The White Lions of Timbavati

White Lion

Mike on Planb recently posted about this magnificent lion, who’s home is Timbavati, a region near Kruger National Park in South Africa. On a visit to that area 10 or so years ago I remember the story of these lions being told to me then. They are very important spiritually to the people of the area, and for more than 12 years have been extinct in their natural habitat.

Prized by trophy hunters, circuses and animal collectors they have all been killed or used in captive breeding programs.

One of the most controversial aspects of these breeding programs is their use in canned-hunting programs, where rich tourists are given a gun and a lion in specially prepared setting, then offered the chance to shoot their own trophy to take home. Some tourists are reported to pay up to US$70,000 for this privilege, and it’s a multi-million dollar a year industry.

The color of this lion is owed to one recessive gene, and otherwise they are a common species. This means as a species they have no special domestic or international legal protections.

In March of this year a small colony of these lions were reintroduced into their natural habitat, and are slowly becoming re-established. Full establishment of this lion in it’s natural habitat looks set to be a hard battle in the long run, and your financial support would be much appreciated.

For the full story see Mike’s detailed post (link above) or the Global White Lion Protection Trust website.

I also join Mike in encouraging other bloggers to help spread the word by writing about this and/or linking to this post, Mike’s post and the Global White Lion Protection Trust website.

Biodiversity Begins at Home

No sooner did it arrive did it seem to have been forgotten. On Thursday the UN report, Geo-4, was released. This is the most comprehensive report to date about the state of the world’s global environment. Its 572 pages were written by 390 specialists and reviewed by more than 1000 others. The news was not good.

Decline of fish stocks, degradation of farm land, unsustainable pressure on resources, dwindling supplies of fresh water for people and ecosystems were among the points made in the report.

Two recurring points made in the report were loss of biodiversity and unsustainable agriculture. Thirty crops dominate agriculture and provide about 90% of the world’s calorie intake. Two thirds of the world’s population depend on the input of nitrogen based fertilizers for their food supply. You may wonder what this has to do with home gardening, and I’m going to tell you.

As most of my regular readers know already, many things changed after WWII in both gardening and agriculture. Before this time, there was not a lot of difference between home gardening and farming. Both farmers and gardeners generally saved and traded their own seeds, and while seed companies did exist then they only sold Open Pollinated (OP) seeds that were suitable for seed saving.

There was no need for nitrogen based fertilizers (which were originally created as a means for recycling the stockpiles of chemical weapons that existed after WWII), because people used their own compost and rotated crops that used nitrogen with ones like beans that fixed nitrogen into the ground. Pests and plant diseases that now require the application of pesticides weren’t usually a problem, because crop rotation meant the same plants didn’t play host to these problems from one year to the next, and a healthy garden usually meant beneficial insects would establish themselves to combat crop pests.

After WWII, all over the world, there were major changes in the way food was grown and we were all taught to believe these changes were beneficial. While there were some benefits, mostly these changes were all about creating new farming methods and plant varieties so that farmers could be made dependent on products like seeds and pesticides produced by corporations. Any objections to how everything worked fell mostly on deaf ears, because massive government subsidies meant everyone came out ahead financially anyway.

Initially, there was simply a divergence between gardening and farming, but soon gardeners were encouraged to take advantage of these supposed benefits too. Pesticides and fertilizers were made available to home gardeners, together with the seeds of the new varieties being developed. The seed and chemical companies quickly discovered they could very effectively promote their products with the ‘what if’ scenario. What if you need fertilizer and don’t use it? You better use fertilizer just in case! Most people after they use fertilizer don’t have the slightest idea if it was needed, or what the benefits were. The same logic applies to pesticides – what if you get a disease or insect pests and you haven’t used the right pesticides? Better use them all, just in case. In this way huge amounts of unnecessary products are used in home gardens every year!

In this way too, many gardeners find themselves under a lot of pressure from fellow gardeners who don’t know better, who encourage the use of these products to one another, or sometimes promote ‘organic’ alternatives to these unnecessary products. All this is just free advertising for the chemical companies!

Seed companies only make money if you buy seeds, they don’t make money if you save and trade seeds with other gardeners. Seed companies have the fundamental problem that they have seeds developed for farmers, and the systems of pesticides and fertilizers used, and they need to get home gardeners to grow them too. These are the seeds you find in most seed catalogs and garden centers.

