Why You Just Can't Buy Good Horseradish [ earthstuff/ ]
Tomorrow evening sees the start of Pesach (Passover.) The time when Jews1 the world over remember the liberation of their ancestors2 from a life of slavery in Egypt. It is primarily a happy festival, but, intermingled with the happiness of liberation from slavery3, we remember the suffering and hardship, too, and one of the traditions is that we eat bitter herbs to remember the bitter times and tears -- even the tears of the ordinary Egyptians who had to endure the Ten Plagues brought down on them as a result of their political leaders' refusal to negotiate a good faith, mutually satisfactory settlement.
Prime amongst the Bitter Herbs is Horseradish -- "Chrain" in Yiddish ("ch" as in "loch".) Or perhaps that only happens to Jewish descendants of the European diaspora.
For most people, there are only really two ways to lay hands on Chrain in any shape manner or form: Either you buy ready-made Chrain, stained purpley-pink, and tasting about like crunchy cotton-wool, or you buy some Horseradish roots, and suffer tears, agony and pain shredding it up really, really small, adding vinegar, a bit of salt pepper and maybe a touch of sugar, and making your own.
Either way, every year, I hear the same complaint from my father and his brother: "You Just Can't Get Decent Chrain Anymore. It's Just Not The Way Chrain Used To Taste! Weak and Pathetic, I Call It."
And they're right!7
Even home-made from store-bought roots, its just Not As Strong. And finally I've worked out why.
By an amazing coincidence, one of the farmers in the near neighbourhood grows Horseradish, on we can only properly term "Commercial Scale". Last year I bumped into him at the local store, his pickup piled high with bushel-sacks of Horseradish -- merely a sample, he assured me, for the food processors to test for quality. Each year he ships out tonnes and tonnes of Horseradish. My guess is that he probably represents the country's entire Horseradish supply.
He doesn't make a fortune selling Horseradish. Like too many farmers everywhere, he barely scrapes by. I strongly suspect that, like everybody else who has ever grown Horseradish -- anywhere -- he grows it every year simply because, well... he grew it last year. You see, you can never get all the roots out of the ground. They spread in mass profusion, snap at so much as a glance, and the tiniest piece comes up as next year's crown. No wonder Comfrey holds no fears for me!
A few days ago I dug up my Horseradish roots. Grown from supermarket-bought crowns a few years ago, they have Migrated. Now they infest pathways and Real Veggie beds, and generally make a Bloody Nuisance6 of themselves. Got some fine roots out, though, and saved the crowns for planting for next year. My Plan is to fill a wire-bin with stable-sweepings, plant the Horseradish in that, and harvest long, straight, clean, Ready To Shred roots, without all the hassle of deformed, soil-grown roots, next year. I had the same Plan last year...
But here's why Chrain doesn't taste like the olde tyme thinge. IT CAN'T. You see, the characteristic Horseradish flavour comes about in an interesting8 way: The pungent aroma and flavour of Horseradish is a Mustard Oil produced from two separate chemicals that occur in separate cells within Horseradish roots. The Oil in question is only produced when you crush the root, mingling the two components. This oil is highly volatile, escaping easily through through rubber seals of glass jars. It is almost as difficult to contain as Hydrogen gas9, so flavour and odour don't last long once the chrain has been made up.
Now we can understand why Store Bought chrain is but a pale, pathetic imitation of the Real Thing. But how do we explain that chrain made from Store Bought Roots lacks the authority of the Real McCohen?
Warren (my farmer friend across the way) had to deliver his Horseradish samples to the Supermarkets at least three months ago. He had to deliver the Bulk Fresh Produce at least 6 weeks ago. I, on the other hand, harvested my Horseradish root at its very Prime. A mere ten days before Pesach.
Harvested two months before its Prime; Transported across half a continent; cold storaged until Ready For Processing. Pasteurized. Radeurized. God-Knows-What-erized. How the hell could Commercial Horseradish ever taste like the real thing? Thin, straggly, pre-teen Horseradish roots, not yet matured... How can anybody expect them to substitute for True Horseradish?
So the sad, sorry story is that Store Bought just cannot compete with Home Grown. My Dad (and Uncle) are right. "You Just Can't Get Decent Chrain Anymore."
Unless you grow your own.
You see, in their youth, the only Chrain available at Pesach was what Uncle Scholem grew. In their memory of Pesach Past; in their recollection of childhood seders, in the tears they cried from for our Ancestors Freed from Slavery In Egypt, my Dad (and Uncle) were right. Chrain Ain't What It Was. It can't be! Nothing harvested months ago can be!
I suspect that this story is all too true for far too many foodstuffs eaten in good faith by masses of people everywhere. People who believe they're eating Real Food. The truth is that they're eating Prematurely Harvested Crap. It is not any single body's fault. Not the Farmer's -- he just grows the stuff and ships what the supermarkets are willing to buy. Not the Supermarket's fault -- they just buy it in, ship it out (usually about as fast as it's being offloaded from the truck at the back of the store.) And certainly not the consumer's fault -- they just wanna buy Horseradish Root.
How many flavours are lost to the mass of humanity? How many wonderful tastes will most people never know? Simply because they cannot or will not grow their own?
[1] and atheists of Jewish descent...
[2] well... somebody's ancestors, anyway!
[3] Particularly poignant for Jews4 who grew-up in Apartheid South Africa.
[4] and atheists of Jewish descent who have an functioning conscience...
[5] There was a "5"? Give me anothe Scothc!
[6] Been watching too much of the Black Books series lately... You supply the voices.
[7] OK, admittedly some of that is just old men remembering their youth through rose-tinted specs.
