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Trades

Jane on Horticultural recently posted on some things she got from trades, so I thought I would post some of mine.

Miss Hathorn of Mustardplaster traded some of her very tasty looking honey, together with some Blue Hubbard Squash and True Red Cranberry seeds for some of my garlic:

Honey and Seeds

I love the labels she made for everything!

Lieven traded me a winter squash from his garden for some of my garlic:

Squash

He didn’t tell me what kind it was, but I’ve seen pictures on the Internet of a squash called Sweet Dumpling that looks similar. Lieven warned me it was sweet. Not for soup, he said!

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It’s Official, We’re Allotmenteers!

The ink is still wet! I’ve just signed the paperwork for a community garden plot (an allotment in British English), just north of Amsterdam. It’s a 300m2 double-sized plot, and while one third the size of the old garden, it’s very large for something so close to Amsterdam.

Greenhouse and Weeds

This picture shows the greenhouse, plum tree and lots of weeds.

The person who owns the land I use as a garden now asked for it back some time ago, and I’ve been looking for a new place.

As these things usually are, my new garden is in need of a lot of work, and there is a lot of old rubbish to throw away. The previous owner didn’t do much work this last year, so it’s covered with weeds. There are also a number of existing plants, including 13 fruit trees, but not many old varieties, so I have a lot of work ahead pulling them out and replacing them over time. On the plus side, the previous owner left a greenhouse and shed for me, as well as a number of tools.

Shed

This is the shed the previous owner left behind.

This garden community consists of nearly 100 gardens, pretty much all of them are used primarily for growing vegetables. Nearby, under different management, are a couple of other community gardens some of which allow houses to be built on the plots and are primarily used for growing flowers.

In many ways the differences between the vegetable growing plots and flower growing plots are the same as the differences between similarly oriented gardening blogs! Holland also has a really weird culture surrounding their community gardens. It’s taken a while to find a community garden that had both space and like minded fellow gardeners.

In several places in northern Europe, including Holland, community gardens were historically used as a place for people to grow their own food. In many cases these were very important before and during WWII, but after the war as food became more easily available many of the gardens fell into disuse.

Because Holland is such a tiny country, as a way of preserving agricultural land and providing space for future urban growth, the cities are all built in a very compact way. In the major cities like Amsterdam or The Hague, home gardens are very rare, because there just isn’t space allocated for them. Only very wealthy people have any garden at all in cities, and almost all gardens are small. In more remote places there is more space, and gardens are more common.

Because gardens are so hard to come by in cities, in recent times people have been looking to community gardens as an alternative. This is why some of the local community gardens primarily have people who grow flowers and allow people to also have a small house on them. A ‘small house’ usually means something along the lines of pre-fab garden houses, that are sometimes sold in garden centers. Most of these houses are not suitable for winter use, and fall apart after about 10-15 years of use. In summer, many people live out of these houses. Some people literally use their garden plot to grow grass, and settle in for the summer with a barbecue and a radio. Many community gardens have running water, electricity and sometimes gas service. They usually have community toilets as an alternative to sewage services. Since canals and dikes are used here to keep the land dry, it’s usually possible to discharge ‘grey water’ from showers or sinks into a nearby canal.

Most of these community gardens that have houses aspire to be ‘high class’, and there is an ongoing effort to improve them. There is frequently a lot of pressure put on the gardeners to keep their gardens to very high standards. Many of them have the rule that you can’t grow only vegetables, because they aren’t considered attractive enough. There are frequently contests or other activities where gardens are rated or compared with one another. This all often means there is frequently a lot of lush growth, often making finding a spot with enough direct sunlight to grow vegetables a challenge.

All community gardens here require you to volunteer a number of hours in order to maintain the common areas. This is almost always on Saturday, because it’s a weekend day when everyone can attend during the day as many people object to working on Sunday. Many of these high class gardens have very high aspirations for their common areas, and expect you to attend as many as eight Saturdays per year for volunteer work, usually from about 10:00 to 14:00. As far as I’m concerned, this is the heart of the day not leaving a lot of time to do other things, and eight days a year means every other weekend in the summer months. I find this a lot of volunteer hours.

