September 2012

Caretakers of the Seeds

We do not own the seeds we sell; we are simply caretakers of the seedstock, maintaining genetic purity, quality and viability while they are in our care. These seeds – all of them – belong to humanity. They are what have kept us alive for the past 12,000 to 15,000 years once the human race transitioned from hunter-gatherers into a more agricultural society, growing and saving the seeds from year to year, putting aside the very best seeds for planting the next year.

It is impossible to our way of thinking for anyone to “own” or “patent” seeds, as they are the very lifeblood of our race.

This is our full-time job as well as our consuming passion, not just a passing fancy or whimsical interest. This, our life’s calling, demands every bit of education, experience, creativity, energy and enthusiasm that we have. Everyday. We see, looking back, that every single thing that we’ve done in our life has led us up to this point and has been a preparation for this work that has selected us.

We have come to realize that the more knowledge and experience that we gain, the more that have yet to gain. Our road ahead is full of learning and we welcome that. We are eternally grateful for the mentors that have most graciously taken us under their wing, educating us and showing us the best possible ways to move forward with moral and ethical integrity, as well as seed purity, vitality and quality. Thank you ever so much! We are in your debt.

There are those who want to put seed companies out of business, advocating for everyone to save their own seeds and maintain their own seed banks and seedstocks. This is a noble proposition, but we don’t believe it to be feasible. We have almost 20 years of growing and soil building knowledge and experience behind us, yet we feel in so many ways that we are just beginning our journey into deeper knowledge. This is our commitment, to bringing out the best varieties and maintaining the highest quality of seeds and it takes all of our time and then some. We don’t see everyone as being interested or able to make this commitment over the long term. This is one of the main reasons why viable, family owned and run seed companies are so critically important today. It is human scale agriculture in the purest form, at the very beginning of the cycle of food.

We see diversified, decentralized and local human scale agriculture as being the answer to how we are going to feed ourselves in the long term. It starts with the absolute best seeds possible, which is in turn made possible by individual seed companies that have a commitment and passion to constant, careful observation and maintenance of the highest quality seeds, correcting genetic drift, anomalies and other problems as they arise in partnerships with highly dedicated and experienced seed growers who are experts in their fields.

This doesn’t and can’t happen overnight or in a short time frame; it takes years and years. We are often looking 3 – 5 years into the future in order to introduce a new variety of seed from the time it arrives in our hands. We do the initial evaluation grow-out, and if we like it one of our growers will do another grow-out for observation of any variability, drift or evidence of possible cross breeding. The subsequent grow-outs ensure that each new generation is growing true to the previous one and the established standard for that variety. Each grow-out requires a full season. If there are problems, they are evaluated to see what is required to correct them, and if it is worth the time or if it would be better to start with another variety that looks more promising. After the evaluations the production grow-out begins taking place. This in itself may take 2 or more years, depending on how much seed we have to start with. Some seed production takes 3 or more years just to reach a genetically viable starting population. From there the seed production growing takes place, and we can offer that seed variety for sale.

This level of dedication is labor and resource intensive, one of the reasons that diverse family seed companies are needed to provide the quality of seed we need to grow our food. Individual gardeners can participate in saving and preserving seeds and diversity as well, learning to save a smaller number of particularly tasty varieties on a smaller scale. We strongly encourage everyone to try saving at least a small portion of their seeds. It is a wonderful education into the miracle that is seed, along with the irrepressible adaptability of the seed. The humble strength of life is clearly shown each spring when moist warm soil breaks the dormancy of a seed, giving it another chance to express its full genetic encoding and potential. As with gardening, saving seeds will make you a better observer, a better gardener and a better steward of your part of the earth.

We feel that it is through a collaborative effort between small family run seed companies, seed saving exchanges and dedicated individual gardeners that the strength of the seed future is the strongest. Independent, decentralized yet cooperative seed production and distribution is the most robust and resilient model that offers the best protection against the loss of seed varieties to a patent or consolidation effort.

by Stephen Scott

Best Homemade Fish Emulsion

A person is using tongs to stir something in a bowl.

Fish Emulsion Feeds Your Plants

Fish emulsion has been a go-to product for the organic and natural home gardener for years now, as it has proven its effectiveness in feeding the soil and plants with biologically available nutrients while increasing soil and microbe health. The main drawback to commercial fish emulsion is the cost and the smell. While we can’t do anything to help you with the fishy smell, we can help you make your own fish emulsion that will not only save you a lot of money in product and shipping costs, but just might make a better product than you can buy! This homemade fish emulsion will almost always supply more nutrients than commercially available, but also supplies much more beneficial bacteria from the brewing process. In order to ship, commercial emulsions have little to no active bacteria, because they make containers swell as they continue to grow!