The same ‘what if’ logic is also used for garden seeds. For example seeds with disease resistance for a disease that could only be an issue for farmers is promoted to home growers, in order to make home gardeners afraid to plant anything else. Quietly older varieties of plants are removed from seed catalogs and replaced with new ones, that are supposedly ‘better’ than the inferior old ones. In this way seed companies that offer more new varieties are supposed to make you feel better about buying seeds from them, because what if you accidentally bought an older variety that was inferior somehow. After all, gardeners are supposed to feel excited about getting seeds for the newest varieties of plants to try in their garden.

What’s astonishing is how successful this system of marketing has been over the years in selling seeds to home gardeners. If the seeds of a particular variety of plant aren’t saved and periodically replanted, the variety is just lost. This is because seeds only stay viable for a few years. This period of viability can be extended with techniques like freezing the seeds, but nothing lasts forever. It’s been estimated that in this way, about 70% of the food plant varieties have been lost since WWII, and many more are still lost every year. Even seed banks, tasked with preserving these varieties, have only managed to save a tiny fraction of what used to exist.

Together with this lost of biodiversity is the loss of gardeners who know how these old gardening systems worked, and who are experienced with traditional breeding and seed saving techniques. Even university agriculture programs don’t usually teach these techniques, because they aren’t considered important for modern agriculture.

In recent years reductions in government subsidies have put a much bigger squeeze on farmers financially, who because of local laws and international ‘free trade’ treaties are forced to first buy expensive seeds and chemicals, then sell them the resulting crops below their own costs. Loans are often used to cover the financial short falls, driving farmers into an ever growing cycle of poverty and debt. This has led very large numbers of farmers in India, Australia and many other places to kill themselves in order to escape their debt. Very agressive methods are being used to promote new hybrid rice varieties in Asia for the sole purpose of squeezing farmers financially and leaving them dependent on seed and chemical companies.

So this is all pretty heavy news.  What can you as a home gardener do to help the situation?

For seed and chemical companies, the only solution to the world’s agriculture problems will be new varieties of seeds, pesticides and fertilizers. Going back to old varieties of plants will never be an option, and indeed since these older varieties compete with the newer varieties, seed and chemical companies want to see the older varieties disappear.

As a home gardener, you can play steward to some of these old varieties. You can learn some of these mostly forgotten techniques like crop rotations, seed saving and amateur plant breeding. These are the techniques that improve soil instead of degrade it, and increase biodiversity. Organic Guide recently posted on how some of these techniques are being proposed as a solution to the current Australian farming crisis.

Even if you don’t do anything besides learning to identify commercial varieties of plants and not buying these seeds, but rather using your seed buying money to buy OP varieties as well as support some of the few small seed companies that are still around working to preserve old varieties, you can make a big difference.

Growing heirloom and heritage varieties can be very rewarding, and once you get away from the 30 crops mentioned in the UN report as being responsible for 90% of our calorie intake, there’s a whole exciting world of new foods and plant varieties to be found! To see pictures of a few of them, click on the ‘Featured Plant’ link on the sidebar of this blog as well as having a look at these blogs:

Daughter of the Soil

In the Toads Garden

Of course with the excitement will come a few disappointments.

New Garden, First Frost, Fires and New Blogs

No pictures yet, but our new garden is coming along nicely. Most of the weeds are out, and I hope the garlic and some other things will go in this weekend.

One of the difficult things in a new garden is amending the soil. I have lots of compost from the old garden to use for this, but it means lots of carrying back and forth.

We had our first frost on Monday night. It was light, but enough to kill most things. Fine with me, as I don’t have a lot of plants in the ground right now, but it means winter is coming! It’s not horribly early, but I think this frost was a little earlier than usual this year. It’s also hard to know what’s normal anymore.

Several others have said similar things, but I want to say that my thoughts go out to all the people in southern California affected by the fires. It’s not just all the people who have lost their lives or homes, or what the news here reports as the roughly 1,000,000 people who have been evacuated, but everyone who has to breath the dirty air and all the friends and relatives of all these people. Something like this impacts nearly the whole world. It’s probably too much to expect politicians will be able to make the association between this and global climate change, but we can always hope.

Is it just me, or does it seem like there have been a lot of changes in the garden blog world in the last few months? I think I blinked and missed it. Suddenly the number of people reading this blog has gone way up, and there are new blogs popping up all over the place. This is a little normal this time of year, because those of us the the northern hemisphere are just finishing their gardens, and those in the south are just beginning, so lots more people are paying attention to blogging, but it all seems a lot more intense this year.