[8] ...for some value of "interesting"...
[9] I exaggerate!10
[10] ... but only slightly.
Technorati Tags: horseradish, chrain, pesach, passover, food-quality
Storming-up a Brew [ earthstuff/ ]
For a while, now, I've been planning to start brewing beer again, as I did until some years ago. Remember that one of our self-sufficiency goals is Pizza dinner made completely from self-produced ingredients, baked in a self-built oven. And a critical part of any self-respecting Pizza dinner has to be the beer!As ever, the challenge is in getting all the ingredients and equipment needed. Despite homebrewing being quite popular in SA, it is not like more civilized parts of the world where there are plenty of homebrew shops that can supply the necessary. The tiny handful of suppliers that exist are hard-to-find, carry very limited ranges of ingredients, and are generally not very useful.
It is the harvest season. The road was fraught with grain trucks carting the harvest to silos. Wheat, barley, wheat, oats, wheat,
I made a stop in Swellendam, to buy some stone-ground whole flour for breadmaking; there is an old watermill at the local museum where they mill a small quantity of wheat every week. Swellendam is also in the very heart of Grain Country, and sports a very large grain-storage facility. As I drove out of town, at least 3-dozen grain trucks were lined up at the silos to offload their precious harvest. It's been a nerve-wracking time for the farmers. Millions of Rands tied up in getting the seed into the ground. Less than perfect rainfall during the growing season, and too much rain a mere fortnight before the harvest. But at last the harvest is in, safely stored in a silo. The nation eats.
I detoured off the usual route to Gansbaai, travelling via Caledon -- another major grain-handling town about an hour-and-a-half from Cape Town. The town is dominated by massive grain silos and the railway tracks that run through them, ready to transport the grain to Gauteng. My reason for the detour is that Caledon is also home to a very large maltings: SAB Maltings. The same SAB -- previously South African Breweries -- now SABMiller, that is one of the largest beer conglomerates in the world. The maltings was a fascinating and entertaining diversion. They produce something like 220000 tonnes of malt a year! But they're still happy to deal with homebrewers wanting only a tiny, little, insignificant 50kg sack of pale malt. A very helpful, friendly lady named Estelle was wonderful in helping me get my malt. For them a tiny little drop in an ocean of beer. For me a rather large1 quantity. Had to park the car on a weighbridge long enough to weigh a small train so that they could weigh my purchase. 50kg on the nose!
I'd have taken a picture of my little Corolla pimpmobile on the weighbridge, but, after my single pic of the maltings, the security guy on the gate came running over to tell me, "No, no! You're not allowed to take pictures!" Say what? It's not like this is a weapons factory. They make malt! We've known how to make malt for thousand of years! WTF?
"What would happen if I just stood outside the gate, across the road and took a picture?" I asked him. "You couldn't stop me then."
"Yes," he agreed, "It's a stupid rule, but its more than my job's worth!"2
I promised him that I would delete the picture from my phone. Faithless liar.
The Nation's Beer
Much of the drive is along the N2 -- the National Road that runs from Cape Town all the way to Durban. Driving along the smaller roads between Caledon and Gansbaai gave me a better appreciation of the vastness of the grainlands. I was quite surprised at the humbleness of the machinery still used to gather in the harvest. I expected to see lines of giant combines, four abreast, followed by large tractor-trailers catching the grain. What I saw was simple mowers, cutting down the grain and gathering it into windrows, ready for the thresher in a few days, followed by the bailer to make those gigantic round hay-bales that need a tractor with a forklift attachment to move them.
There was a logic to the old-style balers that made rectangular bales. Bales were still small enough for a man to lift. These huge round things? Never!
What would happen to these farmers if you took their diesel away?
They plough, disk and plant their multi-million-rand seedbed using massive four-wheel-drive tractors, four to six wheels per axle. They spray, spray, spray, poison upon poison, using aeroplanes and wide-boom sprayers aback their tractors. They harvest -- be it with the very large all-in-one combine-harvester mobile grainfactories (and there were some) or with the humbler, simpler and cheaper machinery -- and load their harvest onto 22m long trucks to be transported hundreds of kilometres to a silo. From there the grain gets trucked -- mostly trucked, since the rail network no longer finds it economic to transport grain -- to the millers. The industrial mills that tear the grain apart into its smallest usable components, to be reconstituted into computer-managed maximum-profit product, stuffed with additives to enhance the colour, smell, and, mostly, shelf-life.
What happens when you take the oil away?
What happens when diesel is too expensive?
How do the millions eat?
Let alone drink beer...
The simple truth is, "They don't!" The Elephant In The Room That Nobody Wants To Talk About: there are simply too many of us humans in an energy poor future. I am not suggesting a catastrophic starvation scenario -- those are more usually politically engendered than arising from natural consequence. But I don't see how to feed upwards of 6½-billion people without cheap and abundant energy.
I'm planning to get into small-scale grains over the next year or so. Even if its just for making my own beer :-)
[Pics taken with cellphone camera. Please excuse the pathetic quality.]
[1] Nearly typed "a very lager quantity" there... Freudian ship?
[2] Not in those words. Poetic license. This is a Xhosa-speaking man for whom English is a third or fourth language. You get the gist. (May I one day speak Xhosa half as well as he speaks English!)
