songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:

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.

http://s1086.photobucket.com/albums/...Spring%202011/

thanks! i like the hairy look on the ladies.
very natural.

for some reason peach blossom picture would not
load, but the rest i could see.

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 will try it again then.


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.

I like the change of season, given any choice I like to travel in
October and April.

i like the changes too.


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?

the wind was out of the south and that field is
south. too much dust in the air to be outside
in the garden harvesting the peas. we are
surrounded by soybeans this year except due east
is a field that is being taken over by poplars.
next year it will likely be corn. i'm waiting for
the armageddon when they actually plant something
different.


I see. I don't have harvesters here. The analogous situation for me is
when nearby pasture is burned or spread with chicken litter.

my own soybeans are a few weeks later than the
field soybeans. supposedly they were grown
organically before i planted them. they had a
different taste than the field beans i grew last
year so i'm hoping they'll turn out.



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