First of all welcome to blogging all of you that have started in the last few months. I am way behind on researching new blogs to add to my news reader and blogroll, not to mention way behind on reading my usual blogs, so hopefully in the coming weeks I will spend some time and find some of you. I will also try to write some posts of an introductory nature, so some of you can get to know me better. In the meantime, I hope some of you will make some comments here or send me an email. Please let me know you exist!

Here are a few new blogs I’ve been in touch with recently:

A Thinking Stomach: Making wise choices for eating and gardening. Pasadena California.

A Spot with Pots: Learning to be more self sufficient. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Organic Guide: Living organically. Online magazine, including a blog, with a worldwide focus. Printed magazine began in 1987, but is now being moved online. Based in Sydney, Australia.

If I’ve missed anyone on this very short list, it’s not on purpose. Please let me know, and I’ll update this post or mention you in a future one.

Bare Bones Gardening

There is a new very interesting looking Australian blog called Bare Bones Gardening.

It’s all about gardening without spending money, something along the lines of what I posted about a few days ago and have advocated many times in past posts. Also included in the scope of this blog is gardening with disabilities.

Recent posts on Bare Bones Gardening have included things like recycled paper jiffy pots, repairing garden hose, free mulch and compost and compostable garden planters.

He also recently posted about Ruth Stout and Esther Deans no-till garden methods. I’m more familiar with Ruth Stout who in the 60s and 70s, in the US, championed what we might now call organic gardening. The idea of organic gardening didn’t exist then because the widespread use of chemicals in agriculture was still too new. She was one of the first people to advocate natural gardening methods, and still has a large following of people who believe in these today. Me included!

Bare Bones Gardening has been around for about 2 months now, and has 48 posts. That’s almost one post a day! All of these posts are well thought out and full of interesting material. This is definitely a blog to add to your bookmarks or RSS feeds.

More Trades

I posted a few days ago about some things I traded my garlic for. Here are a couple more:

Eggs and Cheese

My garlic got me a nice discount for some eggs and cheese. These came from Het Marlanner Kaashuis (Fries and Dutch languages). The cheese is handmade by the farmer there, and in my opinion is among the best tasting cheese I have ever had. It’s traditional Dutch/Fries style, sometimes called ‘Gouda’ by people outside of Holland. It’s made with milk from his own certified organic/bio-dynamic raised cows. It tastes so wonderful compared to commercial cheese, it’s made without any added color or other chemicals and the milk comes from well cared for cows. They sell many different kinds of cheeses, ranging from young to very mature, and many made with different herbs and spices. Some of the herbs come from their own garden, or are collected from nearby wild areas.

One of the most important aspects of this cheese is the biodiversity behind it. The area this farm is located in is rich in natural biodiversity. The cows have no fewer than 75 different grasses and other plants to eat (the farmer calls these ‘herbs’), and I have seen several different breeds of cows in his fields and barn.

Their eggs too have a wonderful fresh taste. People in North America will immediately notice something strange about the eggs. Here in Holland (and I think most of Europe) a ‘dozen’ eggs aren’t really a dozen. Here they sell eggs in packages of 10. If you’re wondering if the eggs are free range or not, if you visit just poke your head around the corner from the shop and have a look at them running around.

I hope I’m not giving away a trade secret here if I tell you when they have spoiled cheese that can no longer be sold, they feed it to the chickens. Perhaps this is part of the reason the eggs taste so special!

They also sell meat from their cows, as well as a wide variety of other organic and bio-dynamic products. They give tours, if you arrange it with them in advance.

They are not able to use my garlic in their cheese now, because it’s not certified organic or bio-dynamic like the rest of their products. They have however said they will use my garlic as planting stock in their own garden, eventually to also be certified and used in their cheeses.

Although it’s in a very remote part of Friesland, a province in the north of The Netherlands, it’s worth a visit if you are ever in the area. It’s on the road between Metslawier and Ee, and if you are coming from Ee it’s on the left hand side. They are open Monday-Saturday 10-13.00 and again from 15-20.00.

Pumpkin Seed Oil

The label on this bottle says Kürbis Kern Oel [Ölmühle Hötzl/Mureck(a)].

This is pumpkin seed oil. It comes from a Swiss neighbor of mine, and I understand it’s popular in both Switzerland and Austria. It’s commonly served on salads, but can also be used in other dishes. It’s supposed to both taste good and have health giving properties. I had some the other day and it’s really delicious.

It has a brown color, but according to Wikipedia if you put it on yogurt it turns green. I haven’t tried this yet!