This is a sort of administrative post I guess.  First of all, Happy New Year to everyone.  I can’t possibly send email greetings to everyone I know any more, there are just too many of you, so I’ll assume if you’re a reader of this blog, you’ll hear it from me here.

Blogroll

The second thing is you may have noticed my blogroll disappeared again.  If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll notice every once in a while I delete or completely rearrange it.

The problem is basically this.  As a blogger I really put a lot of value in operating independently, speaking my own mind and not having any commercial influences.  The reality is however, as free of commercial influences as I am, I’m hugely dependent on Google and other search engines for a large portion of my readership.  Most people first encounter this blog in search engine results, and sometimes go on to become a regular reader.  The more visible I am in search engine results, the more seriously people take this blog and the more it becomes a familiar name to them.

Search engines like Google count links and value of links when it decides how important a site is.  If Google thinks I’m an important site, then when I link somewhere else it thinks this is unusually important too.  In this way I am able to help other bloggers or websites improve their position in Google, and I see this as an important part of what I do.  We all want to help make one another important.  We all want what we feel is important to be more visible to others.

Unfortunately, all this ‘link love’ comes at a price.  If I put up too many links, especially in my blogroll, search engines notice this and deduct ‘points’ from me.  If you’re a smaller and less known site or if you have too many links yourself especially of a commercial nature, Google probably thinks you’re a low valued site, wonders why I’m linking to you and deducts even more points for my link to you.

Search Engine Optimization

I routinely do what’s called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  I’ve written some posts about this before, and if you search on Google you will find them.  I make this blog more friendly for search engines.

I changed to a new domain name recently, bifurcatedcarrots.eu and at the same time changed the structure of my site a little.  Part of the reason for doing this was SEO.

Anyway, it’s clear the next step in SEO is a blogroll cleanup.

I’ve removed the blogroll completely for now, and in the coming weeks and months I’ll be experimenting with returning some entries.  Unfortunately, the entries most likely to come back are those of well established websites!  It’s not that I’m too special to include links to smaller sites, or I prefer the big ones.  In fact the opposite is true.  I usually think the smaller more personal sites are more interesting to read, and I would prefer to promote them.

I’m sorry if I end up deleting your entry in my blogroll.  I’ll try to make up for it a bit by mentioning more blogs in posts.  To the extent I think I can within the guidelines of SEO, I’ll try to put back some of the entries over time.

As unfriendly and cold as this advice might seem, if you want to make it more likely I will put you in my blogroll, you need to do SEO yourself and get other bloggers to link to you first.  You have to become important, before I can help make you important!  If you have any questions about this, please send an email and I’ll try to offer some more suggestions specific to your situation.

What’s the reason for this blog?

Since you asked, let me try to explain…

My community garden, called ‘Vlijtigveld’ (meaning busy or diligent field), has a racist and not very smart management.  The name really says it all, almost in a comical way.  What’s an organic gardener like me doing trying to have a lazy no-dig garden, with mulch to control weeds, in a place where we’re all supposed to be working hard??

Anyway, for 4 years now I’ve been trying to ignore the fact the management doesn’t recognize any gardening technique that’s not heavily reliant on sprays or chemical fertilizers, or any gardener that doesn’t control weeds by killing them with chemical warfare or pulling them out one at a time.

I’ve also been trying to ignore the garden management as they walk around telling any one who’ll listen about how they don’t let in any more Turkish gardeners, or how 60% of the gardeners have to be Dutch or the foreigners will get voting rights.  It’s us against them, don’t you know!  In this time I’ve been pretending not to notice our perimeter security fence, designed with a weak side, meaning whenever there is a break-in and a garden is vandalized, it will almost certainly belong to a Muslim gardener.

Literally, all our gardens are assigned based on ethnic origin, and the layout of the complex is planned on this basis.  Because the management doesn’t want any of us teaming up against them, they avoid assigning friends adjacent gardens, and try to promote friction by assigning nearby gardens to people of conflicting ethnic origins.

Anyway, as we can all imagine, this isn’t working very well.  It’s not working because it’s as much comical as anything else.  The gardeners are all mostly getting along and becoming friends.  The management has mostly lost the respect of everyone, Dutch and foreign.  This has recently prompted a great deal of hostility from the management, gardeners are now frequently harassed by the management and often threatened with the loss of their gardens.  Our drinking water was recently cut off!  You’d think it was war.

So, I really don’t have the time or inclination to try to solve all the problems of our community gardens.  I have no desire to join the management and try to ‘fix it’ from within.  Other than a little passive aggressiveness, I’ve really been trying to keep my head down.

