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Another World Blog

A friend of mine who lives locally has a travel blog called Another World Blog.

Since he’s recently moved to the Netherlands he’s now writing a lot about the country from the point of view as an immigrant.  At the moment, he’s very interested in exploring Dutch customs and traditions.  He’s also travelled other places and written about those too.

I often don’t write much about living in the Netherlands.  For this reason I like to recommend other blogs with this kind of material.  I hope you have a look at his blog, and maybe leave a comment or two…

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How the Netherlands Got Its Cycle Paths

From time to time I read about interest in the US or other places about how Europe does it’s traffic engineering.  For example I’ve heard a number of US cities are adopting traffic circles modelled after those in the UK.

A few Dutch cities with particularly dangerous and complicated intersections have apparently pretty successfully implemented the ‘hands off’ approach, and removed all signals and warning signs.  This is in the theory that everyone approaching a dangerous situation tends to see it, slow down and be more careful.  Apparently having too many signs is a distraction.  A lot of attention has been paid to these recently.

Anyway, the question comes up from time to time, how did the Dutch get their amazing network of bicycle paths, which can be found everywhere in the country?  If you’re like me perhaps you might think it’s just a natural thing, because the country is so flat or because cycling is so popular.  Actually, there’s a story about this, and a lesson to be learned.  Here’s a video I found recently.

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Tom Wagner Visit, Part 2

A number of Tom’s tomato and potato growing trials are hosted by Chinook Farms CSA, in western Washington State.  As it turned out during the first evening of my visit a number of grain related presentations and demonstrations were hosted onsite.

Western Washington isn’t an area with a lot of grain farms.  It’s mostly considered unsuitable for grains, but Eric Fritch and his wife who run Chinook Farms CSA are trying to change that.  They feel there is a market in the area for small scale artesian grains to be grown, and in effect they are trying to get grain farming in the area started from scratch.

Their farmland previously had cedar trees, I guess grown for lumber or other wood materials.  These were recently cleared to make room for the farm, but this left the ground very nitrogen poor.  Grains need nitrogen in order to build up protein in the grain.  Grains need a minimum protein content to be suitable for breads, and without enough protein the grains can only be sold as animal feed.

However, a high nitrogen fertilizer given too early in the plant life-cycle of the grains, will result in more seed heads and poorer quality grain.  Therefore if fertilizer is to be added, it has to be added later, after the seed heads have formed.  Part of these trials was therefore to test when and how much nitrogen to apply and at what stage in plant development.  This is why you see this so clearly displayed on the signs.

One of the problems discussed during this evening’s presentations was a lack of locally available grain processing equipment, especially suited for small scale production.

They demonstrated the combine used on the farm, something that was bought used for around US$4000, I think.  It was pointed out that anyone trying to do something with grains on a less-than-farm scale, wouldn’t be able to use something like that.  For example, someone with a large suburban lot garden.  How are you going to get something like that up your driveway?

It turns out there are smaller combines available on the market, but the cost is roughly 10 times that of the larger one and they have to be imported from Italy.  Since such a machine would only be used for a few hours per year, it would be a hard purchase to justify for the average person.

Also discussed was the need for grain processing equipment like hullers, which also have similar high costs together with a relatively few number of hours of use per year.

It all makes growing grains on a small scale very expensive, unless a number of farmers and small scale growers work together and share costs.

A combine has 1 million moving parts, and makes quite a bit of noise and stirs up a lot of dust as it goes!

One of the things Tom and I talked about was his interest in getting into breeding of grains.  In particular, he talked about the problems of getting old varieties of grains out of gene banks.

If you make a request for a sample of an old grain from a genebank, as a rule they will only give you a few grams.  If you grow this sample, after the first year if all goes well, you’ll probably have several hundred grams.  If you regrow this, a few kilograms after the second year.  So it won’t be until the 3rd or even 4th year of regrowing these samples that you will have enough to do a proper trial, and if you have a crop failure in the meantime you have to start over.

Doing these initial plantings and replantings is quite expensive and labor intensive.  It’s requires a lot of personal care and attention, and like I talked about above involves a lot of short term use of expensive equipment, as well as probably a lot of manual harvesting with a scythe.

For older varieties that can be purchased in bulk, and there are a few of these, this is a possible alternative.  Most of the older varieties however are not available for bulk purchase, and neither is it economically feasible to make these available for sale.

If someone doesn’t take it upon themselves to do or fund these initial grow-outs of old grain varieties, it won’t be possible in 5-10 years time to be able to do trials and commercial scale plantings of old grain varieties.  This is just a fact.

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Tom Wagner Visit, Part 1

Certainly one of the highlights of my recent visit to the US was seeing Tom Wagner, and some of his trial gardens.

I spent most of two days with Tom, and while I saw so much and spent a lot of time talking with Tom, I have two main sets of pictures in my camera, so I will split these over two posts.

This first post is on the various lines of tomatoes I saw.  Wow, Tom is really working on a number of exciting lines of tomatoes!

Tom has been doing a lot of work recently with both blue tomatoes and blight resistance, as well as lots of other things like his well known Green Zebra tomato and related lines and crosses.

One of the things you may notice in these pictures of blue tomatoes, are the degree of blue color.  One of the things I find interesting about the blue color, is it’s primarily a reaction to sunlight that the tomatoes turn blue.  So, if the tomatoes have this gene, they won’t develop much of the color unless the fruit itself is exposed to a lot of light.

Another characteristic of the blue is it protects the tomatoes against sunscald!  I’ve started to notice sunscald on my tomatoes over the last couple of years, and I think it’s the result of thinning ozone over Europe.  This is the first I’ve heard of tomatoes being resistant to sunscald, and I think this is the kind of trait that could become important as climate change becomes more of a reality.

