Entries Tagged 'Books' ↓

[This was originally posted Nov 13, 2007 on my Sundrop Jewelry blog.]

I recently finished reading “Giving” by Bill Clinton (from the library, since I’m a tightwad and trying not to purchase excess consumer goods). Although reviews have been mixed (a few have criticized the lack of attention paid to the failures of government philanthropy) I found it fascinating and inspiring, and by the time I finished the book had quite a lot of little scraps of paper marking the ideas I found most interesting. Sure, it’s true that governments have more money and resources that could be used to promote societal good than most of us do, but the book isn’t intended to be a guide for governments. It is intended to reach out and grab individual readers with its poignant stories of successes by people who are both much more and much less powerful than each of us.

There are hundreds of people and organizations discussed, but I want to mention a few that most interested me, that really made me want to get involved.

I signed up for Kiva, an online micro-loan organization that lets you lend small amounts of money directly to individuals – tiny business loans, but which can have a large impact on the lives of these people and their families. Kiva has actually had so much interest as a result of this book that they restrict the amount you can loan any one person to $25: 20 people loaning $25 each will provide a $500 loan. Over the next few months to years the loan will be repaid, after which you can take your money out or re-loan it to another individual. Global Giving is a similar website that enables you to donate money to a specific project of your choice (topics range from AIDS to Climate Change).

[Update: I'm still using Kiva, relending my donation each time repayments add up to $25 sitting in my account.]

Other types of giving are more traditional: donating money to World Bicycle Relief so they can provide locally-made bicycles to HIV/AIDS healthcare workers and help tsunami victims re-establish their lives; or Heifer International to give animals that produce milk, wool, eggs, meat, and honey to help poor families set up businesses selling excess milk etc. I like these particular charities because they manage to make monetary donations work even harder; the locally-made bicycles create jobs in the area, and Heifer families ‘pass on the gift’ by giving away the first offspring of their animal to a neighbor in similar circumstances.

These are the easy ones in my mind, the ones that only involve money. I would like to get involved with Habitat for Humanity again, partly because I want to learn more about building, especially low-energy homes using green materials. That will depend to some degree on where projects are located – for all the benefits of not having a car, bicycles can be restricting.

As mentioned in my previous seed saving post, I had a hard time finding consistent, believable information online about how to save seeds. One webpage would talk only about the method for cleaning and storing tomato seeds, not addressing whether or not you should worry about whether the seeds you were so carefully saving had been cross-pollinated by something else, while another would insist that all tomato varieties must be separated by at least 25′ or you’d end up with a funky, undesirable new tomato variety when you grew out the seed next year.

So, to the library!

While Suzanne Ashworth’s book “Seed to Seed” is the definitive guide to seed saving, as a novice I found it a little impenetrable. It’s the place to go for every nitty-gritty detail, but I needed a stronger general understanding before I could make best use of it. “Saving Seeds: The Gardener’s Guide to Growing and Saving Vegetable and Flower Seeds” by Marc Rogers was less intimidating to a beginning seed-saver like myself.

“Saving Seeds” is written for the home gardener learning to save seeds, with clear directions on how to prevent cross-fertilization in all the usual (and some unusual) garden vegetables, written in an approachable, conversational way. Most important, the author states clearly which seeds are easy to save (beans, peas, and tomato) and which should be left to the intrepid expert (cauliflower, beet).

The main points:
• Maintain genetic diversity by harvesting seed from multiple plants. If you harvest seed from a single plant each year, your stock will eventually get inbred and be more susceptible to disease (exception: saving seed from just a single squash or the self-pollinating beans and peas will not weaken the strain).
• Choose only your best plants and best fruits/vegetables from which to harvest seed.
• Decide what you want to emphasize – earliest tomatoes? turnips that keep well all winter? disease resistance? lettuce that bolts latest in the summer? dwarf variety for container planting?
• If you just save what’s left at the end of the summer (like I was) you’ll end up selecting for the latest-producing peas and beans, rather than the earliest.
• Isolation to prevent cross-pollinating – how to do it and when is it necessary?
• Beans, peas, lettuce, and tomatoes are self-pollinating and rarely cross-pollinate even between varieties (e.g. my Black Cherry tomato is unlikely to cross with a Brandywine tomato), but it can be a good idea to separate varieties with a different kind of plant.
• Since isolation by distance for corn, cucumber, squash, melons, eggplant, and peppers is impractical in the confines of a home garden, you can bag the flowers to prevent them from being cross-pollinated by different varieties. Bagged blossoms of corn, squash and melons must be hand pollinated, while the eggplant and peppers will self-pollinate.
• Members of the brassica (broccoli, cabbage, etc.), mustard (turnip, chinese cabbage, etc), and celery (parsley, carrot, etc) families are biennials and in my zone most must be dug and overwintered, then replanted in the spring to produce seed the second year. Almost all of these must also be physically isolated (flowers bagged) to prevent crossing.

