All of us home gardeners are affected, to one degree or another & will be into the future. (Not to mention major food suppliers, even in "developed" countries.)
The deniers (including powerful committee chairmen in the US Congress) are still out there serving their Corporate Masters, but let us hope that their in$anity will become less influential as facts develop.
An entertaining article about the exposure of Willie Soon, one of the most corrupt "scientist" deniers can be found at:
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OR
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You will need to scroll way down -- past some very useful articles -- to:
"All your Willie Soon schadenfreude in one handy article".
HB
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time."
It's been nice to see some life in the group again. Let's not kill it by g etting political. I'd rather just read about the gardening advice and expe riences from others and take the divisive stuff somewhere else.
A little late getting things started this year myself. Just got the pepper seeds put into pots yesterday. Will get the tomatoes seeds into some dirt either today or tomorrow. As I'm potting things up, it seems my eyes were bigger than my garden space one again, so again I'm going to have to put s ome veggie plants in with the flowers (or wherever I can find room).
Climate Change has an impact on those of us who do bother to garden and who also try to have productive gardens. That makes climate change on topic here. Climate change only becomes a divisive issue here when those who can't read for comprehension try to deny that it is a reality.
I still think your tomato problems have to do with your soil. As with cooking, you can't make bad ingredients taste better, you can only make good ingredients taste worse. It all starts with the soil.
I am wondering if you should not start over with know good organic soil. Maybe even use certified compost from a reputable dealer. Who knows what in the world is in municipal compose.
Do you have worms in your soil? They are a great indication of your soils health.
Are your tomato beds well drained? Tomatoes love to be drenched (they are from the Amazon), but do not like their roots in standing/stagnant water.
-T
Songbird is a really great source of this kind of information, probably knows 100 times what I do.
For the views of the scientific community, see "Anthropogenic warming has increased drought risk in California" in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" at .
looks like a few random trolls to me, neither of those folks seem to have posted here before much at all and funny they both pop up on a topic that they complain about being OT.
to have credibility it would help them if they actually posted about gardening.
anyways, here is a way that CC will affect many out west in the USoA, the snowpack this year is miniscule, affecting 1/3 of the water supply that many millions of people rely upon.
a fair amount of that snowpack is gone from an obvious lack of precipitation, but it is made much worse because the water systems out there are built around using that snow pack as their water storage. currently most of the areas seem to be running at 10-20% of average.
what happens when the snows no longer fall as snow, but end up as rain or when the snows are sublimated off due to higher temperatures, well that is a part of what we are getting now. the water infrastructure is not built around rain on the mountains.
to change that one aspect of the water systems out there will cost many billions of dollars, they're going to need bigger reservoirs to capture storm water and store it to get them through the summer months.
this will pretty much affect anyone out west who wants to have a garden if they are trying to rely upon water from the irrigation systems. and it isn't going to be cheap.
some folks are drilling wells and supplementing their irrigation by ground water. the problem there is that everyone else around them is doing the same thing and the ground water levels are rapidly falling. prices for drilling? many thousands of $ for how deep they have to go now in some places and they don't even know how long those wells will last. nothing out there is measured, proven or regulated as of yet, they are all taking more than is being recharged.
luckily, the past few weeks have improved the snow pack in the Colorado River Basin (instead of well below average most are now 10-20% from average, some are even above average *whew* with some time yet to go where we can get some more storms to build up even more snow pack -- that would be great as the reservoirs on the Colorado River are approaching points where water will be reduced or cut off to the most junior water rights holders). yet another expense is required to build intakes from Lake Mead to get water to Las Vegas, because the lake is getting so low.
and as for the question about being a scientist, yes, i am. nobody is paying me other than myself.
Lurker I'd grant you... Troll I'd take exception to. I have posted, but it has been years. I continued to follow the group through its ups and downs , gardening the whole time with every year different than the one prior. F WIW, I've been gardening and preserving my own food for as long add I can r emember. Love it, don't mind a good debate either, just didn't think this was the place for it.
Wasn't really trying to poke the bear, either. Just wanted to avoid what I 've seen so many times over the years. I do find it interesting that it's the same characters who get their dander up every time someone cares to dis agree with something someone said.
So keep going with the insults and inflammatory remarks (speaking to both s ides here). Watch the traffic fall off again. Then some new folks will co me along in a few months and we can do it all over again.
I'm in the inland northwest. Far different than the coastal areas or weste rn valleys. The Cascade Mountains stop most of the rain so we only average about 12" per year, most of that occurring in the fall and winter when the prevailing winds shift slightly to bring the weather in around the mountai ns. We get four distinct seasons, with the summers betting very hot and d ry, so irrigation is critical, and very little water is wasted. Winters ar e normally just a few degrees below freezing, although we have dropped to d ouble-digit negatives a few times.
I grow quite a variety of stuff. Plenty of paste tomatoes every year to pu t up sauces (spaghetti, salsa, and whatever else inspires me), so plenty of peppers and other stuff to go into the sauces too. Because of the heat, bl ossom end rot can be troublesome at times. I grow my own herbs to use well . In fact, everything I use in my preserving I grow myself or buy from som eone local.
I also grow a lot of winter squash and root crops that I keep through the w inter. One of the happiest memories I have is making borscht for the first time and finding that the family loved it! It's the only reason I'm allow ed to grow beets now (although I do sneak in a batch of pickles every year) . Speaking of pickles, I also grow cukes to make hot dill pickles and my gr andmothers lime pickle that are so crunchy and sweet.
We have an assortment of fruit trees and vines and bushes that we freeze, d ry, or otherwise preserve. I made Concorde grape pie filling 2 years ago f or the first time and even though it's difficult, it will be made every yea r from now on. So delicious!
I grow fingerling potatoes and leeks. I dont generally grow other potatoes or onions because those are readily available around here at a price lower than I could ever grow them for. Many times you can find a grower that wil l let you go into the fields after they've harvested them and pick what's l eft and that price is hard to beat. Sweet corn is available for a nickel a n ear when its in season, so I don't grow that either, but I do grow popcor n and the kids think that's a blast
In finishing up some of what's left in the cellar, I just made a couple mor e batches of red onion jam. So good on roasts, hamburgers, or whatever. Thi s is also one that gets made every year.
There's a lot more that goes on around here, but perhaps I'll share more as time goes on.
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