Technorati Tags: beer, grain, food, food-supply, peak-oil, farming, agriculture
The White Lions of Timbavati [ earthstuff/ ]
That's three times, now! Three times that I've been tagged as a "Blogger for Positive Global Change". First by Sarah at Farming Friends, who tagged me months ago1, then, just in the past couple of days by James of "The Good Life" and Robbyn on "The Back Forty". Wow! Thank you all!2 I'll take the opportunity to act on something that has bothered me for a while, now: Reading this blog it would be easy to think that the whole "self-sufficiency, sustainable future, post-peak-everything" idea is, for us, mostly about gardening. It can never be that simple.Africa's Most Sacred People
Last night we went to a fascinating, shocking, terrible, wonderful talk/video/fundraiser in Plettenberg Bay (a schlep -- about a 50 minute drive away) presented by Linda Tucker, to raise funds and awareness of the plight of the White Lions of Timbavati. Linda (who was at school for a while together with J) wrote an incredible book, "Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God", which we are lucky enough to own in its first edition. Her book documents her incredible, 15-year spiritual journey from international model to being named "Protector of the White Lions" by no lesser a person than the Lion Queen of Timbavati.White Lions are considered by the High-Shamans of many tribes to be Africa's most sacred animals. According to sacred tradition they were sent by God to teach us how to become human. It is said that if ever the White Lions disappear from the Timbavati, all Africa will die.
Science and Business
The White Lions are a genetic variation on ordinary tawny Lions, their white (and they really are snowey-white, not merely some lighter shade of brown) colouring results from a recessive gene present in the Timbavati lion population, exactly like blue eyes in humans results from a recessive gene. They are not albinos; they are a true white colour.
Scientific estimates place the number of White Lions at less than 300 individuals. Not one White Lion is left in the wild. The Global White Lion Protection Trust is engaged in efforts to reintroduce White Lions into the wild, and things are looking hopeful. The trouble is that, in the wild, the lions become vulnerable to criminal "hunters" who have no compunction in illegally selling a kill to some rich first-worlder3. So, ironically, keeping a lion free turns out to be quite expensive. The Trust is also trying to get various legislative measures, CITES listings and other pushed through to protect these unique Spirit Guides. Sadly the battle is made difficult because the White Lions are not a genetically distinct species from ordinary tawny lions; they are "simply" a variety of Panthera leo. And, because Lions are not an endangered species, trade in Lions is permitted between zoos, parks, private collectors all around the world. Sadly, this means that trade in White Lions thrives, too, since they are afforded no special protection, despite the deep spiritual significance they hold.
The Timbavati lies in the Eastern part of the country, bordering the Kruger National Park. Besides being famous for the White Lions, the area is infamous for what has become known as the "Canned Hunting Industry." Wealthy landowners "farm" animals for trophy hunting. The White Lions are the most prized of these trophies, fetching upwards of US$70,000 a head. They are bred and raised in captivity, never knowing freedom, never knowing the hunt, denied the freedom of their natural homeland. They are tranquilized and constrained in tiny compounds. And then shot dead by some Brave Hunter standing safe outside the fence, to become a stuffed trophy.
The video showed several lions being "hunted" in this manner. A mature lioness, majestic in her power, awesome in her might, her beauty, confused, dazed and frightened by drugs and strangeness, tethered to a truck. Leaps into the air, screaming and twisting as shot after shot after shot after shot hammer into her... Her cubs paw at her dead body...
I cannot imagine the worldview of a person who is comfortable with this travesty. I cannot comprehend the soul sickness that must attend such depravity. It would be all too easy to fall into the trap of hating the people who run canned hunting operations and their customers. But really I think they're no more than a manifestation of a sickness that runs deep in our western-mode society (and the whole world lives to a greater degree in that western-mode society.) The sickness that starts with us seeing ourselves as distinct from the natural world, somehow superior to it and aloof. The sickness that results in our believing that "it is up to us to save the planet" -- from the global climate change we have induced, from the poverty of the strip-mall culture, from the soul-sucking aggression of the money system, from the poisons we've spewed into our air, soil and water.
The Earth exists quite happily without us. The Earth has been self-correcting against all manner of disaster for billions of years. The Earth and her people need us big-headed monkies not at all. The only thing that needs saving is humanity itself.
Take Action
Please click over to the Global White Lion Protection Trust website for more information than I can reasonably fit here. Make a donation while you're there, or, better yet, become a member of the Trust. Your Dollars, Euros and Yen are more powerful currencies than ours; what is a small amount for you is a large amount in Rands, and packs a correspondingly powerful punch.I highly recommend Linda's book as a fascinating insight into the spiritual heart of Africa. Proceeds all go towards saving White Lions and reintroducing them into the wild.
Please blog about this, write about this, shout about this, talk, sing, dance about this. Help us get the word out to more and more people. Help us celebrate the fact of the White Lions. Marketers and business-people, politicians and the bloggeratti, all are saying how powerful is this new mode of conversation, how quickly and viral a message can become. Let us prove that power now.
As an African I beseech you to help us save our spirit guides. As an apprentice human being, I tell you that we are lost if we cannot save these White Lions -- our guardians.
They were sent here to teach us our humanity. It seems they're not done teaching us yet.
[1] I'm practicing hard to make the SA Olympic Procrastination Squad, but am being outcompeted by the bureaucrats in the Dept. Environmental Affairs and Tourism. I don't think it is fair that government employees should be allowed to compete for Olympic Teams.
[2] I'll tag some other blogs as Bloggers for Positive Global Change in a separate post. I don't want to stray too far from the desperate, urgent, terrifying, heart-rending message of the White Lions.
[3] Just so you don't get the wrong picture: the people running these canned-hunting operations are not impoverished AK47-wielding third-worlders trying to eke out a living anyway they can. They are extremely wealthy, powerful, well organised business people who will stop at nothing to keep their multi-million dollar a year business intact. The government is set to finally enact legislation (it's been years in the making) in February next year to ban canned hunting. The canned-hunting industry has already made it clear that they will spend whatever it takes to fight the legislation through the courts, all the way to the Constitutional Court. Meanwhile, I am certain, they will simply bribe their way around the law -- just another business expense -- so I doubt the law will have any real effect.
