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David Hare-Scott[_2_] · 09-09-2010, 12:25 AM posted to rec.gardens

wrote:
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

It's always good when someone finds a cultivar that suits their
taste and growing conditions. I would never suggest that people
should persist with growing things that don't suit them - that's
what it is all about getting fresh produce that you enjoy.
Precisely so; which is why I won't be giving space to "Brandywine"
tomatoes again. Too much vine; too little tomato. What others might
do is not my concern but I would find having _no_ tomatoes in the
garden an acceptable alternative.

If you stick to hybrids you cannot usefully keep the seed for
yourself or swap with neighbours and your choice of cultivars will
be restricted. You must go back to the supplier every year and pay
what they ask, and in the case of tomatoes you will be limited to a
small fraction of the cultivars available.
Irrelevant to me. I'm just not caputured by the seed-saving mystique,
have
no interest in my neighbors at all, let alone in swapping anything
with them, and I already have declared myself to be a tomato
Philistine. DW&I are not big fruit eaters and tomatoes are just
another fruit and best eaten green, to my taste. I'm good for, maybe,
two ripe tomato sandwiches a year and that's about it. Don't eat
catsup; barbeque sauce is made from peppers, not from tomatoes; if
Lidia Bastianich can make pasta sauce from canned tomatoes, I guess
they're good enough for me.
There's no more reason to fear that old devil Big Business
"controlling"
the food supply than there is to fear its controlling the electricity
supply, the petroleum supply, the forest products supply, all of
which it does. "Big Business" got so because people buy its stuff.

Ah yes the free market will find a balance, all we have to do is allow it to
operate by people paying for their choice and all will be well. Another
furphy. The free market wants its profits now and next year it doesn't make
money out of 30 years from now so it doesn't care. If you want to consign
your civilisation to forever making short term decisions have a free market
economy. If you want your productive soil ruined by strip mining despite
needing the land to feed the next generation but there is money in coal now,
have a free market economy.

I
certainly don't harbor any resentment over the fact that I might have
to go up to Sherwood's Nursery from time to time and buy a new packet
of seeds. Surely, there is no reason to believe that some great
catastrophe or grand conspiratorial collaboration of greedy
corporations is going make that impossible to do.

Business makes no money from biodiversity. The more people fall for the
myth of total hybrid superiority the fewer cultivars will be kept. You may
not care about this choice but I do. You may not care about a system that
has worked well for thousands of years, I do.

Neither would the
presence or absence of "Brandywine" tomatoes, for example, on the
shelf next to other cultivars, have the slightest effect on the
latters' prices.

Of course it has no effect on prices if you get your seeds for free.

Those beliefs, which seem to be rather widespread,
reflect "irrational doomsday fear". Some would say they might also
reflect heads full of marshmallows.

Nice.

I find it odd that you post from a country that prides itself on
individualism and has half the population rabidly wanting to reduce
controls on the individual (by government) but you seem quite happy
to hand your lives over to big business who are not elected and only
exist to make a profit. To me keeping control of seeds, that
humans have taken thousands of years to breed, in the hands of the
individual is just common sense. That may be "doomsday fear" around
your place (Atlanta?) but is it really irrational?
I guess I miss your point. As it happens, "big business" _is_ elected.
People vote for it with their wallets every day.

Back to the free market myth again.

Businesses exist to
provide products and services of which people freely avail
themselves. The profit is the result of those activities. I'm amazed
at how few people, most of them successful businesspeople, grasp that
simple reality.

I grasp it very well.

It is a peculiarity of free markets that one only
succeeds over the long term by being of service to ones fellow man.

This is where you don't get it. Business will take profit today over profit
tomorrow any time. The system only succeeds by moving from one source of
resources to the next as they are depleted. The system *cannot* work unless
it is growing. Any time growth stops artifical methods must be used to get
it growing again. What sort of system periodically gives the choice of
gross unemployment and misery or a trillion dollar cardiac re-start?

We must all understand this one fact. In a finite world with finite
resources growth must come to and end and then free market capitalism falls
over. That isn't a wish on my part, I am not pushing ideology I am pushing
a prediction of fact. The present system has served well enough during a
period when unrestrained growth was tolerable but it all comes to an end
when that is no longer possible. The economy must remake itself so that
constant growth is not essential and it becomes sustainable. Getting there
will be a very hard road. The first step is accepting there is a problem.

