Australian Seedsavers Portuguese Tour
Margarida of the Portuguese Seed Savers recently sent an email to a mailing list I’m on, telling everyone about the visit to their country by the founders of the Australian Seedsavers. One of the coordinators of the Australian organization is Kate, known to some of you because she has a blog and visited some of us in Europe too.
Anyway, the Australian Seedsavers met more than 400 people in Portugal. They visited food gardens at several locations and taught workshops on collecting and saving seeds, traditional plant varieties, edible seeds, permaculture, activism and kitchen gardens in schools.
You can read more about this in Portuguese here, or in English here.
Resilient Seed
Ella von der Haide has produced Resilient Seed, a film about the action days in Brussels last April. The film includes interviews with many interesting people who attended and/or organized the event. If you know where to look there are a few glimpses of me, and Bifurcated Carrots is mentioned in the credits at the end.
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.
Another World Blog
A friend of mine who lives locally has a travel blog called Another World Blog.
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…
How the Netherlands Got Its Cycle Paths
From time to time I read about interest in the US or other places about how Europe does it’s traffic engineering. For example I’ve heard a number of US cities are adopting traffic circles modelled after those in the UK.
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.
Tom Wagner Visit, Part 2
A number of Tom’s tomato and potato growing trials are hosted by Chinook Farms CSA, in western Washington State. As it turned out during the first evening of my visit a number of grain related presentations and demonstrations were hosted onsite.
Western Washington isn’t an area with a lot of grain farms. It’s mostly considered unsuitable for grains, but Eric Fritch and his wife who run Chinook Farms CSA are trying to change that. They feel there is a market in the area for small scale artesian grains to be grown, and in effect they are trying to get grain farming in the area started from scratch.
Their farmland previously had cedar trees, I guess grown for lumber or other wood materials. These were recently cleared to make room for the farm, but this left the ground very nitrogen poor. Grains need nitrogen in order to build up protein in the grain. Grains need a minimum protein content to be suitable for breads, and without enough protein the grains can only be sold as animal feed.
However, a high nitrogen fertilizer given too early in the plant life-cycle of the grains, will result in more seed heads and poorer quality grain. Therefore if fertilizer is to be added, it has to be added later, after the seed heads have formed. Part of these trials was therefore to test when and how much nitrogen to apply and at what stage in plant development. This is why you see this so clearly displayed on the signs.
One of the problems discussed during this evening’s presentations was a lack of locally available grain processing equipment, especially suited for small scale production.
They demonstrated the combine used on the farm, something that was bought used for around US$4000, I think. It was pointed out that anyone trying to do something with grains on a less-than-farm scale, wouldn’t be able to use something like that. For example, someone with a large suburban lot garden. How are you going to get something like that up your driveway?
It turns out there are smaller combines available on the market, but the cost is roughly 10 times that of the larger one and they have to be imported from Italy. Since such a machine would only be used for a few hours per year, it would be a hard purchase to justify for the average person.
Also discussed was the need for grain processing equipment like hullers, which also have similar high costs together with a relatively few number of hours of use per year.
It all makes growing grains on a small scale very expensive, unless a number of farmers and small scale growers work together and share costs.
A combine has 1 million moving parts, and makes quite a bit of noise and stirs up a lot of dust as it goes!
One of the things Tom and I talked about was his interest in getting into breeding of grains. In particular, he talked about the problems of getting old varieties of grains out of gene banks.
If you make a request for a sample of an old grain from a genebank, as a rule they will only give you a few grams. If you grow this sample, after the first year if all goes well, you’ll probably have several hundred grams. If you regrow this, a few kilograms after the second year. So it won’t be until the 3rd or even 4th year of regrowing these samples that you will have enough to do a proper trial, and if you have a crop failure in the meantime you have to start over.
Doing these initial plantings and replantings is quite expensive and labor intensive. It’s requires a lot of personal care and attention, and like I talked about above involves a lot of short term use of expensive equipment, as well as probably a lot of manual harvesting with a scythe.
For older varieties that can be purchased in bulk, and there are a few of these, this is a possible alternative. Most of the older varieties however are not available for bulk purchase, and neither is it economically feasible to make these available for sale.
If someone doesn’t take it upon themselves to do or fund these initial grow-outs of old grain varieties, it won’t be possible in 5-10 years time to be able to do trials and commercial scale plantings of old grain varieties. This is just a fact.
