Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
First Lady Michelle Obama started work on the new vegetable garden on the White House South Lawn today!
Congratulations to Roger of Kitchen Gardeners International, who’s idea this was. It’s a great day for America and a great day for the Obamas who can look forward to their own fresh organic vegetables.
Last year I made a series of posts about Hawaii’s move to ban the artificial sweetener aspartame in the state. While this didn’t pass last year, a new resolution has been put forward, Hawaii HCR 128, calling on the FDA themselves to revoke their approval of aspartame and remove it from the US market.
The text of the resolution is a little tedious, but quite an extraordinary read! I hope anyone who reads this blog and is a regular consumer of aspartame will read it and give some serious thought to what they’re doing to their bodies.
No less extraordinary is the list of cosponsors of the measure:
Details of the measure and it’s current status can be found on the Hawaiian Legislature webpage (type HCR128 into the search box), and there is an RSS feed if you want to follow the progress of this measure.
First the measure has to clear the Health Commitee, and will then be referred to the Finance Committee.
I just came across this article on Grist, that addresses some of the things I mentioned in my last post.
After a presidential election that was won in no small part thanks to the power of the Internet, it’s logical to assume political lobbying will also follow suit. I think this bill, which according to the Grist article has little chance of passing, likely touched a nerve in the food processing industry who responded by spreading political nonsense all over the Internet from almost unknown sources in hopes of turning public opinion against it.
I think it’s important to learn a lesson from this.
I think it’s important for all of us to work within webs of trust, and if you read something really sensational on the Internet from a source you’re not familiar with and want to post about it, be sure to research the topic thoroughly first. If you post regularly on the Internet, earn your readers trust by being careful about what you post about. Most importantly, don’t present something as fact unless you’re pretty sure it’s true, and you’ve taken reasonable steps to verify it. I know my record on this is not perfect, but I think it’s doubly important these days we all pay more attention to this issue.
For the first time since 1906, in the wake of Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, there’s a proposal by the Obama administration to completely reorganize food safety enforcement in the US. Since countries all over the world will likely adopt the basic principles behind any such a reorganization, it’s an issue that affects us all.
You can read the text of the proposed bill here. The US Senate is considering a slightly different version that can be found by searching the Internet.
One of the strange things about this bill is the nearly complete lack of response from any mainstream news sources, or even many of the more well known food blogs. It seems Obama has stunned everyone into silence, and everyone is afraid to take a stand on the issue. Given the implications of this kind of change, I think it’s a little funny so few people have an opinion.
In the wake of recent food contaminations and the large numbers of people sickened by food contamination in the US and elsewhere, something urgently needs to be done. The real question at hand is if this bill is taking the right approach, and in my opinion there are a lot of good things going for it. There are however some problems and omissions as well.
A few of the comments I’ve encountered suggest it’s a measure intended to benefit large companies like Monsanto and Dow. In my opinion, this isn’t true. It’s a bill aimed as food processing and production, in other words companies that make something you put into your mouth and eat. Companies like Monsanto and Dow produce seeds and chemicals, and are simply not affected by this one way or another, which can be a good or bad thing of course. It’s clearly an omission that someone like Monsanto or Dow are allowed to introduce contaminants into our food, and it not be regulated. Maybe however this is a battle for another day.
I’ve also heard arguments along the lines of it takes power from the states, or places burdens on them. I must admit, when I read the text of the bill I don’t see horrible impending changes that are going to destroy the boundaries between the federal and local governments.
It will certainly be possible under the terms of what’s being proposed to outsource the entire food safety management to the food producers themselves, which of course is a situation not unlike what we have now.
The bill is certainly lacking clear definitions of what it means to be a food production facility, and it could potentially mean a home garden or someone’s kitchen. I don’t see any specific attacks on organic or small CSA/farms, but there are also no clear exemptions for them. In my opinion this is a problem that has to be addressed. This is really the right time to formally legalize the on site slaughtering of animals by small farms.
This bill has some pretty cumbersome ‘paperwork’ associated with it, requiring food production facilities to track every additive and input of the process, very reminiscent of organic farm certification. This is a very unfair burden for small and family run farms, who should be exempt from these provisions.
There is also a provision to allow victims of food contamination to file lawsuits for compensation. While this is obviously a great thing involving serious and large scale contaminations, again it’s not so great in terms of more frivolous lawsuits against small farms and CSAa, which I think also need to be exempted from this or a federal insurance fund needs to be created to handle these cases of compensation.
What is clear is it’s the intention of these bills to put thousands more food inspectors into the field, and empower them to act when they encounter dangerous situations.
The idea behind these changes gets my qualified approval, but I’ll be watching what happens as these bills are debated and amended.
