Seed Swaps

Emma of The Fluffius Muppetus blog and The Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast just reminded me it’s the season for seed swaps.  Check out her latest podcast.

For those of you in the UK within traveling distance of Brighton, you may want to visit Seedy Sunday on 3 February.  Everyone else will have to search around themselves.  I’m sure there are Seedy Saturdays and Sundays going on across Canada this year, and the links on the front of this blog may help you find more information about these.

For those of you who don’t have any seeds to share, these events almost always have free seeds or seeds available for purchase.

Reading Material

Thank you everyone who left comments on my Free Gardening Books post from several days ago mentioning books. A few that stood out for me were:

Fukuoka, Masanobu; The One-Straw Revolution (1978): This is a very famous book among natural/organic gardeners. Translated from Japanese, it is Fukuoka’s account of how he changed the way people looked at agriculture in Japan and developed his own very clever no-till methods that can be adapted and used by anyone anywhere in the world. This is a very short book, and doesn’t take long to read, which is handy for an e-book you are trying to read on a computer screen.

Burr, Fearing; The Field and Garden Vegetables of America (1863): This is a great historic account of the edible plants cultivated in the US in 1863. A complete manual for the vegetable gardener. The book discusses the pros and cons of different varieties available at the time, as well as offering advice on cultivation. It’s great fun to read the old style English language and word choices used in the book. It’s interesting as well to look at the Latin names assigned to the different plants at the time and compare them to modern Latin names, because they’ve changed quite a bit.

Søren pointed out this book to me:

Krasil’nikov, N.A. Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants: The Soil and Health library in Tasmania, Australia describes this as one of the most important in it’s collection. Written by a Soviet scientist, it is a detailed text of soil sciences as they were seen in the time. While the west was busy developing new plant varieties and agricultural chemicals, this book describes the approach that was taken in at least part of the Soviet Union to boost it’s agricultural yields.

Lieven also pointed me to a UK Soil Association publication, and with a little browsing on their website I see they have quite a few interesting things available for download. They seem to regularly regenerate the links on their website which makes it impossible to link to any of them here, because the links would stop working by the time I posted them. They have no reuse policy or Creative Commons style licensing that I can see so I sent them an email asking for permission to make some of their publications available for download here, but they didn’t reply, so I don’t have permission to do that.

What kind of organization goes to such trouble to make reading material available to the public, but then makes it impossible to reuse?

Anyway, if you care to, you can go to the UK soil association website and use their search engine to find some of their publications. A few I would recommend are:

SilentInvasionEXECSUMMlores
one planet agriculture

Manure and Garlic Rust

As many of you know, garlic rust has been a problem disease in many places in the world over the last couple years.

What’s interesting is some people get rust on their plants, and it’s not serious. This is what happened to me over the last two years. It came later than most other people and it didn’t really seem to cause serious problems.

For other people it’s a very serious problem.

I don’t use manure or any other high nitrogen fertilizer in my garden.

Apparently, most people I know who had serious problems with garlic rust, including someone with a garden 100km (60 miles) from mine, used manure when planting their garlic.

You would think this would be a yes or no question, did you use manure? It turns out it can be a lot more complicated, involve timing, different kinds of manure as well as combinations with other fertilizers.

Also, anyone reading this should realize the use of manure is a bit of a cultural thing. Growing up in the US, we never used manure on our gardens, or at most a small amount. I suspect there are a lot of other Americans who don’t either. I guess most Americans growing up on a farm, or raising rabbits, chickens or other livestock would probably use manure on their gardens, but perhaps not others? Most Europeans, especially northern Europeans seem to use manure each year, often covering their garden with as much as several centimeters.

There you have it. Do you grow garlic? Do you get rust each year, and if so how serious? Do you use manure or similar high nitrogen fertilizer, if so when and how much do you use? Please be specific in your answers. Thank you!

Real Seed Catalogue Order

Seed Order

I recently placed an order of seeds and tubers with the Real Seed Catalogue in the UK, and I was really impressed.

On the left side of the picture you can see my order receipt. Printed on this receipt (double sided to save paper) are both personalized seed saving and cooking instructions for each item I purchased.

Inserted into each plastic seed bag are very detailed planting instructions, together with common mistakes, problems and general advice. Far more than the usual planting date range, spacing and depth information you usually get.

Literally, every bit of useful information they could have sent me they did.  When is the last time you bought a packet of seeds and got cooking instructions?

Not to be missed was also the following on their receipt:

“This is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, so there are no shares, and therefore no shareholders to siphon off funds – instead, all spare income is invested back into our vegetable seed research and breeding work.”