Many of these community gardens are so proud of their appearance, they are open to the public and encourage people to take walks through them as a sort of community service. To me this seems great if you want to show off your flowers, but not so good if you don’t want strangers taking your vegetables.

In all community gardens, when you take over a plot, you are always expected to pay the previous gardener something for the value of what is being left over for you. Officially the amount of money you have to pay is determined by an assessment made by the garden management, but in reality the previous owner has a lot of influence over the amount paid.

Many people consider these garden plots to be something of an investment, and expect to get more money from the next owner than they themselves paid. In addition, because many of these community garden plots are in short supply, new owners are often forced to pay whatever is being asked, because otherwise there are no alternatives available. This means there is often a cycle of ‘irrational exuberance’ in the turn over of these gardens, and the prices are often sky high! Many people plant a few more flowers, and justify this as sufficient improvement for an increase in value. Others really deck out the house, with a fresh coat of paint, solar panels, wooden deck or whatever.

For some of these gardens you are expected to pay as much as 15,000 euros, or nearly US$25,000! In any event, prices below 5000 euros for a reasonable garden are rare. Even after you pay this initial cost, you still have to pay rent on the land and management fees, usually about 1000 euros per year.

Especially if you are someone like me who wants to grow mostly vegetables, you are looking at first paying way too much money for someone else’s flowers, only to have to remove them and then when you sell your plot it’s not likely to have much value.

Some of these community gardens that are primarily for houses and flowers, also have a few ‘special’ plots on the side for people who want to grow vegetables. In this case, the price asked for these plots are often more reasonable. At the same time they are often tiny second class plots, primarily for students, because of course flowers are more important than vegetables and you don’t need as much space if you don’t have a house! In this case there is still the same expectation for volunteer hours.

For some reason a lot of these community gardens do not have good public transportation connections, and it’s often assumed that some people may come by bicycle, but most will drive their cars. One of the nice things about my new garden is it has pretty good public transportation access, and would be a bit of a long ride but possible to do on a bike.

For the greenhouse, shed and two cold frames, together with a large collection of tools, I paid the previous owner 500 euros for his garden. This community garden requires three volunteer Saturdays per year, and there are no rules about what my garden has to look like or what I grow. There is a strong commitment within the management to keep costs as low as possible, and the annual fees (including rent) are about 450 euros, which I find all very reasonable. It is fortunately not open to the wider public, and there is pretty good security in the form of fences and gates.

Let the weed digging begin!!

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Doing Good Things Without Spending Money

It was Michael Moore that said in his movie Bowling for Columbine that we are supposed to be afraid and consume. If you are afraid of crime, you should buy a gun. If you are afraid of having an inadequate car, you should buy an SUV. If you are afraid of being fat or unhealthy, you should buy diet or other special foods.

In this way, for many people, doing good things for yourself or for the world means spending money.

In fact, sometimes the best things come for free or for not very much money.

The obvious example of this is heirloom plants. Most of us realize, for example, you often get a much nicer plant if you get seeds or other propagation material from a fellow gardener than if you go to a garden center, or even a specialty plant shop and spend a lot of money. I’m going to depart a bit from the usual gardening topics, and offer some suggestions on how you can apply these principles to other things as well. In particular, I’m going to try to make some suggestions that won’t have a major impact on your current lifestyle.

Energy and Greenhouse Gases

There’s no shortage of things you can spend money on if you want to save energy or protect the environment. You can buy double glazed windows, hybrid autos, compact fluorescent light bulbs or high efficiency home appliances, among other things. Sometimes you can even get tax deductions or subsidies for buying these things. In fact, it sometimes seems we are all saving up our money so we can buy one of these things after another. If you buy an energy efficient car or appliance today, you can be sure in a few years time there will be something better to buy. If you spend money on new windows for your house, you can be sure you’ll have to take out a loan that takes years to pay off, and it will take ages to make up the cost in energy savings.

