What kind of gardener would I be if I was afraid to stir up a little dirt when the time comes?

Here’s why:

We present for the first time a comparative analysis of blood and organ system data from trials with rats fed three main commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), which are present in food and feed in the world. NK 603 has been modified to be tolerant to the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation. MON 810 and MON 863 are engineered to synthesize two different Bt toxins used as insecticides. … Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded. –http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm

Our food is being poisoned in the quest for profits. These grains are already in the American retail food markets … and have been for a while. We are involuntary and unwitting participants in the worlds largest feeding experiment.

Other nations, recognizing the shoddy science, political cronyism and lax regulatory methods behind the US certification of these frankenfoods as, well, ‘food’, are bucking against accepting these grains into their food supply. For the most part, they are having a VERY hard time at drawing the line.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the full weight of the US is being used to force acceptance of these iffy ‘foods’ all across the globe. One tool has been a turn toward an international standard for food safety that permits such foods. Then countries with tighter standards will have to set those standards aside and accept this junk within their borders. The US is one such country that used to enforce a higher standard. That’s gone now. Literally 100’s of farmers in India have already been pushed into such a bleak economic corner that they have committed suicide by drinking the very poisons they have been goaded into applying to their fields. Apparently, despite a worldwide ban on its use / production, they are able to routinely obtain and use DDT.

Hint: they aren’t making it in their kitchens.

In the US, it is not possible to publish research like this. I have no clue how the French got  hold of this grain and a waiver allowing them to test this and publish their results. I suspect that they did not bother with the paperwork at all.

The reading is a little heavy – it is a full-on scientific research paper, after all — but I sure wish that you’d follow the link above and try to read at least some of it.

Keep in mind that most live animal science experiments end in the death of the test animals. In this case, that means us.

I hate GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and their insidious sidekick, chemical farming, with the same passion I reserve for pedophiles, politicians, drug sales reps and big bankers.

You will sometimes read my arguments, cogent or otherwise, for gangland-style executions of the occasional corporate board. At the top of that list would be the heads of the banking cartel and the agribusiness (seed + chemicals) cartel headed up by Monsanto and Dow Chemical companies. But there are others.

These companies are fabulously successful in the financial sense, which means that there is probably no other way to uproot their boards and top executives.

Ignore those arguments … they are the product of a fevered mind which sometimes hallucinates the thought that mankind may be able to reverse its own idiocy.

Besides which, such action, even if effective, would be illegal and, if I read the Bible book of Revelation correctly, ultimately fail to have the needed impact. Besides which, it’s just morally wrong to kill someone whose only public fault was to knowingly poison the world’s food supply, and those whose hard labors provides it, in the name of corporate greed. That would just be wrong.

Okay … here’s the link that has me steamed today. I usually stay pretty tense about this topic, but today I am vulgar hot. As you read it, remember to stay calm: firstly, because this only applies if you eat food or wear clothes and secondly, because it’s hard to aim straight when you’re agitated.

If you haven’t given any thought to becoming a Guerilla Gardener or, if you have thought about it but simply haven’t taken action, you really owe it to yourself to see how much beauty one guy with buck teeth has brought to Zurich, Switzerland.

http://www.maurice-maggi.ch/blumengraffiti/guerilla-gardening/ggtv-guerrilla-gardener-maurice-maggi-zurich/

There are two videos at the above link. Watch them in succession and then ask yourself if you don’t know of some locations in your neighborhood that could use some cheering up.

Maggi simply gets the seed below the surface, hiding it from birds and insects. He doesn’t water it. He doesn’t fertilize it … nature handles that just fine. It would appear that he plants hollyhocks and poppy’s together … both can tolerate fairly dry conditions.

He used a term that I was unfamiliar with: biotope. I’ve looked it up for my benefit and passed it along for yours. This definition comes from Wikipedia; YMMV.

Biotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals. Biotope is almost synonymous with the term habitat, but while the subject of a habitat is a species or a population, the subject of a biotope is a biological community.

^{I Stumbled this a few minutes ago … I hope it takes off. If you have a way to help it along, please do so.}

^{Here’s my review in Stumble:}

“Guerilla gardening means the planting of public spaces without permission. Maurice Maggi has been during this in Zurich for ~20 years. He’s the source of the hollyhocks that beautify that city. Now, do your part in YOUR city. For more info, Google for "guerilla gardening".”

(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.

