Compost and its Importance to the Food We Eat

Sitric Compost Garden Community -

Dan Barber, US chef extraordinaire and champion of sustainable agriculture (www.bluehillfarm.com/food/overview/team/dan-barber) explains that COMPOST is the most important ingredient in his recipe for the best tasting salad.
Compost warms the greenhouse seedlings. Compost does so much more .

Sitric Compost Garden Community - Home of the Sitric Picnic

Scientists say California hasn’t been this dry in 500 years

Energy and Environment

Scientists say California hasn’t been this dry in 500 years

By Darryl Fears
September 2015 
 

A snowboarder threads his way through patches of dirt in Olympic Valley, Calif. Many Tahoe-area ski resorts have closed due to low snowfall as California’s historic drought continues. (Max Whittaker/Getty Images)

Researchers knew California’s drought was already a record breaker when they set out to find its exact place in history, but they were surprised by what they discovered: It has been 500 years since what is now the Golden State has been this dry.

California is in the fourth year of a severe drought with temperatures so high and precipitation so low that rain and snow evaporate almost as soon as they hit the ground. A research paper released Monday said an analysis of blue oak tree rings in the state’s Central Valley showed that the amount of mountain snow California relies on for moisture hasn’t been so low since the 1500s. That was around the time when European explorers landed in what became San Diego, when Columbus set off on a final voyage to the Caribbean, when King Henry VIII was alive.

A team of researchers embarked on the study in April when state officials announced they had found “no snow whatsoever” in the Sierra Nevada mountains for the first time in 75 years of measuring. The research showed the level of snowpack is actually the lowest it has been in five centuries. Mountain snowpack provides 30 percent of California’s annual water supply when it melts and flows to rivers, streams, lakes and reservoirs. Across the state, the levels of water in those bodies are nearing historic lows.

[Global warming worsened the California drought, scientists say]

“The results were astonishing,” Valerie Trouet, an associate professor at the University of Arizona who was a senior author for the study published in the journal Nature. “We knew it was an all-time low over a historical period, but to see this as a low for the last 500 years, we didn’t expect that. There’s very little doubt about it.”

Drought plagues California

Climate models suggest many Western states will face longer and harsher droughts in the decades to come.

In a statement, Nature said the “findings highlight the critical condition” of California’s reservoirs and groundwater, where water the state needs for municipalities and agriculture is stored. Both of those sources are slowly being drained, with little precipitation to replenish the rivers and lakes that supply them.

The small amount of moisture stored in plants and the soil is quickly evaporating into the state’s dry atmosphere, exposing the parched ground to lightning strikes that spark wildfires. California has experienced about a thousand more wildfires this fire season compared to last, including two that are currently raging in the northern part of the state.

California is having its “second-busiest season in a decade,” said Stanton Florea, a spokesman for the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Region, which manages 21 million acres of wildlands in California.

In April, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) ordered the state’s first mandatory water cut for metropolitan areas. He announced the restriction from a dry patch of grass in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe that normally would have been wet from melting snow.

Since that day, the state’s 400 water utilities have implemented water cuts of up to 35 percent in some areas, and farmers who long enjoyed the right to freely take water from rivers to water crops and hydrate livestock gave up a quarter of those rights for fear that the state would restrict them even more. Federal and state officials have used convoys to truck salmon and other fish from one part of the state to another, fearing a mass die-off if they tried to migrate to the Pacific Ocean in rivers that are abnormally low and completely dry in places.

[10 animals that will disappear with Western sagebrush]

And the news keeps getting worse. A study by scientists at NASA and Columbia University said California was one of several states in the Southwest facing a mega-drought that could last up to 30 years if greenhouse gas emissions are not dramatically curtailed by 2050. A study by scientists at Stanford University said a future of more-frequent drought in California is a near certainty because temperatures are increasing at a time when precipitation rates are steady, allowing heat to overwhelm the moisture. And another Columbia study said California’s current drought is part of a natural pattern, but human-caused climate change has made it significantly worse.

The Columbia study analyzed month-to-month climate data between 1901 and 2014 to find fluctuations in precipitation, wind, temperature and humidity. It said average temperatures in California have increased by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over 113 years. And, starting in the 1960s, heat increased with the introduction of more greenhouse gases from automobiles and other sources.

“When greenhouse gases accumulate, it’s like a bully showing up at your door to demand that you give it more and more every year,” said the study’s lead author, Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at Columbia University’s Earth Science Institute. In California, that meant more moisture evaporated from rain and from groundwater sprayed on crops in farming regions such as the Central Valley.

Thursday’s study “confirms the same message” of the earlier studies, and supports their warnings about the impacts of climate change, Trouet said. “It’s dry. We’re not just confirming, we’re refining.”

The historic nature of the current drought was well known, but how it ranked over time was not. When Trouet and her team learned in April that snowpack that usually supplies 30 percent of the California’s potable water each year was so low, “we realized we had the data from previous research to put this into context for the longer term,” she said.

What they didn’t have were fresh tree samples, so Stahle of Arkansas traveled to the Central Valley and extracted a core sample from blue oak trees. Blue oaks love winter rain, and their tree rings express it with wide bands. Low periods of moisture result in narrow bands. “It’s like a bar code,” said Trouet.

A warning buoy sits on the dry, cracked bed of Lake Mendocino near Ukiah, Calif. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

Blue oaks in the valley are a long way from the Sierra Nevada mountains in the northern part of the state, but the same weather systems that supply rain to the low elevations where they stand result in snow in high mountain elevations. Analyzing the new core samples and others taken in previous years, the scientists didn’t observe rings as narrow at low elevations as today’s until a period that dated from the 1500s.

“We looked at the past 500 years,” Trouet said. “This is the most extreme. It doesn’t mean this won’t happen again for another 500 years. It’s likely that this will happen more often in the future because of the low amount of precipitation combined with higher temperatures makes it likely that they will occur together more often, causing droughts.”

Hundreds of homes destroyed in Calif. Valley Fire  ----  Play Video1:12
A fast-moving wildfire in north-central California has destroyed hundreds of building since igniting Saturday. Thousands of residents have been forced to flee Middletown and nearby communities. (Reuters)

 Darryl Fears has worked at The Washington Post for more than a decade, mostly as a reporter on the National staff. He currently covers the environment, focusing on the Chesapeake Bay and issues affecting wildlife.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/14/scientists-say-its-been-500-years-since-california-was-this-dry/

How changing the way we farm could reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Certain farming practices can trap a majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. On a global scale, this could even lead to a net decrease in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels — or, in other words, help reverse climate change.

