The Dawn of the Seed Library

Posted on February 26, 2013 by

Have you heard about this? A library in Colorado is adding vegetable seeds to its collection of lending materials.

What a lovely idea! I’m always saying how if more people gardened, the world would be a better place – we’d have more respect for the earth, we’d have more conversations with our neighbors, we’d all understand the value of hard work and the true cost of the food we purchase in grocery stores. As a gardener, I couldn’t possibly pretend this is a bad thing, but I have some serious reservations about this scheme. Do the borrowers truly understand their responsibility in this contract?

What educational support are they providing alongside the seed lending to make sure that the strains are preserved as pure? The average person understands very little of how plants work, so are they going to be able to perform proper pollination to ensure that they are returning the same variety that they checked out? While many vegetables can self-pollinate, varieties are best perpetuated by crossing two different plants of the same variety to preserve genetic diversity within the same strain. So while this project is intended to preserve heirloom varieties, which is important and wonderful, is there enough educational support in place to make sure this actually happens, or are they going to be muddying up their seed collection season after season?

Are they providing education about saving the seeds of varieties that are grown for their leaves or roots and not their seed-bearing fruits? The library-going mother and daughter featured in the article linked above were eager to grow carrots and talked about how excited they would be to plant seed and harvest carrots 30 days later. Did the library tell this poor woman that to be able to return seed from carrots, they will need to keep at least two plants in the ground for the entire year, as carrots are biennial and will not set the seed she’s duty-bound to return until next season? That’s a pretty big commitment for a casual or first-time gardener. I suspect that the library’s supply of carrot, beet, and parsley seed will be dwindling rather quickly.

And what of those who don’t return the seed? Do they get fined? Most people don’t even return library books on time over a span of three weeks (believe me, I know, I worked in a library all through undergrad) – how are they going to return the seed properly over several months? Over a year?

Seed saving is a pretty straightforward easy process if you know what you’re doing – but will the tomato seeds be properly fermented with the pulp as they ought to be? If seeds are returned with vegetable matter still clinging to them, who is going to clean them properly for storage?

Anything that makes gardening more accessible for the average person makes me happy. But I take serious issue with things that set people up for failure, and if people don’t accurately understand what they’re taking on and how to properly pollinate, ripen, and store the seed they’re supposed to return, many of them will feel like they failed and be unwilling to grow vegetables again. I worry about these seed borrowers accruing a sense of guilt over not returning the carrot seeds they borrowed because they didn’t understand what creating carrot seed actually involves.

Maybe I worry too much. Maybe I’m a negative nellie. Probably. But listen here, seed library borrowers – if you have questions, please ask. Ask your local cooperative extension. If you feel like you’re failing, please don’t give up. Take it as a learning opportunity – me and dozens of other garden writers are standing by to help.

 

Posted in Annuals, Herbs, Vegetables | Leave a comment

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Image | Posted on February 6, 2013 by | Leave a comment

The factor in the organic vs. conventional debate that no one ever mentions

Posted on February 4, 2013 by

I just read through “Is organic food worth the expense?” in today’s New York Times. It was one of their Room for Debate columns, in which they line up a group of experts who argue pro or con about the issue from the standpoint of their professional specialty. It’s a good format, but this was a somewhat ridiculous topic to debate: if it’s a question of eating organic or not eating, then there’s your answer. We all have our own circumstances that play into this decision, and all the convincing arguments in the world won’t matter if someone simply doesn’t have the luxury of making that decision in the first place.

Nothing especially interesting or revolutionary was revealed in this “debate”. Each expert’s argument was predictable in its points and inaccuracies. Marion Nestle, the NYU nutritionist who I respect like crazy, wrongly implied that organic food is grown without pesticides, when, of course, it IS grown with pesticides – they’re just organic pesticides. The experts arguing against the point (that organic food is not worth the expense) trotted out their usual arguments: lower yields, can’t feed the world, more expensive, etc. And predictably, the comments on the article were impassioned and mostly idiotic, summarizing everything that is wrong on both sides of the debate (i.e., “Eat organic or get cancer! Your choice!” versus “Organic is a sham for fools and you’re a sucker for even considering buying this crap!”).

It surprises me that, after all of these years, a factor that NEVER comes up in studies or debates is that of vegetable variety. Any gardener can tell you that different varieties of vegetables perform differently. They look different, they taste different, they grow differently, their nutritional content differs. So for all this talk about yields, and nutrition, and the oh-so-subjective topic of flavor (because  organic proponents LOVE to go off about how much better organic broccoli tastes than conventional broccoli), I believe the answer lies, at least partly, in different varieties being grown in the two systems. Organic vegetables start with organic seed, and not every vegetable variety is available in an organic form. So, while conventional farmers may all be growing ‘Imperial’ or ‘Marathon’ broccoli, the organic farmers are growing ‘Belstar’ because it is available as certified organic seed. And OF COURSE it is going to taste different, look different, yield different, and have a different nutritional value (which will also vary based on the soil chemistry and fertilizer inputs).