Technorati Tags: lions, white-lions, canned-hunting, hunting, trophy-hunting, cites, timbavati, linda-tucker, spirit, humanity
Small Victory Against Global Warming [ earthstuff/ ]
TV adverts... Ugh! I so seldom see them, 'cos I so seldom look at the TV. One one of my rare forays into the mental-candy-floss zone a few months ago just took my breath away. For all the wrong reasons. An advert, heavily disguised as a Public Service Announcement, telling us all that "dishwashers use 50% less energy, and 10x less water than handwashing."Now this might be true in some parts of the world where people wash their dishes by holding them under a stream of hot, running water (and then stick them in the dishwasher!)1 but I cannot, in my wildest imaginings, think of any way it can be true in a developing country, where the vast majority of people wash their dishes by hand, and many, many of them lack running water in their homes, so having to transport the water by the (heavy) bucketload. I know that modern dishwashers have become pretty efficient, but I still don't see how they can use less than 3 cups of water -- which would 10x less than we use to wash dishes by hand, in the sink -- to get a load of dishes clean. In fact, the best figures I can find claim that a high-efficiency dishwasher, in its "eco" mode, uses 12 litres of water. A sink is full enough for a stack of dishes with 5 or 6 litres.
I lack any way at all to measure the energy efficiency: our hot water is heated by the solar panel on the roof, so our energy expenditure on water heating is almost nil. Really, really hard to get 50% more efficient than that!
I won't even begin to get into comparing the embedded energy costs of constructing, plumbing, transporting, and eventually disposing of, a dishwasher! After all, to be completely fair I'd have to figure out the embedded energy cost of our sink and solar panels...
The ad closed with the tagline "so do your bit for the environment." By buying a dishwasher?
Sponsored by Reckitt Benckiser South Africa, makers/distributors of Finish dishwashing products, the ad is part of their campaign to "increase the penetration of dishwashers in the country by an additional 100 000 units by the end of 2007" gratuitously aided by some addle-witted plunk-heads at the Central Energy Fund -- a state-owned energy company -- who didn't think to question RB's self-serving lies.
After my third viewing of this disingenuous piece of crap, I could stand the deception no longer. Booted the trusty 'puter, and fired off a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority.
Well, the weeks ticked by. I have not seen the ad lately, so assume that the ad-campaign has come to an end. Lo', yesterday, arrives an email from the ASA, freighted with a PDF:
"A hypothetical reasonable person, on seeing the commercial, would understand that it is a fact that dishwashers use 50% less energy and 10 times less water than washing dishes by hand. The documentation at hand, however, does not specifically confirm this, and specifically indicates that 'study need to be continued to verify these preliminary learning.'Victory is Ours! A small one, but victory nonetheless.
"Based on the above, the [ASA] Directorate is not satisfied that the claims that 'dishwashers use 50% less energy and 10 times less water than washing dishes by hand' is substantiated. The commercial is therefore in contravention of [the advertising Code]....
"the respondent is required to... withdraw the claim.. with immediate effect... from every medium in which they appear"
[1] I've seen it with my own eyes, but being a polite guest in their house, refrained from my usual sort of reaction.
Technorati Tags: global-warming, energy, finish, dishwasher, reckitt-benckiser, deception, lies, advertising
Garden Archaeology [ earthstuff/ ]
What sort of antediluvian creature wielded this Fearsome Implement?This axe-head is about 50% larger than any I've worked with. Gnarled and knobbled with rust and encrustations, I have to wonder how long it has been lying in the soil...
I dug up this Fearsome Implement a few days ago, just as I was coming to the (final! eventual!) finish of a new deep bed in the veggie garden. About 30cm deep, the fork stopped with a clunk. We don't have many stones in the soil, here, but there are a few, so that was the natural assumption. But nooooo....!
My guess is that the axe-head dates back to about the 1950's, but what do I know? It could be as old as 120 years! In other parts of the garden we've dug up such miscellanæa as Bed Springs, bicycle wheels, many, many glass bottles, ranging from Cheap Booze containers to Patent Medicine bottles, and, once, a Chrome Car Bumper (no doubt 1950's vintage.)
The entire neighbourhood was originally earmarked for the Knysna Woodcutter families -- hillbilly denizens of the Forest in the mid- to late-1800's, and this axe-head is exactly the sort of implement they would have used. The earliest official survey of the Braamekraal plots is dated 1894. Sadly the Woodcutters' descendents have mostly mostly moved on.
But the Woodcutters' allotments, one of which we occupy, their trash and their graves, overlay a much older story. A Bushman1 landscape going back at least fifty-thousand years. Most inhabitants of the neighbourhood have arrived within the last five to eight years, and are profoundly ignorant of the Woodcutter heritage over which they casually, carelessly splash their MacMansions. How much more ignorant are they of the Bushman heritage under thir feet?
[1] This touches on a Whole Big Political Issue, about which I am profoundly ignorant. It seems that, whilst people in the NGO/UN/Politically Correct circles would prefer to refer to the Bushman Peoples -- the First Peoples of Africa -- as "the Khoisan tribes", the Bushman peoples themselves prefer the label "Bushman", finding some distinction between themselves and the Khoisan. I probably have the whole thing wrong. The fact remains that these are amongst the most-discriminated-against people in the whole world. I believe that we could learn a whole lot from them -- or from what tattered remains of their heritage and knowledge still exists.