By Skylar Lindsay, FoodTank September 3, 2014

A recent study by the Rodale Institute documents how specific organic farming practices can trap a majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. On a global scale, this could even lead to a net decrease in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels — or, in other words, help reverse climate change.

The study, “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change: A Down-to-Earth Solution to Global Warming,” highlights soil’s natural ability to trap carbon from the atmosphere. This process, called carbon sequestration, occurs when photosynthesis removes carbon from the air faster than other biological processes, like respiration, release it.

According to the Rodale, if half of the world’s croplands were shifted to regenerative methods, the world could reduce net annual greenhouse gas emissions from 51 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent to below 41– the threshold necessary by 2020 to limit global warming to 1.5º C.

The figures are based on 75 peer-reviewed studies and on test sites throughout the world where organic and conventional methods are compared side by side. These include Rodale’s long-running Farming Systems Trial (FST) in the United States and more recent Tropical Farming Systems Trial in Costa Rica. Rodale uses this data to calculate a rate of carbon sequestration per area of land cultivated, and then scale-up to see the impact of global adoption of each practice.

For example, if all current cropland were cultivated using methods tested in Iran and Egypt, 21 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO₂e), or 40 percent of global emissions, could be sequestered annually. If applied to the world’s pasture and grassland, Rodale calculates its recommendations could sequester 37 GtCO₂e, or over 70 percent of emissions. Changing the cultivation of cropland, pasture, and grassland together could lead to a net reduction in the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

Rodale’s recommendations focus on soil health, biodiversity, and avoiding farming methods that contribute to a net release of carbon including the overuse and misuse of pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and unnecessary tilling. The regenerative techniques include crop rotation, cover crops, mulching and green manure, composting, and no-till practices.

Cover cropping techniques increase soil carbon via photosynthesis and better carbon retention in topsoil layers. Perennial cover crops, called living mulches, are especially effective due to large, deep root systems. Strategic crop rotations increase soil carbon levels, and coupled with on-farm composting and cover cropping, encourages soil microbes that absorb carbon. These regenerative practices also help carbon-absorbing fungi populations.

Skylar Lindsay majors in Peace & Conflict Studies at Colgate University, where he heads the organic farming initiative and leads for the Outdoor Education program.


http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Bite/2014/0903/How-changing-the-way-we-farm-could-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions

The Beauty of Pollination - Moving Art ™

The Beauty of Pollination - Moving Art ™
- a very short, but beautiful video presented as part of a TED Talk conference in 2011.


This video was shown at the TED conference in 2011, with scenes from "Wings of Life", a film about the threat to essential pollinators that produce over a third of the food we eat. The seductive love dance between flowers and pollinators sustains the fabric of life and is the mystical keystone event where the animal and plant worlds intersect that make the world go round.  Enjoy!!!

"Wings of Life" now streaming on Netflix!

Wasps saved her gardens

 

 
Wasps saved her geraniums

10/18/2014 12:00 AM

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/living/home-garden/garden-detective/article2952818.html#storylink=cpy

A reader had a complaint regarding tiny green caterpillars in her geranium plants. The answer is to get rid of the white moth that lays an egg in each geranium bud. The caterpillar egg hatches out in a few days and the tiny worm eats the inside of the bud. Hence, there’s no flower or a damaged one.
The secret to my hedge rows of beautiful full-blooming geraniums is a black wasp that buzzes in and out of the bushes and leaves them thoroughly devoid of eggs and caterpillars. The wasps come to my garden uninvited. Where they come from, I do not know. They just solved a bad situation.

Margaret Tucher, Davis

You are fortunate that a beneficial insect – a parasitic wasp – is limiting pests on your geraniums, said UC master gardener Lorraine Van Kekerix.

The wasps break the life cycle of a common moth that lays eggs in several common flowering plants including petunias and geraniums, one of the moth’s preferred host plants. The adult moth does not eat the plant.

The moth’s wings are about 1 1/2 inches across; the color ranges from light green to brownish with lighter colored bars across the wings. It’s not the familiar white cabbage moth but another pest, the geranium or tobacco budworm moth.

When the moth eggs hatch, geranium budworm larvae emerge. The larvae eat the plants and do the damage. Specifically, geranium budworms eat the developing flower buds so the buds do not open. Severely affected plants may not produce flowers at all.

The geranium budworms eat flower petals as well as the buds. If the infestation is particularly large, they may eat leaves as well. While this pest prefers geraniums, petunias and tobacco (including flowering tobacco), it will also attack other flowers and plants.

What you describe in your rows of geraniums is a beneficial insect, a parasitic wasp. A parasite feeds on a host organism. Most parasites are smaller than the host and often are the larval stages of an insect. Specialized flies and wasps are the most common types of parasitic insects, and there are several types of parasitic wasps that can attack geranium budworms.

Most of these wasps are tiny and do not sting people. Parasitic wasps lay eggs in or on the geranium budworm. When the wasp larvae emerge, they develop by feeding on and killing the worm. Parasitic wasps can lay hundreds of eggs a day.

A beneficial insect is part of the natural cycle of checks and balances when it destroys or reduces a rapid increase in the pest population. We benefit as we no longer need to deal with the pest. There are many ways to protect and increase the population of these naturally occurring beneficial insects in our gardens.

Start by reducing use of broad-spectrum pesticides (that kill a wide range of insects) in the garden. Broad-spectrum pesticides often kill the beneficial insects in higher proportions than the pests. Many pesticide residues persist in the garden, and those residues can reduce the reproduction of these beneficial insects or kill them long after the pesticide was originally applied.

If a pesticide is needed, spare the beneficials by choosing a less persistent pesticide or one that kills only specific pests. For example, Bacillus thuringensis affects only caterpillars including geranium budworms, hornworms and cabbage worms.

To maintain a population of beneficial insects, design your garden to provide the food and habitat they need. These insects need nectar, pollen and shelter throughout the growing season so the population is large enough to control the pests.