Obviously, a difference in variety doesn’t make organic food any more realistic for someone who can’t afford it, but it can possibly account for a lot of the qualities that experts on both sides argue for an against. I’ve never seen it addressed in any studies (not that I read a ton of scientific literature) and it surprises me that experts like scientists, nutritionists, and farmers, don’t address how this might factor in to the conclusions in the studies – and in their own personal opinions.

Speaking of personal opinions, here’s mine: I believe that the key to safe, environmentally friendly food lies in scale. I don’t think that industrial farming is ever good for the environment, regardless of whether conventional or organic practices are in effect. Both involve enormous, expensive, gas-guzzling equipment, thousands of gallons of pesticides and water, and potentially massive volumes of fertilizer run-off polluting the soil and water ways.

In small scale, local (or local-ish) agriculture, you reduce the potential for damage by pests and disease, and when they do occur, solutions are more likely to be applied carefully, by hand, instead of with a giant spray truck and high pressure hose. I believe that small scale farmers make more economically driven decisions, so that when it comes to buying and applying pesticides, they think such things through and come up with unique solutions to each problem rather than simply spray as a matter of course. I realize, yes, I am generalizing a bit, and that this pertains primarily to vegetable farmers, not those who grow corn or soybeans. But I believe that a pesticide – any pesticide, whether organic or synthetic – in the hands of the farmer, or one who works directly with him or her, is safer than in the hands of someone who is just one of thousands employees working for a big company.

 

Posted in Not Gardening, Organic Gardening, Science, Vegetables | 3 Comments

The Age of Misinformation

Posted on January 22, 2013 by

Apparently, it takes rage to get me back to my blog. I realize I should be more positive than that, but the occasional tweet and my new Pinterest board (appropriately entitled “DO NOT DO THESE ‘GARDEN TIPS’” Yes, complete with caps. Didn’t want anyone to miss the title and think I was endorsing these ideas) simply aren’t a big enough platform to say what needs to be said.

The misinformation about gardening on the internet appears to be getting worse.

That’s probably true of just about every subject, but I have recently come across some gardening tidbits that are beyond the pale. I won’t dignify them by linking to them (google the key words, you’re sure to find the pages if you really want to), but here’s a sample of some I’ve come across just in the last 24 hours:

Plant dill with tomatoes and tomato hornworms will eat the dill instead of the tomatoes.

Bees love the flowers of stinging nettle, so leave them in your garden to attract them.

Glue pennies to a sphere (like a bowling ball) and put near your hydrangeas to make them blue.

Make your own weed killer out of regular grocery store vinegar, salt, and dish soap.

Pyrethrum is a safe, organic pest control that is non-toxic to humans and animals.

Use battery acid to acidify your soil. Just pour it right on and irrigate the next day, or put it in a garbage can, mix with water, and then dump it on. No mentions of quantity or demonstrated need, no – just throw that stuff right in your garden.

So those first three are just stupid*, but those last two are downright dangerous. Pyrethrum is extremely toxic to bees, and if you haven’t heard lately, bees need all the help they can get to continue providing  the valuable service of pollination. This suggestion was listed on an article entitled “Extensive list of organic pest control remedies” and has been pinned dozens of times on Pinterest. In the original article, the suggestion is indeed accompanied by the words, “harmless to humans and animals.” Its context – nestled among completely ineffective suggestions like steeping onion peels in water for a pesticide, and brewing up a batch of the well-intentioned but completely ridiculous “bug juice” (large quantities of the pest insect blended with water and sprayed on susceptible plants) – implies a benignity that absolutely does not exist for this chemical, despite the fact that it is plant-derived and hence “organic.”

And as for the sulfuric acid, how could ANYONE think for even a second that battery acid is safe to apply to soil? If you were to pick up a tub of it, the numerous warnings ought to alert you that you shouldn’t even be handling it, much less throwing it around your garden. Adding acid to your soil does not suddenly make it more acid – soil pH is the result of weathering and long-term chemical processes. There is no fast fix to soil pH problems, and anyway, no one should even think about messing with their soil pH without an actual laboratory soil test verifying a pH issue (in which case the lab will make a recommendation for remedying the problem, and it will NOT involve willy-nilly application of a highly corrosive chemical).

