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Ottawa Gardener is Back

Ottawa Gardener got in touch several weeks ago to let me know she was returning to blogging, but I’ve been too distracted by other things to make a post about it until now.

For some time I’ve enjoyed reading her Ottawa Hortiphilia blog, where she’s written about seed saving and related topics, in her snowy Canadian home.  For the last several months she’s had other priorities like home schooling her kids, and her blog got put on the back burner.

Now she’s back!  She’s started a new, ‘temporary blog’ called The Veggie Patch Re-imagined.

Do any of us really have permanent blogs anyway?

For those of you who already know Ottawa Hortiphilia, it’s time to update your Blogroll with her new blog.  For everyone else I suggest stopping by, saying hello, introducing yourself and getting to know her a little better.

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Help Wanted

Like I mentioned in the last post, a number of packages of planting stock and seeds went out over the weekend or will go out today.  It’s a little hard to compare one year to the next because I don’t really count packages or keep track of the number of kilos I send out.  At the same time it’s clear what I sent out this year is sharply up from last year, perhaps double.

I’m not finished yet either!  In a few months my Yacón, Oca, Mashua and so on will be ready, and I will send this out to some people.  I’m also sure I’ll make trades with other people and/or just send out seeds to people who ask.

What I pay in postage is very low on a annual basis.  Mostly it’s just stamps.  Nearly everyone either reimburses me for the postage or sends something in trade.  Cost is not really an issue, at least for me.

Also, lets face it, I have this blog and I share plant materials because I think it’s an important thing to do and I enjoy it.  I don’t do it because I have to or it’s any sort of chore.

At the same time, it can be a lot of work.  For example Steph and I spent the better part of a day sorting my planting materials, going through what everyone wanted, hunting for it in my garlic or seed collection, then packaging it all up.

The time we spent doing this was not really a problem, but if it doubles again next year like it did this year, it’s soon going to become unmanageable.

Starting next year I’m going to have to find a way to limit the number of packages I send out, and I’m not sure yet how I’m going to do that.  I don’t really want to discourage anyone who wants something from asking for it, or ask for increasing amounts of money to make it a cost issue, as this would probably only discourage the very people I want the most to share things with.

I don’t want to only offer plant materials to bloggers, or make people promise to reshare the materials I give them.  In fact there aren’t any conditions I want to put on who can receive things from me, or what they can do with them, because to me that would be undermining the whole point of sending materials out.  These plant materials are not just for gardening geeks, they are for everyone who wants them to grow in their gardens, and for everyone to do whatever they want with them.

Why It’s Important

Probably most people reading this are wondering why I’m making such a big deal about plants that can be purchased from a seed company anyway.  In fact many of these people would probably prefer to buy from a seed company, because of convenience or a perceived difference in quality.  In fact I’m grateful many people feel that way right now.  If they all started asking me for seeds I would become swamped, because I’m not a seed company and will never be able to cope with that sort of volume.  There are however some very important reasons why it’s better to get plant materials informally from someone like me or perhaps a fellow gardener.

The first reason is preservation of biodiversity, as Ben so clearly illustrated at the recent bloggers meeting in Oxford.

This mentality most of us have as gardeners, where we all go to the store and buy the same packets of seeds, often F1 varieties, only ensures we are all growing plants with exactly the same genetics in our gardens.  If something happens, a disease or change in climate, we are all guaranteed to lose all of our plants at exactly the same time.

If a number of different seed-saving gardeners are growing cucumbers, even if they are the same named variety like ‘White Wonder’ or anything else, there will be small and important differences from one garden to the next.  Some gardeners will save seeds from the best looking plants, and others the best tasting.  Some gardens will have diseases and will therefore end up with a strain with some resistance.  Some gardeners will actually cause major variations of genetics to occur, by cross pollinating plants and creating new varieties.

By taking seeds from me, you help preserve the biodiversity that exists in my seeds, however big or small this may be.  Because these differences exist, it will always be possible to grow seed obtained from different sources side by side, and choose the most desirable seeds.  In this way we can continue to improve the seeds available for growing.  The more differences available the better, and the best possible situation is if every gardener everywhere is growing a slightly different plant, something that will never happen if we all buy the same packet of seeds from the same subset of seed stores.