All fish emulsions are good organic nitrogen sources, but they also supply phosphorus, potassium, amino acids, proteins and trace elements or micro-nutrients that are really needed to provide deep nutrition to your soil community and plants. One of the benefits of fish emulsion is that they provide a slower release of nutrients into the soil without over-feeding all at once. It is usually applied as a soil drench, but some gardeners swear by using it as a foliar fertilizer as well.

Adding seaweed or kelp to the brewing process adds about 60 trace elements and natural growth hormones to the mix, really boosting the effectiveness of the fish emulsion. The seaweed or kelp transforms the emulsion into a complete biological fertilizer. Beneficial soil fungi love seaweed. Dried seaweed is available at most oriental grocery stores. The amount you need to add will depend entirely on your soil needs. If you are just getting started in improving your soil, add up to a cup of dried seaweed or 2 – 3 cups fresh. If your soil is doing pretty good then add about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of dried seaweed and up to 1 – 2 cups fresh.

Making Your Own Fish Emulsion

To make your own, obtain a dedicated 5 gallon bucket for this project. Trust me; you won’t want to use it for anything else once you’re done! Buy 10 cans of herring type fish such as sardines, mackerel or anchovies. Sourcing these from a dollar store or scratch and dent store makes perfect sense, as you don’t care about the can and aren’t going to eat them.

Rich, well-aged compost is a key ingredient to great fish emulsion, as it has lots of active microbes and other biological life which will help kick-start the fermentation of the fish. A good compost hunting dog is not required, but really helps. We’ve found the Doberman breed to be very helpful in finding just the right compost! Dalmatians do a pretty good job as well.

Fill the bucket half full of well-aged compost, aged sawdust or leaves, or a combination of all three. You are looking for the dark brown, crumbly compost that smells like rich earth.

Add water to about 2 inches from the top…

add in the cans of fish, rinsing the cans with the water to make sure you get every last drop of the “good stuff”. The juices or oils in the can will breed beneficial microbes and supply extra proteins.

To supercharge the brew, add 1/4 to 1/2 cup of blackstrap molasses to provide sugars and minerals to the fermenting process. The sugars also help control odors. Next, add the chopped or powdered seaweed to the mix. If you need extra sulfur and magnesium, add 1 Tbs Epsom salts.

Stir well and cover with a lid to control the odor, but not tightly as it will build pressure as it brews.

Be Careful!

NOTE – Make sure that flies do not get into the bucket or you will have a marvelous breeding ground for maggots! One solution is to drill several holes in the lid for the bucket and glue screen mesh on the inside of the lid, allowing air flow but keeping those pesky flies out. Remember, you are brewing the most delicious aromas the flies have ever smelled!

Let it Ferment

Let it brew for at least 2 weeks, a month is better. Give the contents a good stir every couple of days.

Once it has brewed for a month, it is ready for use!

There are a lot of ways to use this brew, so be creative. Some folks will strain off the solids, put them in the compost pile and use the liquid as a concentrated “tea” to be diluted with water. Others keep everything together and stir the mix well before taking what they need. What you have is a supply of bio-available nutrients in a soluble form.

Use as a Soil Drench and Foliar Fertilizer

For a soil drench, use 2 – 3 Tbs per gallon of water and apply to the roots on a monthly basis during the growing season. 1 Tbs per gallon of water makes a good foliar fertilizer. Just make sure to apply it by misting during the cooler parts of the day, not drenching the leaves in the heat. Half a cup per gallon will give your compost pile a kick start.

This brew will keep for at least a year, but you might want to make fresh each season. If you need less than 5 gallons, halve or quarter the recipe. It will smell, so store it where the odor won’t knock you out. I don’t trust the “deodorized” fish emulsions, as to remove the odor, some component of the fish product was removed either physically or chemically and is no longer available as a nutrient.

by Stephen Scott

Garden Advice

Rough Service Lightbulbs Can Kill Your Chickens

Backyard chicken owners looking for an alternative to heat lamp bulbs to keep coops and water warm in the winter should beware of “rough service” bulbs that have a coating that makes them shatter resistant. That coating is Teflon or PTFE, and is deadly to your chicken flock. There have been a number of people experiencing this problem, but there remains a lot of folks who have not heard of this yet.

