I posted a picture of myself a few days ago, but didn’t say what it was for. It’s been published! You can find it here, on the UK Royal Horticultural Society website’s Grow Your Own pages, together with some other well known garden bloggers. You may have to click on the ‘more blogs’ link to find my picture. What a fun idea, posting pictures of all of us together!
Now we have to see how many people actually read this page, follow the link and how much traffic I’ll actually get…
It’s been interesting to see how the relationship between bloggers and organizations like the RHS or media organizations has matured over time. Of the two major media organizations in the UK, The Guardian has openly come out, embraced the world of blogs, regularly links to more well known blogs and in my opinion this makes the quality of what they offer much higher. The BBC on the other hand pretends blogs don’t exist. In the US it’s a similar story, with MSNBC linking to blogs sometimes, but most others like CNN ignoring the world of private blogs.
How can media organizations consider themselves legitimate, when they report on stories like the recent revolution in Egypt, identify blogs as a major part of this, then ignore and not link to them? If they’re a major part of the news, we should be able to read them, with translating tool if necessary, and for this a link needs to be provided! Finding the Egyptian blogs really took some searching. What about blogs in the rest of the Middle East? If they’re there, they shouldn’t be ignored.
Most news organization by now call their website a ‘blog’ or have a section of ‘blogs’, but they don’t have blogrolls, you have to register to leave a comment they don’t write about other blogs, they lack an informality in how they write or in some other way just don’t have one of the things most of us understand are important about a blog. It’s become an important split in the world’s mainstream media.
The RHS
Back to the RHS, one of the best known UK gardening charities. I’m pleased they’re reaching out to blogs, but at the same time there’s some dirty laundry to be aired.
While they have a very important history, in modern times they have not done a lot to promote agricultural biodiversity. If you go to their online seed shop, you’ll find a difficult to search through selection of commercial seeds, with a few heirloom and heirloom sounding varieties mixed in. Don’t buy seeds from their website, just because you see my picture there! They are not the right people to buy seeds from.
I had a similar experience when I visited Wisley Gardens a few years ago during apple season. I walked around in their apple orchards, with most of the apples rotting on the ground. Then I walked into their tasting area, sampled pieces of apples and cider that were brought in from somewhere else, and mostly completely different varieties from what they had in their fields. The same was true in the garden shop, which had commercial varieties of apple trees on sale but not many old varieties were visible or available. They’re a good place to go and look at the trees in the field, but if you’re interested in growing old apple varieties, you should get your trees somewhere else.
In the same way the RHS or The Guardian hope to increase their customer base by making relations with blogs, I hope it’s possible for blogs to sometimes criticize and influence the commercial nature of these organizations.
Here you go Pat & Steph.
Corporate news is in the business of controlling what we think..including what we think is news in the first place!
Hi Patrick – good to see your faceover at the RHS. I rather like the idea of all the bloggers over there getting together for a natter. I wonder what impish things our photos might get up to over there? 😉
FYI the BBC are beginning to recognise bloggers. The problem is their website is so vast and there’s a few different versions of gardening on there, that it’s quite easy to miss what’s going on. The Gardeners’ World portion has blogs from people associated with various BBC programmes, but there’s another bit too (bbc.co.uk/gardening)which relaunched its own blogs around last October. There you’ll not only find a blogroll (which I’m expecting to see expanded over time just like the Guardian one), but they’re also commissioning guest blog posts from bloggers, including myself and Emma Cooper. After a great deal of flak from other parts of the media re bloggers, it’s great that finally some kudos is coming our way re the contribution we can make to the gardening debate/advice/news etc etc
PS and too right re giving open, honest and constructive criticism as well as sharing the good things about these organisations 🙂
Congratulations VP on the BBC posts, etc! It does look like it’s just getting started at the BBC, and I hope it develops into something interesting.
It was a pleasant surprise to find you over at RHS too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRz34Dee7XY
Hi Cynthia,
Did you mean to put this on the Cuban blogs post?
Anyway, it’s funny to see this video from 2008, because a lot of what’s in it is now very much disputed.
For example, it’s true in the beginning they were all organic because pesticides were not available, but current estimates are that less than 10% are still organic. Pesticides have been becoming more common in recent years apparently, and farmers are quick to start using them again.
Also, what I understand is beyond iceburg lettuce and standard red tomatoes, Cuban people apparently don’t eat many vegetables. And yes, apparently these urban gardens are very good at cranking out these veggies.
On the other hand, most Cubans eat meat or black beans, and these have to be produced in the countryside away from the cities.
