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New Frontiers in Genetic Engineering

I was browsing some older posts from Matt’s blog, and I came across this.

In fact this is something I’ve known for a while, and coincidentally sent Matt an email about the other day, but I’ve never posted here on the subject.

It’s just a fact, the science of genetic engineering (GE) is quickly moving out of the laboratory and into the home.  Not just in our ability to buy products that are themselves a result of GE, but also in our own ability to make GE organisms.

Already, if you have a well equiped home, it’s possible to do an awful lot.  The cost of this equipment is within the budgets of many people, it’s only getting cheaper and it’s accuracy increasing.

The amount of publicly available data that can assist GE is also increasing at a dramatic rate; including things like decoded genomes and cataloges of marker genes (a fancy term that just means genes with a known trait).  All of this applies to plants, microorganisms, animals and even humans.

So while the debate now often centers on the latest Roundup ready gene Monsanto inserted into our soybeans, tomorrow it could be the latest accident caused by a teenager or the mess intentionally caused by someone knowledgeable.

I often compare GE to abortions.  I don’t really think it makes sense for anyone to be for or against abortions.  An abortion is just a medical procedure.  You can argue if it’s immoral, talk about it in terms of legal or illegal, safe or unsafe, early or late, but you can never deny the existence of the procedure itself.

This is really where we are now with GE.  It doesn’t make sense to call it good or bad.  The genie is out of the bottle.  Now it’s time to start learning as much as possible as quickly as possible about the science, and to focus honestly and diligently on what the real risks are.

In the meantime, this crap doesn’t belong in our food or the environment, until we’ve had a chance to honestly research and learn more about it!

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Blogs to Watch

My recent post on Monsanto stirred up quite a commotion! I was having a look at some of the people who commented and followed the links back to their blogs, and I discovered a couple of new ones I hadn’t seen before, that deserved special attention.

Matt of The Scientist Gardener is studying the unintended side-effects and safety of plant genetic engineering. Now here’s a field that’s going to be in the spotlight! Even if he and I may not choose to grow the same things in our gardens, I’m really looking forward to following his blog and staying in touch.

Raymondo of New from Old is someone I know from elsewhere on the Internet, and he has a new blog.  An amateur plant breeder in Australia, getting started on some really interesting looking projects.

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Citrus Grafting

I decided a few months ago it was time for me to get into the world of plant grafting.  I posted a few weeks ago about some pre-grafted fruit trees I bought, as well as some root stock.  I expected this all to start in the course of the coming months, but then I had the idea of doing a citrus graft!

This all started when I read Christina’s post here, about some mandarins in the garden of a friend.  She mentioned a variety named Shirokolistvennyi, a Russian variety believed to be very cold hardy.  That started me thinking, if there was a cold hardy mandarin that grows in Russia, why couldn’t I grow it here in Amsterdam?

I asked Christina if her friend might be able to send me a cutting to make a graft with, only to find out she lives in an area under citrus quarantine, and scion wood is not even allowed to be transported locally.  This is to prevent the spread of disease.

After some looking, I found some scion budwood was available from the USDA GRIN germplasm collection.  I agreed with the curator he would send me some — if I would first send him a copy of the ‘letter of authorization’ he said was required for European import of citrus.  So I set off on the great paper chase.

I called customs, the plant disease control people, the people who perform inspections on plant imports (this has all been privatized, outsourced and just a real mess in general).

Everyone I talked to said the same thing.  There are no restrictions on importing citrus budwood into the Netherlands (I don’t know about the rest of the EU), so there was no ‘letter of authorization’ to issue, in fact no one I spoke to had ever heard of a letter of authorization.

The USDA GRIN curator said he couldn’t issue a phytosanitary certificate or any other paperwork, until I could give him the letter of authorization.

Finally we agreed he would just skip all the paperwork, and send it!

So there it is, in the middle, in the plastic bag.

While waiting for GRIN to process my budwood request, I set out to find rootstock for grafting.  Those are the two plants, Poncirus trifoliata, also called Trifolate orange, a citrus relative, said to be very cold hardy and good for use as grafting rootstock.  They are really thorny!

I found the plants at a local nursery De Groene Prins.  It turns out the guy that runs the nursery has been looking for cold hardy citrus to grow locally for some time now, so we had a walk through his garden and he showed me some of the plants he’s experimenting with!  He was very knowledgeable and helpful, and certainly worth a visit for anyone looking for exotic cold hardy plants in the Netherlands.

