What’s in the ground:

This should really be titled what’s out of the ground. After the heat wave of last week and the rains that have came, our spring crops should be on their way to bolting. If you our still putting up with the bitterness of arugula, or the yellow flowers of your broccoli has choked out any remaining florets, it’s time to clear the way for something else.

What’s going on in sustainability:

So I’m happy that my day got too busy and I didn’t post this until now, because if I had, I would not be writing with the energy I’ve gained from attending Vandana Shiva’s lecture at the Academy of Natural Sciences. The renowned seed saver, physicist and environmental advocate gave an amazing lecture of the monoculture of the mind, our western predisposition to approach problems with one track of thinking and narrow solutions rather than taking the whole system into consideration and finding innovative ways to make better, more utilitarian systems.

Although her talk was mainly about the theories of paradigm shifts, her main focus of work and the message she gave was taking back economic systems and the land by the simplest measure, saving a seed. She told horrific stories of companies like Monsanto infiltrating small farming communities, setting up deals with local governments to supply seeds that are patented, and forbidding the farmers by law to not use the seed again, or genetically engineering seed not to reproduce. Companies like Monsanto also have created dependency for farmers to use industrial and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, thereby stripping them of the knowledge of natural farm systems. And in the end, over 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide by drinking the very same poison that they were forced into debt to buy by these multinational companies.

Therefore, as I left open ended in the first section of this blog, don’t just rip those bolted plants out of the ground and throw them in the compost. First, collect the seed packs. Once you do, you can bind them with string, find a cool, dry place, and hang the green pods to dry into brown, and then save the seed. When saving any nightshade seed (pepper, tomato and eggplant) make sure you dry the seed out thoroughly in an open aired container. Anything with a lid will get them moldy. And be careful with hybrid seeds, because since they are hybrids, the gene may make the reproductive seed different from the plant they came from.

But as Dr. Shiva has so eloquently shown, this is one of the most important tasks humans can take. Our species thrives in cooperation, it’s what made us come out of the woods and trees and build cities and thrive. When one entity controls not only all of the money to buy food, but the means to grow it, then we’ve lost that cooperative system that has made us so successful. And when any species loses their evolutionary technique that makes them successful, the next step is extinction. So when you save those seeds, you are really saving so much more.

Good luck, until next week, this is the note from the urban homestead.