For quite some time now I’ve not posted much of anything because I didn’t like the ‘me too’ direction I had started out in. I think I wrote a pretty good series about growing tomatoes – I certainly had fun doing the artwork – and my readers seemed to like the slug article, but there are tons of nearly identical ‘de rigueur’ articles on the internet. Until fresh research turns up something startling, there just isn’t anything left to write on these topics. (Read the slug article – I did stumble on something new that works surprisingly well.) Although I am not removing those posts and, indeed, I plan to add to them from time to time, I’m taking a new direction.

Gardening is often seen as this sort of passive thing that people who like vegetables or pansies do … a harmless pastime, like painting by number, for those with no real talent or drive.

I don’t think so … I never have thought so, but, like most gardeners, I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words before so I just put my passion into the soil. Well, as you’ll see by the writing that follows, I’ve found the words.

– Bill

You are probably here because you agree that organic food is a good idea. In that case, you might might be interested in this 5:47 radio link.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

You may also be interested in knowing that Ireland is now officially and completely GMO free. Even so-called ‘trial fields’ (which end up contaminating the surrounding fields as their pollen spreads) are no longer permitted. This is a HUGE victory … to have even ONE government stand up to big agri-business instead of cowering before it, as the US, Canadian and British governments have.

Obama betrayed us all in his appointment of a representative of big-ag as our nations ag representative … but what else are we to expect? The guy he appointed is associated with the agribusiness lobbying group that started the “groundswell” letter writing campaign against the Whitehouse organic garden. Obama is too much of a politician, and not enough of a man, to stand up to these folks … but it looks like the Irish are up to the task.