I want the other gardeners to get together and decide what kind of community gardens they want to have, work for it themselves, possibly with my help.  To that end, I decided to start a blog to provide the gardeners, as well as anyone else with an interest in Vlijtigveld more information.  As well as information it will have the views of myself, the sole American gardener.  I think mostly the blog will have a lot of detailed information about how the rules are constructed, and how Dutch law might provide some help.  I’ve exchanged some letters with the garden management, and I intend to publish these.  It’s probably not going to make a lot of sense to most readers, but if you’re interested you’re welcome!

Luck was with me when I went searching for a domain name for this new blog.  ‘Their’ domain name, vlijtigveld.nl was not in use and available for registration, so this blog is at http://vlijtigveld.nl  The management are not really Internet people, so it may be some time before they notice the existence of the blog…

If you’re in the area, please come by!  Entrance is free.

If you’re able to sponsor a stand or presentation on either day, please get in touch!  You can either contact me, and I will put you in touch with the right person, or you can contact them directly via their websites.  There is no cost to sponsor a stand.  You can either give seeds and plants away at no cost, or you can sell them.  You can also run an information only stand.

I first wrote about this cauliflower 6 years ago.  Bayu who lives in Indonesia left a comment asking if I had any spare seeds I would send for free, but I don’t have these any more.  Does anyone have some seeds, or would like to buy some seeds, and send them to Indonesia for free?  If so, please let me know and I’ll forward the email address.

These are pretty ordinary seeds.  If you live in the US, they are available for example at Baker Creek.  There are similar varieties with different names, so if you have something that looks the same it probably is.

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.

This is the English version, and they’ve promised to make versions in other languages as time permits.  Especially as someone who participated, it’s really nice to watch the film and think back on a great weekend, with great people, that so many worked so hard to organize.

Untitled from sab inee on Vimeo.

So much of Tom speaks to what it means to collect and share heirloom and heritage varieties.  Tom not only has a very impressive collection of heritage apples, mostly from the US south, but he’s done everything possible to collect stories and other documentation to go along with them.  The roots of Tom’s interest in his apple collection lie in his childhood and passions as a young man.

Not only has the world lost so many heritage plant varieties over the years, but we’ve lost the passions that go along with growing, documenting and hunting for them.

Tom recently rewrote and reposted the story of how found the Junaluska apple, and sent me a link.  Note too the link on the bottom of the page that leads to the various descriptions of the apple he found.  Many of us grow the Cherokee Trail of Tears beans in our garden each year, and now thanks to Tom a Cherokee apple from that time is also available.

If you live in the US and are looking for an apple tree to grow, consider buying this or others from Tom via his website.

Since he’s recently moved to the Netherlands he’s now writing a lot about the country from the point of view as an immigrant.  At the moment, he’s very interested in exploring Dutch customs and traditions.  He’s also travelled other places and written about those too.

I often don’t write much about living in the Netherlands.  For this reason I like to recommend other blogs with this kind of material.  I hope you have a look at his blog, and maybe leave a comment or two…

All I can say is it looks great to me! I think if anyone would like to help out with a donation or tips or pointers, he would like to hear from you.

I’ve recently come across her website where you can find links to her books for sale on Amazon, and download some excerpts.  You can also find her contact information if you want to ask her questions about her books and inquire about seeds for sale.

She is one of only a few bloggers around that focus not only on heirloom vegetables, growing them, saving and sharing seeds, but also cooking them!  Be sure to have a look.

I’m sometimes much worse.  I can go for months without reading any other blog.  I sometimes worry I’ll post something very obvious that everyone else has been talking about for months, and make a fool of myself.

In fact I really appreciate it when people send me emails or leave comments here pointing out things to me I might not otherwise notice, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t notice them!

Anyway, in that spirit, I have a couple of links to blogs I stumbled across lately, but if I’ve missed your blog and you would like me to mention it, please let me know.  Don’t take the lack of my noticing your blog personally in any way, it’s only that I just haven’t spent the time to hunt them all out.

Lass Leben is German for ‘Let Live’, and even if you can’t read German all you have to do is look at the blogroll to see this blog takes a similar approach to gardening as I do.  I met some Germans, Swiss and Austrians recently in Brussels, and I’m wondering if I met this person…  Anyway, if you don’t speak German it’s worth using Google Translate on this blog.

Paul of 16 Wild Acres (or is that Wilde Acres) recently left some comments here.  His blog is about a farming project he starting on and writing about.  I think it’s going to be interesting to follow his efforts.

This is an ‘ongoing’ series, so be sure to check back at the link above for possible future releases.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three