If you’re vegetarian like me, you might not find his meat interesting, but it’s still very nice to know there are people out there like him raising meat humanely in environmentally friendly ways.

In particular his mentioning animals who eat grass just don’t get sick, goes along with a discussion I had a few months ago with a local farmer who also raises his animals on grass.  He referred to his cows as their own pharmacist.  He said, he could watch them eat, and when they weren’t feeling well, they would eat the plants in the pasture their bodies needed, in the right amounts.  He said he could just sit on the fence, watch them, and could tell all kinds of things about them by what they were eating at any given moment.

The good news is the Agricultural Minister promised to ban this variety like 9 other EU countries have already done.  The bad news is his statement also included the condition ‘this would only be possible with the permission of the European Commission’.

What a load of rubbish!

Not only is there no one in particular to ask such permission from in the EU, or anyone likely to give it, but it’s not necessary.  Poland is a sovereign country and can pass it’s own laws without EU approval.  Do we need to remind the Polish minister that the ban in France was overturned by the courts, and so the ban in Poland should avoid the issues that led to this?

Please write Mr Marek Sawicki, the Polish Minister of Agriculture, and let him know what you think!

marek.sawicki@minrol.gov.pl
tel.: +48 226231510; fax: +48 226231788

Please also send a copy to ICPPC – International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside, who are coordinating this campaign.  Contact information is on their website.

Yesterday an EU Advocate-General sided with French seed organization Kokopelli on the provision in EU law prohibiting the sale of unregistered varieties.

In reference to EU seed laws and related French regulations, the Advocate-General said they

“violate the principle of proportionality, free enterprise, free movement of goods, and the principle of non discrimination.”

The Advocate-General said the official seed catalog has

“nothing to do with plant health”

and

“it is up to farmers to decide which varieties they grow”

the Advocate-General added

“the fact that farmers are confined to the listed varieties greatly reduces genetic diversity in European fields.”

Unfortunately the original opinion was written in German, and as of the time of this post had not yet been translated into English.  You can read the opinion in a variety of non-English languages here.

Almost all of Kokopelli’s arguments were upheld, and most of the opposition’s arguments were not.

This time they assure us no one could possibly object to the trial.  They say they will remove the tassels before the plants produce pollen so contamination of the nearby environment won’t be possible.  They also say there will be no business interests, it will only be a project of the university.  Hm, I wonder if the university has any business connections itself…

An important message from the organizers of the resistance:

[EN] Hello,

Yesterday we learned that the VIB is requesting authorisation for a field trial for GM maize in Wetteren. This crop would be launched in a three year open field trial, from 2012 on. A public consultation is organised which is open till 21 January.

It’s very important to respond individually to this consultation by using the special form for this purpose.

Below you find links to useful documents, press articles and a dossier that aims to develop some arguments on this case.

http://fieldliberation.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/rough-reader-on-the-new-vib-maize-crop.pdf

The pdf is just a personal summary of some facts and possible context around that sudden new field trial. To be used freely, as extra inspiration for replying at the inquiry, for an article, an action, or a campaign…

For more information see their website.

See here to respond to the consultation, but be aware as of the time of this post, the English language form wasn’t available.  Keep trying!  Let’s send some web traffic their way and let them know we’re eager, even before the form becomes available.

I was looking around for other films made by Ella von der Haide, the same person who made Resilient Seed the film about our Brussels action last spring, and I came across this.  What a find!  This is a really interesting look into Community Gardens in South Africa, and the sorts of problems they face.

Thanks to Mike who mentioned these videos in a comment on my last post.  These videos are of Dan Jason of Salt Spring Seeds and The Plant Sanctuary for Canada, and Owen Bridge of Annapolis Valley Seeds, representing Canada’s two coasts at a Seedy Sunday event from earlier this year.

It’s really a great example on how in different parts of the world we have slightly different battles and laws, but in the end our overall problems and goals are the same.  Here is Europe we are fighting the battle of legalizing seed saving, but in North America they’re not only fighting to keep seed saving legal, but also facing the real prospect of aggressive police action if they are unsuccessful.

Recently some laws were changed in Canada and other parts of the world like Europe to protect the pharmaceutical industry from the competition of natural foods and herbal remedies.  This resulted in raids in Canada where unlicensed vitamins were confiscated by swat teams at gunpoint.  It’s very possible heirloom seed companies will one day see their stocks of seeds confiscated in the same way.

We all need to act locally and think globally.  We should grow seeds in our own gardens that are locally obtained and suitable for our local climate, but we shouldn’t forget seeds can be obtained elsewhere if necessary.  In the same way, we should be fighting our own battles locally, but not forgetting there’s a whole world out there with other people fighting the same battle.

Source by Loch Ness Water Gardens

A few Dutch cities with particularly dangerous and complicated intersections have apparently pretty successfully implemented the ‘hands off’ approach, and removed all signals and warning signs.  This is in the theory that everyone approaching a dangerous situation tends to see it, slow down and be more careful.  Apparently having too many signs is a distraction.  A lot of attention has been paid to these recently.