Gardens with a wide variety of plants that bloom at different times throughout the seasons can provide these good guys the food and shelter they need at all life stages.

For more information on beneficial insects, visit the University of California’s Integrated Pest Management website and obtain Pest Note 74140, “Biological Control and Natural Enemies.” You can find it at www.ipm.ucdavis.edu.

The IPM website also features a picture gallery of natural enemies, which includes beneficial insects.
The gallery is very useful in identifying beneficial insects. It’s likely you’ll recognize several that are already helping to control the pests in your garden.

http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/living/home-garden/garden-detective/article2952818.html

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/living/home-garden/garden-detective/article2952818.html#storylink=cpy

Hope in a Changing Climate - trailer

Hope in a Changing Climate places the restoration of ecosystems at the centre of global discussions on climate change, poverty and sustainable agriculture.

 

This documentary entitled Hope in a Changing Climate highlights that fertile, life-sustaining environments can come out of degraded ecosystems. It shows projects in China, Ethiopa and Rwanda where large areas of decimated ecosystems that were able to be restored through the efforts of local people, enabling them to break free from poverty.

Our Bees, Ourselves - Bees and Colony Collapse

Our Bees, Ourselves
Bees and Colony Collapse

MARK WINSTON     JULY 14, 2014

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — AROUND the world, honeybee colonies are dying in huge numbers: About one-third of hives collapse each year, a pattern going back a decade. For bees and the plants they pollinate — as well as for beekeepers, farmers, honey lovers and everyone else who appreciates this marvelous social insect — this is a catastrophe.

But in the midst of crisis can come learning. Honeybee collapse has much to teach us about how humans can avoid a similar fate, brought on by the increasingly severe environmental perturbations that challenge modern society.

Honeybee collapse has been particularly vexing because there is no one cause, but rather a thousand little cuts. The main elements include the compounding impact of pesticides applied to fields, as well as pesticides applied directly into hives to control mites; fungal, bacterial and viral pests and diseases; nutritional deficiencies caused by vast acreages of single-crop fields that lack diverse flowering plants; and, in the United States, commercial beekeeping itself, which disrupts colonies by moving most bees around the country multiple times each year to pollinate crops.

The real issue, though, is not the volume of problems, but the interactions among them. Here we find a core lesson from the bees that we ignore at our peril: the concept of synergy, where one plus one equals three, or four, or more. A typical honeybee colony contains residue from more than 120 pesticides. Alone, each represents a benign dose. But together they form a toxic soup of chemicals whose interplay can substantially reduce the effectiveness of bees’ immune systems, making them more susceptible to diseases.

These findings provide the most sophisticated data set available for any species about synergies among pesticides, and between pesticides and disease. The only human equivalent is research into pharmaceutical interactions, with many prescription drugs showing harmful or fatal side effects when used together, particularly in patients who already are disease-compromised. Pesticides have medical impacts as potent as pharmaceuticals do, yet we know virtually nothing about their synergistic impacts on our health, or their interplay with human diseases.

Observing the tumultuous demise of honeybees should alert us that our own well-being might be similarly threatened. The honeybee is a remarkably resilient species that has thrived for 40 million years, and the widespread collapse of so many colonies presents a clear message: We must demand that our regulatory authorities require studies on how exposure to low dosages of combined chemicals may affect human health before approving compounds.

Bees also provide some clues to how we may build a more collaborative relationship with the services that ecosystems can provide. Beyond honeybees, there are thousands of wild bee species that could offer some of the pollination service needed for agriculture. Yet feral bees — that is, bees not kept by beekeepers — also are threatened by factors similar to those afflicting honeybees: heavy pesticide use, destruction of nesting sites by overly intensive agriculture and a lack of diverse nectar and pollen sources thanks to highly effective weed killers, which decimate the unmanaged plants that bees depend on for nutrition.

Recently, my laboratory at Simon Fraser University conducted a study on farms that produce canola oil that illustrated the profound value of wild bees. We discovered that crop yields, and thus profits, are maximized if considerable acreages of cropland are left uncultivated to support wild pollinators.

A variety of wild plants means a healthier, more diverse bee population, which will then move to the planted fields next door in larger and more active numbers. Indeed, farmers who planted their entire field would earn about $27,000 in profit per farm, whereas those who left a third unplanted for bees to nest and forage in would earn $65,000 on a farm of similar size.

Such logic goes against conventional wisdom that fields and bees alike can be uniformly micromanaged. The current challenges faced by managed honeybees and wild bees remind us that we can manage too much. Excessive cultivation, chemical use and habitat destruction eventually destroy the very organisms that could be our partners.

And this insight goes beyond mere agricultural economics. There is a lesson in the decline of bees about how to respond to the most fundamental challenges facing contemporary human societies. We can best meet our own needs if we maintain a balance with nature — a balance that is as important to our health and prosperity as it is to the bees.

Mark Winston, a biologist and the director of the Center for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, is the author of the forthcoming book “Bee Time: Lessons From the Hive.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 15, 2014, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Our Bees, Ourselves.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/opinion/bees-and-colony-collapse.html

No-till farming's Johnny Appleseed

 

No-till farming’s Johnny Appleseed — in a grimy Prius

By Nathanael Johnson

17 Apr 2014
 
Let’s start with Jeff Mitchell’s car. From the outside, it looks like a regular, if slightly dinged-up, white Prius. But inside it’s so messy that it’s hard for me to describe it without sounding like I’m exaggerating.

 









When I say the back seat is packed solidly with papers, I mean that literally: It’s as if Mitchell had pulled up alongside a set of filing cabinets and transferred everything that could fit into the back, carefully filling the leg space until it was high enough to be incorporated into the stack on the seats. The papers are wedged solidly together, three-quarters of the way up to the headrests.

There’s some PVC pipe back there too, some metal tools, a power cord, and some luggage. But that’s just what I could see on the surface. On the front dash there’s another layer of files, and a layer of dirt. And again, when I say dirt, I’m not overstating it. It’s not just a patina of dust; there are big clots of mud clinging to the face of the radio.

“What can I say?” Mitchell said when I asked about the state of his vehicle. “I’m embarrassed. People say I could just scatter seeds in here and they’d grow.”