It’s always the official line. In order to save the environment, we need to spend more money. If it’s not consumer goods, it’s more expensive green energy or carbon offsets. Just spend five minutes trying to convince someone who is determined to spend money on something like this they are wasting their money, and you’ll realize you are wasting your time. It takes a very strong will to do something different, and to stand up to the official line.

Most of these so called energy savers have some things in common. They all involve energy to make, transport, market and dispose of. Things like compact fluorescent lights and the batteries in hybrid autos are made with heavy metals and other very toxic materials, and are major disposal problems. In addition, the energy involved in putting some of these things on the market are much more that just in the manufacture. You have to consider most of these items have companies behind them, with employees who have to drive to work and travel for business. In order to accommodate this travel roads and other infrastructure need to be built. Marketing takes energy too, to support everything from billboards to in store promotions as well as traditional media outlets, all of whom have employees who travel, and so on. ‘Green’ energy like biofuels, often take more energy to manufacture then traditional energy sources. The amount of energy that goes into things we buy is more than many of us realize.

Lots of people would argue the points I make in this paragraph above, but let me be clear I stand by them. Take the issue of heavy metals and toxic materials in products. Many people would say these problems are not an issue, because they can be recycled.

If you had a used compact fluorescent bulb, would you know where to take it for recycling? Not many of us do, or at the very least are faced with getting in our car and transporting it a long distance before it can be recycled.

Even if you do know where to take things for recycling, do you really trust they will recycle it if it is cheaper to dispose of it? Much of the technology needed to recycle things currently being sold, depends on technology that doesn’t yet exist. In this world of privatizations, corruption and the quest for profits, many things that we think are recycled are really disposed of, sometimes illegally and often in developing countries. Similar arguments could be made for manufacturing energy use, and in the real world the energy costs are real. It’s always better to not buy the product in the first place.

There is always an excuse why disposal is not a problem, or the assumption technology will somehow solve the problem for us in the future, but not always many people who acknowledge the problem really exists.

Most of the time you can actually save more energy if you don’t buy anything!

If you need to buy something new, like a household appliance or a car, you should always look for the most energy efficient alternative available, but as an alternative also consider something smaller, cheaper and simpler than what you currently have! As a consumer, you should always demand the products you buy are as environmentally friendly as possible, but never rush out to buy something you don’t need because it is marketed as environmentally friendly.

Also, consider the possibility of buying something second hand. The energy you save in the manufacture of a new item may offset an awful lot of the energy loss in having an appliance that’s not as efficient.

Cars are a good example of this. If you want to drive an SUV, and buy one second hand, it will be much less of an energy hog in the long run than if you buy one new. If you want to drive a hybrid car, buying one second hand will reduce both manufacturing energy and toxic disposal problems. Above all, think about how what you buy will be disposed of, and avoid buying something new that is toxic or that will otherwise be a disposal problem. If you are a few years behind everyone else in choosing what you buy, and buy it second hand, you can be part of the recycling solution rather than the cause of the waste and energy problem.

Thinking Outside of the Box

This is a very North American expression that means making bold and risky decisions, and taking a creative approach to problems. Often these decisions go against what everyone else is telling you is right.

For example, it’s been discussed recently that in the US that about the same amount of fossil fuels are used by cars as in the manufacture of food. In Europe a slightly lower percentage is used for food. The majority of this energy is used for animal products, because first crops have to be grown as feed for animals. The amount of energy in processed foods is also very high, again because first the crops have to be grown and then processed.

You can save a lot of energy by eating only non-processed vegetarian foods or locally raised grass feed meats, probably more than you could save if you drove an energy efficient car or simply drove less. Remember the true costs of these foods are distorted by massive government subsidies, that despite all the rhetoric about ending farmers subsidies, continue to be paid.

As an alternative to replacing all of the lights in your house with compact fluorescent bulbs, consider doing an energy audit of your house and try to reduce unnecessary usage instead.

If you have a 60w incandescent light bulb, and you replace it with an equivalent compact fluorescent bulb, it will use 13w instead. A large percentage of this difference in energy consumption can be made by replacing the 60w incandescent bulb with a standard 40w or 25w instead, perhaps even a 15w bulb. The use of timers or timed switches, can reduce the amount of time the light is on, and save more energy. Many people would find this a better alternative to the harshness of a compact fluorescent bulb anyway.