Break the chain, my fellow gardeners, please. If you find an idea that appeals to you and it is on a site that makes liberal use of the words, “thrifty,” “moms,” “natural,” or “organic”; if it comes from TipNut, eHow, AllExperts, Yahoo Voices, or any such site, don’t take it as gospel truth. Do your research before pinning these ideas to Pinterest, or tweeting them, or mentioning them in passing to a friend. Verify them from numerous sources, ideally adding a “site:.edu” or “site:.org” operator to your searches which will get you to a university or organization that will hopefully be reliable and authoritative (though I have seen some pretty shocking stuff on these sites lately too – not everything is edited and fact-checked). If you cannot verify them, they are opinion, and most likely a misinformed opinion created by someone who fancies themselves an expert. Be careful out there and help others be careful as well.

*Why are these ideas stupid? Tomato hornworms only eat tomatoes and related  plants like tobacco – they wouldn’t and couldn’t consume dill. Stinging nettle is wind pollinated. If a bee landed on it, it was probably only to take a rest, as its flowers would not even be recognizable as such to bees. Pennies will never, ever turn a hydrangea blue  - it is the presence of aluminum in soil that affects this change, and pennies do not contain aluminum (except the 1.5 million aluminum pennies which were minted in 1974, but those never circulated, and it is technically illegal to possess them). The make-your-own weed killer recipe is ineffective with household vinegar, and if you need to kill weeds in concrete, as the recipe suggests it should be used for, you are better off using boiling water or a weeding knife (even an old butter knife), both of which are easier and cheaper than mixing up a batch of this.

See, look, research works!

 

 

 

Posted in Herbs, Science, Vegetables | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Wordless Wednesday – 07.11.12

Posted on July 11, 2012 by

Posted in Herbs | Leave a comment

Asiatic Garden Beetle: The Winged Menace

Posted on July 9, 2012 by

Herbs are generally acknowledged to be some of the easiest to grow, most pest-resistant edibles on earth. At least, that’s what all the books said, and that had been my experience. Until last year.

It was about a year ago now that I noticed my basil was being eaten at a rather alarming rate. Leaves that were lush and fragrant when I went to bed were nothing more than a midrib with a few ragged shreds clinging to it in the morning. I inspected the plants carefully and kept watch for any voracious visitors for several days but saw nothing. Damage began cropping up on my mint and sage as well. Finally, I did an internet search and determined the cause of the problem – Asiatic garden beetles.

It was obvious they were the culprit, not just for their notorious taste for herbs, but because I had seen them everywhere. I had seen them in my shower in the morning, crawling on shop windows downtown, and dead on the sidewalks under the porch light. My first instinct was to take the advice I gave for years to callers on our radio show – handpick as many as you can. They are only active at night, so shortly after I started seeing their damage again this year, my husband and I went outside just as the sun was setting.

What we saw was frightening. Hundreds and hundreds of the beetles were emerging from the soil, congregating on the carrot tops, piling up on the petunias, and gathering through out the garden. And this year, since I had expanded my herb selection, they were really doing a number on lemon verbena and pineapple sage. We set out to squashing them and lost count quickly, but it would be no exaggeration to say that we each killed over 100. My husband stacked them carefully around the basil in an attempt to scare off their brethren (all that happened was we indulged thousands of very lucky ants).

And yet, the damage continued. Continues, excuse me. While I know that every female beetle I kill has an ultimate exponential effect on future populations, this is the first pest I have ever dealt with that I find completely discouraging. The things hide in the soil at night, so covering them with row cover won’t help. Systemics are out of the question – these are herbs, for pete’s sake – but every other night they come back in shocking numbers.

We’re still trying to figure out our control methods. In the meantime, we’re pretty darn adept at sqaushing beetles (and scrubbing black beetles guts out of our finger prints we finally do go inside to bed). If you’ve experienced this pest and tried a safe-for-edibles control that worked, I would truly appreciate your suggestions!

Posted in Herbs, Vegetables | 1 Comment

Heirloom, hybrid, GMO – what’s it all mean?

Posted on March 5, 2012 by

It’s seed-starting time! Well, maybe not quite yet, but almost. Seed ordering and seed shopping time, for sure. And you’re probably hearing a lot of confusing chatter about these terms and wondering what they mean to you as a home gardener. Let’s start with some clear, simple definitions of the terms you often read about in association with seeds, particularly seeds for vegetables and herbs:

Heirloom: a variety that has been around for many decades. The seeds themselves are not heirloom, the variety of plant is. These varieties are the results of careful, considered crossing by farmers and home gardeners over several seasons in the hopes of improving a vegetable’s flavor, color, or habit. Examples of popular heirloom varieties include ‘Brandywine’ tomato, ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelon, and ‘Danvers Half Long’ carrot.