I was never able to get a straight answer out of Mitchell as to why his car was so squalid, but it’s easy enough to guess. He has spent years driving up and down California’s long Central Valley, from one field to another, asking farmers to sign up to try new conservation techniques. He estimates that the car has driven 600,000 miles, though he can’t say for sure: The odometer stopped at 299,999. The car really does have to function as a high-speed file cabinet, as well as a mobile tool shed and soil-sample transporter.

“So, is this basically your life?” I asked, after about an hour driving down highway 99. I was expecting a good-natured gripe about him becoming permanently welded to the driver’s seat. But instead he said:

“You know, I’ve been truly fortunate. I’ve been doing this long enough that wherever I go I’ll look out and see a field and think, ‘That’s where we did that one trial, how’s that coming along?’ And there have been some big changes. It’s gratifying. There’s a soil scientist at Berkeley, Garrison Sposito, who says it may be just once or twice in a century that agriculture has an opportunity to re-create itself in a revolutionary way. Now, it may sound way over the top, but I think that’s what’s happening with conservation agriculture. It’s energizing for me to wake up to that every day.”

His official title is Associate Extension Vegetable Crops Specialist, but since the early 1990s Mitchell has really been a Johnny Appleseed for conservation, leading an ever-growing band of farmers toward sustainability. The idea driving Mitchell’s work is to develop farm systems that are closer to proven natural systems. That main idea breaks down into four tenets: Don’t disturb the soil; maximize the diversity of plants, insects, fungi, and microbiota; keep living roots in the soil; and keep the ground covered with plant residues. Since 1999, a team working with Mitchell has been demonstrating that it’s possible to do all that profitably.

After another hour on the road we reached the University of California West Side Extension and Research Center. Behind a handful of one-story buildings lay a collection of plots that workers have farmed continuously with conservation techniques. Mitchell took me to a field where they had been experimenting with a tomato-and-cotton rotation since 1999: “These beds have not moved, they have not been worked, in 15 years.” This 15-year study suggests that there are real, sustained benefits to the methods that the UC researchers have pioneered.

Mitchell waded into the shoulder-high cover crops of one bed. There’s a bed nearby of cleanly plowed soil. The contrast couldn’t be more different. Mitchell knelt in the cover crop, pushing aside the plants. The earth was covered in a layer of duff (dead leaves and twigs). It looked a lot like — well, like any bit of ground that humans haven’t recently scraped.

“There’s more organic material going into the soil, more carbon and more nitrogen. There’s more capture of water, and the shade and residue reduces soil water evaporation.”

These kind of innovations might seem obvious, but the journey to no-till cotton has been exasperatingly hard. Cotton requires coddling: It has a large seed, but it’s not a vigorous seedling, so often a farmer will knock off a layer of dry soil, drop the seeds onto moist earth, then cover it up. All this requires tilling the field. So Mitchell’s team decided to fine tune a planter to bury the seeds at just the right depth: Too close to the surface and they’d dry out, too deep and they’d never make it up. But when they ran the planter over the field it bounced over dry tomato stalks and dropped seeds higgledy-piggledy.

That first year the crop came up patchy. So they started trying residue managers, to push debris out of the way of each seed line, then brush it back into place. Mitchell went to Georgia to see what they were using there. They tried different timing and amounts of irrigation. If they tried to plant while the field was too wet the tractor would turn everything into a muddy mess. If they waited until it dried, the seed wouldn’t get enough moisture. If they irrigated after planting, the soil might form a hard crust that the seed couldn’t penetrate. They made pass after pass, making minute adjustments to the equipment until tempers frayed.

“I’m not an argumentative guy, but some of the things have been so trying,” Mitchell remembered. At the end of one of those days, one of Mitchell’s collaborators threw up his hands and said, “This will never work!” But then, in 2004, after years of disappointments, they finally hit on just the right combination of techniques — specific levels of irrigation, fine-tuned equipment, special disk and finger attachments for the planter — and got a beautiful cotton crop.

When all the pieces came together, the cotton began producing reliably. And Mitchell also noticed an added benefit: As the years passed, the soil improved, and all this got easier. Instead of the farm equipment needing to break up clots of compacted soil, the researchers found they were planting into soft, fine-grained earth, continuously tilled by worms and roots and microorganisms.

Mitchell’s work looks like a clear winner on paper: The yields are now the same as in the plowed beds, and the no-till beds take less work, sequester more carbon, suck up less water, and require less tractor fuel. And yet few farmers have taken up these methods.

“When I had the results showing that you can save 16 percent of irrigation water with residues and no till, I thought it would really change things in the Valley,” Mitchell mused. “But it hasn’t seemed to be that relevant.”

There are farmers successfully using these methods, but the percentage is still very low. And Mitchell can understand why people are skeptical. The cost savings — for fuel and labor (water prices are too variable to estimate) — are just $70 an acre, which isn’t terribly significant for a cotton farmer. And, as Mitchell knows, there are lots of things that can go wrong when a farmer starts trying new things.

That reluctance to change doesn’t slow Mitchell down for long. He knows that surmounting the technological challenges is less than half the battle. The bulk of the work is in teaching people how to do the same thing, and — even more importantly — convincing them that it’s worth their time.

And so he gets in the dirty Prius again, year in and year out, adding mile after uncounted mile, and carrying his Johnny Appleseed act across California.

http://grist.org/food/no-till-farmings-johnny-appleseed-in-a-grimy-prius/?ut

CAN PLANTS THINK?

This is a very creative, informative and cute video.  This short video shares information about  how plants problem solve, communicate with other plant life, and work together in groups to survive. Hope you enjoy it! 
 

Saving Seeds: 7 Reasons Why and Dozens of Tips for How

Saving seeds can help gardeners save money, grow better crops and become more self-reliant. Learn all about saving vegetable seeds.

By Roberta Bailey
December 2012/January 2013

When you save your own seeds, you are joining a chain of farmers, gardeners and seed savers that dates back to the Stone Age. All domestic crops were once wild plants that early humans selected to feed themselves or, later, their livestock. Today, gardeners save seeds for many reasons.

Photo By Dwight Kuhn

1. Money Savings. Every time you buy a seed variety, you invest in your future. For example, I just bought some expensive ‘Midori Giant’ soybean seed, and I feel better about the high price tag because I know I’ll have the variety as long as I continue saving seeds from my plants. (With soybeans, you simply let the last picking dry on the plant and you have next year’s seed.)

