This is for all those northern hemisphere people who are getting grumpy because the frost is coming (or arrived already) and their tomatoes are still green. It is for those not looking forward to being indoors reading seed catalogs for the next 5 months worrying about fuel bills.
It features blossoms, new life and includes some nubile ladies and a hairy young male wriggling naked in the clover as our many of our forebears were wont to do at this time of year.
Hmmm... I am not one of those, I am looking forward to winter. Fall has just now arrived. It is unusually warm here, not a single frost yet! All, I mean all of my flowers are still in bloom. The trees are just now starting to change colors. Soon the leaves will fall big time. I would say we are about three weeks behind normal.
I enjoy the four seasons. Just when you get tired of the same old thing, things start to change. In the Fall one can star gaze without bundling up too much and still get lots of sleep at night because it is getting darker earlier. I have about twenty good size pumpkins growing for halloween decorations. Apple Cider and donuts are now flowing at mills. Halloween is my favorite holiday. The costume dance parties, haunted houses, corn field mazes, hay rides, cool weather, Apple Cider and Pumpkin Pie.
I prepay for the fuel bill, the pantry is well stocked and so is the freezer. This week I will remove the window screens, put in the glass windows, remove the water hoses and store the patio furniture. For me winter is the Math and physics season, exercising the mind, learn and see how the universe works.
Hmmm... I am not one of those, I am looking forward to winter. Fall has just now arrived. It is unusually warm here, not a single frost yet! All, I mean all of my flowers are still in bloom. The trees are just now starting to change colors. Soon the leaves will fall big time. I would say we are about three weeks behind normal.
I enjoy the four seasons. Just when you get tired of the same old thing, things start to change. In the Fall one can star gaze without bundling up too much and still get lots of sleep at night because it is getting darker earlier. I have about twenty good size pumpkins growing for halloween decorations. Apple Cider and donuts are now flowing at mills. Halloween is my favorite holiday. The costume dance parties, haunted houses, corn field mazes, hay rides, cool weather, Apple Cider and Pumpkin Pie.
I prepay for the fuel bill, the pantry is well stocked and so is the freezer. This week I will remove the window screens, put in the glass windows, remove the water hoses and store the patio furniture. For me winter is the Math and physics season, exercising the mind, learn and see how the universe works.
very natural.
for some reason peach blossom picture would not load, but the rest i could see.
weather here has been beautiful lately. it should be warm enough through friday at least with a bit of rain here or there in the forecast (won't believe it until i see it). we've not even had to turn on the heat yet (but a few nights were cool enough to make me get out the warmer clothes for a change).
i was enjoying my evening breeze when the combine started harvesting the soybeans next to us. didn't get to the peas in time. 75F in here now. very nice.
songbird
Some glitch in photobucket I expect, the pic is OK at this end and has the same origin and treatment as the rest. Photobucket does some strange things, like much web software it seems unreliable. They recently announced that you could set your own avatar image - it doesn't work. Also their stats are all over the place.
I like the change of season, given any choice I like to travel in October and April.
What is the connection between the harvester starting and you getting your peas? Do you mean you were going to test harvest a few soybeans before the harvester arrived?
D
I look forward to a winter respite from gardening and mowing... and green tomatoes are excellent fried and especially pickled.
LOL, we had frost this morning (Tassie)... the days are glorious though :)
I see. I don't have harvesters here. The analogous situation for me is when nearby pasture is burned or spread with chicken litter.
One of my seed merchants offers "organically grown seeds" for some species. Apparently this means they are better because no chemferts or sprays were used while they were grown. Other than the possibility that such a product was a better (or even a different) cultivar than the others I am unclear on the exact benefits. If there is something nasty that can be transferred via just the seed into your environment or into the seeds themselves caused by growing non-organically? What might that be? I don't know.
If such transfer of something undesirable can be avoided by growing seed organically wouldn't you still have the problem if somewhere in the ancestry of the seed there were non-organic growing practices? The system seems to rely on either having an organic provenance back to the year zero or the assumption that the nastiness is somehow diluted over the generations. How many generations does it take? I don't know and since I haven't seen any evidence of what the nastiness might be it seems rather difficult to determine.
David
That's the normal around here, hay, soybeans and corn, nothing else. What else can a single farmer grow with a combine? Except many of the farmers around here get their seeds for free if they try different strains of soybeans and corn. One good thing is that my closest neighbors just grow hay for their own livestock. Dust is not a problem here, after harvest when it starts to get cold the manure gets spread on the fields. Ah that not so fresh air.... It is not that bad, cold weather really does keep the manure oder down.
