Within hours of me announcing my new domain, fellow blogger Emma Cooper in the UK also announced her new domain, EmmaCooper.org. Emma is a blogger, podcaster, writer, gardener, chicken raiser and who knows what else. She and her partner Pete have been working hard the last days and weeks preparing a new website, where you can read more about her and what she does.
Seed Saving in Poland
I posted a few weeks ago about the International Seed Swap and Days of Action in Brussels. I’ve recently heard of some activities planned in Poland to coincide with this (website in Polish). If you’re in Poland, consider stopping by!
Beginning with Organic Gardening
Julie just left this comment on another post, and since the answers to her questions are kind of long I thought I would make a post out of it and hope others would add their comments too!
hi, i was just wondering if anyone has any information about specific brands of non-gmo seeds sold in canada? also, i was wondering if a product is called “organic” but does not have a certified organic label, can i trust that it is in fact organic? One more thing, im a complete novice, so bear with me, do i have to buy organic soil to grow an organic garden? and if so, any credible canadian brands?
Thanks Julie! Someone just asked me the other day to write more about gardening.
I write new posts like this every year around this time, because they are hard to find again in a blog where things scroll off the front page after a few days. The gardening world is full of people with different opinions and perspectives on gardening and these are of course my own and those who choose to leave comments here. You shouldn’t be afraid to look elsewhere if you don’t like the answers here. In particular, I can’t offer a lot of advice about Canadian brands because I live in the Netherlands, but maybe others can.
GMOs
First of all, if GMOs are your concern, you are unlikely to find any GMO garden seeds, or even GMO contaminated seeds on the market. GMO crops are mostly commodity crops like corn, soy and canola (rape), and these can’t contaminate vegetables most commonly grown in home gardens. Also, if you are growing known varieties, for example heritage or heirloom varieties, there can’t only be tiny bits of contamination, it doesn’t work that way. In order for these plants to be contaminated with GMOs, there has to be a crossing between two plants (a GMO and non-GMO plant) and this would result in a 50/50 mix of genes, giving you a totally different plant.
Occasionally GMO varieties are specifically offered for sale to home gardeners, but this is very rare. GMO seeds are mostly sold to farmers. You don’t need to worry about being fooled, because these seeds are very expensive and the companies who offer them expect you to not only pay a lot extra for them, but generally also sign written agreements concerning their use.
As long as you aren’t growing commodity type crops where GMO varieties are already being sold, you grow known varieties like heirloom or heritage ones, you don’t intentionally buy GMO seeds and you don’t eat any wildly unexpected results from your garden, you can’t possibly be eating any GMOs from your garden.
Organic
There’s a very important difference between (certified) organic seeds, and seeds grown for an organic gardener like yourself. (Certified) organic seeds are grown without chemicals and pesticides and certified GMO-free (even though as I explained above these probably wouldn’t contain GMOs anyway). On the other hand, heritage/heirloom seeds were bred at a time when chemicals and large scale farms didn’t exist or weren’t as widely used as they are today, and so are much better suited for an organic garden like yours.
My suggestion would be to choose heritage or heirloom varieties over certified organic. I’ve written a lot about this before, and I’ll link to some of these posts in a minute, but the best way to choose a seed company is by picking one that doesn’t sell anything but heirloom or heritage seeds! Make sure when you look at the seed listings of a company you are considering buying seeds from they don’t offer any seeds labelled as F1 or hybrid. It’s not that there’s anything automatically wrong with F1 hybrid seeds, but companies that sell them often have misleading marketing intended to discourage you from buying good quality heirloom varieties, and so this is a good way to choose a seed company. Some excellent Canadian seed companies that fall into this category are:
Annapolis Valley Heritage Seeds
Salt Spring Seeds
Terra Edibles
Stellar Seeds
Sunshine Farm Seeds
Hope Seeds
It’s worth adding that I’m pretty sure all of these companies grow their seeds without chemicals and fertilizers anyway. Heirloom/heritage seeds don’t require many chemicals, and most companies like these don’t bother spending the money on them and it would be against their principles anyway. If they say their seeds are grown organically, I would trust them to be telling the truth. Many small companies like these can’t afford the cost of being certified organic, but that doesn’t mean their seeds are grown any differently.
Here are a few of the posts I’ve written in the past on this topic:
How to Buy Heirloom/OP Seeds
Certified Organic Can Be Bad for Small and Local
The reality is many of the best gardening seeds can be had for free, or just the cost of postage and handling. I have a list of people all over the world, including some in Canada, who re-save their garden seeds and send them to others:
While you may not want to start gardening with only seeds from other’s gardens, I would really suggest planting at least 1 or 2 varieties you get this way each year.
I have a lot of information elsewhere on this blog about saving your own seeds, if you are ever interested in that, but this is probably a topic for another post. If you search around with Google or the search box here, you will probably easily find it.
Planting Soil
Okay, I’ve written lots about this before too. There’s lots of controversy in potting soil.
To try to give a quick answer to your question, potting soil is nearly always made from peat or a peat alternative, mixed with a few cents of chemical fertilizer, then put in fancy packaging with the price marked up 500%. By it’s nature it’s not organic, nor can it easily be made organic. Even if it’s called ‘organic’ or ‘natural’, you shouldn’t believe it!
The fertilizer is necessary, because most plants won’t grow without any nutrients in the ground.
The main problem is commercial potting soil is sterile and weed free. When you start seedlings indoors, this is important because micro-organisms present in organic fertilizer alternatives like compost will often kill small seedlings. Even if you buy organic potting soil that’s made with something like compost as the fertilizer, it may not be sterile and it may kill small plants.
