Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
On my way back from the Oxford meeting this year, after taking Tom to London Heathrow airport, and then arriving in Dover a little early for our ferry connection, we ended up in a nearby park in order to have a picnic before getting on our boat.
Besides the ruins of a WWII bunker, the main feature of this park were an unusual breed of cows, uniquely suited for the white cliffs of Dover.
Waist high, and only a little larger than a very large dog, they were really kind of interesting cows.
I found this flying around my garden a few months ago. Probably because I let it live, it’s now going to lay eggs on my cabbages resulting in them being eaten down to the stems. Anyway, I thought it was interesting enough to make a short post.
Happy New Years everyone!
You’ll have to pardon me as I reflect on my past a bit here. I grew up in Chicago, and while I haven’t been there since I was young, decades ago, I still like to have a little smile at people’s accents there from time to time. Maybe it’s particularly fitting now that I speak a couple of other languages besides English, I appreciate how special regional accents can be.
Where you at? [sic]
Anyway, this is the local question, as people sometimes ask it there. Given it’s context, it can mean just about anything. It can refer to location, mental state or even how much money you have. By design, it’s totally ambiguous.
So I’m going to let you know where I’m at.
I started blogging almost exactly 5 years ago. Right away I started talking about the extreme loss of biodiversity the world was facing, and I encouraged people to start growing their own food, as well as saving and sharing their own seeds. I spoke out sharply over the years about Europe’s oppressive seed laws, above all trying to educate people that these laws exist. I spoke out about the GMOs the seed companies were spreading around the world, which wasn’t a secret to anyone.
This year, the president of the United States announced he was going to tear up part of his lawn and plant a mostly heirloom vegetable garden. To say I was astonished is a huge understatement.
Seed laws in Europe are beginning to fall apart. Denmark started allowing sales of unregistered seeds under certain circumstances, and a number of other countries started with low cost registration of varieties. Because Europe is fragmented in the way it is, it’s sometimes hard to get information on what’s going on in other countries, but it’s clear the tide is changing.
While it’s too soon to let our guards down, the indications are GMOs as they are presently available, are simply not going to be accepted by consumers, and are being phased out.
It’s too early to say we are reversing the losses to agricultural biodiversity, but things are looking a lot better than a few years ago. The number of gardeners trading and saving seeds has become phenomenal!
I’ve spoken out against aspartame sweetener, and there’s now increasing awareness of the dangers associated with this product.
Even in the US, high fructose corn syrup seems like it’s on the way out.
As one of the more popular gardening blogs writing about these topics, it’s been an emotional and stressful time. It’s made me realize I was both doing a good job predicting the future, but also playing a role in the changes as they were occurring. People were listening to me, telling others and things were changing.
At the same time these things were changing, the popularity of my blog was increasing. You have to understand, it’s the nature of the Internet, popularity of this nature does not occur with a few extra readers at a time. It increases exponentially. When readership of my blog increases, it usually does so by doubling over the course of a few months, and continues to do this over and over. It’s worth pointing out that it goes down sometimes too.
As the popularity of my blog increases, I can quickly find myself dealing with a lot of responsibilities all at the same time. Answering emails and comments, fielding requests for seeds, planning events like the meeting in Oxford this year, and so on. These kinds of things can lead to hours of work per day, and when they are increasing at the same rate as the readership of my blog, something eventually has to give.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I value these things all as an important part of my blog, but I haven’t found a good way of automating and managing the growth of them yet.
Aside from all of this, I have a personal life too and other responsibilities to deal with too.
So all of this came to a head a few months ago, and this is why I’ve been so quiet lately. An unexpected holiday as it were. Lots of people have been waiting for things from me, and have been disappointed. I have stacks of unanswered emails, and lots of seeds and other plant materials waiting to go out.
I hope to start getting back into the swing of things over the holidays, and I will soon contact as many of you as possible who are still waiting for me for some reason. If I don’t get in touch with you, please contact me again. I’m sure a lot of things have just fallen through the cracks.