The Teflon gives off toxic gasses when heated. Birds (such as chickens or other poultry) are very sensitive to airborne toxins and can die from the exposure to such fumes. This can happen quickly. There have been a number of reports of small flock owners finding their entire flock dead in the morning after installing this type of light. A large scale poultry research facility has experienced the death of all 2400 birds over the course of a few days following the changing out of regular heat bulbs for the rough service lightbulbs. Sylvania and GE both make these rough service lightbulbs and are readily available, often close to the heat lamps in stores. GE has no warning labels on their bulbs, but Sylvania does have a sticker warning that the bulb can be harmful to poultry.

The Teflon starts to off gas as low as 325F and possibly lower. Many light bulbs will reach better than 500F, creating a lot of initial off gassing when first turned on. This cloud of toxic gas is what kills the chickens and other poultry in their coops on a cold night.

On a side note, this is the same Teflon used to coat the common household pans, with the same off gassing into your kitchen where you and your family are breathing the air!

by Stephen Scott

Garden Advice

A Banker Bets on Sustainable Agriculture

“It now appears that we are about five years into a chronic global food crisis that is unlikely to fade for many decades…”

These words were written by none other than an investment strategist who looks at what is or will be profitable in the future and he is betting that sustainable agriculture is one of them. Jeremy Grantham has also talked about the finite resources that are becoming apparent to all but those in government, industry and economists. He believes that our most pressing issue we are facing today is not energy or one of many other crises that we are facing, but food. Food, the third most important ingredient for life is, or soon will become center stage of the world’s attention.

Why the focus on food? Won’t GMOs and industrial agriculture feed us all? The fact of the matter is that system is completely unsustainable. It requires massive amounts of petrochemicals and petroleum just to keep it moving, much less expanding. As the cost of those petrochemicals and fuel continue to rise it will simply become much too expensive to grow food in that system, despite any and all subsidies, price protections or trade restrictions. Right now the foundation of the food system is in crises. The farmers are being squeezed while the corporate food manufacturers are still profitable. It is very easy to see the declining grain production (even before the drought of the past 2 years), across the board increases in resource costs and plummeting crop yields from petrochemical fertilizers. The future of industrial scale farming isn’t looking too rosy right now. What happens when the farmers can’t afford to farm? When they can’t afford the costs to run the tractors, buy the seeds, fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides that are required to grow the industrial crops? Who will do the growing then?

From his quarterly letter –

“¢ Grain productivity has fallen decade by decade since 1970 from 3.5% to 1.5%. Quite probably, the most efficient grain producers are approaching a “glass ceiling” where further increases in productivity per acre approach zero at the grain species’ limit (just as race horses do not run materially faster now than in the 1920s). Remarkably, investment in agricultural research has steadily fallen globally, as a percent of GDP.
“¢ Water problems will increase to a point where gains from increased irrigation will be offset by the loss of underground water and the salination of the soil.
“¢ Persistent bad farming practices perpetuate land degradation, which will continue to undermine our long-term sustainable productive capacity.
“¢ Incremental returns from increasing fertilizer use will steadily decline on the margin for fertilizer use has increased five-fold in the last 50 years and the easy pickings are behind us.
“¢ There will be increased weather instability, notably floods and droughts, but also steadily increasing heat. The last three years of global weather were so bad that to draw three such years randomly would have been a remote possibility. The climate is changing.
“¢ The costs of fertilizer and fuel will rise rapidly.

Grantham believes that we will transition to a more or less to a sustainable, organic and largely regional food system in the foreseeable future. This, coincidentally, is almost the exact same argument that organic and sustainable farming folks have been talking about for several years now, although for somewhat different reasons. His thoughts are that we have a choice – we can voluntarily create and adapt the above mentioned sustainable food production model, or we will be forced to do so. Not by any government or corporation, but by scarcity. When industrial, chemical agriculture finally proves that it really can’t feed the world, what then? Organic, sustainable agriculture may be the only player left at the table.

He has bet on organic and sustainable agriculture by establishing foundations that finance research into better organic agriculture methods. Once the best practices and highest productivity methods are known, he wants to directly finance those organic farms. This will take some time, as there is no current infrastructure, training or experience on this scale to draw from and must be created. Current models need to be scaled up and tested to be able to dovetail into an overall system that not only helps to maintain itself, but grows itself as organically as the food it produces.

A Banker Bets on Organic Farming

by Stephen Scott

Garden Advice

Help Build a Better World

We need to build a better world, you and I. There has never been more of a need than there is today. There has also never been a better time. There is an old saying, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”

A better world where our lives make sense, where we stop working longer hours in jobs we detest to buy things that fill our homes but don’t and can’t make us happy. Where we realize that we – not things and not money – make ourselves and each other happy. Our lives are better when we work with others, helping them while helping ourselves at the same time. A world where what we do engages us and what we love, and that work fulfills us and gives us and the world meaning. Where both parties in each and every transaction benefit, and the first thought isn’t “what profit is there for me?” and the dollar isn’t the sole measure of benefit, profit and satisfaction.