In SA we have eleven official languages. No single Khoisan language is among them.
Technorati Tags: knysna, woodcutters, archeology, archaeology, bushman, khoisan, khoi
Organic Growing vs. Organic Growing [ earthstuff/ ]
Over on The Back Forty blog, Robbyn asks, "Are Organic Pesticides Safe?The short answer could be, "Yes. They degrade rapidly in the environment, and so pose no long term threat."
Another, equally valid, short answer could be, "No! So-called Organic Pesticides, like any other disruptive measure, break the links and cycles in the local ecosystem, so, in the long term, they simply aggravate the problem you're trying to solve, albeit slightly more safely than do conventional pesticides."
As anyone who has taken a more-than-cursory glimpse at our farm website will have figured, I place my self firmly in the latter camp. If I use a poison (of whatever nature) to kill off the aphids presently attacking my Broccoli1, then I disrupt the food supply for the Ladybugs that make a meal of Aphids. Consequently the Ladybug population is going to decline for want of food. Then, come Summer, when I get a real Aphid infestation, I'll surely want for more Ladybugs. But they won't be there, due to my interference. Much better to leave things largely alone.
If the Aphid attack gets too severe -- unlikely, as the weather forecast is for a bit of cold front in another day or so -- I will resort to blasting the Aphids off with the hose, where they will remain as prey to the Ladybugs, but not on my soon-to-seed Early Purple Broccoli.
Remember that the term "Pesticide" still contains the root "-cide": death. It is a paradox to me that so many growers are trying so hard to grow stuff -- to make plants live, so that we in turn can eat and live, live and be healthy -- but spend their time running around trying to kill everything else. Surely the answer to vibrant life, exuberant life-liness, cannot lie in death!
Keep in mind who benefits most from pesticide use!
Excursion
One of my favourite memories is of a Saturday Morning Gardening show on TV, presented by a well-known local gardening "expert". Mainly the show is a thinly veiled advert for selling more gardening stuff2, as are most of these things.
By his own admission, he knows next-to-nothing about "organic" methods. One particular occasion, he was scripted to shill for a company launching a new range of "organic pesticides and fertilisers", and ended up chatting to an organic veggie grower. (Well, he looked pretty organic!) At the key product-placement-point in the programme, the presenter looks over at the veggie grower, and says, "So what would you use if your crops were attacked by X?" (Some pest; can't remember.)
The grower looked completely blank, frowned, mumbled something along the lines of, "I don't know. Never happens 'cos of the Wasps."
Exit Stage Left.
One of my favourite memories is of a Saturday Morning Gardening show on TV, presented by a well-known local gardening "expert". Mainly the show is a thinly veiled advert for selling more gardening stuff2, as are most of these things.
By his own admission, he knows next-to-nothing about "organic" methods. One particular occasion, he was scripted to shill for a company launching a new range of "organic pesticides and fertilisers", and ended up chatting to an organic veggie grower. (Well, he looked pretty organic!) At the key product-placement-point in the programme, the presenter looks over at the veggie grower, and says, "So what would you use if your crops were attacked by X?" (Some pest; can't remember.)
The grower looked completely blank, frowned, mumbled something along the lines of, "I don't know. Never happens 'cos of the Wasps."
Exit Stage Left.
"But What Is Lurgy?"
All this begs the question, "What is the meaning of the term 'organic'?" I think the "Certified Organic" labels are pretty-much3 a load of crap (depending where in the world you are to some extent.) The range of practise that can legitimately be called "organic" is so wide as to render a single blanket label meaningless. At one end of the spectrum, all a grower has to do is replace the existing fossil-fuel-based fertilisers and pesticides with equivalents acceptable under some-or-other certification regime. At the other end are more "hardcore" practices that shun all such artificial interventions, and aim to build up a vibrantly healthy ecology, especially in the soil, and then rely on the natural health of plants to cope with whatever comes along.
Whilst I consider that my own growing is pretty much towards the "hardcore" end of the spectrum4, I am not knocking the other choices. There have to be paths for "conventional" growers to transition to a more sustainable practise while coping with the realities of the supermarket-oriented supply chain, the bank-beholden, joyless, tractor-enchained existence of industrial agriculture. (I cannot find it in myself to call that "farming", and, evidently, many agro-industry growers I have met agree, shunning the label "farmer".)
I would propose a three-level organic certification scheme. Something along the lines of "Green Label Organic" for the conventional-using-alternative-chemicals approach, "Silver Label" for somewhere in-between, and "Gold Standard" for the hardcore non-interventionist approach. It would take some working out, some marketing to educate consumers about the differences, but would enable price-tiering to the benefit of all. Maybe. It all sounds a lot like working in an office to me, and part of a way of thinking about the world that is soon to pass.
Mike's Answer to Robbyn
So, to answer Robbyn (if you've made it this far!) I would give the Stinkbugs a Round Of Applause. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap! around the bugs, leaves and all. Damage to the leaves is minimal; you get Squashed Stinkbug all over your hands, but that washes off easily enough; the bugs you don't squash will fly away or get knocked off your Tomatoes, and you'll give predators some time to get going. Worst case, the crop will take a knock, but look upon it as a long-term investment in your garden's health.
Longer term, the Big Deal -- what defines "organic" for me -- is to build up your soil. Lots of compost, even if its pretty rubbish compost; as long as you're adding lots and lots of organic matter to the soil, sooner or later things will improve. As the soil becomes healthier -- and plenty of fungal activity is a good sign -- the biodiversity of your garden will improve. Everything derives from the soil/Earth itself, all plant health, all the predators, and ultimately our own wellbeing.