Many people would be astonished the amount of power their appliances use in standby mode. Many modern appliances that are supposedly new and energy efficient use less energy only because they have an on/off switch and can be turned completely off when not being used.

It can be a useful exercise to go through your house and turn everything off or unplug everything until your electric meter stops turning. When you go to bed at night, your appliances should not be using electricity without reason! Kate at Cider Press Hill turned off or unplugged everything and her meter was still turning. A lot of careful searching revealed the floor dimmer switch on her halogen light was the problem. You may be surprised what you find if you do this yourself. Troublesome appliances can be turned off using a power strip with an on/off switch, a cord switch, perhaps a hardwired switch to your household wiring or just unplugging them when they are not being used.

By using standard light bulbs but reducing the wattage and hours they are on to the minimum necessary, as well as turning off standby appliances when they are not used, you will probably save more electricity than buying compact fluorescent light bulbs.

After all, the bottom line is how much energy you use, not how many energy efficient appliances you buy!

Central Heating and Cooling

If you live in a very cold climate, there is probably little substitute to making sure your house is a weather proofed as possible.

Many of us live in a temperate climate, where heating and cooling are only needed briefly through the year. In this case, you should certainly deal with major problems, seal large holes and take reasonable steps to weather proof your house but there may be better alternatives to spending a lot of money on insulation or new windows.

First a gas powered space heater is more efficient than central heating where heat is distributed via water pipes or forced air. With a little planning, it can be easier to heat just a room or two by closing doors when your heat comes from one place.

Even with central heating, you can save a lot of money by turning off the heat in rooms when it’s not needed, and turning it down or off when you are out or at night when you are asleep.

It is true that heating up an entire cold house can take a lot of energy, meaning turning the heat down or off for brief periods may not save you much energy. At the same time, if you can turn the heat down for longer periods (6-10 hours) combined with only heating a few rooms, you can save a lot of energy.

Since I live in a house with several floors, what I like to do is turn the heat in the house as low as possible, and when I’m cold go up to the attic for a while. We have several large windows in the attic, that let in a lot of light all year round. This sunlight means the attic is always warmer than the rest of the house. In the summer, when it’s warm, I go to a downstairs room to cool off.

If you already have a functioning heating system, you shouldn’t go out and buy a new one for no reason. If you do need to buy a new one, you may want to consider these ideas.

The same ideas can be applied to cooling systems. If you need to cool your house, you can do it only as needed in one or a few rooms at a time. If you have a custom house built, or you are moving, you can think about having a room or two that you can shut off from the rest of the house and cool only when needed.

For many people in a wide variety of climates, a solar hot water heater is a good option. If you have a cold winter, you may need to drain it from time to time in order to keep it from freezing. If cost is an issue, and you are good at do-it-yourself projects, building your own is a real option. It’s also possible to buy a system pre-made and installed. A good option is to have a small inexpensive hot water heater and put the solar water heater in front of it. In this way, the non-solar hot water heater only operates when necessary.

Applying these principles to food

In the same way it’s possible to do good by not spending money on other things, it’s possible to do this with food too.

Again here the official line is we all have to spend more money on food in order to be healthy. We are supposed to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables, and depending on where you live there is other advice for eating other quantities of food like fish and dairy products. You never hear we are supposed to eat less.

If you are afraid of sugar, you are supposed to drink diet soda. If you are afraid of fat, you are supposed to eat fat substitutes. If you are afraid of carbohydrates, salt, meat, pesticides or whatever it is that you are supposed to be afraid of, there is food you can buy for a higher price that has a ‘safe’ alternative to what you are trying to avoid. The same thing is true with things we are supposed to need more of, for everything from Omega-3 to Vitamins.

By breaking food up into components, and selling us substitutes or enriched foods, food companies make a fortune and we eat more unhealthy processed foods. Food companies make even more money by selling us certified foods, like certified ‘organic’ or ‘Fair Trade’.