Open-Pollinated (also appears as OP): Open-pollinated means a variety “comes true” from seed: if you have two plants of the same variety, you can cross pollinate them and the resulting seed will be nearly identical to the parent plant. This means that you can save the seeds from an open-pollinated variety, plant them the following season, and you’ll end up with a plant that is more or less the same in terms of size, shape, color, and taste of the vegetable you purchased from a seed company. By definition, all heirloom varieties are open-pollinated.

Hybrid: Hybrid varieties are created by crossing multiple varieties of a plant. However, they differ from heirloom varieties in that they are usually not open-pollinated; that is, they do not come true from seed (there are a few exceptions, however – like ‘Bright Lights’ Swiss chard: too new to be an heirloom, but is, in fact, an open pollinated hybrid). If you buy a hybrid variety from a seed catalog and try to save the seeds, even if you crossed two flowers on the exact same plant, the fruit you get the following season will NOT be the same as the variety you bought. It could be better but it will probably be of lower quality, as hybrid varieties are created through a series of complex crosses that the breeder will not share with the public. The primary breeding goal for most hybrid vegetable varieties is uniformity and pest/disease resistance – the fruits borne by the plant are all roughly the same size, color, and shape. Some examples of hybrid varieties are ‘Big Boy’ tomato, ‘Silver Queen’ corn, and ‘Sugar Baby’ watermelon.

Both heirloom and hybrid vegetable varieties begin life the same way: as the progeny resulting from the crossing of two different varieties of the same type of vegetable. Heirloom varieties are all hybrids – hybrid merely means the result of a cross. However, heirloom varieties are open-pollinated and can be perpetuated through saving the seeds of one season’s crop for the next; Hybrid varieties can only be created through controlled crossing and their parentage is typically rather secret.

There is a great deal of subjectivity and value judgments that swirl around these two notions – there are a lot of “preachers” on the heirloom side who swear that heirloom tastes better and is the only thing worth growing. However, hybrid varieties have a great deal to recommend them: they typically display vigor (you may have even heard the term “hybrid vigor,” which describes crossing plants for stronger, healthier growth) and disease resistance. Often, if you look at a hybrid tomato description or even the little plastic tag in cell pack of tomato plants, you’ll see a code of letters – something like “VFNT.” This means that this tomato is resistant to the common tomato foes: verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, root-knot nematodes, and tobacco mosaic virus. So for gardeners in areas where these diseases are wide-spread, choosing hybrid, disease-resistant tomatoes is a no-brainer.

Which brings us to the term “organic.” As it applies to home garden seed, organic means that the parent plants were grown using certified organic techniques – no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers were used to produce or store the seed. But here’s the thing – both heirloom and hybrid varieties can be organic. It is a matter of seed production, not seed origin. So though “heirloom” and “organic” are often tossed about as though they are mutually inclusive, they definitely are not. You can have non-organic heirloom seeds and organic hybrid seeds just the same as you could have organic heirloom seeds and non-organic hybrids.

And with that comes the most confusing part and most often misused seed term, GMO. GMO stands for “genetically modified organism” and it means just that – a technician literally goes into the seed and physically inserts a gene from another organism. The process of genetically modifying seeds results in a DNA-level change of a plant’s physical and chemical make-up. Is it bad? Well, here’s the kicker – no one really knows. There have been no studies researching the effects of genetically modified food on humans or the environment. GMO techniques have one primary goal: to make more money for the company producing them. They do not make food tastier, more nutritious, less expensive, or higher yielding. Their benefits are purely profit based, and the profits are solely for the enrichment of the company behind the modification.

To that end, it is currently unlikely that genetically modified varieties will enter your vegetable garden. It is a relatively expensive process and is typically reserved for cash crops (rapeseed, cotton, and most famously, corn). However, since the USDA inexplicably does not require genetically modified food to be labeled as such, there is a possibility that the practice could eventually intersect with the life of the home vegetable gardener. Fortunately, if seed is certified organic, by definition, it cannot carry any genetic modifications. So buying organic seed is one way to be absolutely sure that you don’t buy GMO seed; another option is to only shop with brands and retailers who have taken the Safe Seed pledge to never knowingly buy or sell seed that has undergone genetic engineering.

These terms have become loaded and emotional and widely misunderstood, making it difficult for the average home gardener to understand what exactly they mean. Though long-winded, I do hope these definitions take away some of the emotion and propaganda that many other garden bloggers use in discussing the issue. If you have any questions, you are most welcome to e-mail me.

Posted in Annuals, Vegetables | 1 Comment