Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
They’ve made remarkable progress over the last few days. The wall is almost gone, just a few difficult spots left. They’ve also broken up half the floor.
Where the wall used to be are piles of bricks…
There’s an incredible diversity among the bricks.
I came across the blog Generation Y a few days ago, because the BBC linked to it! The BBC doesn’t usually link to blogs, so it caught my eye to see this.
Anyway, Generation Y, written by Yoani Sanchez, is all about people with the letter ‘Y’ in their name.
Are you wondering why the BBC is interested in a blog about the letter Y, and why I’m talking about it and linking to it here? Don’t be silly! You’re probably one of those people who come here and expect this to be a gardening blog.
Generation Y is really one of the leading Cuban dissident blogs, and it’s written entirely in English. It’s a powerful and very well written blog. Well worth having a look at. Be sure to have a look at her ‘How to Help’ page, and especially if you’re travelling to Cuba, consider bringing some of the things she asks for in your luggage.
For other Cuban blogs in Spanish, there’s a list here.
Generation Y has a blogroll with English language or English translated blogs, and for your convenience I’m copying the list here:
It’s almost time to remove the load bearing wall in the middle of my house. For new readers, I’ve already made a series of posts about my foundation repair and here.
The piles have all been driven, and the city has inspected them and given approval. One pile went a little wrong, perhaps driven a little fast and too enthusiastically, but wasn’t deemed a serious problem. Still to be done on the piles are to fill the hollow pipes with concrete.
In the meantime however, the empty pipes of the piles are the most stable thing in the house, so they are building the support structures needed for the load bearing wall removal on top of the pipes. You can see on the bottom left of the picture below, a section of pipe sticking out of the floor.
The support structure above is built on 3 pile pipes, and is about a half meter off the floor. On the right side of the picture, you can see a hole in the wall. That part of the wall was in a particularly bad state, and basically fell apart as they were installing the support. In front of the hole, you can see the pile of bricks that came from the hole.
The picture below was pretty much taken of the same angle, but of the ceiling. You can see how the steel bars are supporting the ceiling. This same sort of support was built along both sides of the load bearing wall.
Below is the support structure built used along the outer walls.
It’s really been a big undertaking to build this support structure! It was built, then the contractor came along and decided it needed to be changed, then the construction engineer came along and decided it needed to be changed, then the contractor wanted to change it again.
Today the city came along to give their final approval to remove the wall. The good news is they gave their approval, but the bad news is the support structure needs to be changed again and strengthened! The city also wants a simple support installed on the front of the house.
It’s probably a little more interesting for the Europeans reading this, but the bricks in my house are very special. They are the original ones used to build my house 350 years ago, and they were all handmade. The guy doing the demolition work has been removing them one at a time, cleaning and stacking them.
The contractor tells me they are worth money! At a yard sale they apparently go for €2-3 a piece. I don’t know if I’ll pay back the cost of my foundation that way, but they are clearly an important part of the history of my house.
There will be a seed swap on Sunday, 17 April, with street demonstrations planned the following day. If you live anywhere nearby, please consider coming.
I’ve been helping with the planning for this, and will be sharing a table at the seed swap with the Danish Seed Savers. I would love to meet some of you! To be clear, the seed swap means FREE SEEDS. You don’t have to offer anything in return, and there are no per packet costs or entrance fees like some other seed swaps.
More than 50 organizations have registered to attend, from at least Germany, Denmark, France, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Switzerland and Poland.
Farmers from India and Turkey will be present to explain the seed saving situation in their countries, and how intellectual property rights legislation interferes with their rights to do this.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter will also attend via video conference.
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.
