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Direct Action Against GM Potatoes in Belgium

The Belgian Field Liberation Movement is planning a demonstration with direct action against the GM potato trial fields in Wetteren, Belgium on Sunday 29 May 2011.  Here trials are being conducted on blight resistant GM potatoes.  Activities planned are:

  • Debate and Press conference on GMOs, GM crops in Belgium and the role of public research institutions.
  • Information on interesting non-GM potato varieties that are bred for blight resistance.
  • Farmers market and seed swap.
  • Organic french fries workshop.
  • Concert and cultural activities
  • Non-violent direct action: replace the GM potatoes with traditionally bred blight resistant potatoes.

For more information see their blog.

Be sure to bring seed balls made with True Potato Seeds!

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Beginning with Organic Gardening

Julie just left this comment on another post, and since the answers to her questions are kind of long I thought I would make a post out of it and hope others would add their comments too!

hi, i was just wondering if anyone has any information about specific brands of non-gmo seeds sold in canada? also, i was wondering if a product is called “organic” but does not have a certified organic label, can i trust that it is in fact organic? One more thing, im a complete novice, so bear with me, do i have to buy organic soil to grow an organic garden? and if so, any credible canadian brands?

Thanks Julie!  Someone just asked me the other day to write more about gardening.

I write new posts like this every year around this time, because they are hard to find again in a blog where things scroll off the front page after a few days.  The gardening world is full of people with different opinions and perspectives on gardening and these are of course my own and those who choose to leave comments here.  You shouldn’t be afraid to look elsewhere if you don’t like the answers here.  In particular, I can’t offer a lot of advice about Canadian brands because I live in the Netherlands, but maybe others can.

GMOs

First of all, if GMOs are your concern, you are unlikely to find any GMO garden seeds, or even GMO contaminated seeds on the market.  GMO crops are mostly commodity crops like corn, soy and canola (rape), and these can’t contaminate vegetables most commonly grown in home gardens.  Also, if you are growing known varieties, for example heritage or heirloom varieties, there can’t only be tiny bits of contamination, it doesn’t work that way.  In order for these plants to be contaminated with GMOs, there has to be a crossing between two plants (a GMO and non-GMO plant) and this would result in a 50/50 mix of genes, giving you a totally different plant.

Occasionally GMO varieties are specifically offered for sale to home gardeners, but this is very rare.  GMO seeds are mostly sold to farmers.  You don’t need to worry about being fooled, because these seeds are very expensive and the companies who offer them expect you to not only pay a lot extra for them, but generally also sign written agreements concerning their use.

As long as you aren’t growing commodity type crops where GMO varieties are already being sold, you grow known varieties like heirloom or heritage ones, you don’t intentionally buy GMO seeds and you don’t eat any wildly unexpected results from your garden, you can’t possibly be eating any GMOs from your garden.

Organic

There’s a very important difference between (certified) organic seeds, and seeds grown for an organic gardener like yourself.  (Certified) organic seeds are grown without chemicals and pesticides and certified GMO-free (even though as I explained above these probably wouldn’t contain GMOs anyway).  On the other hand, heritage/heirloom seeds were bred at a time when chemicals and large scale farms didn’t exist or weren’t as widely used as they are today, and so are much better suited for an organic garden like yours.

My suggestion would be to choose heritage or heirloom varieties over certified organic.  I’ve written a lot about this before, and I’ll link to some of these posts in a minute, but the best way to choose a seed company is by picking one that doesn’t sell anything but heirloom or heritage seeds!  Make sure when you look at the seed listings of a company you are considering buying seeds from they don’t offer any seeds labelled as F1 or hybrid.  It’s not that there’s anything automatically wrong with F1 hybrid seeds, but companies that sell them often have misleading marketing intended to discourage you from buying good quality heirloom varieties, and so this is a good way to choose a seed company.  Some excellent Canadian seed companies that fall into this category are:

Annapolis Valley Heritage Seeds
Salt Spring Seeds
Terra Edibles
Stellar Seeds
Sunshine Farm Seeds
Hope Seeds

It’s worth adding that I’m pretty sure all of these companies grow their seeds without chemicals and fertilizers anyway.  Heirloom/heritage seeds don’t require many chemicals, and most companies like these don’t bother spending the money on them and it would be against their principles anyway.  If they say their seeds are grown organically, I would trust them to be telling the truth. Many small companies like these can’t afford the cost of being certified organic, but that doesn’t mean their seeds are grown any differently.

Here are a few of the posts I’ve written in the past on this topic:

How to Buy Heirloom/OP Seeds
Certified Organic Can Be Bad for Small and Local

The reality is many of the best gardening seeds can be had for free, or just the cost of postage and handling.  I have a list of people all over the world, including some in Canada, who re-save their garden seeds and send them to others:

Blogger Seed Network

While you may not want to start gardening with only seeds from other’s gardens, I would really suggest planting at least 1 or 2 varieties you get this way each year.

I have a lot of information elsewhere on this blog about saving your own seeds, if you are ever interested in that, but this is probably a topic for another post.  If you search around with Google or the search box here, you will probably easily find it.

Planting Soil

Okay, I’ve written lots about this before too.  There’s lots of controversy in potting soil.

