Federal District Judge revoked USDA approval of GMO Sugar Beets-for time being

 A very small Victory in the fight against GMO-Franken foods!

Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco revoked the 5 year old USDA approved beets, which carry an Round-up resistance gene, until the Department of Agriculture finishes a environmental impact assessment. According to the Center for Food Safety, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit the USDA claims this could take until April 2012. After this years harvest no GMO Sugar Beets are allowed to be planted until this impact assessment is completed, effectively banning the planting of the genetically modified sugar beets which already make up about 95 percent of the yearly Sugar Beet crop and about half the produced sugar in the United States, the other half coming from Sugar Cane.

In September 2009, Judge Jeffrey White determined that the USDA had not adequately considered the Genetically Modified Beets potential effects on the environment, including the danger of the genetically engineered traits spreading to other sugar beets or to related crops of table beets and Swiss chard
On Friday he then followed through with a ban on the crop for the time being, a move which comes on the heels of a Supreme Court decision earlier this year concerning GMO-Alfalfa.
Even the Judge granted the plaintiffs request to formally vacate the approval of the beets, which now disallows farmers growing them outside of field trials, he denied the plaintiffs request for a permanent injunction which also would have banned the growing of this crop saying it was not necessary as long it wasn't approved for commercial plantings.

That's why this makes it only a small victory. It is not a total ban, we still will have GMO sugar in our sugar supply for now.

Some of the Agricultural Departments and GMO industry promoters arguments give me the creeps.
They argued in the hearing which was held in Judge White's courtroom earlier Friday that the "approval should not be revoked because their department's mistakes were not all that serious" and hey! "that crop will be approved down the line anyway" and they asked the judge to at least give them a 9 month delay to give them time to put temporary measures in place. Luckily the Judge disagreed with them saying in his opinion their errors "were not minor or insignificant and they had already more then enough time to put interim measures into place" since his first ruling in September. He also said that no matter if he could legally consider the economic consequences of revoking the approval the USDA had not adequately demonstrated a severe economic impact.
Some Sugar Beet farmers said they are not sure how much conventional seed is still available these days for next years planting. According to Monsanto, who developed the crop, revoking approval of the seed could cost them and their customers $ 2 Billion in 2011 and 2012.
They 'Monsanto' did not talk about the economic impact their GMO Sugar Beets would have on Organic Seed growers like Frank Morton who grows organic Beet and Chard seeds or others like him or the impact this GMO crop would have on the potential crippling loss of genetic diversity, which goes above and beyond the damage that simple monoculture has already inflicted on the US agriculture.
With the lack of conventional seeds for Sugar Beets it just proves the point, doesn't it?
They also did not talk about the impact it could have on us, humans. Health wise. Because they don't know the impact it might have on humans, they don't know it won't have an impact on our health either.
We are just a bunch of large guinea pigs!

We are in danger of loosing our seed heritage, our food to provide for us.
We need diversity not mono culture. Just think about the impact if we loose the diversity of seeds, all it takes is that the one seed left, the GMO seed, fails to provide for us, what are we going to do then?
Once it is in the environment there is no going back.
Once our seeds are gone, they are gone.
I don't know about you, but to me it is a scary thought having to rely on only one variety of seed to feed me and not knowing what is in my food.
But this is were we are headed.
Now is the time to stop it, we still have a chance to reverse this dangerous trend.

Shop consciously, don't buy knowingly or unknowingly GMO products.

Vote with your cash! Vote the Politicians in Bed with Monsanto and Co out of Office.

Don't sit back and watch it unfold, help unfold!

Protecting our seed supply

One of my favorite online television series and blog, based in around Portland-Oregon is called Cooking up a Story which deals with the culture of food we are eating, the farming of our food, it's production and the politics and science which are surrounding our food nowadays. 
I love the eye opening stories they bring on their website about people involved with food, the food we eat and about living sustainable, showing us what is happening in the world of food, what is done to it and what we can do to save one of the most important assets we humans have.

One issue which is very important to me and probably should be important to anyone who likes to eat good, healthy, nourishing food is the problem with our seed supply dwindling more and more as there are less and less independent seed companies which don't belong or are connected to the large corporate companies like Monsanto. The majority of our seed supply is now in the hands of only 10 corporate seed companies and of those 44% are in the US. This is very concerning.
Cooking up a Story also is concerned about this issue and so I like to share a video from their
 website with Frank Morton, who is an organic seed breeder from Philomath in Oregon explaining the structure of the gloabal commercial seed industry we have today. It is part of an ongoing series called
'Seeds of Life'



                                                                                                   

                                       
                    Click to play                   

                                       
We all should be very concerned about the future of our Seed supply. Without seeds there will be no food and with our seed supply the corporations are calling the shots in what we get to eat and if we get to eat.
We all need to speak up and vote with our money. We all need to start buying open pollinated and heirloom seeds, seeds which are not connected to these companies and then save and protect our own seed supply.

