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Post by prairiegarden on May 26, 2018 14:29:19 GMT -5
Manitoba Maple which is considered barely a Maple apparently, is a weed as persistent as dandelions. I've got one that's been cut back to the ground yearly for 4 years and it's already 4 feet tall again, it got pulled out once but obviously didn't get all the root. It or it's cousins have volunteered everywhere in the garden. At my land I dumped some cuttings into a sand hollow and ignored them, assuming they would dry out and become fill, there are now three healthy trees growing energetically in spite of having been heavily browsed. by moose over last winter.. I'm leaving them to grow for firewood. The official word is they won't grow in sand. Nobody told them that apparently. One thing going for them is that the last infestation by forest webworms, the maples were the only trees untouched, the caterpillars went after everything else from the alfalfa to the pine. Diversity is a wonderful thing...no idea if other maples have similar resistance or not.Supposedly we are too cold here for 'real' maples.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 20, 2016 1:01:38 GMT -5
That is very impressive.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 18, 2016 2:57:06 GMT -5
Right the guy who brought it back from North Africa said he did that to prevent it from being messed with by geneticists.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 18, 2016 2:16:19 GMT -5
What beautiful country. That road would have been absolutely terrifying to try to drive in the dark after the quake, and indeed shows why it would be safer to stop and get out. There's really no way to know where to be safe, is there, worse than a hurricane or even a tornado which usually have more or less a pattern.
I kept wondering how he got past some of those breaks, like that one place it looked as though the road completely blocked by rubble and another where it had sheared and the far side looked about 1/2 a metre or more higher than the near side. Thanks for posting that, it was interesting to see just how widespread the damage was, it's not really concentrated in a small area at all. So lucky you escaped that.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 17, 2016 16:07:11 GMT -5
A number of years ago now, this exact thing happened with small butcher shops in Canada, hundreds of them were forced to close because of onerous and expensive new requirements to comply. Now in BC at least, they supposedly are going to or have repealed this at least in some areas. It's interesting that since the little indepenants were driven out of business we have had at least two fairly serious recalls, from industrial factory type meat processors. There's no record I can find of any health issues at all ever coming out of a family size abattoir/butcher shop. When your business depends on your neighbours there's an incentive not to make them sick.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 17, 2016 15:57:50 GMT -5
This sounds like another deliberate attempt to drive the small producer out of business. Now then, now might be the time to try to curb this with Trump coming in on promises to look after the interests of the little guy. I don't for a moment think that's where his heart or interests lie, but he clearly likes to throw his weight around and upset people. If some way could be found to get him onside against this sort of overkill control on free enterprise....it would be nice to see something positive come out of this.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 17, 2016 15:43:32 GMT -5
Ideally, BOTH avenues would be pursued, multiple solutions to a given problem tend to result in more stability than a single one. In the case of "going back to basics", I sort of assume that boils down to "going back to Farro" Since a lot of people who have wheat problems CAN eat emmer and einkorn, that would seem to indicate that a lot of the "problem" proteins come from the goat grass side of the family. Or actually (since the BB genes themselves come from a species of goat grass) even go back to einkorn and see what can be done there (has anyone found out what you get if you take einkorn and hexaploid it?) It probably might be worth investigating Timopheevi again as well, since it, of course has another set of ancestor proteins that might be easier on the stomach (Has anyone? Since Timopheevi is a pretty obscure wheat still, I assume that, if any scientific research has been done on it's effects on the digestive system of people with allergies, it is still in the very early stages.) I've often wondered how much of the modern wheat problems are actually not so much the wheat, although certainly some people have serious allergic reactions, but the chemicals used on most wheat combined with the genetics developed over the years for shorter straw etc. That might help explain the explosion of numbers of people with wheat issues, and has also been suggested as a possible reason for the huge numbers of people with peanut allergies.. I've read that every loaf of bread tested in the UK showed up with glyphosate residue, so imagine it's also in the flour. Another possible factor might be the way wheat is handled now; years ago it mildly fermented as it dried in stooks, you'd look a long time to find any done that way now, at least in N.A. It would have been interesting to know what the source/variety of the wheat was for the Harvard study. It would also be interesting to see the results of a study done with older varieties including the emmer etc. vs newer ones. I got some pounds of emmer a few years ago and have done nothing with it, thinking the other day I should at least sprout some to see if it's still viable. Apparently it's a pain to thresh out. Years ago I worked in organic bakery which did a lot of product for people with allergies. Some people with wheat issues could eat kamut, which because of the way it was brought to North America, apparently can't legally be fiddled with and still be called kamut. Anyone done anything with that?
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 16, 2016 18:32:10 GMT -5
I don't know that I agree that the fad of gardening is fading.from all reports organic produce is supposed to be the fastest growing industry, and lots of people are growing gardens because they can't afford to pay the store prices. The last few years all sorts of new ideas are being brought forward and now are fairly commonly seen, from raised beds to growing on walls and roofs, plans for diy wicking boxes and aquaponics are all over the Internet, sheet mulching with cardboard, hugelculture, straw bales have all hit mainstream . People are raising stuff in pop bottle chains in windows or on fire escapes, or in shopping bags and milk crates.