To try to give a quick answer to your question, potting soil is nearly always made from peat or a peat alternative, mixed with a few cents of chemical fertilizer, then put in fancy packaging with the price marked up 500%.  By it’s nature it’s not organic, nor can it easily be made organic.  Even if it’s called ‘organic’ or ‘natural’, you shouldn’t believe it!

The fertilizer is necessary, because most plants won’t grow without any nutrients in the ground.

The main problem is commercial potting soil is sterile and weed free.  When you start seedlings indoors, this is important because micro-organisms present in organic fertilizer alternatives like compost will often kill small seedlings.  Even if you buy organic potting soil that’s made with something like compost as the fertilizer, it may not be sterile and it may kill small plants.

You can make your own organic potting soil by mixing peat moss in equal amount with home made compost sterilized in the oven at 400F (200C) for 30 minutes.  The peat doesn’t have to be sterilized, only the compost.  It’s also possible to use bleach to sterilize the compost. I can tell you from experience that cooking compost doesn’t smell very good…

Most people don’t go to this trouble, or the expense of buying organic commercial potting soil, and just accept this is the one non-organic part of their garden.  This is what I do.  I buy normal potting soil when I have to, but otherwise I’m a completely organic gardener.

Okay, I hope I’ve answered your questions, but you probably have a lot more now…  I hope this helped.

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The Big Light Bulb Ripoff

I’ve posted before on The Truth About Energy-Saving Light Bulbs.  It’s clear the battle lines between the manufactures and consumers are being drawn and the situation is changing a bit, so I thought it was time for another post.

Being Lied To

Do you notice how this has changed?  Before we were told CFLs were 80% more efficient than ordinary incandescent bulbs.  In my earlier post I explained how, even based solely on electricity consumption, this figure was an outright lie.  By the time you took into account things like manufacturing and transportation costs, as unlike standard bulbs CFLs are pretty much only made in China, and disposal costs because these bulbs need special handling and transportation due to the toxic materials they contain, it’s unlikely there was any energy savings at all with these bulbs.

Not to mention being told by the manufacturers that it was safe to have mercury in our homes!  Can you imagine that, someone else telling us this?  Who wants toxic heavy metals in their home in any amount?  And for what reason exactly?

Can you believe this, they almost got away with putting toxic materials in nearly every home worldwide?  Are people gullible or what?!  But this is okay, isn’t it — now we know CFLs are a piece of crap, we can throw them all away and buy the next round of consumer products.

Do you notice they’ve stopped with all the propaganda?  At least in the shops here in Amsterdam, they’ve quietly moved the bulbs made from toxic materials to the side in favor of other technologies.  They’ve also stopped telling us in such a deceitful way the newer bulbs are so extremely efficient like they used to.

Now it’s more like, here, buy this bulb because it’s the law.

They’ve also quietly stopped telling us the newer bulbs last longer.  What they’re now doing is making standard light bulbs that burn out much faster than they did a few years ago.  We just discarded a bulb purchased 15 years ago, and have been using daily in a floor lamp for about the last 5 years.  How long has it been since we could buy a standard light bulb that lasted 5 years?  There’s no reason standard incandescent bulbs can’t be made for a longer life, in fact if you search the Internet with Google you will see a number of places selling these bulbs in countries like China where they’re still legal.

To be very clear on this, there is absolutely no evidence beyond wild claims from from manufacturers that expensive bulbs pay themselves back in energy savings.  Remember when cigarette companies used to claim their products were safe and not addicting?  As long as no one can come up with absolute proof to the contrary, they can claim whatever they want.

The Demise of the 15w Bulb

Supposedly they started with the phasing out of 100w and 75w bulbs, as well as all frosted bulbs.  They also assured us stores would continue to be able to stock older bulbs, and they would continue to be available for a while.

Boy, I haven’t seen any stores stocking older bulbs, have you?  If you ran a store, would you want to keep low value stock like that laying around?

It’s this frosted bulb bit that’s the hidden detail.  This seems to have a number of unexpected consequences.  The first is 15w bulbs have totally disappeared from the stores, apparently because they can’t be made unfrosted.

Well we can all understand, at least from an emotional point of view, why they would ban 100w and 75w bulbs, right?  Because they use so much electricity?  Why do they need to ban the one incandescent bulb logical for someone who needs a small energy efficient light for a small space?  After all, for someone who does want to lower their electric bill, and wants to replace a higher wattage bulb with a more efficient cheap one, a 15w bulb would be the logical way to do it.  Is this too much competition for other supposedly energy saving light bulbs?

The Big Consumer Ripoff

Ten years ago light bulbs could be had for 10 or 20 cents, purchased in a package of 20 or so bulbs from a discount retailer.

Especially as the price of oil is going up, the true manufacturing and transportation costs of these new bulbs is really showing itself!  These days it’s hard to find a light bulb for less than about €1 (around US$1.35), about a 500% mark-up from a few years ago.  These prices are only going to go up if the manufacturers of the newer technologies are given a monopoly on the market.

It’s not acceptable to just lower the price a bit now, and take a loss, maybe put them on sale.  Maybe a government subsidy here and there to distribute free or discounted bulbs.  As consumers we have the right to access to cheaper technologies, as protection against future prices rises or market manipulations.  If the new lighting technologies are so great, let them stand the test of time!

It’s not just incandescent bulbs that are becoming unavailable, it’s fixtures and devices like timers, switches and motion detectors.  These are now becoming packaged with newer bulbs and fittings, forcing you to use a particular brand or type of bulb.