Anyway, the question comes up from time to time, how did the Dutch get their amazing network of bicycle paths, which can be found everywhere in the country?  If you’re like me perhaps you might think it’s just a natural thing, because the country is so flat or because cycling is so popular.  Actually, there’s a story about this, and a lesson to be learned.  Here’s a video I found recently.

*GATHERING CALL *
*Thursday 20 October 2011 from 12.00 pm to 2.00 pm*
*In front of the UPOV**building*
*(Union internationale pour la protection des obtentions végétales)*
*34, Chemin des Colombettes – Geneva*

*For the immediate recognition of farmers’ right to re-use and Exchange freely their seeds, to protect them from biopiracy and contaminations from patented genes. No to seeds multinationals’ grip!*

*No to the 1991 Proprietary Variety Protection Act, to any form of patent on plants, part of plants, their genes or extraction processes.*

Since 1991, the UPOV seeks to forbid farmers to use part of their own crop for seeds, or to force them to pay royalties to companies holding a Plant Variety Certificate. Yet, any of the seeds sold by the industry is still a product of seeds collected at no cost in the fields of farmers who have selected and preserved for millennia all food plants we feed on to this day. The Convention on Biological Diversity did introduce in 1992 in Rio the principle of a fair sharing of advantages which should force companies to pay farmer’s whose seeds were used as resources. Today, the UPOV seeks to apply at any rate its reverse sharing where it is the bio-pirated farmer who has to pay the bio-pirate!

*Yet, the right of farmers to re-use and exchange their seeds is essential for crops’ adaptation to climate change and local adaptation, which is the only way to decrease the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It ensures the security of seeds stocks and thus of food security. *

The growing number of patents on natural genes, muted or manipulated, of commercial seeds already protected by Plant Variety Certificate reinforces further the confiscation of all seeds of our planet by a handful of seeds multinationals that seize peoples’ right to food. The detrimental alliance of the UPOV and the Patents Office threatens directly food sovereignty.

*Come on and join us:*

*Farming Mystica, theatrical sketches, pacific and militant actions are awaiting you there!*

Contacts :

Uniterre, Swiss member of the European Coordination Via Campesina +41 21 601 74 67 www.uniterre.ch
European Coordination Via Campesina Rue de la Sablonnière 18- 1000 Bruxelles-Belgium- www.eurovia.org

Please RSVP

I don’t do many posts on request, but I guess this is an exception.

In 2009 I wrote this post and mentioned I was going to use vinegar to try to kill the weeds in the gravel.  At the time I was hoping for feedback from others who had tried something similar.  Not only did I not get a lot of feedback, but pretty soon I gave up on the vinegar.  It took a lot of vinegar, and it wasn’t really working very well.  Since I made that post however, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic via Google, from people looking for solutions to weeds in gravel paths.  Rather then let all those people end up on a post that lays out something that doesn’t work, I thought I would make an updated post here with what I find works well!

We have gravel paths all over our community garden complex, and the picture above is one that hasn’t been maintained in a few months.  You can see it’s pretty well covered with weeds.  You notice there are gardens on both sides, so the weeds either escape from the gardens next to the path, or more likely are from seeds blown by the wind.  In a situation like this, I find a weed burner works pretty well to control the weeds.

Below is a picture of a similar path as the one above, but where I’ve been using a weed burner regularly to burn the weeds.

I last used the weed burner here a few weeks ago, and I’m pretty sure the gardeners on the sides have pulled a few weeds by hand too.  You can see the weed burner is not perfect, but it does a pretty good job and is a lot easier than doing it completely by hand.  The entire path in this picture, all the way to the end, takes about an hour to do with a weed burner and if the weeds are kept under control it only needs to be done every month or two during the growing season.  Once it gets to the point of the path in the top picture, it has to be done weekly for a few months, until the weeds are under control.

The weed burner only burns off the tops of the weeds, and doesn’t kill them right away.  It takes going over them a few times before they die completely.  Some weeds aren’t killed by the weed burner, and have to be pulled by hand, but these are mostly the larger and easier to pull weeds.  You also have to give some thought to what you have alongside the path, and in particular avoid flammable things like dry mulch or dry rotted wood.  You also can’t use the weed burner in dry weather or when fire is otherwise a hazard.

As a rule it works better to make a number of quick passes over the path, a few days or a week or two apart, rather than one intensive burn.  When you singe the tops of the plants, rather than turning them to ash, they are more likely to die completely over time.  This is because singeing damages them, and causes the plants to expend more resources trying to repair the damage.  Occasionally weeds respond better to having their tops burned off completely, and this tends to make the path look better, so it can help to do this from time to time too.

Above is an example of a path were the weed burner doesn’t work.  This path has a garden on the left, and a grassy patch on the right, with no barrier between the grass and gravel path.

You can see too the picture includes the path in front of two different gardens, the one in the back is not quite as diligent in digging the grass out, and the gardener in front I know has a system of chemicals for spraying on the path.  I don’t know what chemicals he uses, but he also says nothing he tried really works.

