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Grow your own food

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flipper

flipper

Paranormal Adept
Whether it's to save money, an act of preparedness, or just a fabulous hobby, container gardening is a fantastic and flexible way of growing food for you and your family.
Container Gardening For Food
You probably know already that organic foods are good for you. The major problem most people have with organic food is the expense. However, there are several different ways to radically reduce the cost of your food.
How to Grow Your Own Organic Food in Small Spaces
No matter your region, you can grow cold-hardy winter crops that have proven they can take biting temps. Just follow these winter gardening tips from one of the foremost four-season gardeners in the country.
Organic Gardening – MOTHER EARTH NEWS
A second kind of seeds are genetically engineered. Bioengineered seeds are fast contaminating the global seed supply on a wholesale level, and threatening the purity of seeds everywhere. The DNA of the plant has been changed. A cold water fish gene could be spliced into a tomato to make the plant more resistant to frost, for example.
Why it Matters to Buy Heirloom Plants and Seeds | Care2 Healthy Living
Since 1995 we have established Permaculture gardens in two different climate zones: in the arid dry condition of the Queensland Outback and in the tropical wet coastal area of Queensland. In November 2004 we moved to Tasmania and gardening down here is very different from gardening up north in the tropics. The latest entries in our Tasmanian garden diary are here.
http://www.growyourownfood.com.au/
 
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I doubt there are any major food plants left that *aren't already* GMO- if not from modern gene-splicing days, then from the old days when they saved the best of the crop for seed (selective breeding of useful mutations) or used chemicals or radiation to cause random genetic mutations, then conserved the "errors" that turned out to be useful traits... If there is anything in the produce aisle that is precisely what Nature made, I don't know about it. That ship sailed decades, or even centuries ago. If the exact same genetic misspelling of the GMO fish/tomato hybrid had come about by pure random mutation, no one would hesitate to benefit from it.
 
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Pygar2 said:
I doubt there are any major food plants left that *aren't already* GMO- if not from modern gene-splicing days, then from the old days when they saved the best of the crop for seed (selective breeding of useful mutations) or used chemicals or radiation to cause random genetic mutations, then conserved the "errors" that turned out to be useful traits... If there is anything in the produce aisle that is precisely what Nature made, I don't know about it. That ship sailed decades, or even centuries ago. If the exact same genetic misspelling of the GMO fish/tomato hybrid had come about by pure random mutation, so one would hesitate to benefit from it.
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Selective breeding is not really the problem as this has been done for thousands of years and is the reason why there are so many cross breeds of plants, GMO on the other hand is far removed from this careful process and I feel it is frankly quite dangerous.

I agree we should all avoid GMO

Now having said that the seeds I grow are all local adapted variates for the most part meaning that they have become adapted to the local climate and I tend to grow more than one variate of the same crop each year and never in the same spot. Cross breading between these happens (tomatoes I guarantee do this) and to some extent is encouraged as it refreshes the gene pool and stops inbreeding to an extent (you also get some very cool looking and tasting fruit to boot). On top of this I trade seeds with other growers so that we all keep a balance gene pool as much as we can.

The variates I grow came over to NZ with the early settlers between 150 and 200 years ago and have been grown in home vegetable gardens since that time. These are not commercial crop plants in the slightest and would be no good for this for a number of reasons which if you are a grower you already understand and there is no point in going into here.
 
Selective breeding is a *form* of genetic modification; of changing the spelling of the DNA code. So what is really being said is, "Now that we have some idea how to do this without waiting for natural mutation, or creating unnatural mutations at random, let's give up!" Why is it "holy" for some caveman to do GM, or some farmer 300 years ago, or some scientist in a lab in 1965, and suddenly unholy, now? Only because you are either used to the facts, or don't know about the facts, or feel we have less right to try and improve crops than the ones who were doing it from random mutations. A differently spelled gene is a differently spelled gene- so if you wouldn't find the identical gene offensive if it came from the caveman, farmer, or irradiation scientist in 1965, wherein lies the offense? I'm trying to understand why, all of the sudden, for the first time in human history, genes are sacrosanct, to be set in stone...
 
2014 is shaping up to be a decisive year for the future of food and farming. Grassroots activists are gearing up for new legislative battles, including state GMO labeling laws and county bans on growing genetically engineered crops. Meanwhile the multinational food corporations last month raised the stakes in the ongoing David vs. Goliath battle by petitioning the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to allow companies to continue to label or market products that contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as “natural.”
GMO and the “Natural” Food Fight: The Treacherous Terrain of Food Labeling | Global Research
OCA: Genetically Engineered Food, Biotechnology, and GMOs
 
A portion of the transgene from ingested GM soybeans, along with the promoter that switches it on, transfers into human gut bacteria during ingestion.4 The fact that the transformed bacteria survives applications of Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, suggests that the transgene continues to produce the Roundup Ready protein. If true, then long after people stop eating GM soy they may be constantly exposed to its potentially allergenic protein, which is being created within their gut. (This protein may be made more allergenic due to misfolding, attached molecular chains, or rearrangement of unstable transgenes, but there is insufficient data to support or rule out these possibilities.1)
Genetically Modified Foods Unsafe? GM Foods and Allergies | Global Research
 
aspartame may be disguised as a new name in your favorite foods – aminosweet.
The FDA’s own toxicologist, Dr. Adrian Gross told Congress that without a shadow of a doubt, aspartame can cause brain tumors and brain cancer and that it violated the Delaney Amendment. Aside from cancers and tumors, top researchers have linked aspartame with the following symptoms and diseases:
  • Headaches
  • Memory loss
  • Seizures
  • Vision Loss
  • Coma
  • ADD
  • Lupus
  • Fibromyalgia
  • Muscular Dystrophy
  • Alzheimer’s
  • Chrnoic Fatigue
  • Diabetes
  • Depression