I’m now faced with the task of totally reinventing things, both because the world has changed so much and I need to find other topics to write about, and because I need to priortize better and figure out ways of managing the Internet growth cycles. I thank you in advance for your patience, and also appreciate any suggestions you may have.
Above all, thank you everyone for reading this blog and caring about what have turned into some of the most important topics in today’s world.
I had sort of an interesting experience recently giving up a blog. Many of you may remember Root Cause (www.root-cause.net). This was a joint effort between myself and Rebsie of Daughter of the Soil. Like many blogs it got off to a good start, then Rebsie and I decided we had other priorities. When the time came to renew the domain name, I decided it wasn’t worth the US$10, and let it expire.
Much to my surprise, the domain was quickly snatched up by a spammer!
Why would this domain be interesting to a spammer? Well, many of my fellow bloggers out there showed support for our work by linking to us in posts and including us in their blogrolls. This made it one of the more popular gardening blogs on the Internet. This meant we ranked very well in search engines, which sent a lot of traffic both to us as well as the other blogs we linked to. By grabbing this expired domain, this spammer was able to make use of all these incoming links for other purposes. A few people still have this in their blogrolls!
Anyone still linking there will probably themselves lose some search engine ranking, because by now this is almost certainly a ‘known spammer’, and search engines usually punish people who link to known spammers!
I think it’s really important to check your blogroll from time to time, and be sure to remove links that go to places you don’t expect. If you decide to abandon your blog, consider this sort of thing could happen. You might want to consider removing your blogroll, as well as contacting people who list you in theirs and ask them to remove the link.
If you’re still linking to Root Cause, please remove the link!
Today is the start of the phased ban on incandescent light bulbs in Europe.
This is a really poorly thought out policy, and a very thinly veiled attempt to push consumers from cheaper unpatented technologies like the common light bulb that dates back to Thomas Edison, and force them to buy newer patented alternatives which have their own drawbacks.
The argument that this is for environmental reasons does not hold water, nor do the cost analysis.
There is the argument that older bulbs use only a few percent of energy consumed to actually produce light, and the rest is simply converted to heat. Well I heat my house in the winter at the same time of the year I use the most lighting, and if my light bulbs contribute to that, I will simply use less central heating.
In addition, while newer bulbs may be more efficient, the amount of energy used for home lighting is a very, very tiny percentage of world energy use and therefore the amount of energy saved is also tiny. We are also replacing a product that used to be made in Europe (ordinary light bulbs) with one that is now made in China and shipped half way across the world (CFLs). The extra energy used to transport these bulbs is surely not part of the politicians energy calculation.
CFLs contain mercury, a dangerous poison. Long ago mercury thermometers were made illegal almost everywhere in the world over safety concerns. Most of us, including those of us who are environmentally aware, don’t want to have any unnecessary mercury in our homes! It does not matter what the amount is, or if our local city governments promise to recycle it. The most environmentally friendly product is not one that’s been recycled, it’s the one that was never purchased in the first place! We simply do not want to buy, consume or be exposed to any mercury in our homes. There is no internationally or scientifically recognized ‘safe limit’ to exposure to mercury in living spaces that I’m aware of. There is certainly no desirable limit of exposure.
Besides, the technology exists now to make CFLs with considerably less mercury than is currently being done. While politicians and product manufacturers would love to see us all go out and buy the high mercury version now, only to rush out and replace them by buying the lower mercury version later, that’s not what we as consumers want to do. If we are going to buy CFLs at all, for most of us it makes sense to wait until the low mercury versions are available to buy them!
When the time comes that manufacturers create a product consumers want to buy that replaces the traditional light bulb, it will be time to phase them out. Until then, it’s time politicians see that people don’t want inferior, poisonous and pointless technology forced down their throat for the sake of corporate profits.
In the meantime, politicians might want to turn their attention to matters of real consequence to the environment, like agricultural reform, increased efficiency in vehicle transport, the phasing out of nuclear and carbon based power generation and the reinvigoration of local economies.
This whole idea of getting rid of light bulbs must have been dreamt up by the same politicians who thought of the EU consitutional reforms we are all so eagerly waiting for.