The next important reason for trading seeds informally, particularly if you live in Europe, is it’s illegal to buy and sell these plant materials in many places.  While in Europe we do have a number of companies offering these seeds for sale, like Kokopelli or The Real Seed Catalogue, these companies are operating above the law and are subject to harassment or closure at any time.  For those of you who haven’t read some of my earlier posts on this subject, quite simply it’s a matter of nearly all seeds grown commercially are patented, and the unpatented varieties we grow and save seeds from represent unfair trading competition to commercial seeds and so are illegal.

By having an informal trading network of seeds and other plant materials, we not only have an alternative if the commercial sources were to be shut down, but we make companies like Kokopelli or Real Seeds less of a target because we are an alternative that can’t effectively be shut down by legal action.

What You Can Do

Grow and share your own seeds!

In many ways, the more informal the better.  Share with friends or fellow community garden growers.  Join seed exchange groups, or do it via the Internet.  Charge a modest amount of money, or do it for free.  Anyway you can find to get your seeds out there helps reduce the load for others who are also doing it.

In particular, for me personally, you can help me by also offering plant materials via your blog.  If you save and reshare things I send you, great!  If you get seeds or other plant materials from other sources, that’s fine too.  If you are reading this and don’t have a blog, but would like to share some plant materials, contact me and maybe we can find a way for you to offer plant materials here.  Anything you offer helps distribute the work and reduce the number of things I have to send out.

I am really pleased to see two other blogs of people who attended the meeting at Oxford now offering seeds to anyone who contacts them, and I really hope to see more.  You don’t have to offer much, one or two varieties is enough to get started.  You will probably have to spend some of your own money to get some of these seeds out there, but it’s not much!  A few postage stamps, unless you are sharing something heavy.

I did a little bit of an experiment, and I made two posts offering free Alpine Strawberry seeds, here and here.  People still find these posts in search engines, and I still get requests.  To give you an idea of what to expect if you make a post like that, I probably send out 10 to 20 requests per year.  Of course I am free to cancel the offer anytime I want.  If 100 people were to offer one type of seed in this way, it would be a tremendous Internet resource.  If any one person that I already sent these Alpine Strawberry seeds to were to contact me and offer to help save and send them out, that would make my life a lot easier too and make it more likely I would keep the offer going!

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Heirloom Coffee

For many of us, especially since the latest spike in oil prices, the priority is to eat local foods and buy local products.  Many of us too make an effort to buy as directly from farmers or other producers as possible.  Of course there are many important reasons for this, but what about those products that can’t be obtained locally?

For those of us that don’t live in the tropics, coffee is one of these products.  Many of the same reasons we look for local products are relevant to coffee.

We all know there’s a load of certification programs for different kinds of coffee.  Organic, Fair Trade, Birdsong, you name it.  Many of us also realize that most of these labels are just marketing, and there’s not always a lot of added value that goes along with them.

It turns out there are really a lot of important differences in coffee that concern things we care about.  Most coffees are grown on large faceless plantations, often producing a very low quality product.  Farmers can receive very different levels of compensation, mostly far below what most of us would consider a living wage.  There are heirloom and F1 hybrid varieties of coffee.  Coffee can be grown in environmentally friendly and sustainable ways or can be destructive to the environment.

You can make a really huge difference in many ways according to the kind of coffee you buy, both for social reasons as well as quality.  What’s the secret?  The secret first of all is to roast your own coffee, because the market for pre-roasted coffee is tightly controlled and you have access to many more different kinds of beans if you buy them green.

Once roasted, coffee goes stale in about 2 weeks even when vacuum packed.  This means if you roast and grind your own coffee, you get a freshness you may not experience any other way.  I did a post about this a while ago.

Here in the Netherlands, I purchase green coffee beans from ongebrand.nl.

Until now, I haven’t been able to find a good source for socially responsible green coffee beans elsewhere to recommend to anyone else, but recently I came across a blog dedicated to exactly this topic!  This blog does a much better job explaining all the politics and history of coffee production in the world, and is really worth having a look at, especially if you drink coffee.  This blog is mostly focused on the US, so if anyone else knows of other good sources of green coffee beans elsewhere, I hope you will let us know.

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New EU Seed Directive

Luigi over at the Biodiversity Weblog posted the text of a new EU directive on seeds.

It’s far from the end of EU Seed Laws we are all hoping for, but it’s kind of interesting because it seems to be vaguely worded and could let individual countries significantly relax their seed laws if they choose to.

The proof is in the pudding as they say, and we just have to wait and see what happens.

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The Hedge

The Hedge

I’ve been meaning to do a post about the hedge in our garden for a while now, and it seemed like it would go along with the discussion on my post Wednesday about the dead ground and the cultural issues that go along with it.

