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Tomato Trench Planting Method

I recently did a couple of posts about starting tomatoes in a tray, then transplanting the seedlings deep into a pot.

Tomatoes are one of the few plants that benefit from being transplanted deeply, because they can grow new roots from the part of the plant buried. If possible it’s good to transplant tomato seedlings a couple of times in the course of moving them out to the garden.

Marc of Garden Desk just made a post that goes along with this idea nicely, about planting tomatoes with the trench method.

I mentioned before that since tomatoes are one of the few plants that can develop roots along a buried stem, that other vegetable plants should be buried to about the same level when transplanting. Mostly this is true. It’s come up in discussion recently that if you have a leggy seedling of almost any vegetable variety, that planting deep can help with the legginess. This can be a reason to plant a non-tomato plant seedling deep. Just be reasonable, and keep in mind that some plants may not like being planted too deep.

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Anarchocyclist Blog

I’ve been reading Anarchocyclist for a few years now. I’ve linked to it before in a few posts here, and for a short time it was in my blogroll. It was in my blogroll because I thought he was going to start a garden and post about it, but the garden never materialized.

This blog is located in British Columbia, I think in the greater Vancouver area. When I first started reading it doviende was working on a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (I also studied Math) and planning an urban garden. He had even contacted his local authorities and began negotiating a city permit for a front yard vegetable garden. Yes, apparently the city of Vancouver issues permits for these, and they are not that difficult to get.

Anyway, circumstances changed and studying Math was no longer a priority and the Chinese language was much more interesting. This led to travel to China for language study. In the last several weeks he started a class in Punjabi and started planning a garden again! In particular he has been looking into a community garden (allotment). On the assumption a garden will soon materialize, I’m going to put the blog back in my blogroll.

This is an example of a garden blog that has a lot more than just gardening. He certainly sits on the extreme end of the political-gardening spectrum, is an interesting person who writes well and has a lot of interesting things to say. His blog is worth checking out.

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Dwindling Resources

Mike on Planb just made a really thought provoking and well written post on the problems South Africa is having with their power grid, and as a result everything that depends on electricity. This has certainly been in the news here, but the magnitude of the problem is much more clear in Mike’s post.

It’s worth mentioning Mike has been anticipating this for years, and has designed his house and farm so that as much as possible will keep functioning the event of a power outage.

The Internet connection is another story…

In many ways we should be looking at South Africa as an indication of the future we will all likely see. Shortages of food, water and energy are all looming on the horizon. It’s what’s being called the end of ‘The Goldilocks Era’. It can only help to be prepared the best we can, and of course growing a portion of our own food or supporting local agriculture is an important part of that.

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2008 SSE Yearbook

It just arrived today! This is old news to most of you because Meg at Future House posted about their copy which arrived a few days ago. I posted last year about the 2007 yearbook, as well as making a post about the yearbook in 2006.

It’s my third year getting the yearbook, and when it arrives my head is always full of thoughts about what I might order as well as the SSE themselves and what kind of organization they are. Really a lot has changed in the world in the last few years, and the SSE has changed a lot too.

Together with sending the yearbook, the SSE sent me an email notifying me it was on it’s way. It’s worth mentioning something else that was in this email. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway opened it’s doors for the first deposits a few days ago, and the SSE sent it’s first deposit of 485 vegetable varieties. The SSE plans to send about 2000 more varieties per year over the next few years, making it one of the worlds largest depositors.

You may remember in my previous posts on the SSE yearbook I mentioned the declining numbers of ‘listed members’. Listed members are those that offer seeds or other plant material to other members. In 2006 there were 756 (down from 801 in 2005), in 2007 there were 726 and in 2008 there are 716. Their peak was in 1995 when they had 1031 listed members. Obviously this is very important, because these listed members are the core of how and why the SSE was established, and are by many measures the most important reason it is so special and why people join.

In the past I’ve made several posts attributing the reason for the decline in listed members to older members being no longer able to participate and not enough younger members stepping forward to take their place. It’s clear not everything is quite so simple anymore.

What is clear is the number of younger people starting to save their own seeds is soaring, and membership in seed saving organizations all over the world has been increasing. Even the SSE has seen this increase, now having over 8000 members in total.

Biodiversity treaties enacted in the early 1990s, clearing the way for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault required participants to either be a botanical garden/educational institution or a private seed company.

In the case of seed collections from botanical gardens and education institutions, these would be funded by corporate interests and exist for their purposes. This would mean for example if Monsanto needed to develop a new GM soybean, they could use a variety from one of these collections, genetically modify it, then patent it. These collections are now closed to the public.

Collections belonging to private seed companies would remain property of those companies.

It appears recent changes in the last decade at the SSE were made at least in part to accommodate these new treaties, and in order for the SSE to become a private seed company with it’s own collection that it could protect and make sure their members and members of the public continued to have access to it. This is the good news, and there is every indication that they are succeeding in their goals in this respect.

At the same time, in the midst of their commercial successes, they seem to be losing touch with their members.

Towards the end of 2007 the SSE board of directors fired the CEO of the SSE, co-founder Kent Whealy. He is the former husband of the now acting CEO Diane Ott Whealy. A series of letters from different people stating their positions on the matter went out to SSE members or were published on the Internet.

I don’t have an opinion, or indeed enough information to offer much of an opinion, other than to say I am a little disappointed a better way could not have been found and a way that allowed Kent Whealy to stay at the SSE.

This entire event seems to be an indication of larger splits within the SSE, and could be connected with the declining numbers of listed members.

I plan to continue as a listed SSE member and I urge others to do the same. I also urge everyone including non-members to continue to purchase seeds and other plant materials from the SSE website and catalog.

At the same time, I think we should realize that the day may come where the SSE can no longer function as a seed exchange organization, and we should look towards making sure good alternatives exist, like other local or national seed exchange organizations. I would encourage everyone to support these alternatives as well.