Carol Deppe
One of my favorite gardening books is Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant breeding and seed saving.
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.
Open Letter from Eleven Scientists Who Participated in Field Liberation Day in Belgium
Here’s a Google translated version of the open letter published in the Flemish newspaper De Morgen from the eleven scientists who chose to participate in Field Liberation Day.
You can find the original Dutch language version here.
Here is a reply from the scientists who opposed the demonstration.
The original Dutch language version is here.
Here’s a quote from the second letter:
Sleep comfortable
Just think: what carries the least risk to humans and the environment? A potato with well-characterized resistance genes (the GM version) or a potato with the same genes in it and also a lot of other genes that we all know nothing (and bionica and toluca example)? If you do not see dangers in the use of bionica and toluca varieties, sleep on both ears in terms of the GM potato.
Part of the strange language here is the translation from Dutch, and I’ve fixed it a little by hand, but the point is clear. From a scientist’s point of view — fewer genetics are better. The traditionally bred blight resistant varieties Bionica and Toluca are dangerous to plant, because they have too many unknown and not useful genes in them! Really?
The only way forward is monocultures, and as little biodiversity as possible? Otherwise humans and the environment are at risk? If you don’t agree, sleep comfortably on both ears? This is like president Bush telling the world they were either with him or against him in Iraq. I don’t think this is the basis for common ground.
Plan Be
Friend and fellow blogger Mike in South Africa just moved his blog. What better a time to mention him here so all you new readers know who he is, and to help Google find the new address!
For those of you who know him, be sure to update your blogroll and bookmarks.
If you don’t know him, be sure to have a look! His new blog is here, but he hasn’t migrated his content yet. You might also want to have a look at his old blog so you can see what he’s written in the past.
New EU Seed Law
In what’s an obvious first step to clear the way for patents and GMOs, the European Union is preparing a new seed law to replace the existing one. Several months ago the EU considered what to do with the current legislation and discussed 3 possibilities; maintain current legislation unchanged, modify current legislation, or drop current legislation. In their wisdom, they decided seed legislation was necessary, but should be changed. With this as a foregone conclusion, they have opened a period of public consultation on how best to change the current seed laws.
In their published documents they offer a number of scenarios, and while some are worse than others, none are completely acceptable.
There’s honestly little hope they’ll actually take public opinion into account, but it’s still very important to give them a run for their money. Maybe, if they get a large response, and they can see people are very upset about their plans, it may have some impact. Please try to submit a response if you can. If you’re unable to read through all of their documents and submit a response using their form, please just send them an email stating your objections to seed laws in general and the registration of varieties.
I’ll try to put together as much information as I can together with arguments, before the deadline for submission. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please give them here! I’ll also post my response, so if nothing else, please consider replacing my name with your own and submitting it yourself.
The European seed laws affect everyone everywhere on the planet, and everyone everywhere should respond to this public consultation. The EU is the largest economy in the world, and rules that become established here will be pushed onto other countries as well. Above all else it’s vital to protect our rights to save and regrow our own seeds, no matter where in the world we live.
Plot With a View
Heguiberto of Weird Combinations sent me an email a few days ago to tell me about his blog. It’s been around for a while, but I hadn’t noticed it before, and I was very happy to hear about it.
Check out the view from his community garden! It looks out on the San Francisco Mission neighborhood, Twin Peaks and the Sutro Tower, parts of the Civic Center with a glimpse of the upper parts of the of the Golden Gate Bridge towers.
One of the nice things about his blog is he makes the connection between gardening and food, which of course some other blogs do too, but it’s still nice to see. He and his partner eat mostly vegetarian, so this is emphasized in the blog too.