You can make your own organic potting soil by mixing peat moss in equal amount with home made compost sterilized in the oven at 400F (200C) for 30 minutes. The peat doesn’t have to be sterilized, only the compost. It’s also possible to use bleach to sterilize the compost. I can tell you from experience that cooking compost doesn’t smell very good…
Most people don’t go to this trouble, or the expense of buying organic commercial potting soil, and just accept this is the one non-organic part of their garden. This is what I do. I buy normal potting soil when I have to, but otherwise I’m a completely organic gardener.
Okay, I hope I’ve answered your questions, but you probably have a lot more now… I hope this helped.
Synergy Seeds
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!
Open Source Programmer Needed
Open Source Seeds and Open Source Software
I hope by now there are a number of readers of this blog who understand these two principles are one and the same. Vandana Shiva famously talked about this in an Internet video, and I’ve certainly talked about this here before too.
It’s not like you can’t grow OP seeds in your garden by day and surf the Internet with Windows at night, but if you do it’s a bit like growing both OP and commercial F1 seeds in your garden at the same time. There’s nothing wrong with this, but some will see it as a small conflict of ideologies, and often people don’t do it themselves for this reason.
This is because the principles behind non-commercial seeds and non-commercial software are pretty much the same.
Inventorying Genetic Resources
One of both the strengths and weaknesses of today’s genetic resources is they are spread all over the world and tucked away in different places. There are an estimated 1700 genebanks in the world, most in different localities and jurisdictions. Probably even more important are farms and gardens all over the world, each with their own important collections of plants.
No less importantly, there are increasingly people offering their own collections of seeds for trade, often over the Internet like the Bloggers Seed Network.
The diversity of locations is a strength because if something happens at one location or with one collection, the damage can be isolated and duplicates that may be stored elsewhere can be used to replace the losses.
This diversity is a weakness because it can both be difficult to locate needed genetic resources, and more importantly it can be difficult to detect when important resources are lost.
Garden Seed Inventory
I’m not the first person to have an idea like this. Kent Whealy, cofounder of the Seed Savers Exchange, identified a similar problem in the 1980s which led him to compile the Garden Seed Inventory. This is something he more or less kept up to date until the time he was forced to leave the SSE a few years ago.
Kent noticed there was a lot of consolidation in the seed business in the US and Canada, and every time a seed company went out of business or was taken over by another part of their inventory was lost. He noticed a lot of OP varieties were disappearing in this way, and no one was doing anything about it because they weren’t noticing it.
These inventories published by Kent were catalyst for a number of things.
First of course were the SSE themselves who began to purchase as many of these seeds as possible before they were lost, and added them to their collection. This became a very important part of the work of the SSE.
A number of other people were motivated to start maintaining them as part of their private collections, and people like George Stevens of Synergy Seeds even started seed companies based on the idea of protecting these seeds that were being lost. At one time Synergy Seeds was identified by Kent’s Garden Seed Inventory as the 13th most important source of non-commercial OP garden seeds in all of North America.
More Complexities
The world is a much more complex place than it was at the time of the Garden Seed Inventory. Most importantly the issue of genetic resources has become much more visible in light of climate change and peak oil. Agriculture needs to change, and genetic resources are key to this. No longer is the availability of OP garden seeds and consolidation of seed companies in North America the focus of attention, but rather it’s the world as a whole.
Our genetic resources are threatened by personal greed, like we’ve seen at the Seed Savers Exchange and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
We’ve seen massive consolidation in seed companies worldwide, leaving Monsanto owning most of them.
We’ve seen the introduction of a number of very complex treaties and changes to intellectual property rights laws.
We’ve also seen the introduction of MTAs or Material Transfer Agreements, in many ways much more insidious that other treaties or laws. MTAs are a written contract between you and the person giving you the seeds. Treaties and laws will change and go away with time, subject to different interpretations in different jurisdictions, but written agreements are always and forever! These are also usually written with future changes possible, so in fact when you sign them you aren’t aware of all the restrictions or obligations that might possibly be placed on you. MTAs are also something a company like Monsanto can deal with, and have the money to defend in court, but the administration of these is impossible for an independent plant breeder.
The Task at Hand
On the most basic level an Internet based application is needed for the Blogger Seed Network. Something ordinary people on the Internet can use search for and trade seeds.
At the most extreme level, it should include all plant varieties everywhere in the world, commercial varieties, garden and farm varieties, plant breeders and plant collectors personal collections, and the collections of the estimated 1700 world’s genebanks, together with their legal status with relation to the various treaties and MTAs that are around, as well as their availability. We will need to identify duplicates and possible or near duplicates.
Obviously what we end up with will lie somewhere in between, and will very much be an ongoing project. A lot of this information already exists, and key will be identifying and securing it, then figuring out how to best incorporate it. We need to be able to keep this information up to date, and identify trends.
The basic application needs to be based on non-commercial software with an open architecture, with the possibility of maintaining some confidential information. It needs to be distributed for robustness, and to prevent the possibility it could be shut down due to laws in one or a number of jurisdictions. It needs to be kept up to date!
At one time I was paid to work as a software developer, but I was never very good and those days seem pretty far behind me. I also don’t have time to do much work on the technical side of this. I can however help with some of the support, planning and architectural details, as well as acquiring data. You need to be very self motivated, and most of the work will need to be done by yourself or others you find to help you. Mostly it will be up to you to implement all aspects of this on your own.
Can I tempt anyone into getting started on what promises to be a very high visibility programming project?
