Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
On the second day, the demonstration wasn’t until the end of the day, so we spent the morning and early afternoon talking and planning. At lunch time we were entertained by some clowns.
They performed and told their story in at least 3 different languages, maybe more, so no one was left.
They juggled…
and grew genetically modified plants…
Various organizations across Europe organized and participated in a mass seed swap, demonstration and other activities. I was there, and this is the first in a series of posts on the event. I posted about this before, and the official website of the event is here.
I hosted a table at the seed swap together with the Danish Seed Savers. In the picture below is Søren of In the Toad’s Garden on the left, Lila Towle head of the Danish Seed Savers on the right, and me in the middle.
Neil Munro of the UK Heritage Seed Library was there together with
Maria Scholten, a freelance researcher working with the Scottish Crofting
Federation:
Not to be outdone of course was Kokopelli of France and Belgium:
Tom Wagner’s potatoes were prominently featured. Those below were offered by Lieven of De Lusthof.
there were bags:
spuds:
seeds in little compartments:
seeds on the cob and in the pumpkin:
heads of grain:
seeds in test tubes and jars:
seeds laid out nicely on the table:
and more bags of seeds:
and much more…
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.
I was really excited the other day to get some alliums from Owen:
Allium triquetrum, Babington leek and Allium ursinum bulbs.
I should have taken this picture when I first got them! They’re all suffering a bit from transplant shock, together with the warm sunny days we’ve been having over the last week or so. They arrived in perfect condition, but now are a little wilted.
Anyway, it’s been more than a week and they’re still alive. I expect them to make it. I’m looking forward to eating some!
George Stevens of Synergy Seeds recently sent me an email telling me about his seeds for 2011 and that he’d like to be part of the Blogger Seed Network here.
I’ve ordered seeds a couple of times from Synergy Seeds over the years, and in 2004 Kent Whealy in his Garden Seed Inventory book identified them as the 13th most important source of rare OP seeds in North America. Please support George and his work by ordering some seeds from him!