You can save a lot of money, and eat healthier foods by avoiding processed foods and chemical additives, and emphasizing simpler foods like plain fruits and vegetables, and small portions of starches like whole grains or potatoes. Many people are very happy and healthy as vegetarians, but if you do eat meats, use moderation.

Rather than buying certified organic, try to buy foods locally from someone you trust who doesn’t used pesticides or other chemicals or choose foods that don’t normally need a lot of chemicals to produce (see the list near the bottom of the page). In this way it will probably be cheaper, and you will support your local economy.

By eating in this way, you also meet the criteria of most of the widely recognized and credible dietary guidelines.

Above all, if you are not hungry, don’t eat. It’s not necessary to be afraid of your health, and buy and eat more food as a result.

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When to Grow Commercial Varieties

I got the idea for this post the other day when having an email exchange with a fellow blogger, who mentioned she grew some commercial/hybrid varieties. This is the 204th post on this blog, and mostly I’ve spent the last 203 posts going over and over all the reasons why commercial varieties are bad and heirloom varieties are good. I think 99% of the time this is true. At the moment I only grow heirloom or Open Pollinated (OP) varieties. In the past I’ve certainly grown commercial/hybrid varieties and I’ll probably do it again in the future.

There is certainly no reason to grow commercial varieties if you don’t want too. There are plenty of heirloom varieties to choose from, and lots of good reasons to choose them. This is more the point I have been trying to make.

Growing your own vegetables and other plants is a lot of work, and the point is not to save a small amount of money on seeds by choosing one variety over another. The small cost of buying seeds, is not the point. The point is to grow the best possible plants, and receive the maximum reward for the time you spend in your garden. This is always the goal of any gardener, and certainly my goal. I am absolutely convinced the best way to achieve this in most cases is by growing heirloom varieties.

The problem is companies that sell us seeds are closely tied to the ones that sell us food. They are the companies that have the political clout to force unwanted GM foods into our food chain. They are very powerful companies with aggressive marketing strategies. In particular they are very good at playing on everyone’s fear of wasting time in the garden, and promoting their products as ‘safer’, and therefore worth the extra cost. They also force nearly all retailers who sell their products to sign marketing agreements, forbidding them from making clear what plant varieties are heirloom or not.

This means if you want to be sure you are buying heirloom varieties, you must buy them from a retailer that does not sell ANY commercial varieties. There are not many retailers like this, and they make this clear in their catalogs or web pages. Just look for a policies or ‘about’ page that clearly states they don’t sell hybrid seeds. Companies like this that do exist are proud of who they are, and make this clear to their customers. There are some links to seed companies like this on the front of this blog, but you can find others by searching the Internet for ‘heirloom seed companies’ or something similar.

Why Are Some Commercial Varieties Better?

First there are OP and hybrid commercial varieties.

Some OP commercial varieties can be better than heirloom, because the supply of heirloom varieties is suffering from decades of neglect. In the last few years a lot more attention has been paid to heirloom varieties, and more and more high quality plant varieties are becoming available.

Some very common vegetables fall into this OP category. For example, green (sometimes called black) zucchini (many people know this as courgette) and a few other common squashes or pumpkins. A few varieties of tomato also fall into this category. In these examples, I wouldn’t say these are superior to heirloom varieties, but if you don’t find them boring there is no particular reason to choose an heirloom variety instead.

There are a few advantages to hybrid varieties, the main thing being they are genetically identical and therefore can be very reliable. In all OP (commercial and heirloom) there are genetic variations between the plants, more with some plants than others.

With some plants the genetic variation is so great a significant percentage of plants will fail to grow properly. Corn and some cole family plants (especially broccoli and brussel sprouts) fall into this category. While there are excellent heirloom varieties of these plants, if what you really want is a very dependable harvest, you are probably better off buying commercial hybrid varieties. Many people still prefer the taste of heirloom varieties, and in particular for broccoli many people like the purple sprouting or nutribud varieties. For brussel sprouts many people like Long Island Improved, and one of my personal favorites is Mezo Nano.