Fertilizer is probably something all gardeners use, at least from time to time. It comes in many forms from chemical to animal manure, or perhaps homemade in the form of ‘tea’ made from compost, manure or green plants. There are also fertilizers claiming to be organic. Some are added to the ground, and others applied to the leaves of the plants (foliar feeding). Some are strong and others weak. Of course there are also the component parts; nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N,P and K), and fertilizers are given numerical ratings of these components like 10-20-10. It can all seem confusing and opaque, especially at the beginning.
In particular many people feel somehow that fertilizer is an important element of gardening, and since other people use it, they have to as well. An extension to this is the knowledge that organic gardeners don’t use chemical fertilizers, therefore you have to find an organic alternative like manure.
The Habit
This feeling like fertilizer is somehow an important part of gardening, can lead to a sort of addiction or dependence on fertilizer, that works something like this.
First you add fertilizer to your garden and you notice everything grows faster and looks greener and healthier. This is particularly true with fertilizer high in nitrogen, and it’s very easy to get the feeling that if some fertilizer makes the plants look so good, more must be better.
At this point you might give your plants so much they experience sudden death, but more likely you keep giving them small amounts over time, perhaps a little extra when you sense it’s needed. Since fertilizers usually contain more than one nutrient (NPK), probably over time the nutrients in your garden are getting more and more out of balance. Since this probably leads to your plants not growing well, it can easily make you think you need more fertilizer.
By the time you’ve added so much that you finally realize you are causing the problem and not solving it, you can be faced with a situation that’s very difficult to deal with.
As someone who has spent the past decade or so moving their garden around, and needing to borrow spots from other people, I can tell you it’s a very common problem in my area.
A related problem can be if your garden is former pasture land, or otherwise has a lot of recently applied animal manure.
When do you need fertilizer?
As a rule, for most people, a well managed and established garden does not need any fertilizer. It’s too complicated a topic to make such a broad statement, but this is the general rule.
It’s possible when you first start a garden you will have some problems, usually a shortage of organic material. In this case it’s likely you will have to do something about the existing problems, and this might involve using some fertilizer. Often fertilizer is not necessary, but sometimes it is.
If you are unable to practice good principles of crop rotation, you may need some fertilizer to compensate. It’s worth pointing out you’ll likely end up with a whole host of other problems too if you don’t practice proper rotations.
Potted plants often require fertilizer.
Unless you are sure you need fertilizer, it’s best not to use any at all. If you do need to use it, it’s best to use something weak like fish emulsion or homemade teas from green leaves or compost. Fresh animal manure should almost never be used in your garden, rather it should be composted first.
If you live somewhere soil tests are available, get an analysis of your ground before you add any fertilizer. This will give you an idea if anything is needed.
What can you do once the damage is done?
Besides hoping for rain, and just waiting for it all to wash away, one of the first things you should try to address in over-fertilized ground is nitrogen (N) levels. Too much nitrogen, and your plants will be stressed and the weeds will grow faster than anything else you may try to grow. Not enough, and your plants will be weak and small.
In my experience, the problem manifests itself like this. In a healthy garden nitrogen fixing plants are the primary source of nitrogen, and the ground will be rich in fixed nitrogen. Another much less important source of fixed nitrogen is compost. Fixed nitrogen remains in the ground, and tends to become available when as the plants need it. Any other source of nitrogen that gets added to the garden, whether from natural sources like manure or chemical fertilizer, will be soluble. Soluble nitrogen is available immediately, and can stress or kill plants. Soluble nitrogen can wash away, but it can also accumulate in large amounts in the ground. In the presence of soluble nitrogen, nitrogen fixing plants will fix less, so there will be less fixed nitrogen in the ground. In addition, if your ground is low in organic material, it may not have the capability to retain fixed nitrogen.
If your ground has too much soluble nitrogen, for example has a lot of animal manure added, try covering the garden with a high carbon mulch material like wood chips or straw. In extreme cases you may want to mix a small amount of this material into the ground, but this can cause other problems as well, so don’t do it unless you think it’s really needed. High carbon material will remove nitrogen from the ground.
If your garden is lacking nitrogen, consider a weak nitrogen fertilizer like fish/kelp emulsion, or homemade fertilizers like ‘teas’ in the short run, but nitrogen fixing plants are key to the long term. Consider planting one or more nitrogen fixing trees like Alders or Sea Buckthorn in temperate climates. For other climates you’ll have to research the issue and see what’s available. Growing nitrogen fixing crops like beans and peas is also a good solution, perhaps as companion plants. This is a situation that may take a few years to get stabilized, and if you’re using a chemical fertilizer now and intend to stop, you may want to cut back as a first step, for just this reason.
For other nutrient imbalances, I don’t have any good suggestions. If you are unsure of the state of your ground, adding compost is always a safe thing to do. If you can, let your ground lay fallow for a year or more before using it again as a garden.