Having read “Saving Seeds”, I now have a much better understanding of what I need to do to save my own seeds, and feel much more confident that it is possible (and not nearly as complicated as some other sources made it seem) to save seeds even within a small garden. I’m especially excited to begin saving some tomato and pepper seeds this year. Essentially, I’ll be starting my own breeding program, over time developing varieties adapted to my particular growing conditions.

‘Save Three Lives’,
by Robert Rodale A recent train of small events lead me to read “Save Three Lives: A Plan for Famine Prevention” by Robert Rodale, founder of the Rodale Institute and Organic Gardening Magazine. Although the book is nearly 20 years old and I’m sure some of it is out of date, a large amount, sadly, is not. The problems the author talks about in 1991 Africa are still here in 2010 – famine and (in some ways worse) the consistent, continuous low-level hunger and malnutrition – not quite starving, but never having quite enough – from which it is so easy to topple into famine or premature death from related diseases.

The most important problem, according to Rodale, the problem that makes the majority of our efforts useless or even damaging to the very people we are trying to aid, is a lack of cultural understanding – a lack of even caring to understand essential differences. Soil in the tropics is delicate, and needs much more care to continue to produce than soil in temperate regions. But we come in to Africa with our Western agro-science, developed in cooler regions with resilient soils, and tell the people who have lived in an area for generations that they’re doing it wrong. They follow our well-meant advice and can produce nearly twice as much food from the same land (by paying for Western fertilizers, etc) – for a few years. This was the so-called “Green Revolution,” and it lead to food surpluses and a population explosion, but just a decade or so later their soil had lost its fertility and was producing less than in the beginning, with the added burden of now needing to purchase petroleum-based fertilizers, making the food that was being produced too expensive for many living there to buy. Depleted soils force farmers to move on to a new piece of land, often removing the forest to do so, and lack of firewood has become a problem nearly as severe as lack of food. Nor, according to Rodale, are fuel-efficient stoves the answer, since an open fire serves many purposes in an African home. One of these overlooked purposes is that the smoke kills insects in the thatch, preserving both the roof overhead and the inhabitants by reducing the insects that prey on straw, food stores and people. A similar story of well-meaning Westerners damaging indigenous societies is related in “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond: Westerners arrive in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and convince the people to change their mountainside farming practices – and because of that change, the first strong rain of the monsoon season washes away all of the carefully-built topsoil.


Alley Cropping with Leguminous Trees
Rodale’s solutions all revolve around ensuring that aid provided to Africans is of the type that Africans themselves want and will use – often encouraging them to return to more traditional agriculture such as alley cropping with rows fast-growing leguminous (nitrogen-fixing) trees planted between rows of food crops. The trees would provide nitrogen, wood for fires and building, mulch for the crops to retain moisture, and act as a barrier to diseases and pests that can easily sweep through a monoculture.

His suggestions for repairing the problems, for preventing the need for food aid that often results in huge amounts of surplus subsidized American yellow field corn, suitable for animal feed, being sent too late, to regions where the people eat white rather than yellow corn, undercuting the prices of what food the local farmers can produce, and which is often hijacked by soldiers on both sides of conflicts or even prevented from landing – these suggestions are still relevant, at least partly because so little progress seems to have been made. I am not trying to suggest that many very dedicated people have not come up with improved ideas and implemented them in some places (a number of articles about reclaiming the desert spring to my mind). However, the fact that what ‘everyone’ knows about Africa – the ‘rickets and flies’ stereotypes of famine and refugees – has not improved in 20 years, seems to indicate that the problem is nowhere near being solved.

I searched online trying to find something that directly addressed the points the author makes and the solutions he puts forth, but didn’t find anything specifically touted as an update to this book. I did read “Plan B 2.0″ by Lester Brown a few years ago, but I don’t remember many of the specifics and they’re up to 4.0 now, so I obviously need to go back and read the updated version. I’d be very interested in any other recommendations anyone might have.

For quite a while, I’ve been wanting to write about gardening, preserving, cooking, reducing energy use, frugality, and general sustainable living. That’s a lot of topics, I know, and I didn’t want to crowd out or overwhelm the sustainable business focus of my Sundrop Jewelry blog.

A recent train of small events lead me to read “Save Three Lives” by Robert Rodale, founder of the Rodale Institute and Organic Gardening Magazine. Although the book is nearly 20 years old and I’m sure some of it is out of date, a large amount, sadly, is not. I’ll write a separate post about the book, but it was the final straw, with a call to action that caused me to actually write to all three branches of government (the Dept of Justice is starting an series of public workshops looking into antitrust and monopoly issues concerning our agriculture conglomerates this spring).

The book also tipped me over the edge and convinced me that I really did want to blog about all these things – I sat down and in a half hour had a list of post ideas more than a page long. Since then, more keep popping into my head or being sparked by other bloggers’ posts coming across my google reader list. Some posts you can look forward to seeing here:

• a series of at least one good recipe for each food coming out of the garden
• how to build self-watering containers
• donating to food pantries (I’ve always wondered whether it’s better to donate money or loss leader items from the grocery store)
• an update on the 90% reduction posts I did 3 years ago

I also hope that having a blog will help/force me to actually keep records of my gardening so I have a better idea what to do/not do again in the future.