Tolerate the pests. You cannot cultivate a healthy garden without them!
----
1Aphids! In July, no less. I thought the buggers were all in bed for the Winter!
2Trying to remain polite and maintain a "Family" rating, here.
3But not totally! And sometimes very necessary as a way to reassure buyers.
4Even though I have violated the principle myself, on occasion, before anybody calls me out for lying!
----
Technorati Tags: pesticide, organic, organic-pesticide, pest-control, gardening, agriculture, sustainability, aphids, stinkbugs, soil, health, soil-health
The Clock of the World [ earthstuff/ ]
Keeping TrackTactics is extension in space. Strategy is extension in time.
Gardening teaches both Tactics and Strategy to the attentive student, though the emphasis tend to be on Strategy.
Tactics: Laying out garden beds. Which hoe to use for a given weed-challenge. The pointy shovel or the straight-edged shovel for lifting that particular pile of manure? Spade or fork for digging that bed?
Strategy: Right now, in the middle of Winter, I have no more than another month before all considerations of next Summer's crops will be before me. Already I weigh up whether I have enough seed of the varieties I would like to grow, and seed orders take form. Time to buy the crop netting I will need to keep Pumpkin Fly from the Cucurbits, come mid-January. Compost heaps are a-cooking in anticipation of the Spring Rush. It's already late to be digging new beds to increase the area under cultivation.
I usually end-up getting it wrong somewhere along the line. Don't we all?
I guess that everyone has their own strange and unique ways to keep track of what-to-do-when. Of course you have to remember to actually look at the damn wall-chart/spreadsheet/book/diary.
Hedgewizard describes, in a hilarious post, the soggy and disastrous end to one such system.
Detour
I have quite a few friends who subscribe to Rudolf Steiner's ideas on cultivation, summed up, codified and dogmatised as Biodynamic Growing. Most are not Deeply Committed Members Of The Movement, merely dabblers who apply an eclectic handful of biodynamic potions and techniques -- a pinch of some or other weird concoction kept in a cow's horn added to the compost heap while dancing clockwise at full moon; Yarrow stored in a deer-bladder pouch. A bit challenging, that last one, since the Red Deer fail utterly to be found in South Africa.
No! I sound like I'm dissing the biodynamic ideas, and really, I'm not! I just have trouble believing that these homoeopathic treatments of seed, soil, water and compost can have any significant effect on the growth of plants when its simply a case of not getting enough water, nitrogen or calcium, or when the soil pH is way out of whack. In other words, the effects of macro-nutrient deficiency or imbalance vastly overshadows whether the moon was in Scorpio or Leo when you planted the seed. Personally I don't believe I am that good a gardener that I have those large-effect inputs well enough under control for the subtle effects of biodynamic preparations to manifest.
One of the key ideas of biodynamic gardening is Sowing By The Moon. In broad outline, we should sow leaf crops in the First Quarter of the moon -- that period from New Moon to Half Moon during the waxing phase -- fruit crops (Tomatoes, Chillis, Squashes and so on) from the Waxing Half to just before Full Moon, and root crops from Full Moon until the Waning Half. The last quarter of the moon is no good for planting anything, and should be kept for digging beds, weeding and mulching. Of course this is only the very crude outline; there is much, much more subtle detail; attention to astrological effects and their interaction with the nature of various plant varieties.
Whether you buy into this stuff or not (and I make no comment or commitment either way, myself) there is one very useful idea.
The Moon
The Moon gives us the perfect clock we need. Every Moonth, sometime in the First Quarter, I know I need to plant Lettuce. Every Half Moon its time to sow Radishes.
No need for fancy systems. Just going outside of an evening to take a look at the sky.
The Sky
Number One Son bought an imposing reflector telescope, so we've been having lots of fun learning to use it. Our triumph was getting good views of Jupiter, Saturn (it's awsome!) and Venus (blindingly bright) all on one evening's perfect viewing a couple of weeks ago. Consequently we're learning a whole lot about the constellations -- the patterns of the heavens. The Clock Of The Year.
Then, too, I would dearly love to learn more about how to read Nature's clocks. Bits of folklore like, "Plant your Potatoes when the Apple trees blossom." Anybody have some pointer to that sort of knowledge? I imagine that huge swathes of that sort of lore has already been lost; how do we relearn it? Reinvent it?
Yet more ways to reconnect ourselves with the Universe. Actually, we've never really been disconnected; only in the tiny space inside our own heads have we thought so.
Technorati Tags: strategy, gardening, planning, planting, gtd, biodynamics, steiner, astronomy, astrology
Self-sufficiency and Stress [ earthstuff/ ]
The week past has been a journey back in time, back in psyche and spirit, back into a world I no longer inhabit. It's been a worthwhile journey, sharpening my understanding of just how far outside the circle I have managed to wander. A week performing a "code audit" of a large-ish software system.Basically this means analysing the software using a variety of techniques and tools, knowing where to look for likely problem areas, and then writing a report on what you think of the whole mess. Too many hours sitting chained to a PC so that the job gets completed "on time" -- whatever that means. Too little time being physically active in the garden; too little time doing the myriad of small things that need doing around the farm; too time spent solving real challenges. But it will bring in a little bit of money, so...