So, while we all refer to them as a seed company, we need to keep in mind they are a little more than that.  I think Europe is very lucky to have a seed company like them.

Certified Organic Can Be Bad for Small and Local

GRAIN recently published an article about the politics of certified organic seeds.

While every country has a slightly different interpretation of the rule, generally speaking, certified organic food must be grown with certified organic seeds when they are available.

This sounds innocent enough, even logical to some people. As innocent as it sounds it’s a really insidious rule that makes things very difficult for some small farmers and decreases global biodiversity.

No Significant Difference

While no one should use treated seeds in their garden, and organic foods certainly should not be grown from treated seeds, the use of organic seeds doesn’t make any sense.

The root of the definition of certified organic is the plants should be grown on land that has not come in contact with chemical fertilizers and pesticides for two years. By the time you purchase and grow any seed in your garden, two years will have almost certainly passed since the parent plant could have been sprayed anyway.

If you are purchasing an OP or heirloom variety of plant, there is a reduced chance pesticides or other chemicals would have been used in it’s production. This is because a large portion of the chemicals used in agriculture are used to make produce appear cosmetically perfect or to protect it from spoilage. These chemicals aren’t needed when seed is produced. This doesn’t apply to F1 hybrid varieties, for which toxic chemicals are frequently used, and presumably these chemicals are allowed under organic certification because organic F1 seeds are widely available.

The chance of transporting chemicals of any significance into your garden or dinner table with an untreated purchased seed is infinitessimally small. First the original plant has to be sprayed, then the chemical must find it’s way to the very small seed, then the seed decomposes in your garden leaving a new plant in it’s place. It’s virtually impossible any chemical residue could be left behind that is any higher than what’s already present in your garden anyway. If you add supermarket vegetable scraps to your compost, you have a much greater chance of adding chemicals to your garden than using non organic seeds.

There is no possibility organic seeds can produce better plants. When you grow a seed, you are simply using it’s DNA. If a seed germinates and grows into a plant, that plant will be the same regardless if it came from an organic seed or not. There are simply no realistic possibilities for any differences to exist.

If you save your own seeds and trade with your fellow gardeners, the idea of organic seeds becomes a non-issue anyway. This is one more reason why we should all be doing this.

No Big Favors to the Environment Either

Of course one of the reasons many people buy organic foods is to help protect the environment. As anyone who has ever saved their own seeds will tell you, the amount of seeds that comes from a single plant is enormous. You can easily plant one seed and get thousands as a result.

Seed production is not as chemically intensive as producing market produce anyway, and the amount of land needed is a tiny fraction of that used in agriculture.

How Could Organic Be Bad?

The problem comes about in the interpretation of the rule ‘organic seeds must be used, when available’.

In North America many smaller seed companies specializing in OP and heritage varieties, knowing they could soon be shut out of the chain of organic agriculture if they didn’t, have been arranging their own organic certifications. This means in this part of the world organic seeds are widely available for most of the common OP and heirloom varieties. Probably for this reason, the certifying agencies have not been very strict about requiring the use of organic seeds.

In Europe and many other places in the world, it’s a very different story.

In Europe there are a very complicated set of rules governing the production of seeds for agriculture. In particular purchased seeds must come from a licensed source and generally can only be modern commercial varieties. Under limited circumstances, farmers are allowed to save their own seeds, but never to sell or trade them. For farmer grown seeds to be considered organic they must have been grown for two consecutive years first. It’s virtually impossible under realistic circumstances for farmers to maintain their own collections of seeds for their own varieties. If farmers can’t maintain their own seed collections, most heritage and OP varieties cannot be purchased as certified organic.

What’s happening in Europe right now, and the Netherlands was singled out by the GRAIN report above as being one of the worst offenders, is certain classes of crops are being closed when it comes to considering if organic seed is unavailable.

For example, the organic certifying agencies might simply say there are enough certified organic cauliflower seeds on the market, so no organic farmer can claim they can’t find certified organic cauliflower seeds. No arguments are accepted over the varieties available or the price seed companies are asking. Farmers who want to grow organic cauliflower must either have saved their own seeds for the past two years or purchase organic seeds from one of the companies selling them. There would be no other possibilities.

Who are these companies selling the organic seeds?

Referring to the Netherlands in particular, since this was addressed in the GRAIN report, one company called Vitalis controls 82% of the market for organic cauliflower seeds.

In each one of these classes of crops being closed for consideration of organic seeds not being available, only a small number of large companies control the seed market, leaving them in a position to charge virtually whatever they want.