2. Seed Security. Hundreds of excellent plant varieties have been discontinued as big corporations have consolidated the seed industry and focused on more profitable hybrids. If you save your own seed, however, you control the supply. I save seed for ‘Miragreen’ and ‘Blizzard’ peas, ‘Lutz Green Leaf’ beets, and ‘Scarlet Keeper’ carrots because these varieties all grow well here in Maine but have become difficult to find in seed catalogs.

3. Regional Adaptation. This is where saving vegetable seeds can get exciting. Most commercially available seed has been selected because it performs fairly well across the entire country if given synthetic fertilizers. (Several companies now offer seeds selected specifically to perform well in organic conditions — but this isn’t the norm.) When you save seed from the best-performing plants grown on your own land and with your unique cultural conditions, you gradually develop varieties that are better adapted to your soil, climate and growing practices.

4. Consistent Quality. To keep their prices competitive when producing open-pollinated (OP) seed crops, large seed suppliers rarely “rogue” the fields to pull out inferior or off-type plants. This means the OP seed they sell to retail seed companies may have a lot of off-types in it. For gardeners and market farmers, that translates to loss of production per foot of row. To avoid this loss, either save your own seed, or pay more for premium seed produced by small, organic producers whose seeds cost more because they properly select for uniformity and rogue out any plants that aren’t true to type. (See our Seed Company Directory for profiles of more than 100 seed companies, some of which do their own variety trials and follow careful selection practices.)

5. The Joy of Learning. Some people are drawn to the science of seed saving because they want to take their gardening experience to a higher level. The more seeds you save, the more you inevitably learn about botany and the plant kingdom.

6. Explore Heirloom Varieties. Some folks like to grow heirloom varieties because doing so gives them a connection to our garden heritage. Others choose non-hybrid seeds because they don’t want to support the industrial agriculture system that increasingly controls our food supply. Plus, some older, open-pollinated varieties produce more nutritious crops than do modern hybrids bred mostly for high yields and long shelf life. 

7. Influence Crop Traits. Gene pools are incredibly elastic. By carefully observing your plants, you can save seed from those plants that best meet your needs for germination, ripening time, yield, specific fruit shape, flavor, storage qualities, less seediness, better disease resistance, bloom color, or other unique traits within the variety. With time, most of the plants you grow will have your desired traits. For instance, I obtained ‘Elka,’ a Slovakian poppy seed traditionally used before walnuts became commercially available. The Slovaks saved seeds from only the seed heads with the smallest vents — the little holes below the cap that allow the precious nutty seeds to disperse — until eventually their variety had all unvented heads that shed no seed. When I first grew ‘Elka,’ only two-thirds of its seed heads had no open vents. I started selectively saving seed only from the poppy heads that had closed vents. Within three years, all of my plants had seed heads with no open vents, and I didn’t lose any more seed.

Know Your Seed-Saving Goals

Think ahead and create specific goals as you save seed. If you’re saving an heirloom, are you trying to keep it true to its original traits? Are your seed-saving practices changing the plant? If you save seed from the first lettuce plant to bolt, you are selecting for lettuce that bolts early — not a good trait in lettuce. If you save seed from your tomato plants that did not succumb to late blight, you are selecting to improve that variety’s disease resistance.

When I started growing ‘Czech Black’ hot peppers, the fruits varied greatly in shape, from fat peppers with large seed cavities to slender ones with almost no seed. Most were medium-sized fruits that came to a blunt point. If I’d just wanted to save the most seeds with the least amount of work, I could have saved the fat peppers that had the most seeds. But I was trying to produce a seed crop to sell and it needed to be true to the plant type, so I saved seed from the medium-sized peppers growing on the sturdiest, highest-yielding plants. After four years, the peppers were uniform in fruit size and heat — plus, the plants were sturdier and more productive.

Seed-Saving Tips

You should always choose open-pollinated varieties for seed saving. Open-pollinated (OP) plants are non-hybrid plants with seed that is true generation after generation. A hybrid is the offspring of a cross between two parent varieties. Its seed will not be true to type if saved and replanted. Hybrid varieties will be labeled in catalogs and on seed packets as “Hybrid” or “F1.”

 There are two main types of open-pollinated varieties: self-pollinating and cross-pollinating. The easiest crops to save seed from are peas, beans, tomatoes and peppers, all of which are self-pollinating crops. Self-pollinating plants pollinate themselves, usually before the flowers open. The seed that you save from these plants and grow the next year will yield plants just like the original ones. To maintain the plant’s genetic diversity, you should ideally grow and save seed from 20 or more plants. If you save seed from only one self-pollinating plant, the plant will reproduce, but you are narrowing its genetic diversity.

Unlike self-pollinating plants, cross-pollinating plants, such as brassicas, corn, carrots, beets, squash, cucumbers and melons, must receive pollen (usually via wind or insects) from other plants of the same variety to produce viable, true-to-type seed. Cross-pollinating seed crops need to be isolated from other varieties of the same species. The simplest solution is to grow only one variety of a given species. You can save seeds from just one or two plants, but to maintain long-term health and vigor, you should buy new seed every few years unless you can collect from much larger populations than the 20 plants recommended for self-pollinators. Grow a minimum of 50 to 100 plants, and at least 200 for corn. Keep an eye out for plants that seem off-type (like my fat ‘Czech Black’ peppers), and don’t include them when you collect seed. (Go to the Seed Savers Exchange’s Planting and Seed Saving Instructions for details on isolation distances and other specifics for dozens of crops.)

To save seed from legumes, such as self-pollinating peas and beans, simply allow some pods to dry on the plant. Save the leftover seed at the end of your picking stage, or cordon off a section of the row. As the plants will need to be in the garden longer than the “green” stage, allow for this in your garden plan. Different varieties grown right next to each other will have minimal or no cross-pollination, but ideally you should separate varieties by 20 feet to avoid rare cases of cross-pollination.

If you want to save seeds for several varieties of a cross-pollinated crop in the same garden, a physical barrier such as a screen cage or row cover can keep the seed crops isolated. I use wire hoops and row covers on some seed crops to keep them pure. I also alternate years, growing one variety one year and another the next. My ‘Lutz’ beet seed crop produced enough seed to last five to 10 years, leaving me free to produce other beet seed crops in the interim.