As for the farmers down the road one can see those bright red signs with those numbers on each sign, knowing the numbers represents a strain of the crop and I wonder about the cross pollination. For me they are over a mile away. So Armageddon can wait.
Here I am in Michigan, no frost yet? Green grass, flowers still in bloom. Eighty degrees today, still getting cherry tomatoes and a few beefsteaks. Sitting here in my easy chair typing this message with a fan turn on me... In October!
we'll have some manure spreading going on here too at times. the requirement is that it gets plowed in soon after being put down, and that does help reduce the odor a lot. burning, not usually a problem here unless it is still like this past night, the smoke layers from the fireplaces are hanging around. we had to close the doors as we both don't like the smell of smoke (i like it, but it doesn't like me).
the main thing is to avoid the GMO strain that is glyphosate tolerant developed by you know who... i did grow some of those last year and they are mostly developed for oil or animal feed and not for taste. i used them to make soymilk and they were a little different in taste than what i was used to, but i used them anyways. this year instead i bought a bag from the health food store that was labeled organic so that means they were grown without the use of glyphosate and were likely to not be the same beans. i'd bought a few pounds and made soymilk with half of them and it was noticeably different and more like what i was used to in terms of taste. so i'm hoping i'm on the right track. we'll see how the harvest goes when they are ready. if they are dry enough and don't spoil or sprout in the pods, etc.
in my readings about beans/dry beans, Michigan is a large producer of organic beans (but most of them are grown east of here in the "thumb" region) and organic green beans.
i'm not worried about transferring any specific chemical as i think they would be broken down in time by the critters/fungi in the soil. as these are podded things the most residue is going to be on the pod and not the beans (if there is any at all).
no, i'm not trying to avoid the chemical/ fertilizer/heavy metal contaminants by growing organic seeds. i don't think those are a major problem to worry about.
the regulations are lax as far as i'm concerned, as what i would call organic would mean that no GMO traits could be allowed in the seed stock. however, the coopted USoA government use of the word "organic" means that if you cannot get GMO free seedstock you can use the other if you must (it all has to be documented). the main thing is that the soil has not had certain things applied to it for three years, the plants have to be grown without certain things applied to them and the harvesting techniques must make sure there is no mix up with non organic grown seeds (if you are using a harvester that does both you have to harvest an amount of the organic and then consider that non-organic to flush out the harvester). i'm pretty sure that anyone who does enough organic growing doesn't do this as they loose that premium price they get on that amount. instead they just don't have the trouble because they don't have non-organic things to harvest.
so that's the long way of answering the questions, but really, yes, i am trying to avoid the growing of glyphosate resistant crops for my own consumption. i'll have to replant from organic grown stock once in a while to make sure any pollen drift from the bees or air doesn't majorly alter the seeds i use, but that is a small price to pay IMO. the taste being noticeably different and the earlier ripening would both be an easy marker for me to see, i'll still probably rebuy fresh seeds once every three or four years.
the seeds cost me about $1.00 at the health food store. if my harvest is at all close to what i did last year, i should be bringing in between
10-25lbs of soybeans. as the labor for growing them was only a few hours time planting and weeding it will be a direct cost saving to me of about $22-55 (i.e. not a major saving, but the spaces used were likely to be left bare for the summer anyways). the added nitrogen to the soil and the cover crop were the nice side benefits. we'll see how the tulips do next spring. the indirect cost savings is likely around another $20/yr in that i alternate drink milk and soymilk and so cut the amount of milk we buy by about 1/3 and some food costs too as i do eat some of the left over cooked soy bean grindings (okura). the worms get the rest. where i lose out is the cost of electricity for making the soymilk. that probably runs about $0.15/gallon.if i actually ever purchased soy milk the cost savings would be much greater as that runs between 4-8$/gal. but i've never gotten into that habit (don't like the added flavorings and sugars they put in the store brands).
songbird
they probably have to fill out a report of some kind for each row, but do not replant from those seeds harvested anyways. very few farmers can use their own seeds any more by agreements they make with the seed producers.
_Food Inc_ shows one example of how the GMO seed producers go after those who don't buy their products.
:) we like it.
songbird
I just had a look at the photobucket stats for the Spring album. The most accessed image by a long margin, if you believe these stats, was "Naked girls in clover". It seems that chooks are very popular. :-)
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