Read more: Aspartame’s Name Changed to Amino Sweet: A Toxin is Still a Toxin : Natural Society
Follow us: @naturalsociety on Twitter | NaturalSociety on Facebook
 
“Agri-terrorism”? Feds Shut Down Seed Library in Pennsylvania
War on self-sufficiency intensifies
n yet another example of the federal government’s war on self-sufficiency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture shut down a seed library in Pennsylvania, claiming that a system whereby residents could borrow heirloom seeds and then replace them at harvest time was a violation of the 2004 Seed Act, while a commissioner warned that such behavior could lead to “agri-terrorism.”
“Agri-terrorism”? Feds Shut Down Seed Library in Pennsylvania | Global Research
 
flipper said:
“Agri-terrorism”? Feds Shut Down Seed Library in Pennsylvania
War on self-sufficiency intensifies
n yet another example of the federal government’s war on self-sufficiency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture shut down a seed library in Pennsylvania, claiming that a system whereby residents could borrow heirloom seeds and then replace them at harvest time was a violation of the 2004 Seed Act, while a commissioner warned that such behavior could lead to “agri-terrorism.”
“Agri-terrorism”? Feds Shut Down Seed Library in Pennsylvania | Global Research
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I have to ask, why do you Americans stand for this shit?
 
stonehart said:
I have to ask, why do you Americans stand for this shit?
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Once corporations got declared human their ability to hire lawyers to protect their individual rights at the expense of everyone else's started to explode exponentially. Now things are just generally fucked up with no where to go.

Good luck Oregon! But hey, if you can ban cigarettes, plastic water bottles and legalize pot in some states and cities then truly anything is possible in America.
 
Burnt State said:
Once corporations got declared human their ability to hire lawyers to protect their individual rights at the expense of everyone else's started to explode exponentially. Now things are just generally fucked up with no where to go.

Good luck Oregon! But hey, if you can ban cigarettes, plastic water bottles and legalize pot in some states and cities then truly anything is possible in America.
Click to expand...

Legalized pot? That’s easy, as in Washington State it just became legal, and it’s only a fifteen minute drive from my mostly humble abode. That is of course, only if it is one’s particular desire to purchase and then consume the below mentioned products legally. Portland and Alaska are most likely to legalize in the next couple of years. The cops are still attempting to figure out a field sobriety test for the motoring public. It shouldn’t be too hard to spot an impaired driver, as pulling over someone who is traveling well below the posted speed limit, while munching on various fast food items, not to mention the pungent smoke wafting through the air.

Menu | New Vansterdam

The “Sour Diesel” pg. 2 looks pretty gnarly……, just by looking at it, I feel like grabbing some, (non GMO laden), Doritos, and then taking a siesta.

BTW, plastic bags have been outlawed within the city limits, for the sake of sea creatures, and there is a huge alliance of the smaller organic farmers, and ranchers. The downside of this is that in order to eat healthier, (for now anyway), it may cost double, or in some instances triple the price of chain food stores, unless growing your own.

 
You better stock up on Olive Oil.

Bacterium from the USA hits Italy’s Olive Trees
By Venatrix Fulmen (*)

You better stock up on Olive Oil.

Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterium in the class Gammaproteobacteria, is an important plant pathogen that is known to cause phoney peach disease in the southern United States, bacterial leaf scorch, oleander leaf scorch, and Pierce’s disease, as well as recently citrus variegated chlorosis disease (CVC) in Brazil, where it was introduced from the USA.

Apart from earlier, unconfirmed interceptions on grapevine material imported from the USA (EPPO Reporting Service 500/02, 505/13), the disease vector was absent in Europe, though infamous German-born global corporation BAYER already has a computer code for it: XYLEFA.

Now it has hit for the first time Europe, having been reported already in in mid-October 2013.

But the real question is, how does it come that now already 800,000 often centuries-old olive-trees in Salento, Puglia, are infected by Xylella fastidiosa?.

Did the Italian and European authorities sleep for 10 months or was the bacterium inoculated artificially over a wide range at the same time? Though the vector is spread by insects, the epidemic has reportedly already cost producers US$335m (€250m, £200m) – a figure expected to rise.

The growers shall now be forced to destroy many trees in the worst-afflicted areas when an emergency decree comes finally into force next week. The EU bureaucrats and their delaying “study-teams” certainly did sleep.

‘There will be a genuine “cordon sanitaire” of 8,000 hectares where it will be obligatory to destroy the trees’, stated Angelo Corsetti, a spokesman for Coldiretti, the national agricultural organisation.

It seems that nobody is concerned with a thorough investigation how the infestation started and only the food-price speculators rub their hands.

Will European wineyards be the next target?

(*) Venatrix Fulmen is an investigative journalist taking on the Ugly Horde (Banksters, Corporations, Corrupt Governance and their Politicians and Military). She can be reached directly via venatrix.fulmen[AT]tightmail.com


 
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