Reading Material
Thank you everyone who left comments on my Free Gardening Books post from several days ago mentioning books. A few that stood out for me were:
Fukuoka, Masanobu; The One-Straw Revolution (1978): This is a very famous book among natural/organic gardeners. Translated from Japanese, it is Fukuoka’s account of how he changed the way people looked at agriculture in Japan and developed his own very clever no-till methods that can be adapted and used by anyone anywhere in the world. This is a very short book, and doesn’t take long to read, which is handy for an e-book you are trying to read on a computer screen.
Burr, Fearing; The Field and Garden Vegetables of America (1863): This is a great historic account of the edible plants cultivated in the US in 1863. A complete manual for the vegetable gardener. The book discusses the pros and cons of different varieties available at the time, as well as offering advice on cultivation. It’s great fun to read the old style English language and word choices used in the book. It’s interesting as well to look at the Latin names assigned to the different plants at the time and compare them to modern Latin names, because they’ve changed quite a bit.
Søren pointed out this book to me:
Krasil’nikov, N.A. Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants: The Soil and Health library in Tasmania, Australia describes this as one of the most important in it’s collection. Written by a Soviet scientist, it is a detailed text of soil sciences as they were seen in the time. While the west was busy developing new plant varieties and agricultural chemicals, this book describes the approach that was taken in at least part of the Soviet Union to boost it’s agricultural yields.
Lieven also pointed me to a UK Soil Association publication, and with a little browsing on their website I see they have quite a few interesting things available for download. They seem to regularly regenerate the links on their website which makes it impossible to link to any of them here, because the links would stop working by the time I posted them. They have no reuse policy or Creative Commons style licensing that I can see so I sent them an email asking for permission to make some of their publications available for download here, but they didn’t reply, so I don’t have permission to do that.
What kind of organization goes to such trouble to make reading material available to the public, but then makes it impossible to reuse?
Anyway, if you care to, you can go to the UK soil association website and use their search engine to find some of their publications. A few I would recommend are:
SilentInvasionEXECSUMMlores
one planet agriculture
Free Gardening Books
Sandra just posted about a great site in Tasmania, Australia where you can download free e-book copies of gardening and health related books in cases where they are either out of print or the copyright has expired.
This reminded me of Project Gutenberg, based in the US but with affiliates all over the world. They currently have over 100,000 books in total available online for free download, and are expanding their collection all the time. Searching on gardening or gardening related topics gives you a number of titles to choose from. All of Project Gutenberg’s collection are books that are too old to be copyrighted any more.
There are both some advantages and disadvantages to finding gardening books this way. While basic gardening techniques haven’t changed that much over the years, some things have. I was reading a book which if it had been a modern version it might have been discussing spacing the rows of plants in your garden so you could use a garden tiller between them, but in this case it was discussing spacing the rows of plants so you could fit a horse and plow between them.
Heirloom gardening enthusiasts will appreciate being able to read about the varieties of plants that were favored by gardeners, many of which are still available via plant and seed exchanges or other heirloom gardeners.
If anyone comes across any particularly good books this way, I hope you will leave a comment or post about it somewhere so the rest of us can have a look! Also, does anyone know about more places to download free books other than the two mentioned above?
Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming
If you grew up in the US, did you ever read Ranger Rick magazine as a kid? I think when I was 8 or 10 years old I had a subscription and loved it. I was always very excited when the next issue arrived. I think this might have been my first ever subscription to any magazine, and I had it for several years.
Anyway, the people who publish Ranger Rick magazine (still!) sent me an email telling me about this new guide available for download on their website.
This guide is primarily targeted towards people living in the US, but the same basic principles apply anywhere. It’s well written and spot on. Many of us already know a lot of what’s in this guide, and have already made posts along these lines. In any event this subject deserves a lot more of our attention.
Previous Posts Summary
It’s funny how with gardening blogs we always seem to be working with seasons. There are seasons in our garden, but also seasons with our blogs. With a new year ahead of us in our gardens, many new blog readers are popping up looking for gardening information. In addition many new gardening blogs are popping up as fellow gardeners want to share this year’s garden with others on the Internet. It’s also the time of year we all have too much time on our hands anyway.
It occurred to me that this blog is a bit clogged with a large number of posts, and this could make it difficult for a new reader to go through it all. If you are interested in particular topics, for example if you want to see pictures of some of the plants I grew last year or want some of my recipes, following the categories links on the front page of this blog is a good way to do this. I’m not going to list posts that are easy to find in this way here.
This blog started with some posts defining exactly what heirloom plants are, on a very basic level discussed some plant genetics and what exactly an F1 hybrid is, as well as introductions to some basic seed saving and storing techniques. Saving tomato seeds is a very good place for a beginning seed saver to start, and I made a post about this. I followed up on seed saving a bit later with a post about biennial plants, and again with suggestions for easy plants to save seeds from. An important thing anyone should consider when saving seeds is inbreeding depression. Growing garlic is very easy, one of my favorite garden plants, and here is a post about that. I also posted about cover crops.