Our garden complex includes four rows of gardens separated by canals like you see in this picture.  All of the gardens are surrounded by a hedge.  We are all responsible for maintaining the hedge that goes along the outside of our gardens, and I’m personally a bit screwed in this regard.  Because I have a double garden on the end of a row, I have hedge on three sides totalling about 50 linear meters!  Most gardens only have about 15 linear meters.

Since there is no electricity in the gardens, you certainly see a few gardeners starting up their gas (petrol) generators so they can plug in their electric hedge trimmers and trim their 15 meters of hedge (something that needs to be done every few weeks).  Some of the more environmentally minded gardeners use battery operated trimmer they charge at home.  Considering the maintenance and expense of the equipment involved, I don’t find there is much benefit to powered trimmers, so I just use a hand shears.  This is a bit time consuming, but not really a huge deal once it comes down to it.

The hedge is a constant source of irritation for most gardeners.  There are rules governing exactly how high the hedge must be, and the state it has to be kept in.  The management of the garden comes along regularly inspecting and enforcing these rules.  If you don’t take care of your hedge, they can fine you or bill you for the cost of taking care of it for you, and eventually you will lose your garden.  For gardens on the south side it means a shadow is cast on that part of their garden.  For all of us, the size of our gardens is calculated including the hedge and we pay for that space every year.  The hedge is nitrogen fixing, meaning it grows quickly and is a major source of weeds.  We all have to spend considerable effort fighting these weeds and maintaining barriers on the ground.  It’s also sometimes home to birds and other wildlife that are often garden pests.

You can see when it comes down to it some of us are better at taking care of it than others, like the bit in the middle of the picture above which is just growing wild.  Really it just never looks good, if you stand back and look at it as a whole.

One of the issues I personally have with the hedge is I needed to do a rather major cutting back when I first got my garden, and the space it needed in my compost pile was almost more than I had available.

The grass on the outside is also a similar issue, as we all need to take turns mowing it.

So the obvious question is if everyone hates it so much why don’t we get rid of it?  The answer is we can’t.

The garden complex was built on a piece of land which probably used to be used for grazing animals, so it was just open space.  Some overpaid civil servant, who has probably never had a garden and probably no idea how much of an irritation it would be to many of the people using the space, set about to do some urban planning.  With pencil and paper, and lots of committee meetings and associated paperwork, decided exactly how our garden complex would look.  They laid out the grass on the side, and choose the kind of plants used to make the hedge.  They laid out the size and shape of all our gardens.

These civil servants who do this kind of work in this country are held in very high esteem.  Often their names go along with their work, and sometimes they get to choose the names for the neighborhoods.  Often for generations after this work is done, and consideration is being given to building something else in the spot, there are emotional public meetings where people express how painful it is to undo the work of the genius who created the spot in the first place.

I think even if all of us gardeners rioted on city hall, we would be unable to change the urban planning that went into that hedge or the grassy areas around our gardens.  After all, what would really be the harm of putting up a row of trees to block the view from the street, then doing what we wanted with our gardens?  Well this would be violating the idea here of not allowing individual expression.

We also have a similar problem with the security fence that surrounds our garden complex.  There is a precise definition of a security fence in the Netherlands.  It’s a little less than 2 meters high and strong enough to keep it from just being kicked down.  It has to have a legally prescribed notice on it identifying it as a security fence, and if it is kept locked and someone breaches it, we can call the police and complain.  The city planning forbids us from building a fence that is any higher than this, and we regularly have people that jump the fence and vandalize gardens.  Realistically there is little the police can do, and we are not allowed to build a bigger fence to prevent the problem in the first place.

The situation is very straight forward.  The city owns the garden complex and is letting us use it.  If we don’t follow the rules, we will be fined and kicked out.  If we don’t like the rules, we are welcome to go to another garden complex in another city, but similar rules exist everywhere.  It’s not a matter of just going to a private garden complex and paying more, because there is probably no city in the Netherlands that would issue a zoning or use permit for someone to build and operate something like this.

In many neighborhoods the situation is similar if you own an apartment in a large building.  While you might own your apartment, the city controls the appearance of the outside of the building and surrounding area, so there is nothing the occupants can do to change this.  Even as a home owner in Amsterdam, there are rules about the color of paint I can use on the outside of my house, in particular plain white paint is absolutely forbidden.

I understand there are rules like this everywhere in the world, but I think they are really taken to an extreme here.