08 February 2008

Crackpot?

Thompson and Morgan seedsMy final set of seeds arrived this morning, from Thompson and Morgan. Mainly these are seeds that the North American catalogues only held a few varieties of - runner beans, broad beans and sprouts, for example. British foods that haven't caught on as much here, I suspect.

Although I don't have immediate plans to sell vegetables to the public, I have been looking into how to make our vegetable garden officially organic. One of the major problems will be obtaining organic seed, as far as I can see at the moment, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to gather a fair amount of seed from the plants that I grow each year and do it that way. It will take at least three years before I can even apply for organic certification, so I've got plenty of time to practise. It costs around $800 to just apply and the forms and record-keeping requirements are weighty, so it will take a lot of preparation and planning.

I read the introduction [PDF file] to Michael Pollan's new book, In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manfesto this morning, via the ChangeThis website. I agree completely with everything he says, although one paragraph made me doubt my sanity a bit:
...forty years ago...there would have been no way to eat the way I propose in my book without going back to the land and growing all your own food. It would have been the manifesto of a crackpot.

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