Several places have recently added gardening as school subjects, I believe in parts of Australia a permaculture based program is part of the regular school curriculum. In Canada there are a couple of places, one in BC and one in Alberta that the high schools have built greenhouses. There is ..to my eyes anyway..a very active urban farm sort of scenario, ranging from Brooklyn to guerrila gardeners in the gang infested areas of LA. These people are unlikely to be spending time on Internet forums, they are apprentices, really, being introduced to a world they are totally new to. One teacher in Brooklyn has done phenomenal work with kids from about as disadvantaged a background as it is possible to get. Teachers and people working with ex? teenage and older gangsters commonly report that attendance goes up and behaviour issues go down, and that's a huge incentive to keep going.
It's perhaps mostly a different demographic, and they haven't got here yet. Or another point might be that people are starting to put out courses, with the person selling the course available to discuss things with over and above the course. So those are likely diverting people away from forums into their own groups.
As far as plant breeding, it probably never has been something that the majority of people ever got involved with, but those with curiosity probably will. The thing is, it gets no press. The only things most people hear about that the guy down the street might be doing is trying to grow the biggest pumpkin ever. Otherwise, it probably never comes into their mind. But it will eventually, for some anyway.
Legacies are tricky things.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 16, 2016 17:48:28 GMT -5
you have much more faith than I do in that regard. Some years back Stokes started selling Flv R SvR (something like that) corn and I think tomato seed and it was genetically manipulated seed. . I don't believe that any Flavr Savr tomato seed was ever available to home gardeners. I even put out a reward for some seeds but nobody could ever track any down. It had the early spoiling gene turned off, same gene lacking in Giraffe, Stoney's, and other long keepers. It would have been a great variety to cross into great varieties with very short shelf life./ Martin Well damn I finally got around to clearing out old catalogues a couple of months ago or I could've told you the year and the exact veggies. Stokes has been selling various melons for some years, I think they all had names like Athena and Aphrodite that you had to sign something if you were going to buy 1000 seeds or more, iirc, but the small grower didn't have to. The Flv R SvR thing was what alerted me to look for the safe seed pledge that they had at one time , when I contacted them they said they didn't carry GMO seed but couldn't explain in that case how the gene could be patented and in the seed. That's when I stopped buying stuff from them.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 16, 2016 17:33:15 GMT -5
What are you supposed to do if you are driving? Just keep going? Stop and get out? the ones ones I've experienced were little guys hardly more than a quick shudder and over as soon as you knew what it was. Hard to know what to do if you suddenly see a wave of earth or road coming at you.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 15, 2016 20:59:41 GMT -5
A short life but a merry one I assume. Perhaps the idea that fish are now so toxic to eat in any quantity will lead to less overfishing? Would be nice to think of some upside.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 15, 2016 20:43:25 GMT -5
you have much more faith than I do in that regard. Some years back Stokes started selling Flv R SvR (something like that) corn and I think tomato seed and it was genetically manipulated seed. They sell to a great many people who are backyard gardeners as well as the commercial outfits. A few years back they dropped the safe seed pledge and now are a Syngenta associated company. Gene work is what Syngenta does, as far as I know.
also, Vilmorin which is a huge seed company supplying many smaller outlets with seed, said maybe 5 or 6 years ago now that it was going to start stocking/selling GMO seed. I assume they are, don't know.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 15, 2016 20:31:38 GMT -5
An online series on health and nutrition lately really slammed wheat, saying that a Harvard study showed that all humans are affected negatively by wheat, just some more than others. They had people who were highly sensitive, people who could eat it occassionally without issues and people who had no sign at all of being sensitive to it. In every case without exception wheat pushed apart the lining of the gut to a greater or smaller degree.
This is what is referred to as leaky gut and is strongly implicated in virtually all autoimmune diseases, according to these researchers. They think that we have probably evolved to cope with wheat to a greater or lesser degree but the added toxicity of modern life pushes people over the edge of what their body can handle, so they develop the clear reaction warning them to stay away from it. Or so I understood.
This is made that much worse by the modern practice of dessicating wheat in the field, as the most commonly used one is also an antibiotic so attacks the bacteria in the gut which might help the body cope with the wheat proteins.
As far as taking apart wheat and then putting it back together less the problem proteins..not something I'd go for. Researchers keep running into issues with herbal remedies when they try to isolate " the active component" and find the result has different effects than expected. Besides, bread with Red Fife wheat is delicious. It's difficult to imagine you can carve bits of it out and expect to be the same.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 15, 2016 19:51:38 GMT -5
Many people in North America also have the idea that if they save seed to grow it will automatically be inferior, possibly inedible. I can't count the number of times I have heard people talk about ripping out volunteer tomato plants and then buying transplants for the garden. Quite a few think that if they were hybrid tomato seed then the fruit will be awful and never have an answer if you ask them why, it's just something they've been told. It never made any sense to me why if you put two great tomatoes together the next generations wouldn't likely be great too, even if different in some ways from parents, for example. And it's astonishing how many people - gardeners - who don't know there's a difference between GMO and hybrid. On a local gardening group I encouraged a young gardener to protect and foster a couple of volunteers and she acted as though she'd been given permission to climb Mount Everest, so excited and pleased, it was so charming ( but made me feel old and jaded). I have hopes it worked out well, if so, she will be hooked for life, like first time casino players winning a jackpot.
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Post by prairiegarden on Nov 15, 2016 9:42:25 GMT -5
Glad they didn't, so much destruction, a good thing they managed to save the animals they could. You have to wonder how many were lost. How the farmer is going to deal with those fields now is a question enough without losing possibly the last of the herd. Good for them to get the animals down safely.
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