Or, at the very least, by being perceived as such by ones fellow man.
That is as true of those "greedy" gene manipulators as it is of
street whores: If people didn't want their goods, those entities
would find something else to peddle. Unfortunately, a large cadre of
academicians, mid-level managers, self-styled "journalists", a host
of other vocal wage-slaves demonstrating a classic "clerk" mindset
and the cynical politicians who pander to them never seem quite to
grasp the concept. I suspect it to be because they participate in the
economy only as consumers but that's just a guess.

I have no problem with rational self interest. Where I have the problem is
with irrational self interest. Believing that the system can just go on for
ever as resources dwindle is irrational. It is those "clerks" or the
business execs who are filling the airwaves with FUD about climate change
aided and abetted by those politicians? That's how you make the current
system continue to work: lie. The oil executives know their ride will come
to and end but they want it to be later after they have had made their pile
and the future is SEP (someone elses problem).

Surely, you have not been taken in by the myth of American
"individuality". LOL! In the main, it exists only in the movies and
in whatever pro-America propaganda may be circulating at any given
time. The U.S.A. is very much a go-along-to-get-along society -- and
has been thus since the Spaniards arrived with their repressive
Catholic tyranny and began killing off the indigenous peoples.

There is nothing repressive about the current religious right of the USA of
course, they are such easy going get-along guys. Look at those big
businesses that own senators who constantly support perverse agricultural
subsidies. Look at the hate speech directed at your president because of
his colour and the demonstrable lies about him that will not be silenced.
Tyranny and repression are still nearby.

Why
else would so many YPs drive Lexus and BMW automobiles? However, we
continue resolutely to believe the "go-alongness", if you will, to be
voluntary which it clearly ceases to be when some entity -- whether
parents, school, church, corporation, or government -- makes it
compulsory.
Not Atlanta; couldn't take the winters! About 450 miles (724 km) SSE.

In gardening
It was Handel in the headset for two humid late summer's mornings of
relocating the crown of a Springtime storm deadfall from atop a cache
of wire, bamboo poles and PVC pipe. Limbed the tree and bucked the
upper fourth of her crown months ago but did not remove it because,
well, didn't need access to those items. Hasty, I'm not ;-) When
practical, snags and deadfalls are left in place and the deadfalls
limbed, in order to provide easy access to forage by fine fellows
such as these:

http://i946.photobucket.com/albums/ad307/balvenieman/stuff/01-09-09pileated.jpg

http://i946.photobucket.com/albums/ad307/balvenieman/stuff/croppedpileated04.jpg

Later in this week I shall be transporting at least one, possibly two,
cubic yards of what is purported to be composted chicken manure back
to the shack for incorporation into the garden. Composted? I hope so;
we shall see.... Also have plans to relocate a number of daughter
tomato plants into a bed for fall/winter fruit. As a rule, I keep
indeterminate tomatoes within bounds with field wire fencing but this
year, because they were container grown and got a late start, they
were allowed to wallow about and a number of canes rooted in the
yard. Volunteers; no layering required. Unusual because the native
Earth here is sand, sand, and more sand.
By the end of this month, will have planted "green" onions; parsley;
sage; "Little Marvel" peas; "Delinel" beans; cucumbers, yellow
squash, and a number of hardy potherbs. Sept. is the earliest that
I've planted winter peas; it remains to be seen how they'll cope with
the hot weather. Eggplant (aubergine), jalapeño, "bell" peppers and
okra continue to bear. Overnights are cool enough now that the
tomatoes have begun retaining their blossoms and they'll soon be
setting fruit. I really want their containers for other things but
shall leave them in place until the daughters "take" to their new
surroundings.
What of you? Is your climate conducive to actively gardening this
time of
year?

You are right on this at least. Politics and economics are off topic, I
will shut up now.

Yes it is spring. I am raising seedlings in a cloche until the risk of
frost is gone. We have been feasting on asparagus for weeks and soon I must
have some self control and stop cutting it. The artichokes will be budding
soon. The sun is shining and all is right with the world.

David