In many, many places, there is a thick layer of dust and doom spread over the landscape. What water is available is often polluted beyond use, too salty, a vector for horrible diseases or too deep underground to retrieve. Global climate trends have forced people off formerly arable land squarely into the lap of aid agencies. Even if the aid agencies operated in some sort of idealized state – and they do not – living from handout to handout is hardly humankind’s proper state of existence.

Enter, stage left, the incredible synergy of water projects and micro-finance loans.

And you. You’re part of the synergy or I wouldn’t waste my time writing this.

What can happen is simple: these loans can make safe water both available and inexpensive. With crop yields and human health improved and the funding for tuition available, education, one of the key needs in developing lands, can proceed. Too, decent water can help the ambitious to expand farms and businesses, employing others in the process. This is the sort of hope, not the reliance on aid agencies, which lets a family plan a future.

You don’t have to back anything in the links below. Or, if you do, you can keep your involvement very, very small. But I’d appreciate it if you would at least review their proposals for solving a problem that is at the very core of much of the human suffering our world faces.

Even if you can’t spare $25.00 to participate in the micro-finance end of things, would you at least Stumble, Tweet, e-mail or otherwise alert others to the existence of this page?

Thanks,

Bill

Links:

Water Projects:

http://water.org/2009/12/kenyan-woman-mobilizes-community-to-tackle-poverty/

http://www.charitywater.org/ << interesting ‘gift-diversion’ program

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9142.aspx

Loans:

http://bit.ly/dRxGJ

http://www.kiva.org/

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/03/17/080317ta_talk_surowiecki (it’s not all wine & roses)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6668527

http://bit.ly/4ENcpx << it can be profitable, too

https://www.microplace.com/ << better returns than most bank deposits

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/opinion/04wed4.html?_r=1

If you’ve been following the sea change from chemical to organic production of our foodstuffs, you are probably already familiar with how horrible the early drafts of the “organic” laws were in the US.

Just about anything was fair game.

In a display of politics as usual, the highly esteemed Obama-ramalamadingdong is set to appoint one of the chief architects of that loathsome first draft to a key negotiating position for US agriculture around the world.

Let me put it this way: this guy is to sustainable agriculture what the Nazis were to civil rights.

Those of you who voted for ‘change’ are getting it. If you want to shape that change, you need to get moving.

What I find somewhat ‘odd’ about this whole thing is this: 1) BHO was briefed on this guy and recommended him anyways and 2) normally I would expect the mainstream media to ignore a story like this … but someone on their staff is paying attention to the progressive poisoning of our food supply and, at the editorial level, has stuck their neck out. This is my effort to support that rare instance of editorial guts.

My understanding of the Bible forbids involvement in politics. It does not, however, forbid discussing facts with others who might choose to respond with a letter to their congress critters.

On the second page, they point out that “A green plant is made up of about 80% water and 20% dry matter. The largest part of the dry matter is composed of the elements hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen which occur in air and water, while the rest consists of a great variety of elements that originate in the soil. In spite of the small amounts of these components, they are absolutely essential and the complete absence of only one of them makes plant growth impossible.”

Buried in that paragraph is a nugget of information that is vital to the organic grower: the essential nature of trace minerals.

Trees, like any other plant, generally take up only the nutrients they can use and they do so in the precise ratios needed for growth. The proof of this is that these ratios DID result in growth.

Tree leaves are abundant now in many locations around the world and they represent an incredible storehouse of those trace minerals brought from deep below ground in an easy to collect and use form. This isn’t rocket science, folks, the trace minerals have already been mixed and proportioned and packaged for you. The brain part is done: now all that is needed is a little grunt work.

Although there are a number of subtle shadings about how to use them, let’s look at just a couple: decomposition in situ and decomposing before incorporation.

Firstly, let’s tackle ‘in situ’. All this means is to mulch the leaves directly into your lawn, to dig them into your garden or to layer them on top of the soil so as to provide a blanket over it. This will use a goodly number of leaves and is a recommended practice. A mulching mower set to a low cutting height is ideal for the task of mulching leaves into the sod, as the grass should in any case be cut short this time of year to avoid fungal diseases over the winter. The less green you see, the fewer sugars to tempt snow mold and other fungi.