While many people prefer to use fluorescent bulbs for growing seedlings, grow lights are also a good option. Many people are discouraged from using grow lights because they feel it’s too associated with growing drugs, but in fact they are the same lights used in public lighting and are frequently cheap and easily available almost everywhere in the world if you look for them. With a little planning and shopping around, they can be cheaper to purchase and operate than fluorescent lights.
When you start seedlings indoors, don’t forget to harden them before moving them outside!
If you grow peas, beans, garbanzo beans, lentils or any other leguminous nitrogen-fixing plants, you need to know about nitrogen fixing bacteria!
I am a big fan of my weed burner, and I made two posts about this here and here. I am also a fan of my Earthway seeder.
I am a member of the Seed Savers Exchange. I wrote first about it here, followed up here, and posted about them again here.
I think composting has to be a favorite activity of almost any gardener. I wrote two articles on composting, first an introduction to composting and mulching then a post specific to container composting.
Last year I made a post about coffee as a crop, and how the world market for coffee was turned upside down with the introduction of an F1 hybrid coffee bean variety. What happened with coffee has been repeated over and over with other crops with the introduction of hybrid varieties, and is a very import thing for everyone who cares about what they eat and grow to understand.
Long term storage of your harvest is an issue for all of us. One of the ways I do this is by dehydrating my harvest.
All Europeans and everyone living everywhere, should be aware of the so called Agricultural Apartheid as it exists in Europe. In practice what this means is all fruits and vegetables sold anywhere in Europe are commercial varieties and the seeds that produce them come from large seed companies. These rules make it virtually impossible for farmers to save their own seeds and regrow their own crops in Europe. This has also become an issue recently in Turkey, which may become a member of the European Union.
What has to be one of the most important books to be published in 2006 was Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. A must read for anyone who cares about what they eat. We also reached the 100th anniversary of Upton Sinclare’s The Jungle, and it’s really amazing how many things still haven’t changed since then.
Open Source software is a growing worldwide phenomenon, as people get tired of commercial software like that produced by Microsoft and all of the politics surrounding it. Linux is growing in popularity, and has even been recognized by governments around the world. There is a huge and well organized group of people behind the free software movement. Few people understand that the issues are almost the same as heirloom gardening, but we lack the large numbers of organized people. What can we do about this?
What comes after GM foods? I made a post about Marker Assisted Selection or MAS.
The US government has addressed the issue of hunger by redefining it. Now we have food insecurity!
Everyone needs to think about buying food locally, from people you know.
Of all the eating advice we get from everywhere, all the trendy diets and the promotions from cooking shows on TV, they all have one message in common. Eat more food! It’s time for us all to realize we need to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.‘. Here is also some advice on how to avoid eating and growing GM foods.
Us food gardeners and seed savers are a dying breed. Here is a post on gardening trends.
Bird flu is an import issue for everyone everywhere in the world. Here is the other side of the story.
Biofuels are about to become an important part of our lives. Since they are crops that are grown on the same land as our food is, they are about to make a big impact on our food supply.
Here is what everyone should know before buying seeds from a seed catalog.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
I know I’m months behind other blogs talking about this book, but I just finished reading it the other day. This book, by Michael Pollan, is a must read for people interested in things this blog discusses.
I will never think the same way about what I eat again. Like some other blogs have said, where do you start to talk about it. There is so much information, and so many juicy facts, assertions and conclusions that it’s hard to know which are really my favorites.
First of all the book is primarily about food production in the US, but many parallels can be drawn no matter where you live, for example:
“Yet the potential boon of falling raw material prices — which should allow you to sell a lot more of your product at a lower price — can’t be realized in the case of food because of the special nature of your consumer, who can only eat so much food, no matter how cheap it gets.”
And then:
“What this means for the food industry is that the natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year — 1 percent being the annual growth rate of the American population. The problem is 1 percent will never satisfy Wall Street, which demands at the very least a 10 percent return on it’s capital.
This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald’s with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food, or entice them to actually eat more than that. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, of course, and the food industry energetically pursues them both at the same time.”
Add to this the current farming and farm subsidy policies that have created a massive surplus of all types of food, but particularly grains like corn, and low and behold we all start getting fat.
The book explains how the surplus of corn came about in a similar way to what happened with coffee that I posted about before. Before WWII there was a sustainable and environmentally friendly system of crop rotation where farmers could save and replant their own seeds. Along came seed companies that first created F1 hybrid and later GM varieties both with higher yields. The trade off is you have to purchase these seeds from the seed companies every year instead of saving and replanting your seed. and use more pesticides and fertilizers that also had to be purchased every year from the same seed companies. At first this seemed like a good deal, because the profits from the higher yields more than offset the additional costs, but then the market became flooded with the excess corn, driving prices down to rock bottom levels meaning it was impossible to get a return on your investment.