The weed burner just won’t kill the grass in this way.  All that happens is you spend hours burning and reburning the grass, and it just comes back.

Above is a section of path, with my garden on the left.  In this case, I burn the path in front of my garden, but not my neighbors garden.  While I’m an organic gardener, this neighbor is beyond organic, and doesn’t want any power tools used in his garden either.  He rightly considers the weed burner a power tool.

I’m not very diligent at burning in from of my own garden for some reason, and I hardly ever pull anything by hand that doesn’t get killed with the weed burner.  That’s why there are still a few weeds in front of my garden.  My neighbor can hardly be bothered to pull his weeds by hand.  It actually works okay in this way, and the weeds don’t really spread much to my side of the path.

In the picture above, from time to time I burn the path on the left.  One day I got into a big fight with the gardener on the right because I was burning his path (I previously had his agreement to do this), but he felt it was a too environmentally friendly way to get rid of the weeds.  He said it was only temporary, didn’t get all the weeds, that the weeds come back too quickly and RoundUp was the only real way to get rid of weeds in gravel.  He then got out his spray bottle of RoundUp and made a big point of spraying his path at the same time I was using the weed burner.

Since he made such a big obnoxious scene, and since I burn the paths around his so they look clean all the time, he’s under a lot of pressure to make sure his path stays clear or he’ll lose face.  He has to prove RoundUp is better than the weed burner!  He’s frequently out digging and redigging his path.  From time to time it also looks like he sprays it, but that doesn’t really work because it doesn’t kill everything and he still has a path of dead weeds he has to dig up later anyway.  You can see in the picture, his path has a lot of dug up dirt mixed in with the gravel, and it’s always about as green as it is in this picture.

I have heard from others that RoundUp doesn’t really work.  There’s always lots of discussion over alternatives, but I’ve never heard of anyone finding anything they found satisfactory.

The canals around the garden are really bad this year.  They are all full of algal blooms.

In some places the algae is so thick trash floats on it.

The water plants floating on top here look pretty healthy.  When the infestation is a little lighter the ducks and other water birds eat it.  I haven’t seen any water birds in the canals for months now.  Underneath the surface is slimy green algae.

I don’t know for sure what the cause of these algal blooms are, but I suspect they’re caused by excess phosphorus in the water, and probably excess manure being spread on the surrounding land.  Farmers pay land owners to accept their waste manure spread out on it, and this in turn contaminates the water.  Because of a soil test I did a few years ago, I already know there’s a lot of phosphorus in the ground and water.

Pig farmers in particular are known right now to be having a problem with excessive manure from their pigs.  I suspect this is where at least some of the problem is coming from.

Because the canals are so close to my garden, I suspect this is causing a lot of the problems I’ve been having lately with plants not growing well, and weeds like bindweed growing very quickly.  I understand bindweed grows in ground where something is interfering with the natural decomposition of organic material, and I suspect this is being caused by the lack of oxygen in the surrounding canals because of the algae growth.

I’ve been reading in the US, in particular the lakes of Wisconsin, there are similar problems with phosphorus and algal blooms.  The formula of dishwasher detergent was recently changed in the US to reduce the amount of phosphorus, which is a very American solution to the problem of factory farm waste.  Why not after all blame the consumer with something irrelevant?

If anyone complains about the change in formula of dishwasher detergent, you can look at them with a blank stare and ask them if they believe in unnecessarily polluting the environment, and if anyone complains about the factory farming you can tell them every thing is under control because the formula in dishwasher detergent has been changed.

Anyone else having problems with phosphorus pollution and algal blooms?

The spoken language is French, with English subtitles.

If you wish to download a version to play directly on your own computer, you can do that here. The original video without embedded subtitles can be downloaded here.

I’ve posted about this several times before.  Like here.

The more I watch this grow, the more interesting I find it.

It’s another ‘no-weed’ plant, like what I posted about earlier today.  It’s basically grass, and it’s no-weed like most of our lawns are.  It just forms a very thick root mass that almost no weeds can penetrate.  Like grass, I wouldn’t really expect there to be insect or disease problems.  Like grass it can be used as a forage crop, and in fact it grows about 2 meters high, and produces a lot of hay or straw.  For gardeners it’s a useful source of mulch.

It will literally grow anywhere grass grows.  It’s not uncommon to find unselected rye grasses in lawn seed mixes, and rye is not an uncommon component of people’s lawns.  It’s the thicker bladed grass most of us are familiar with.

Okay, I can hear you asking.  If it’s like grass and grows where grass grows, what makes it interesting?  What makes it interesting is that you can eat it!  Literally, anywhere grass grows, this is a drop-in replacement you can eat.

So let me repeat.  Replaces grass, including people’s lawns, is weed, insect and disease free, hardly requires any care, and you can eat it.  When you’re done eating it, any animals you might have can eat it.

If you were to create a major food for a sustainable future, what would you do different?