Above is a grafting knife I bought a few months ago on a visit to San Diego California.  They sell it there in part because it’s used by the citrus industry.  It’s made by Victorinox, and in fact pretty widely available.

I had two plants, so I decided I would make two different kinds of grafts.  First a standard graft, then a bud graft.

For the standard graft, I cut a piece of the budwood and the top of the plant at roughly the same angle.  The budwood is on the left here.  I also cut a further notch in it, that was too small to really show up in the picture, but it is right below the tips of each of these cuts in the down direction.  The intention is to make a bit of a notch, so the two pieces will interlock a bit.

Here they are slotted into one another.  The budwood is on top.  This stayed in place long enough by itself to take this picture.

Next I put some grafting wax on it.  I read different places on the Internet that you should either put the wax on first or tape if first, not knowing for sure which I should do, I started with the wax.

Actually while looking at the pictures I took to make this post I see maybe if I used tape first, I could have taped the graft closed a bit.  None of the surfing around on the subject I’ve done had suggested this might be a good idea.

The wax was purchased locally and called grafting wax, but I’m not really sure it’s the right product.  I needed to melt it over a flame first, and it wasn’t very easy to apply.  None of the wax really penetrated the graft at all, it’s just sort of stuck to the outside.

In the absence of an actual product called grafting tape, I used masking tape.  I had read somewhere that it was okay to do this, but I’m not sure…

Above is the bud graft I made.  The process of doing this was far less picturesque.  In fact it was very difficult, and I hope not too much blood is showing in this picture.  Cutting a bud off the scion wood was no problem, together with some surrounding plant tissue.

You are supposed to slot this into a T-shaped cut on the stem of the root stock.  This is really a lot harder to make than it might seem.  It’s very woody, and when you make a cut with a knife that’s so sharp, the cut disappears right away.  When you try to cut it again with the knife, you make a second parallel cut, that just damages the plant and isn’t very good for slotting the bud into.

Anyway, next time I will approach it more like using the knife to sort of gouge the cut up from below.

The graft is held in place with a rubber band, as an alternative to grafting rubber.

This was sort of a difficult first grafting attempt to make, but then again I guess I’m never for doing anything the easy way.

Actually, in the process of ordering the budwood and buying the rootstock, a Russian friend of mine searched the Internet in Russian for this variety of mandarin.  It turns out it’s more commonly known by the name Gruzinskiy Shirokolistnyi, which means Georgian Wide Leaved Mandarin.  There isn’t any specific information available in Russian about it being cold hardy, but it is supposed to be good for low light conditions (at the possible expense of fewer fruits).  This is promising for me, because low light in the winter can be a problem.  Georgia however has a much warmer climate than me, so I’m a little worried it really is cold hardy.

What my Russian friend said she read, in general, mandarins are hardy down to -5C with no damage, and at -10C may be killed.  It’s pretty unusual the temperature gets down to -10C here, but it does happen.  This winter it got to about -12C.

At the same time, the rootstock I’m using is supposed to make the tree more cold hardy, so this may help.  I understand the rootstock is good down to -20C by itself.

Anyway, I guess I first have to worry about the graft working, then worry about the cold hardiness.

The last part of this story is that I had extra budwood left over after making these two grafts.  I traded them with the guy who runs the nursery where I got the Trifolate orange for these above!  Three seeds from his Yuzu lemon tree, also known to be very cold hardy.  He had two of these plants, one outdoors and one in his polytunnel.  The outdoor plant didn’t have any fruits yet, perhaps still too young, but it survived this past very cold winter with flying colors.  His indoor plant had some fruit on it, and it looked and smelled like a very nice quality lemon.

If anyone out there who has ever done grafting before has any comments, I’d love to hear them.  Especially if this doesn’t work, I’d love to know why…

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Monsanto in Cyberspace

Monsanto is Here

A number of posts have been made in recent weeks on different blogs about Monsanto buying nearly all commercial seed companies, everywhere.  There was a particularly good one on the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

It’s pretty clear in the aftermath of all this consolidation, the next frontier for Monsanto is the Internet.

This blog has received quite a number of requests for Monsanto seed companies to be added to my list of recommended sources of seeds in recent weeks, and comments challenging old posts I’ve made critical of Monsanto are also starting to come in.  Note the one here dated Jan 26th from ‘Rick’.

A discussion forum I frequently participate on also just had some visitors from Monsanto.  At least one of these visitors had actually been around for months, and out of the blue just started spewing nonsense about how good Monsanto’s seed companies were.  He did this together with someone else, so it sort of looked somehow like a legitimate conversation was taking place.