It is a sad reality that after taking into account all government subsidies and monies paid for their crops, it costs Iowa corn farmers more to grow their crops than they receive. For those who choose to continue farming, they must simply make up the difference by taking a loan or working a second job. All they can do is try to grow a little bit more to try to minimize their losses, which of course floods the market further. The only ones that profit are the seed companies, who sell the seed and chemicals, and the food companies. Of course there is no way any farmer can make any money by returning to growing the older varieties of corn, even though that’s what many people would prefer to eat.
So what happens to this mountain of surplus corn that is grown every year in the US? In recent years technologies have been developed to process corn into an amazing number of foods and food additives, which are familiar to most of us: vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, citric and lactic acid, glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, ethanol (for beverages as well as cars), sorbitol, mannitol, xanthan gum, modified and unmodified starches, dextrins, cyclodextrins and MSG. These are just a few and there are others. So many additives in fact, that it is almost impossible to find any processed food in the US that doesn’t have some corn in it. In addition to all of this better living through chemistry, almost all meat production in the US is based on corn. They have even developed a GM strain of salmon that can be raised on corn.
Corn is also made into many consumer products like automotive fuel and plastics.
The processing of corn is not without environmental costs. There are huge pollution problems caused by excessive antibiotic, pesticide and fertilizer use, the ‘manure lagoons’ and antibiotic resistant superbug infections generated by factory animal farms and where crops are grown topsoil is being depleted at an unsustainable rate. Above all, this whole system of processing grain is enormously energy and water intensive, and most of the energy comes from petroleum products. The US food industry consumes more fossil fuels than automobiles do every year. Fertilizers are made from natural gas. Huge amounts of energy are spent powering tractors and transporting all of these products around. Distribution is centralized, so products often travel large distances unnecessarily. Huge amounts of water are consumed by crops, livestock and all of the various processing plants.
As we were discussing on another blog recently, ethanol produced for automobiles in the US takes almost twice as much energy to produce than what is contained in the final product and running vehicals on ethanol is known to reduce air quality.
On the economic side of things, the key to getting us to pay more for food is usually to processes or improve it. If grain is turned into meat, as consumers we pay more for the original grain this way. The same is of course true if a fast food restaurant prepares the food for us, we would all expect to pay more. The phasing out of old foods, and introduction of new ‘improved’ ones is something we are all familiar with. There is also an increasing trend to get us to pay for certification like ‘Fair Trade’ or ‘Organic’.
What about getting us to eat more? This is a much trickier proposition, but the food companies have it figured out. One of the most important is the secret of supersized portions. It’s a fact that people eat about 30% more food if it’s in front of them and available to eat. When, for example, McDonalds offers us an extra large portion of fries (or maybe a large drink) for just a few cents more than we would pay for a normal size, McDonalds gets a little more money out of us and we end up eating more fries than we would otherwise eat. This principle is used by almost anyone who sells food, from supermarkets to restaurants.
Another trick to get us to eat more is substituting one product for another. For example since the 1980s soft drinks in the US have been made with high fructose corn syrup instead of normal sugar. You would think this would just be a direct replacement of one sweetener for another, but in fact that’s not the case. Since the 1980s consumption of normal sugar in the US has actually increased slightly, not decreased. That means people in the US are not only eating all the sugar they used to, they are eating all of this high fructose corn syrup on top of that!
Of course the food industry loves it when there is a new food craze; Atkin’s diet, Holywood diet, low fat, low calorie, whatever it is. It gives them a chance to make new and exciting foods, so we will eat more of them. Of course the food industry has it’s hand in what we are taught as well. For example, the constantly being rewritten food pyramid in the US.
In Europe we now have the eat more fruit and vegetable campaign. Never are we advised to eat less food, only more of the ‘right’ foods. This by the way is not in the book, but I thought it was relavent.
Some facts revealed by the book:
- 19%, or almost 1 in 5, meals in the US are eaten in the car.
- 1 in 3 children eat fast food every day in the US
- 1 in 3 children born today will develop type II diabetes in their lifetime
- It takes 38 different ingredients to make a McDonalds chicken McNugget, at least 13 of which are made from corn
- McDonalds french fries are made from 40% corn.
- For every $1 spent on food in the US, the middlemen, processors and supermarkets get 93 cents. The farmer only gets 7 cents.
We’ve all heard the stories about what livestock gets fed, everything from sewage to meat and bone meal from the same species. We all know it matters what animals eat. What has come out recently in different studies, is that in fact animals raised on corn and other grains may also produce meat that is very unhealthy for us. The Union of Concerned Scientists recently issued a press release saying how much healthier grass fed beef and dairy products were to eat, not just for the animals but for us too.
Much of the remainder of the book is devoted to discussing the hijacking of the term ‘Organic’ by the food industry, as well as discussing several different systems for raising foods in a more natural way, including grass fed animals, with an emphasis on local distribution systems. He discusses how biologically we all have certain instincts for what is good to eat and what isn’t, how food companies have very effectively learned to manipulate these, and how this is probably contributing to the disintegration of eating customs like families sitting down and eating together and a multitude of other eating disorders. All of this is just as interesting as the earlier chapters, but writing about them is just too much for one blog post, and less relevant to the general subject matter of this blog. I am going to let you read about them yourself.