If you’re growing a crop for seed, think ahead of time about spacing. Tomato, pepper or bean plants don’t need more space as seed crops, but biennial beets and carrots do because of how large the seed-producing plants will be in their second year. Beet plants that I set out the second year from roots I stored in my root cellar grew to 3-foot-wide plants. As large seed crops grow, also think about feeding them. I give my seed crops extra nitrogen and minerals during seed production.

When saving seeds, good record keeping is essential. Label your seedlings, your planted rows and your stored seed. I keep a map as a backup record, too, in case a critter makes off with a row marker or weather washes away a label’s ink.

If you spot an interesting off-type, you can save seed and grow it out the next year to see what happens. You may be on your way to creating a new variety — or at least embarking on a little botanical adventure.

Seed crops are harvested at different times than food crops. I often tie off an entire section of a row with ribbon and save all of the seed from that section, leaving it long after the rest of the plants have been removed. Watch plants that produce pods; when the pods are dry but not shattering, they are ready to harvest. I find handpicking pea pods easiest, at least on a small scale. I harvest entire bean and soybean plants and hang them until they are completely dry, then thresh them in a clean bucket. Blow off the chaff using wind or a fan, or sift it through a screen.

Flower heads are usually hand-harvested as they dry. Morning glories and vine crops often mature their bottom seed husks or pods first and progress up the vine as the season goes on. Spread the seed heads out to dry, rub them back and forth between your hands to free the seed, and then winnow or screen away most of the chaff.

Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and cucumbers can be picked as individual fruit. Let the fruit become very ripe to overripe to ensure mature seed. Leave cucumbers on the vine until they mature past the yellow blimp stage. Eggplant should be starting to brown and rot. Tomatoes and peppers need to be very ripe or just past ripe, or picked close to ripe, and then stored until fully ripe to overripe (a process called “after-ripening”).

Tomatoes and cucumbers are “wet” seeds: They have a gel sac around each seed that hinders germination and, in rare cases, can harbor disease. They need to be soaked to remove the gel sac. Squeeze the tomatoes or scrape the seed from the tomato cavities into a labeled container, covering it to keep out flies. Allow the seed to soak for 24 to 48 hours. Add more water after soaking. The good seed will sink while the immature seed will float along with the pulp. Pour off the pulp. Add more water and continue to pour off the pulp until all that remains is clean seed on the bottom. Pour this seed into a strainer to drain off all liquid, and then spread the seeds out to dry in a cool, airy place. I spread my seed on newspaper. Paper plates also work, but paper towels are too fibrous and will stick to the seeds. Label the newspaper or paper plate with the variety name. When the tomato seed is half-dried, stir it to make it less clumpy. After seeds have completely dried, break up any remaining seed clumps and pack the seeds for storage.

To save eggplant seed, grate the fruit or put it through a food processor, and then add it to water. The seed will sink and the pulp will float.
Peppers are even simpler: Just cut fruits open and remove and dry the seed.

For much more on seed-saving procedures for different crops, see the books Saving Seeds by Marc Rogers and The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds by Robert and Cheryl Moore Gough.

Store dried seed in glass jars, plastic bags or paper envelopes. Glass is best, as it does not allow moisture into the seed. Store seeds in a cool, dry place — ideally at less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit and at a relative humidity level of less than 50 percent. In general, for every 10 degrees colder the storage conditions, seed longevity doubles, so it’s best to keep seed in a covered container in a refrigerator. As long as the seed is very dry, it will last longest if you keep it in a freezer. All seed should be dried to a brittle state, ideally to less than 14 percent moisture (the level at which ice crystals won’t form on seeds if stored in the freezer). When you’re ready to use seeds that have been in freezer storage, allow the storage jar to come to room temperature before opening it to avoid condensation on the seed.

Different types of seed have different life spans. Many retain good germination for only a few years, while others stay viable for an impressively long time. Some classic one-year wonders are parsley, parsnip and onions. They may last a second year, but germination and vigor will be much lower. In general, pepper seeds maintain good germination rates for two years; legumes and carrots, three years; squash, beet, eggplant, tomato and brassicas, four years; cucumber, five years; and lettuce, six years. Exact storage conditions affect longevity greatly, however, and seeds from some of these crops can last 10 years or more.

You can do a simple germination test by loosely rolling a few dozen seeds in a moist, white paper towel, keeping it covered with plastic wrap and slightly moist to sprout the seed. Most seed will sprout in four to 28 days. If it takes longer or if less than 50 percent of the seeds sprout, you should probably toss the seeds.

If you end up with more seed than you can use, find a local seed swap. You can trade or share your seed, and you’ll come home with new, locally adapted seed varieties as well as a head likely spinning from all of the knowledge you’ve gleaned from fellow gardeners who share a love of growing great food.
 Organize a seed swap near you, and have MOTHER EARTH NEWS help you get the word out.

Saving Seeds to Sell

If you’re interested in selling seeds that you produce, contact a seed company’s purchaser to inquire about which crops the company needs grown. Specify your areas of expertise. Most seed companies contract for specific strains or varieties one to three years ahead of time.

If you pitch your favorite variety to a seed company, the representatives will want a seed sample so they can trial or observe it for a year or two. Then, if they’re interested, they will contract with you. Some seed companies have tight legal contracts and deadlines. Some use just verbal commitments, however, and you can provide a contract if you want more insurance in such cases.

Prices paid vary with each seed company, and certified organic seed commands higher prices. My experience selling organic seed has been the following: tomato seed at $360 per pound; peppers at $40 per ounce; flowers from $10 per gram for tiny seed to $50 per ounce; hardy, rare rice at $10 per ounce; peas and beans at $5 per pound.
A small seed company may only need a few ounces of seed. Larger companies rarely deal in small lots, requiring 1 to 20 pounds of small seed, such as that of tomatoes. Inquire upfront about amounts needed.

The Organic Seed Alliance provides education and advisory services for seed savers and is an excellent resource.