The second general manner of using tree leaves is to decompose them somewhere other than the point of final use. You might want to finish off a compost pile begun earlier in the year by turning leaves in to it, mixing them thoroughly as you do to prevent them from forming a water-shedding layer. You might also take a tip from others and, after shredding them somewhat with a mower, stack them against a fence or other structure to allow them to begin decomposing there. To the extent that weather permits, earthworms will gladly turn the bottom layers into something called “leaf mold”, which makes an excellent mulch or soil amendment in the spring. Also, in the spring, you can use the dried top layers as the initial ‘browns’ charge for a fresh compost pile.

Fall is also important because soil amendments applied now … lime, bone meal, sulphur, green sand, compost and so on, will have time to be incorporated into the root zone before spring planting. This allows the moderating influences of chemistry (organic chemistry can be gosh-awful slow) and microbiota to be felt, leaving the soil in a more ‘settled’ state. For instance, adding lime or sulphur will change the soil pH (that’s generally WHY they are added) and that will cause distress for the biota that thrived at one extreme or the other. Having winter to work in allows the other biota favoring the new pH to re-establish themselves. You want your soil fully populated by the time it is warm enough to plant. Applying amendments in the fall assists in that goal.

Now is the time to discard leftover plant parts. If the plant simply died because of the cold, it can be sent to the compost. If it died because of disease, send it straight to the trash hopper. Compost cures a lot of stuff but if you add diseased plant material to a late-fall pile, it may never get hot enough long enough to sterilize the pathogens. In that case, you need to allow the pile at least one, and preferably two, years to sit and mature.

Unless beans, peas or other legumes died from disease, do not pull them up by the roots. Rather, cut them off at the soil surface so as to leave their rhizomes in the ground. A quick flick with a sharp hoe will do the trick as will running over them with the mower if you have planted alfalfa or buckwheat and intend to use the top portions as green manure.

Look for some quotes from Kohnke & Franzmeier’s book in the sidebar. I’m liking what I see.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

You may also be interested in knowing that Ireland is now officially and completely GMO free. Not even so-called ‘trial fields’ (which end up contaminating the surrounding fields as their pollen spreads). This is HUGE victory … to have even ONE government stand up to big-ag 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 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.

Her thinking was, and is, good.

A large part of “The American Dream” is self-sufficiency. For many decades, this has been defined as having enough money to buy enough food. Many who thought that they had achieved this, find that their supply of money has now been cut off and their supply of food is now endangered. Make no mistake, the public dole is not bottomless … at some point the well will run dry, as it did for the Irish in the 1850s when the population of Ireland was reduced by 4,000,000 people. A large number of those simply starved to death or died from dietary diseases such as scurvy. Some, my ancestors included, bought a ticket in the bottom of the boat and somehow survived the journey.

Not a pretty picture.

Do not be confused by the date … it is also happening right here in the US. The numbers are still small enough to sneak under the radar of a public enamored of starlets and a President who won a Nobel Peace Prize without having stopped or prevented a single conflict. (Duh???)

Here, in the middle portion of the United States, many home owners have large lawns that cost them a boot-load to tend properly. A typical suburban yard is sufficient to feed all the occupants of the house plopped right in the middle of it. I know that I (this year was a flop – my first ever) typically pull roughly $3,500 worth of groceries off less than 1/2 of my tiny backyard.

So think about it. The bankers and politicians add NOTHING to the GNP. But even the tiniest of vegetable gardens does. And every dollars worth of produce you get from your garden frees you from having to earn $1.30 in pre-tax wages.

Consider this: if your garden was 500 square feet (50×10 or 25×20), it would be more than double the size of my garden of 240 sq. ft. My garden is valued at $14.58 / sq. ft. (home gardens are MUCH more productive than farmed land). If you set aside 500 sq. ft., your gross value would be closer to $7,300, which would free up nearly $9,500 in gross income. This means that even if you lost ~$190 gross earnings per week you would not have to surrender any portion of your current lifestyle. For someone earning $10 per hour (and lots of folks ‘get by’ on exactly that), this means that they could lose 1/2 of their wages and still survive.

Just some numbers to play with, folks. You don’t think us old-timers garden simply for the love of it, do you? Yup, the sun feels good on our liver spots and nothing beats a tomato sandwich with the tomato still warm from the garden. But that’s not the only reason we do it.

You say that your spouse and kids won’t let you have a garden? Above and beyond simply being the lamest excuse on the planet, you need to look up http://bit.ly/ZMDPY . If you live in other states, see if they have similar programs. I found a 40 x 130 (5,200 sq. ft.) parcel through this program that is only one block from my home. That’s 20x the size of my current garden. I won’t see $14.58 per sq. ft. from it this year; but I leased it for 3 years.

