Monsanto

Overall, I do not want this to be a political blog, but I feel compelled to simply forward a couple news stories about Monsanto that I came across today.

This morning I listened to Morning Edition on NPR and heard this story, In India, Bucking The 'Revolution' By Going Organic Recently, I watched a documentary about Monsanto, The World According to Monsanto that horrified me. In one part they documented Indian farmers committing suicide with Monsanto pesticides. I found this documentary via Online Documentaries 4 U, an excellent resource for online documentaries.

I was checking up on Rose Marie Nichols Magee's blog and read her comments about a story local to her, GMO Beet Roots Busted.

These 2 stories make me feel that there might be a turn for the better in agriculture in the very near future. I'm sorry to say that I do boycott Monsanto and GMOs and I believe that you should too.

Black and Blue Blooms

Anytime I find myself liking a plant, I want to know more about it. I want to know where it came from, what uses it may have outside of what I am using it for, whether it has any cultural significance to anything. Seriously, there's a lot of history to a lot of seemingly simple plants. I am very interested in new world plants, and this flower, Salvia guaranitica is a new world flower.

The first thing I figured out after purchasing 2 without knowing much, is that it's a great hummingbird plant. Well, I learned things in regard to its cultivation like it gets big. In warm climates it can be invasive but in temperate places like Pittsburgh it has survived some pretty harsh winters. I might try to winter this if I keep liking it. I will opt for retiring it to my coldroom rather than letting it winter outside because otherwise it will probably die. I wanted to know more about it specifically. It has a nice smell. (gets up to let cat inside and to sniff flowers to better describe)It smells like a fruity sage, not like anise to my nose, though I only have smelled 'black and blue'. There are other slight color variations, all I believe are pretty vivid blue.

So it smells pleasant. Is it edible? According to Rose Marie Nichols Magee, in this blog post, Salvia guaranitica Anise Scented Sage, Rose Marie, one of my heroes, the flower at least is edible. Oh good! More snazzy garnishes!

It seems to have been named after the Guarani Indians of Brazil who drank yerba mate before anyone else. They seem to have used the leaves as a sedative. It sounds like this might be more than a little stronger than say chamomile tea so maybe I won't experiment with that.

Anyway, I enjoy this plant more now knowing that it's not just a pretty flower. I hope you enjoyed these pictures showing my first blooms opening up. I am looking forward to more. Don't you like how the flower went from this dark purple/blue to that^^^?

Starting from Scratch

If you wanna start a garden where there was none, there's more than one way to do it. A lot of people think that you need a rototiller and to double dig before you plant anything. That is not my approach. I had an art teacher in high school who said, think of any art that you make as being complete as you are creating it. This definitely applies to a garden. Indeed, a good garden is good art. Art is often beyond your control. A garden is definitely that. A garden is really a partnership with nature.

You 1st need to ask yourself some questions. The 1st one should be how am I going to do this and have FUN with it? One thing that makes a garden fun is not doing too much work. You might have an overall goal but it's best to do it in manageable steps. When you take a step by step approach you also get to reassess your garden. Maybe that spot that you thought would be great for lettuce because it looks to be shady gets more sun than you thought. Watching a garden go through a year will help you make better decisions later on.

You've decided what area you want to use. What should you do to make things grow better? I start by clearing it of weeds. Ideally, one should get in there and not only pull them from the top, but dig down to the roots. Maybe your yard is a god awful mess. A large part of my garden was awful. Rather than weed the whole thing, I concentrated on the front. In back I covered my weedy mess with cardboard. On top of that was some landscaping cloth and on top of that I put compost. I made raised beds about 6 inches deep. you can't grow everything in that, but you can grow a lot. Square foot gardening is all about this.

The 1st picture shows an intensely improved bed. I dug in compost over most of it to a depth of 8-12 inches deep, some largely due to the fact that I had to dig up a weed tree then topped it all with 3 inches of compost. This bed was very productive but if I had committed myself to doing the same for ALL of my garden I would have become really tired. Personally I tend not to be so single minded. It's so much more fun to fill a silly swan planter with flowers! This year I will shape up more beds.

One bed all I really did is top it with compost. I'd dig some dirt in as I planted things, but I didn't go crazy with it. In some ways this is less disruptive to all the beings that lived in the soil before I arrived. My veggies did all right with that.

Another thing I did because a lot of my space was challenged is to grow things in containers. I like containers anyway because you can get very creative with them. Rose Marie Nichols Magee, and Maggie Stuckey's Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers is a great book even if your plans are not all about containers. These ladies really make it fun with very specific instructions to make your plants grow.

Another thing I believe is important are flowers. Flowers are not only pretty and smell nice, they attract many beneficial insects like bees and good predators. Whenever there has been a lapse of flowers, the bad insects have dominated.