There are many critical systems that are in decline or are breaking, but do not give up. Depending on where you look and what you read the world is on the brink of catastrophic collapse in many areas; finance, food, energy, water and populations are all at risk. There are dire predictions of dark and difficult times ahead, but do not give up.

These circumstances are precisely why you and I must build a better world. We must begin today. Very few people have a positive outlook for the next 5 to 10 years, but we can change that. When questioned, those same people give the reason for their pessimistic outlook as due to the state of the world and to circumstances created by governments and corporations. In other words, they are afraid of external circumstances beyond their control.

We start building a better world by realizing, recognizing and taking responsibility for the only thing that we truly have control over in our lives – our choices. We always have the power of choice. We constantly choose, for better or for worse. Several hundred times a day we make a choice. Our choices affect not only us, but those around us and multitudes of others we will never meet. There are those that say that one person cannot make a difference. This is untrue. One person, alone, will have a difficult time making a difference. However, we are very rarely truly alone – especially in our choices. Our lives are the direct results of our choices, made throughout the years that have lead us to this place in time where we are today. Who we are, what our character is, what we do in life, where we live are all the results of choices we have made.

Our most powerful choice to build a better world may be one that we make with little thought every day. Our choice of how and what to spend our money on is one of those paradoxes that goes largely unnoticed and unexamined in our lives. Both Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan have said that we vote with our forks three times a day. Many of us have heard the “Buy local” and “Know your farmer” mantra, but what does that mean?

What it really comes down to is taking the responsibility of who you support with your dollars. Every time you make a purchase, you are financially helping that company, along with endorsing the way it does business. For better or worse, this is what happens. Do you love the eggs, greens and tomatoes from the young farmer at the Saturday Farmer’s market? Wonderful! Buy them and you directly help that company stay in business and grow. Are you upset at how many jobs have been sent to China, and the newly introduced GMO sweet corn in Wal-Mart? Good! Do you buy anything from them? If so, despite your disagreement, you are helping them to stay in business and grow. It really is that simple.

Realize, though, that simple almost never means easy. It can be tough to make good choices. This is one of the reasons we are so passionate about small business and human scale living. Our individual purchases means very little to a large international corporation, but means a lot to a small family owned farm or business. There is a quote that sums this up nicely –

“When you buy from a small mom or pop business, you are not helping a CEO buy a third vacation home.
You are helping a little girl get dance lessons, a little boy get his team jersey, a mom or dad put food on the table, a family pay a mortgage, or a student pay for college.
Our customers are our shareholders and they are the ones we strive to make happy. “

This can seem daunting at first. There are so many choices about so many things that we don’t want to get wrong, we don’t know where to start. There is also so much negativity around, it can seem to be simply too much. Start small, start by focusing on and emphasizing the positive choices that we can make today. We won’t build a better world by getting rid of the negatives; we will build it by focusing on and increasing the positives. When more of a positive nature is added to a system, it will naturally and automatically become better as the positive displaces the negative. What we focus on – positive or negative – think about, talk about and act on will grow. Help grow the good in our lives. Find good, positive ideas, thoughts and directions, and then incorporate them into your life. It takes some work to concentrate on the good and beneficial, but once those habits are started they will continue to help.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that you cannot make a difference. Never underestimate the power of change inherent in a small effort, movement or idea. Committed people make the difference on a large and small scale every day. As the famous quote from Margaret Mead goes –

“Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Start by finding and working on what you can do, not what can’t be done. Build a better life, starting with your life. Plant a garden at home, no matter how small. Container gardens are great, they are simple to set up and use and can grow some good food. Help out at the community garden, with or without a plot of your own. Share your veggies with a neighbor, family or friends. Help out at the food bank, Meals on Wheels, or your local soup kitchen with donated veggies or your time.

Be on the lookout for opportunities to enrich and improve your life. Stop thinking about the dollar value in each opportunity, and make the decision to take it or not based on how much positive or good it will bring to your life and others. Read more. Read to learn and not just for entertainment. Study your environment and habitat where you live. Get to know what grows wild there. Find out what is edible and what is not. Learn what edibles will grow well with little care and plant some. Start a food forest in your yard or neighborhood and share with those around you. Make a point of getting to know someone new at the Farmer’s market, or going to the Farmer’s market if you don’t already go. Learn what is made in your community or town. You might be surprised at what you don’t know about where you live. Once you start getting to know more about where you live, you just might find that you like it more than you initially thought.

These are some of the ways you and I can build a better world. We can start today.

by Stephen Scott