Strawberry towers

This is just a funny garden year. There it is was mid June and still rainy outside. I looked at my weather report every day, hoping for this 5 day forecast of sun, just to be cheated over and over again.
I found myself planning my schedules by the dry and sunny days. Going shopping only happens on the rainiest days, forget going to town if it is sunny outside. I needed that day to catch up in my yard. 
But finally we got some nice Summer-like weather, I just hope it will last.
The weeds really seemed to like this wet weather, they are growing just like weeds. Or maybe it is just that I couldn't weed all the time and so there will be now weeds all summer. Since our summer arrived I have been outside almost all day, trying to catch up. This i one of the reasons I have been neglecting my blog for a while. I am just so busy outside I hardly have time to do anything else.
So I was really behind planting my Peppers and Eggplants, which I just managed to plant two weeks ago. But even they had been in the small pots for a long time, they are growing so nicely and are already setting peppers. I think using the home-made warming tray has really helped growing healthy and strong plants. Usually I was lucky to get a few peppers late season.
They do say that if you stunt the growth of the heat loving plants like Peppers, Eggplants and Tomatoes they sometimes never catch up anymore and greatly reduce production. My sun-room is just too cold in February to grow anything, having the warming tray is making a big difference.

My first Strawberries, even they were slowly getting ripe, were getting all mushed out by the rain. It wasn't too big of a loss since they didn't really taste all that good anyway. The rain washed all the sweet, strawberry flavor out of them.
But now the weather is perfect strawberry weather and I am picking a large bowl of Strawberries every other day and they are sweet and juicy. Since I am so busy weeding and catching up in my yard I mainly made some of my quick Strawberry Tart and some Ice cream with them. Luckily I only grow Ever-bearing Strawberries so I will have a long harvest and hopefully will be able to make some strawberry jam later in the season.

Strawberries use a lot of yard, especially if you grow enough to make jam and freeze. The area my strawberries are growing in right now will be my new flower and shrub garden, it is our second lot and eventually we'll built a smaller house there. Lucky me, I get to start some of my new garden before there is a house.

This way at least some of it will be established and I get to move my favorite plants from my old garden to the new. I already got started on some of the new garden, but the strawberries are in the way and need to get moved.

 I wanted to move them to my Kitchen-garden, which is fenced in. Already I grow all my other berries in the lower part of this garden, but there just isn't enough room for that many strawberries. To have strawberries down there I needed to go vertical.

For two years I have been looking at the strawberry towers at the Raintree Nurseries website, thinking I like to make my own, but I have been trying to find bigger diameter tubes then the ones they usually have at the Home depot, but never found anything larger then 4" or 8" which I think is not wide enough to grow them successfully. I know from searching online many people make them with the smaller sized tubes, but I just felt there wasn't enough room for the roots and enough dirt to sustain the roots in there.
I also think plastic just gets too hot for the berries and thinking of all the chemicals in the plastic I am not sure I even wanted plastic tubes for growing strawberries.

So one day I saw these strawberry towers in the  Stark Brothers Catalog, which consisted of a small wire cage and coconut fiber mats you can fill with dirt and then plant with your berries. It was a bit small but I liked the idea that the plants had more dirt around their roots and no plastic involved.
So I got the idea of making something similar out of sturdy fencing, some fence posts and coconut fiber mats.

I just cut the fencing into 6 feet high x 35 inch wide sections, rolled them into a tube 33 inch diameter, wiring the length sides together, overlapping just 2 inches to make it sturdier. Then I cut the coconut fiber mat into the same size, rolled it into a tube and inserting it in the wire tower. Now all I had to do fill it up with some good soil mix, watering it well and plant the strawberries. Since my new mail-ordered strawberries were already waiting for me, I had to plant them right away. To plant I just cut some holes into the coconut fiber mat, poked a hole into the dirt and carefully inserted the strawberries. It is a bit tricky to do without hurting the plants. Then I watered it again, to wash the dirt well around the roots. One thing I would do different next time is to let the dirt filled tower sit for a few days before planting the strawberries in it. After a week the dirt had settled a bit and pulled some of the berries down into the wire a bit. I pulled them back up, but my suggestion is wait a week, water it daily and let it settle before planting.

I added a mini bubbler-dripper on top of each tower and connected it to my timed irrigation, the towers will dry out a bit quicker then on flat ground and the berries need a good amount of water to produce berries.
They are growing for about a month in there now and even I lost a few plants, the remaining plants are growing nicely and starting to set some fruit. As the berries produce some runners I will be pinning the new plants into new holes and by next year maybe have all of the tower filled with plants.

Growing them vertical will be not just a space saver I think it will keep them cleaner and more disease free.
And I get to use their old space for my new flower garden.

disclaimer: Not to be shared with the Dervaes Family of Path to Freedom Website. Thank You