Begin by collecting enough paper or cardboard to cover your intended garden bed several layers deep. Also, collect and grind (if you can) enough leaves to cover the area deeply … at least six inches, preferably more. Make up more than you expect to use. The excess, if any, can be applied with good effect to any other area of the garden. Set these aside for the moment.

Most of us don’t have a formal “grinder”. You can line the leaves up near a wall and hit them with the lawnmower a few times, or dump a bunch of leaves into a trash barrel and have at it with the string trimmer. If you have a Snapper mower, Snapper makes a shredding attachment that fits between the blade and the chute that does a 7:1 reduction bang-up job. It’s just some expanded steel mesh with a rim, so, if you can weld, you can probably make one in 15 minutes or so.

Select a site that gets plenty of summer sun – you’ll want at least 6 hours a day and, if you have to make a choice, morning sun is preferable to evening sun. If it tends to be a little too wet to garden, that’s okay — as long as it’s not hopelessly boggy.

Knock the weeds back (anything that isn’t what you hope to grow is a weed), by working your way down to the lowest setting on your mower or just skimming the surface with a string trimmer. Leave the clippings where they fell. Scalping is good. Spading is okay (but largely pointless). Rototilling is not. Roundup is absolutely forbidden!*

Layer on several layers of cardboard and / or newsprint. You want to block the light and water for a while so as to kill the weeds. Do not be overly concerned about using too much. Corrugated cardboard is made up of relatively thin layers of paper and newsprint is fairly porous; both will decompose with dispatch. Two or three layers of corrugated cardboard or a dozen layers of newsprint is about right. Halving that amount may not work at all, but doubling it won’t cause any significant harm.

The layers nearest the ground will absorb moisture from the ground and begin to decay within a few days. The earthworms will come to this bottom layer and eat it**, thus exposing the next layer up to the moisture and repeating the process. Along the way, the earthworms will thank you for your generosity by making even more earthworms. And this, as Martha Stewart says, “is a good thing.”

Wet the top of the paper & cardboard to help hold it in place. You might also consider driving a number of small stakes or even steel nails (uncoated common box (smooth sides, pronounced flat head) #8-#16 will work) through it. Over time, these will rust, releasing iron into the soil. And that, too, “is a good thing.”

Next, add the leaves you had reserved for this moment, watering them as you go. Dry leaves are hard to get wet again. If you just pile the leaves on your planting bed without watering them as you go, you will find disappointment awaiting you in the spring: the bottom layer of leaves will have turned to leaf mold, the good, the outside layers will be hopelessly behind because the sun and wind keep them from staying wet enough long enough. The bad. And the inner layers of leaves will be as dry as you left them, sheltered by the surrounding layers. And the ugly.

So, water as you go. If it’s a cold day, perhaps you can get your POSSLQ to make you a cup of cocoa as you work. But wet those leaves down. Unless you are working in a steady rain, don’t leave things to nature. If you are working in a steady rain, you are beyond hope.

If you have burlap bags or some burlap windscreen fabric (check your local hardware stores & nurseries), lay it over the final pile and stake the outer edges to the ground. This will reduce losses due to wind. Burlap, or other breathable material, is the preferred cover sheeting.

However, this is one of the few times I will ever recommend using plastic in the garden. When preparing a bed this way, a roll of heavy polyethylene will trap heat and moisture inside, allowing for quicker decomposition in the autumn and earlier warming in the spring. Then take it off, rinse it off, and save it for next fall.

The brand name “Visqueen” comes to mind, but there may be others. The only bit of redemption in this environmentally hazardous step is that the plastic, if thick enough, can be used for many years before being recycled. Don’t just pitch it … recycle it. This same sheet of plastic can also be used to sterilize a patch of soil harboring bad stuff (blight, rust … whatever) through the summer. This will return a patch of ground to cultivation in only one year instead of having to fallow it for three or more years to let the offending organism die back to manageable levels.

Know a better way? That’s what the comment section is for. — Bill

*The active ingredient in RoundUp is probably, as claimed, safe. But the “inactive” ingredients, while safe enough individually, aren’t being used individually, are they? The gubmint only requires that they be tested individually, so the label is truthful. But, a glaring loophole does not safety make. Evidence is mounting that the combination causes leukemia. And that, my friend, is “a bad thing”.

** It’s not actually that simple: the earthworms are eating the microorganisms that cause the decay – not the decay itself. I tell ya, a garden is a dangerous place!