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Seed Saving Made Simple

Always save from open-pollinated (OP) varieties, not hybrids. There are two main types of OP crops:
• Self-pollinating (easiest to save), including peas, beans, tomatoes and peppers
• Cross-pollinating (require isolation), including brassicas, corn, carrots, beets, squash, cucumbers and melons

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/saving-seeds-http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/saving-seeds-zm0z12djzsto.aspx

European Agency Says Insecticides a Threat to Honey Bees

Updated January 16, 2013, 7:32 p.m. ET
By MATTHEW DALTON and MICHAEL HADDON

European authorities said three insecticides long suspected of contributing to plunging populations of honey bees pose risks to the insects and called for such chemicals to be placed under tougher scrutiny.

The finding by scientists at the European Food Safety Authority adds fuel to a debate that has raged in recent years in North America and Europe over the cause of mass deaths in the bee colonies that farmers depend on to pollinate their crops. And it could raise pressure on U.S. regulators, who are now reviewing the environmental effects of the chemicals, to withdraw them from the lucrative U.S. market. 

France, Germany, Italy and other European nations previously banned or suspended the use of certain insecticides, known as neonicotinoids, that many farmers and scientists argue are the main causes of declining honey bee populations. The pesticide industry and other scientists say disease and environmental changes are responsible.

The risk assessment, published Wednesday, said three neonicotinoids—clothianidin and imidacloprid, which are made primarily by Bayer AG, BAYN.XE +0.34% and thiamethoxam, which is made by Syngenta AG SYNN.VX +2.57% —pose risks to bees through contaminated dust and pesticide residues on nectar and pollen.

The agency sees a "high acute risk" to bees in how the three insecticides are applied to cereals, cotton, rapeseed, corn and sunflowers.

Its analysis "proposed a much more comprehensive risk assessment for bees and also introduced a higher level of scrutiny for interpretation of field studies," the agency said. But the agency said data aren't available to conclude that the insecticides are contributing to the collapse of bee colonies.

The European Commission, the European Union's executive arm, will request further information from the companies producing the chemicals, a commission spokesman said. The EU is prepared to take "necessary measures" if further studies show a definitive threat to bee populations from the chemicals, the spokesman said.

A top executive at Syngenta criticized the study. "It is obvious to us that EFSA has found itself under political pressure to produce a hurried and inadequate risk assessment, which even they acknowledge contains a high level of uncertainty," said John Atkin, Syngenta's chief operating officer, in a statement. "This report is unworthy of EFSA and of its scientists.

EFSA didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bayer said it stands by previous data it has submitted to regulatory agencies showing the chemicals don't harm bees if used as approved in Europe. "We do not believe that the new EFSA reports alter the quality and validity of these risk assessments and the underlying studies," the German chemical giant said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates pesticides, says it is unaware of any data showing that neonicotinoids have contributed to the collapse of bee colonies. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are examining the issue, but the department says it has found no evidence linking use of the pesticides to mass bee deaths.

The EPA has refused emergency requests from environmental groups to remove a number of neonicotinoids from the market. But the agency, responding to public pressure, has accelerated a periodic safety review of the chemicals to see if additional restrictions are needed on their use.

Environmental groups say the EPA is moving too slowly. They are considering suing to force the agency to take action.

"The EPA has a huge compliance problem," said Jay Feldman, executive director of the anti-pesticides group Beyond Pesticides.

The EPA didn't respond immediately to a request for comment.

Neonicotinoids have been replacing other pesticides in the U.S. that are considered more dangerous and have been gradually removed from the U.S. market.

An industry-backed study published on Monday says that a ban or suspension on the use of neonicotinoids could cost the EU more than €17 billion ($22.68 billion) in lower crop yields over a five-year period. Were the pesticides no longer available, the 27-nation bloc would also see a significant drop in food production at a time of increasing global demand, the study said.
—Alessandro Torello contributed to this article.

Write to Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@dowjones.com
A version of this article appeared January 16, 2013, on page B7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Europe Warns of Risk to Bees.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323468604578245811334066972-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNzExNDcyWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email

The Zero Mile Diet

Carolyn Herriot is a food security consultant and regular columnist for the BC Home & Garden and CommonGround magazines, as well as the best-selling author of A Year on the Garden Path: A 52-Week Organic Gardening Guide, The Zero Mile Diet, and The Zero-Mile Diet Cookbook. Herriot grows certified organic seeds for "Seeds of Victoria" at The Garden Path Centre in Victoria.

This is Carolyn Herriot's TEDx Victoria Talk about The Zero Mile Diet.



http://www.earthfuture.com/gardenpath/
http://tedxvictoria.com

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yFN8V7pWZs&feature=youtu.be

Rain Garden: Slowing Pollution at Its Source

In spring 2012, the City of Elk Grove, a community just south of Sacramento, California, opened a rain garden that is a magnet for wildlife, prevents pollution from running off into local streams, and an important tool to teach others about how use similar earth-friendly techniques in their own yard. Paul Mewton, Chief of Planning, Cosumnes Community Services District, and Greg Gearheart, State Water Resources Control Board, discuss this innovative park and how land use in the Central Valley still impacts our coast and ocean.

Elk Grove Rain Garden Fact Sheet: http://www.elkgrovecity.org/rain-garden/printables/rain-garden-fact-sheet.pdf

California State Water Resources Control Board: http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/

Cosumnes Community Services District: http://www.yourcsd.com/

Thank You Ocean: Water Pollution: http://www.thankyouocean.org/threats/water-pollution/

Edible landscaping sprouts beyond the vegetable patch

Originally published Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 4:01 PM

Tips on creating an edible landscape that can help reduce some pest problems while benefiting pollinators, enhance soil fertility and provide homegrown fruits, vegetables and herbs.

By Mary Beth Breckenridge
Akron Beacon Journal

Food plants have jumped the fence from the kitchen garden.

They're making their way into the landscape, doing double duty as both food sources and things of beauty.
It's a movement called edible landscaping, and there's good reason for it, advocates say. Edible landscaping encourages and simplifies local food production, with all its health and environmental benefits.
The idea behind edible landscaping is that fruits, vegetables and other edible plants can be intermingled with ornamental plants such as shrubs and flowers. Often edibles can be used in place of more common landscape plants — rhubarb instead of hostas, perhaps, or a fruit tree instead of a maple.