Also apparently now Cuba is able to import food much cheaper than it can produce it itself, and so the vast majority of their food is now imported.
It’s not that organoponicos aren’t a good thing, but the facts around them have been distorted and they are not the huge benefit to the Cuban people you would think they are.
Hi. I posted here because you were talking of the BBC and that is a BBC video.
Here are more up to date pages that give the impression organics are alive in Cuba. http://www.greenantilles.com/2011/01/31/1000-indian-farmers-to-visit-cuba-for-organic-farming-lessons/
http://theurbanfarmer.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/OrgCuba2011BrochLoR.pdf
http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/en/NewsArticles/2011/02/UofAstudentsheadtoCubaforlessonsinorganicfarming.aspx
http://www.globalexchange.org/tours/1143.html
Hi Cynthia,
It’s always possible I’m wrong. I’m no expert on Cuba, and I’ve never been there.
Since it’s legal for Europeans to travel there, a lot of people around here have been there. What I hear from friends that are vegetarian is that there is very little vegetarian food and few fruits and vegetables are easily available. This is not because they are in short supply, but that Cubans just don’t eat them. It’s very possible that organopónicos produce 90% of Cuba’s fresh fruit and vegetables, but as a statistic by itself it’s hard to know exactly what that means.
I have little doubt there are organic gardeners and farmers in Cuba, and I’m sure there are some very skilled experts in the field. I’m sure if you go there on an organic gardening course, you will learn some very special things. However, I think this is also true a lot of other places in the world.
Even though the name Organopónico has ‘organic’ in it, that doesn’t necessarily mean they use organic methods. What I’ve heard is the ratio of organic farmers to conventional farmers in Cuba is similar to other places in the world, and Cuban consumers make similar decisions on if organic produce is worth the extra cost or not that people in other places do.
The problem is all the information surrounding how much food Cuba imports, or how much pesticide and fertilizers it uses are state secrets. No one knows for sure.
The links you just gave suggest there’s a booming tourist trade in travelling to Cuba to see organic gardens. I’m sure if the demand is there, the Cuban government can provide this as a service. I’m just not sure this is how people actually eat there…
For sure the Cuban people did eat this way once, when the support of the Soviet Union was suddenly cut off. But times have changed, and Cuba has more money and the ability to import more food now.
The visual beauty of the crumbling mansions next to gardens would be a tour in itself, wouldn’t it! I have always wanted to go. You should.
It seems out of pure economics alone organic is the right system there. My sister has been a few times. One time friends there made her family a flan that took something like their month’s ration of eggs, sugar?, milk.
Maybe in Cuba it’s like Mexico where it appears the people are not eating much in the way of vegetables but when you look into it you see the herbs and vegetables they use are very potent in nutrients or good a removing toxins from the body or parasites, etc. Well there are also nuts and seeds and flowers too to eat. Maybe the Cubans are acclimated to fruits. In Mexico many people think to be a vegetarian is a curious choice but they are smart..it’s on the menu!
Later!!
Oops Anonymous is again me Cynthia!
As for the vegetarian options in Mexico..I meant to write- the people are smart AND fabulous hosts!
I better stop writing on these blogs..it’s not the place for people who say..No wait I forgot to say this or forgot to say that!!
Haha. THANKS!
When I went to Chile a few years ago, I was expecting to eat a lot of Mexican food there, and in general expecting the food to be similar. I was completely wrong!
In all of Santiago, Chile’s capitol city with 5.3 million people, there is one very expensive Mexican restaurant that seats about 30 people. There are also only a small handful of vegetarian restaurants, and they too are very expensive. Vegetarian restaurants are viewed as a place to go to have an exotic meal that impresses a heavy duty meat eater who’s expecting to be satisfied in the same way. It’s not socially acceptable there to be full-time vegetarian, and most restaurants do not have a vegetarian option.
We ate a lot of cheese empanadas from snack kiosks.
In the same way with Cuba, you can’t expect the food there to have any relationship with Mexican food, and I don’t think it really does. I guess they eat a lot of black beans, but the similarity probably ends there.
For Americans, Mexican food is often thought of as very ordinary and cheap, but really in most places in the world this isn’t true. Mexican food is often exotic and expensive, including elsewhere in Latin America.
Especially in South America there is still a bit of a Gaucho culture, the historical cowboys that lived on the plains there. They raised and lived on mostly beef, and beef is still a major part of the diet of people who live in that part of the world. In Brazil and other places it’s heavy on seafood.
In a lot of Latin America, vegetables are often thought of as little more than garnish.