In a few cases modern varieties have resistance to diseases older varieties don’t have. For example some heirloom tomatoes are susceptible to ‘wilt’ viruses. This resistance sometimes works the other way around, for example some heirloom current tomatoes have resistance to late blight that modern varieties don’t have. Marketing also often over-hypes the significance of this, for example promoting a tomato’s resistance to the tobacco mosaic virus, which is primarily an issue for commercial farmers who grow their tomatoes in greenhouses. If you don’t have problems with wilt viruses or other diseases, then having resistant varieties is obviously not an advantage. It’s important to understand exactly what diseases are true risks, and which are the best varieties to address those risks.

Commercial varieties are generally developed for the convenience of farmers. While this doesn’t usually translate to convenience for home gardeners, it sometimes does. For example, many commercial varieties are ‘all at once’ types. This means they are genetically programmed to produce their harvest all in one go, to make it easier for the farmer to use mechanical harvesting techniques. Sometimes for home gardeners who, for example want to process food for storage and it’s easier to have it all at once, this ‘all at once’ trait is more convenient. For most gardeners however, it’s more of an advantage to have the harvest spread out over as much of the season as possible so the food can be enjoyed fresh for as long as possible.

Sometimes it’s not practical to save your own seeds.  Very common OP plants, like cover crops or some very ordinary vegetables, are just not worth spending the time saving seeds when they can be purchased very cheaply.  There can be times saving seeds is too difficult, for example many biennial plants require skills many home gardeners don’t have.

If you grow flowers, there are many types and colors not available in OP varieties. For example, many heirloom flowers grow large and fast, and hybrid varieties have been developed that are more suitable for smaller spaces and home gardens.

Reasons to Grow Heirlooms

Of course for most of the last few years I’ve been posting about the reasons for growing heirloom plants, but here are some of the main points.

Commercial varieties are boring! Commercial varieties are made for farmers, then repackaged and sold to home gardeners. This means you end up buying the same thing you can buy in the supermarket anyway. In the examples above, I said hybrid varieties of broccoli and corn might be better choices for people who want a dependable harvest. But if I want a dependable supply for commercial broccoli or corn, I can just buy them from my local farmer’s market and save myself a lot of time and trouble! There are much more interesting heirloom varieties available.

It’s too much trouble to get commercial seeds. Like I mentioned above, if you want to buy seeds and be certain they are for heirloom varieties, you need to buy them from a seed company that only sells heirloom varieties. This means if you also want to purchase hybrid varieties, they have to be purchased from another seed company! Why bother?

You are not in control of access to commercial varieties, in case you want to buy them in the future. The patent holders are free to discontinue or limit the sale of anything they want, in order to increase demand or perhaps promote other, newer varieties. While it is possible to save seeds from commercial OP varieties and give yourself some protection for this, it’s not possible to save seeds from hybrid varieties and the patent holders can keep the lineage of hybrid varieties secret, so it’s not possible for others to develop homemade or similar varieties. If a seed company discontinues a particular heirloom variety, it’s always possible for another company to sell it instead, or for it to be made available through the Seed Savers Exchange or similar organization.

With heirloom varieties, you can save your own seeds. Like we all know, seeds are not expensive and many people prefer to buy them each year rather than save them, but at least it’s an option if you want to. Saving seeds has many advantages besides saving money. When you save your own seeds, you can do so selectively from the best plants, thereby saving the genes for the plants that are best suited to your garden. You can also trade the seeds with others, possibly for varieties you couldn’t get any other way.

Heirloom varieties are rapidly becoming extinct! By some estimates, 70% of the pre-WWII varieties are gone, simply because people lost interest in them and didn’t keep the seeds. They will never come back! Of course it’s best to save your own seeds, but even if you don’t by buying heirloom varieties you create a demand for them that makes it possible for seed companies to keep offering them.

While the price of a package commercial seeds is small, the money goes to the wrong place. It goes to fund marketing strategies that are replacing heirloom varieties with commercial ones. The little bit of money goes to companies that have a virtual monopoly on our food supplies.