A new blog I just tripped across -- After Peak Oil: Awakening:
we had thought about "the good life" some years previously, but shelved our ideas since it felt like we would be giving ourselves additional stress and complications in return for some fanciful daydream about keeping chickens and the like.The additional stress and complication? Well, complication, yes. But stress? Looking back on the last decade of my life, I guess I have to acknowledge that there was stress involved in moving from a 9-to-5-pension-medical-annual-holiday existence to our somewhat-self-sufficient life. Most of that stress was money stress. Initially the stress of "where's the money going to come from", through the stresses of letting go of "normal" expectations around the "normal" flow of money in-and-out every month, every year, to my present state where, while I think its fun to have and use money, and its useful stuff for a limited number of purposes, I don't really feel it touches me any more. Not in the way that most of humanity is hooked into the Conventional Money System. Trapped in it, really.
But really, I think we Braamekraalies suffer far less from stress than ever before in our lives, and the reason is really very simple:
Human Beings are not built for single-tasking.
We evolved out on The African Plains, wary for the multitude of predators that think we make a tasty midday snack, keeping a sharp eye out for our own lunch. We are intensely social monkeys who constantly touch, taste, see, hear, smell, constantly challenged, constantly problem-solving. We are not well suited, physically, emotionally, psychologically or spiritually, to the low-input environment, the repetetive tasks provided by office jobs and suburban life in front of the desk, TV and steering-wheel. Subjected to that sort of existence, we begin to break down. To suffer stress.
Simply put, a self-sufficient lifestyle (at whatever level) keeps us challenged, interested, awake and alive. The sheer variety of tasks that we face is the important thing, here. Our brains and bodies are well adapted to variety. Need it, in fact.
A Very, Very, Very Fine House [ earthstuff/ ]
"A Low Impact Woodland Home" tells the story of a beautiful, self-built, Earth-friendly home in Wales. I want one! :-)When we designed and built our own house (over ten years ago, now) we were working with very tight cost, time and schedule constraints. Probably just our own lack of imagination. So our house is nowhere near as environmentally low-impact as we would like, and not even close to what the Woodland Home achieves. (I remain convinced that my on-going hayfever battle stems from having moved into the house when the CCA-treated timber was still outgassing noxious poisons.)
I know of several neighbours who would rush out to replicate the Woodland House if they saw it. And they would be missing the point completely! One neighbour has imported several large truckloads of sandstone from hundreds of kilometres away for the house she dreams of building (but cannot afford to finance, build, maintain, heat or cool, is too large for her and her family's needs, and in every way represents the malaise of cheap-abundant-energy thinking). She, too, has completely missed the point. Another neighbour recently built an additional (timber-frame constructed) cottage on her property atop stilts that raise the floor of the house about 3m above the ground, so as to get a better view. Every drop of water has to be pumped up to the house, which becomes a challenge during the not-infrequent power outages. It must be hell in a storm, facing into the teeth of the very fierce Northwester storm winds. And I'd hate to have to bring in the groceries or buckets of garden produce.
Here we are designing for a totally different set of problems, requirements and constraints than we would face in the Southwest of Wales or anywhere else. We have a different fund of locally abundant materials. The point is to make best use of what is locally available; not to import materials from hundreds or thousands of km away. The Woodland House uses local timbers; we would also use structural timber, being in a forest area. They use straw-bales as insulating infill for walls; here we would prefer wattle-and-daub, or perhaps cob, since strawbales are unlikely to survive the onslaught of local insects, and we sit on a deep layer of very high-grade clay just below the Earth's surface. A sod roof is out of the question for us, since we need to harvest all our water from the sky -- no other water source is readily accessible.
So, much as I love and admire the Woodland House, I would shudder in despair if I saw someone here trying to replicate it. Think local! Look around you with your eyes truly open to the opportunities and gifts of The Place Where You Find Yourself.
Technorati Tags: building, house, sustainability, ingenuity, relocalising
And the Sins of the Fathers... [ earthstuff/ ]
A recent essay at The Survival Acres blog touches on many of the terrifying issues that confront us – global warming, peak-oil, overpopulation, the deep degradation of the environment necessary to sustain all life.If there's any conclusion there, then it would seem to be, "What is going to kill us off first: Global Warming and its consequences for the global food supply that the over-abundant human population relies upon, or Peak Oil and the resulting collapse – starting potentially within 2 to 6 years – of industrial/technical society?" Either way, the results would seem to be eerily similar – mass starvation, coupled with lawlessness, roving hordes searching for food, burning the last of the trees to keep warm... The stuff of so many D-grade sci-fi movies.
Let anyone who doubts the sort of behaviour outlined above go to a squatter camp anywhere in Africa and count how many trees remain, how much vegetation, how many animals are left.
The heart of the question is, "Is it at all possible to maintain any form of technological society in the face of the impending human disasters before us?" Or are we doomed to a collapse back to Stone Age technologies and Stone Age human population levels – perhaps only a few hundred-thousand human beings on the planet?
The author of Survival Acres seems pessimistic. Or perhaps that's just "realistic".
Perhaps I am just a little too unwilling to give up a fantasy. The fantasy that we can keep something of our modern technological ways. Perhaps even improve on our present society, creating something more humane, more attuned to our needs and the needs of the rest of the ecosphere about us. But we certainly cannot do it at current human population levels, and we certainly cannot do it at First World levels of energy consumption, even assuming much-reduced human numbers.
How many people can the Earth sustain? For a long time the conventional wisdom seems to be that a population of about 1 billion (that's the American "billion" – 1 000 000 000) though recently I have seen some writing suggesting that 2 billion might be sustainable. Personally I doubt the higher figure, but either way we are in for a hell of a ride as the population crashes from the present levels of somewhere betwee 6.5 and 7 billion!
Can we live on much lower energy levels? Certainly! Concensus among experts I have read seems to suggest that the most energy we could reasonably expect to sustainably generate would be around 20% of current First World consumption. (Not sure if this is purely at a household level, or whether it includes the massive industrial and industry-agricultural inputs. Anyone?)
