Please Remain Seeded With Your Seed Belt Fastened

This is an actual harvest time pic from home.

“We must become experts at the intellectual management of our mental seeds… From now on, we need to be careful only to plant good new seeds, and never negative ones.”

-       excerpt from How Yoga Works by Geshe Michael Roach

Last fall I joined UrbanFarm.org in their online urban farming class to learn new ways to improve and transform my yard, turning it into a more efficient and edible environment. Yes edible.

Back in January, during a break from tour, I was able to put my new knowledge to good use and improve my yard as well as my compost heap and the quality of life for my chickens. I also enjoyed getting properly chased by my new bees while busy upping the diversity in my orchard by planting 30 new fruit trees. I did all of this in little time thanks to the new insights shared by UrbanFarm.org.

Urban farming is about making the most out of a small space. It’s about declaring your yard, your courtyard or windowsill as an actual farm. And then working with the seasons, the sunlight, and local resources like discarded materials and water-runoff to bring it to life as cheaply and conveniently as possible.

It isn’t as daunting as one might think and the payoff is spectacular. Taking control of your food and water supply means reclaiming your power by saving money, saving energy, saving waste and saving fuel believe it or not. It is the foundation for the idea “think globally and act locally.”

In the coming weeks UrbanFarm.org will be hosting a free webinar called “SeedSavingHacked.“  This will be a fascinating class about how to save your own seeds, secure your favorite foods for the future and the interesting events that led up to the patenting and ownership of 78% of our seeds by 3 companies. In the rapidly changing world where the FDA has recently signed off on the Genetically Modified Apple, I feel more encouraged than ever to learn about seeds and seed saving.

To start, it’s important to know the difference between the 3 main types of seeds:

Heirloom – what happens naturally when a plant is left alone for tens of thousands of years; the seed always produces the same variety.

Hybrid, when two sexually compatible plants cross-pollinate to produce a new variety, making interesting food, but sometimes not great new seeds, hence the need for saving. This does occur in nature but is commonly applied by man. A hybrid seed is NOT a GMO.

Genetically Modified(GMO), or transgenic, is when a gene is taken from another species like a fish and transported, typically with a virus, to another species like a tomato. It does not happen in nature and will never qualify as organic. Here is the most current list of GMO foods on the market. http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/311/ge-foods/crops-in-the-pipeline#

Join me in SeedSavingHacked and we’ll expand our horizons together.

SeedSavingHacked.org