He started by giving a list of his favorite seed companies, including some many well known and trusted places like Baker Creek, Sandhill and Seed Savers Exchange, then went on to include some relatively unknown Monsanto seed companies and started promoting them.

Common Theme

Until now, all of these visits have had a common theme.  Monsanto is ‘normal’.  Each one has in some way tried to promote Monsanto as a normal seed company, and people who don’t want to grow seeds from Monsanto are somehow extreme.

These visits have included marketing slogans like ‘Most experienced gardeners trust Johnny’s.’  In particular, the theme that Johnny’s is somehow a trusted place to buy seeds seems to reoccur.  Any blog or other place on the Internet that recommends Johnny’s Seeds is suspect as advertising for Monsanto.

The Truth

The real truth is that us bloggers have been tremendously successful at proving commercial seeds, in particular from Monsanto, have very little legitimacy in a home garden.

When you grow commercial seeds, you can’t re-save them for sharing or replanting.  In general your chance of success is often lower, and you usually don’t end up with something worth taking a picture of and posting on your blog.  There are very few serious and successful blogs out there about gardens growing commercial seeds, because they just aren’t interesting.

Of course I don’t mean to suggest gardeners who grow a few commercial hybrid seeds are doing something wrong, but these plants don’t usually end up being the ones they post and rave about.

What to Do

I’m afraid more is likely to come!  Even if we have a wave of this nonsense and it passes, it’s reasonable to assume Monsanto will keep trying.

In the short run, keep an eye out for it on your blogs and discussion forums.  I don’t do Facebook or Twitter, but those of you who do or visit similar places on the Internet, keep an eye on it there too.

If you see someone who seems to be promoting commercial seed companies in the wrong place, be sure to say something.  Be sure to mention Monsanto, and don’t accept being told that growing seeds from Monsanto is somehow normal!  If they persist, ask them about who they are and what they are doing there.  Make sure you are very clear that you think what they are saying is wrong and just nonsense.

Be sure and talk about your experiences other places on the Internet, so the rest of us can be prepared to cope with the same thing.  By all means, please use this post as a place to leave comments on this.

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Dumping High Fructose Corn Syrup

Since I’ve been to the US twice in the last couple of years, one of the things I’ve noticed is the apparent increasing rejection of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).  A year ago, it was astonishing.  Everything, just absolutely everything was full of HFCS, and excruciatingly sweet.

There’s little doubt, I wasn’t the only one who noticed this.  Friends and family noticed too, and when I was back last November it was clear there was increasing demand for products that didn’t contain HFCS.  Soft drinks are becoming available, and more and more other products, that are just made with normal sugar.  This almost certainly was connected with the world wide shortages of cane and beet sugar over the last year or so.

Where did it go?

If Americans aren’t eating HFCS anymore, it must have gone somewhere.

It’s pretty clear Europe is at least one of the recipients of the surplus.  They don’t call it by the same name here.  It’s usually called something like ‘glucose syrup’ or ‘glucose-fructose syrup’.  It seems to go under a number of names.  These are in a lot of foods and beverages here by now.  I especially notice it in a lot of beers and sweet alcoholic drinks marketed towards young people.  It’s also in many processed foods.

It does not seem to have any so-called European E-numbers associated with it, I guess because it’s not an additive but rather a foodstuff.  For those of you reading this who aren’t in Europe, because of the number of different languages here, and because it helps the food industry hide what they add to food, they have created a special coding system for food additives.  I would have to think about the the politics of it not having an E number a little more, but I guess consumers are more reluctant to buy E-numbers now, and perhaps it was an issue to get HFCS certified as a safe food additive.

What’s wrong with it?

Besides many people disliking the taste, HFCS is associated with many health problems.  It’s use as a food additive in the US corresponds almost exactly to the increase of obesity and related health problems we’ve seen in recent decades.  It’s associated with diabetes, gout and many other health problems.

If you’re trying to avoid eating GM foods, you should avoid this too.  It’s not necessarily made with GM corn, but often is.  According to Monsanto and other large food companies, processing will remove GMOs from this product.  That means, even though it may be made from GM corn, it is legal for sale as a food in Europe.  There hasn’t been any independent confirmation of food industry claims that GMOs are removed, and many people dispute it.  Nevertheless, it is legal for sale in Europe, GM or not.  There is also no requirement to label it as a GM food.