The problem and the challenge is how to manage a transition from our present societal structures and dependence on Big Energy to something that will simultaneously allow us to go forward retaining the good bits of our society (and I would call the Internet one of the Good Bits) whilst also surviving the terrible, tragic process that surely faces us.
Technorati Tags: environment, sustainability, collapse, peak-oil
ForestGardenPlanetEarth [ earthstuff/ ]
As researchers examine the Amazon more carefully, it appears that huge areas contain not only wild plants, but have been stocked with people-friendly cultivars of useful species. More and more, it looks as if the Amazon, like much of the Americas, was a carefully cultivated garden before the Europeans showed up and abused it into a thicketed wilderness. It appears that our idea of wilderness—black forest so dense you can barely walk, where people "take only photographs and leave only footprints"—is a notion burned into our psyches during an anomalous blip: the first two centuries following the Mayflower, in which the gardeners who had tended the Americas for millennia were exterminated, leaving the hemisphere to descend into an neglected tangle of "primeval forest." It's likely that this so-called intact forest had never existed before, since humans arrived here as soon as the glaciers receded and began tending the entire landmass with fire and digging stick.We've known for some time that it's time to kick things up a notch in terms of extending, enriching and diversifying our permaculture efforts at Braamekraal, but its been harrd going in terms of deciding how to proceed. The basic plan we figured out a decade ago still holds good, by and large, but the details need filling-in. What pioneer tree species? Understory varieties? And time, too, to apply the hard-won lessons of the past ten years. What edible varieties will the Mouse Birds leave alone? What fruit trees are bound to attract the Baboons? Ten years ago we didn't even know that Mouse Birds existed! The devil is always in the details!--Toby Hemenway, "Beyond Wilderness: Seeing Garden in the Jungle"
Reading Toby Hemenway's fascinating write-up of the pre-Columbian Americas has set ideas detonating like fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night. His insights and accounts also resonate strongly with some very puzzling things about the South- and Meso-American natives.
Here's a small, green berry. Its a bit poisonous, so if you eat it, you'll almost certainly get a severe tummy-ache. It's an annual that grows all over, seeding itself pretty freely, but nobody in their right mind would want to actually eat it!What vision, what insight, possesses a gardener, inspring them to expend years, prehaps generation, of effort to selectively breed this semi-nasty little berry into the beautiful Tomatoes we love so much?
Technorati Tags: permaculture, forest-garden, ecology, ecosystems, gardening, food-gardening, plant-breeding, landcare, land-management
Global Climate Change [ earthstuff/ ]
Earthtimes.org has a story on the EU-funded Antarctic ice core project, "Air bubbles from Antarctica ice core tell a scary environmental story".
"we know for sure that carbon dioxide has increased by about 35 per cent in the last 200 years. Before the last 200 years, which man has been influencing, it was pretty steady."– Dr Eric Wolff, British Antarctic Surveythe natural level of carbon dioxide over most of the past 800,000 years has been 180-300 parts per million by volume (ppmv) of air. But today it is at 380 ppmv.
In one of the universe's divine jests, on the same day we have our Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, speechifying:
[Africa will] see "an increased incidence of extreme weather events; substantial reductions in surface water resources; accelerated desertification in sensitive arid zones; and greater threats to health, biodiversity and agricultural production"
Now, my opinion is that van Schalkwyk is a halfwit. He has absolutely no clear understanding of the urgent need for strong protection of the environment. He has been handed what is seen as a sinecure post in Cabinet – his reward for screwing the voters of the now-thankfully-extinct New National Party by delivering their votes into the hands of the ANC. One of his first actions as Minister of Environmental Affairs was to ease requirements for Environmental Impact Assessment in constructing cellular phone masts. His department has recently granted carte blanche to golf course developers in the local area to do as they will, in clear conflict with provincial attempts to ride herd on these megabuck millionaire retreats that trash local environments, returning nothing but lies and broken promises to the affected communities.
That aside, I am very happy that he acknowledges the fact of global climate change, unlike some of his counterparts in other countries, who remain steadfastly in denial.
The question remains, though: What is government doing about it? As a nation we are one of the worst polluters of the environment on a per capita basis. We produce more pollution per South African than almost any other country on Earth. The state-owned electricity utility, Eskom, largest electricity supplier in Africa, runs the dirtiest coal-fired power stations in the world. That is why our electricity is among the cheapest in the world. At least in the very short term.
Environmental pollution limits, lax as they are, are seldom enforced. Simply getting chemical suppliers and toxic-waste management companies to comply with regulations commonly takes years, and seldom results in permanent and effective solutions, even after the courts have spoken.
The saddest indictment is that the post of Minister of Environment Affairs and Tourism is considered unimportant-enough by the ANC government to award it to an ex-Nat! (And guess which part of his portfolio gets the significant porion of his limited attention; Environment or Tourism?)
So: The South African government believes that climate change is before us. That is, at least, reassuring. We might have to say goodbye to Cape Town, goodbye Knysna Forests. Are we doing anything about it, yet? No chance.
Technorati Tags: environment, global-warming, ipcc, co2
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- Why You Just Can't Buy Good Horseradish
- Storming-up a Brew
- The White Lions of Timbavati
- Small Victory Against Global Warming
- Garden Archaeology
- Organic Growing vs. Organic Growing
- The Clock of the World
- Self-sufficiency and Stress
- A Very, Very, Very Fine House
- And the Sins of the Fathers...
- ForestGardenPlanetEarth
- Global Climate Change
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