"I think it opens up a whole new territory for people who don't consider themselves gardeners" or don't like the look of a traditional vegetable garden, said Jonathan Hull, co-founder of the not-for-profit organization Green Triangle. The Cleveland-area organization promotes permaculture, an ecological system that stresses living in harmony with nature.
Edible landscaping is considered a part of permaculture because food plays a central role in sustainability, Hull explained. Homegrown food is considered by some to be more nutritious than much of the commercially produced food, and growing food locally saves the energy needed to ship it long distances.

What's more, reducing a lawn to make room for food plants means less maintenance, less need for chemicals and less use of noisy, polluting equipment, he said.

Edible landscaping also benefits pollinators and other wildlife that are seeing many of their habitats and food sources destroyed. And it's an economical approach to landscaping in tough times, noted Renata Brown, the Cleveland Botanical Garden's associate director of education.

But Tim Malinich's motivation is more personal. "The best benefit, in my opinion, — is the taste is phenomenal," said Malinich, a horticulture educator with the Ohio State University Extension in Lorain County.

Landscape designer Sabrena Schweyer said she regularly incorporates edible plants into the landscapes she and husband Samuel Salsbury create through their Akron, Ohio, firm, Salsbury-Schweyer. Sometimes those plants might be clustered in an attractive area set aside for food growing, such as a traditional French garden called a potager, or contained in pots in an area close to the kitchen. Sometimes they're incorporated into a food forest, a growing method that mimics the layers and plant diversity of a natural forest, where plants naturally get the water and food they need to thrive.

She and Salsbury created what she calls an edible border on an 8-foot-wide strip of land that edges the driveway on the south side of their Highland Square house. There they mixed edible plants such as nasturtiums, cardoons, strawberries, potatoes and tomatoes — some of them in pots — among small trees, shrubs and perennial flowers.

Schweyer said she took care to choose food plants they would use and looked for disease-resistant types, which often are heirloom or native plants. Because her yard is small, she often uses dwarf plants or climbers, such as the purple Italian beans that clambered up a bamboo arbor and fed the couple for a good part of last summer.

She chose those beans because their color matched the trim on their house, she said. Beauty, after all, is a foremost consideration for her.

Still, edible landscaping has some benefits that are purely practical, Hull said.

For one thing, mixing a variety of plants can do a better job of reducing pest problems than traditional food gardening methods. Destructive bugs have a harder time finding individual food plants than they do a whole row, which is "like a big neon sign for any munching insect," he said. And with a mix of plants, it's easier to incorporate flowers that attract predator insects or confuse undesirable bugs.

Interplanting can also enhance soil fertility, Hull said. He often incorporates plants grown specifically to be cut down and returned to the soil as fertilizer, or plants that take nitrogen from the air and convert it to a usable form.

And because edible landscaping involves beds that aren't completely replanted each year, they're not tilled annually, he said. Repeated tilling breaks down the soil structure, a detriment to soil health.

Despite the benefits, promoting the concept of edible landscaping means changing some firmly held mindsets.

"I think a lot of people think flowers have to be here, herbs have to be here, vegetables have to be here," Hull said.

He's hoping to break down those boundaries.

EDIBLE LANDSCAPING TIPS

Edible landscaping tips from Jonathan Hull and Tim Malinich:

• Start small. Limit the number and variety of new plants you add each year. That way you won't be overwhelmed by the amount of information you need to learn about them.

• Choose sunny sites. Food plants need a lot of sunlight to produce the best-tasting fruits and vegetables. If you don't plant in full sun, the plants might still look nice, but the food they produce will have a lower sugar content and won't be as tasty.

• Be aware of plant competition. Larger plants such as trees and shrubs can take a big share of water and nutrients, leaving an insufficient amount for the smaller plants.

• Have a water source. Your food plants may need supplemental water, so make sure you have a hose or some other water source that can reach them.

• Plan for wildlife. Birds and beasts like to eat many of the same things we do, so edible landscaping is likely to attract them to your yards. Some people want that; others don't.

If you intend to protect your plants from wildlife, consider the ramifications. For example, you might be tempted to plant a berry bush in your front yard, but "how's that going to look in your design when it's covered with bird netting later in the season?" Malinich asked.

• Be prepared for trade-offs. If you're used to spraying your plants for insects or diseases, you're going to need to be cautious. Consider integrated pest management instead, an approach that looks at all the factors that keep plants healthy and de-emphasizes chemical controls.

• Know what you're growing. Just because someone told you a plant is edible doesn't mean it is. Be sure before you eat it. It's also a good idea to eat only a small amount of a new food at first, just to make sure you're not allergic to it.

• Expand your horizons. Study how to prepare the foods you're growing, so you'll enjoy them and they won't go to waste.

http://seattletimes.com/html/homegarden/2017469487_ediblelandscape09.html

How We Can Eat Our Landscapes

What should a community do with its unused land? 

Plant food, of course. With energy and humor, Pam Warhurst tells at the TEDSalon the story of how she and a growing team of volunteers came together to turn plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens, and to change the narrative of food in their community.

Pam Warhurst cofounded Incredible Edible, an initiative in Todmorden, England dedicated to growing food locally by planting on unused land throughout the community.



More about Pam Warhurst:
Pam Warhurst is the Chair of the Board of the Forestry Commission, which advises on and implements forestry policy in Great Britain. She also cofounded Incredible Edible Todmorden, a local food partnership that encourages community engagement through local growing. Incredible Edible started small, with the planting of a few community herb gardens in Todmorden, and today has spin-offs in the U.S. and Japan. The community has started projects like Every Egg Matters, which educates people on keeping chickens and encourages them to sell eggs to neighbors, and uses a 'Chicken Map' to connect consumers and farmers. Incredible Edible Todmorden empowers ordinary people to take control of their communities through active civic engagement. 

"I wondered if it was possible to take a town like Todmorden and focus on local food to re-engage people with the planet we live on, create the sort of shifts in behaviour we need to live within the resources we have, stop us thinking like disempowered victims and to start taking responsibility for our own futures." Pam Warhurst

“There's so many people that don't really recognize a vegetable unless it's in a bit of plastic with an instruction packet on the top.”  Pam Warhurst

“Can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture? … Yes, and the language would appear to be food.”   Pam Warhurst