The blue lines are also rich in anthocyanins, and probably other nutrients, which are increasingly being lost in our modern diet lacking in colors.

In my opinion, this was one of the more exciting lines Tom was working on, a blue cherry tomato.  Rich in anthocyanins, and well suited for making a sort of dried tomato-raisin as well as sauces and other things.

Here’s a blue line that still has a few undesirable genes…  Would you buy a tomato that had devil’s horns?  I think this is one of the earlier blue lines Tom is working with.

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Bank Fees and Currencies in the US and Europe

Bank Fees

One of the things I was astonished at during my recent trip to the US were bank fees.  At least in the Washington/Oregon area, and I assume the rest of the US as well, they are everywhere!

Since my bank has some fees when I use my bank (ATM) card or credit card in the US, I was seeing fees added to fees, and it really added up!  During the 10 days we were there, we probably paid US$50 in bank fees alone.  It was a standard $3 to take a maximum of $300 from a cash machine (ATM).  Paying with a credit card often cost an extra dollar or two, especially to fill the tank in my car, and 45 cents or so extra for an ATM card.

From my bank, there were no direct fees to use a credit card, but on currency conversion I lost a few percent.  My bank charges about an initial $2 or so to use a ATM card in the US, plus a percentage, plus a few percent for currency conversion.  Including fees on each end, it cost about $5 to make a $50 purchase with my ATM card!

I could escape the fees on the US side by making a supermarket purchase with an ATM card, and asking for cash back, but I still paid my own bank fees for this.  In general, the cheapest way was for me to pay for things with a credit card, where I would only pay a few percent for the currency conversion.

One of the things I found very annoying was the cash machines would only give me $300.  If we were able to get $500 or even $1000 in one go for our $3 fee, we would have been able to get enough cash for our whole trip at the start and saved a lot of fees.

Here in Amsterdam, I can get €1000 (about $1300) in one go, if I use a cash machine from my own bank.  I’m not sure what these machines will give to foreign cards, but perhaps it’s closer to the $300 limit in the US.  I don’t think any local machines charge any fees for foreign cards, but I could be mistaken.

In any event, I don’t pay any fees to use any cash machine to withdraw euros, anywhere in Europe.  I also don’t pay any fees for an ATM card purchase.  I do pay a fee of about $25 per year on my bank account.

In the US of course banks make a lot of fees with overdraft or returned check charges.  This is where you pay for something with a check, and there are not enough funds in your account.  These fees are really exorbitant, and we don’t have these here.  By now all payments are electronic, we don’t use checks anymore, and if you don’t have enough funds the payment simply doesn’t go through.  Generally here you negotiate an overdraft limit with your bank, for this you only pay interest for the days your balance remains negative and otherwise no fees.

A few years ago I did see one ATM machine here in a McDonalds saying it charged a €2 fee.  This is the only machine I have ever seen in the Netherlands with a fee notice on it.  I didn’t see anyone using it that day, and I haven’t been back since so I don’t know if it’s still there.  I doubt they got much business, and I suspect under new EU regulations this isn’t legal anymore.

Currencies

As useful currencies, the US dollar and Euro have diverged in a way.

When the Euro was introduced, the value of the dollar and Euro were pretty close to 1 to 1 in terms of exchange rate.  In particular since Obama came to power, he made some policy decisions that led to a weakening of the US dollar.  For what it’s worth, I think he probably made the right decision at the time, but it does mean things have become a lot more expensive in the US and the exchange rate has fallen.  In fact the value of the US dollar on international markets has been on a decline for some time.  At the same time, the paper and coin currency hasn’t been updated to reflect this!

In my opinion, the dollar has become a really difficult currency for day to day use.  It’s very annoying for example to count $1 bills and pennies.  There is the long running debate over the $1 coin in the US, and really I think the time has come to start thinking about a $5 coin instead or in addition.  The usefulness of the penny ended decades ago, and it’s really time to get rid of that too maybe even together with the nickel.  Is it time to simply drop a zero off the end of the US currency, and reissue notes and coins in the same denominations?  It would be really handy if ATMs dispensed bills larger than 20s, and $100 as the largest note does not really fit in well with international standards.  In fact, maybe it’s time for a complete overhaul and rethink of the currency design.  These ergonomics are probably why most transactions these days in the US seem to be made with plastic.

On the other hand, the Euro has probably increased in value more than they expected at the time of issue, and has some problems because of it’s high value.

There are a number of cash machines in Amsterdam that will not dispense notes smaller than €50, which is about US$65.  You don’t make any friends here if you show up first thing in the morning at a farmers market with a €50 note in your hand.  Generally the stand operators simply can’t give change for them, until they’ve had a chance to collect some smaller money from other customers.  They can be a problem to spend other places as well.

The €500 note (worth about $670) also turned into a bit of a disaster for Europe, and even the €100 note (worth about $135) is a little difficult to get or use.

When first introduced, the €500 note disappeared as fast as they could print them.  Even now, they aren’t completely sure where they all went.  The last I heard they think almost half of them are in Spain.  When it was introduced, people exchanged it with their hoards of $100 notes.  It became the black market currency of choice.  With the €500 notes, it’s possible to carry something approaching $20,000 in a space the size of a cigarette package, making it very easy to carry over international boarders in large amounts.  After a year or so of printing them as fast as they could, only to see them vanish, I think they finally decided not to put any more into circulation.  There are now about 3 of these in circulation for every EU citizen.  They are extremely difficult to get, and if you have one your only option is probably to take it to a bank because I don’t think anyone else will accept it.