Song for Jasmine

For the eco-minded individual, March is a good month. There are events of all shapes and sizes that you can take part in. Here are a few of them.

The biggest event this month will undoubtedly be Earth Hour. It takes place at 8:30 pm local-time on Saturday 27th, wherever you are in the world. Participating is simple, sign up on the website (so they can know how many people take part) and then, when the time comes, just turn off your lights for an hour. The idea is not to save electricity, one hour of lighting won’t make that much difference to anything. No, the idea is to show your support for solid action in favour of tackling climate change. There’s more information on the Earth Hour FAQ, if you’re interested.

Last year, hundreds of millions of people worldwide took part. Towns, cities, and major landmarks across the globe darkened to show their support for action to tackle climate-change. The fact that world leaders let us down in Copenhagen in December only makes it all the more important that we send the message loud and clear once more. So go on, sign up, switch off, and do something different in the dark for an hour!

If you’re in Canada, there’s another event that might interest you. March 11th has been declared Bottled Water Free Day.

This has been organised by the Canadian Federation of Students, the Sierra Youth Coalition and the Polaris Institute. Their aim is simple, they want to encourage people to pledge to stop drinking bottled water.

Why? Because bottled water represents a great deal of plastic and fuel used to transport water that is no better than tap water – and often is tap water – so that people can pay 1000 times as much as it would cost them to take it from the tap. The bottles leach chemicals into the water, which is not good, and then they often end up in landfill instead of being recycled, which is also not good.

If you’d like to know more, take a look at the video, or click on the logo above to go to the Bottled Water Free Day site.

On this side of the pond, there’s the next edition of Semaine sans pesticides (Week without pesticides) coming up, March 20-30. Pesticides are used so heavily these days that people in developed countries are contaminated from birth, which can’t be good. Take a look at the protective gear this guy is wearing in order to spray that stuff on your food!

There are ever-growing numbers of organic farmers out there, so healthier food is becoming more and more available, which is a good thing. For that matter, you can grow your own vegetables organically with little effort, so it’s quite possible to get off the pesticides. It would be great if more farmers took the organic route!

Semaine sans pesticides is a growing event, with participation from all over the world, though most of the events are in France. Why not check out their map and see if there’s something of interest near you. You can turn up and show your support, or simply find out more about the pesticides on your plate.

On a smaller scale, if you’re in Ferney-Voltaire on Monday 29th, drop in to the Cafe du Soleil (14 Grand Rue) at 8pm. The association Eco-pratique will be meeting to discuss reducing electricity consumption, swapping personal experience and ideas. If you’re in the area, drop in and join the fun!

The garden is finished for the year, which is a shame because it’s been a lot of fun. We had the last of our lettuce just a few days ago. It was surviving nicely due to the lack of frost, though it was hardly growing anymore, it’s too cold now. I’m surprised it has lasted so well, I wish I’d planted more towards the end of the summer!

Today I ‘officially’ closed the garden by covering the big plant tubs with their water-trays, to avoid having the winter rains leech out all the nutrients before the next growing season. I’d never really paid much attention to how soil in pots gets depleted of its nutrients before, but that was brought home to me this year. The white tub that I have had for many years grew tiny sunflowers compared to those with new soil, which were three or four times bigger. Shame on me, I should have known better.

I don’t want to use chemical fertilisers, I don’t want to replace the soil in the pots, and I don’t think I can realistically put a compost heap on my terrace, so I’m trying something different. I’m digging small, deep holes in the soil, and burying vegetable peelings in them. Hopefully, over winter, they will rot down enough to feed the soil without also rotting next years plants. Maybe it will work, maybe not, we’ll see!

Our garden has been quite productive, and we’ve enjoyed the produce from it. A recent study claims that organic food is no healthier than normal food, but that study completely ignored the use of pesticides in conventional agriculture. I’ve read enough to convince me that pesticide-free veggies are a good thing. Of course, there are other benefits to growing your own vegetables, such as reducing food-miles.

Food-miles are a measure of the amount of fuel needed to transport food from the farm to your plate. That fuel all contributes to climate-change by emitting greenhouse-gasses, so getting your food locally means less global warming. You can’t get more local than your own garden, so growing your own food is good for the planet too!

On a larger scale, organic farming is also beneficial in the fight against climate change in other ways. Organic farming feeds the soil, not the plant, and doing so means that the soil will absorb and hold more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than chemical-intensive methods. The Carbon Farmers of America have taken this one step further, deliberately adopting farming techniques to optimise carbon sequestration, and making farms more productive in the process. The story of the farms of “Yobarnie” and “Nevallan”, in Australia, is quite an eye-opening account of how well such techniques work.

So your organic garden may be good for the climate, as well as providing good food. I could have squeezed a few more vegetables out of our garden this year, but I’m glad I left some space for sunflowers instead. Apart from being pretty in their own right, they’ve been feeding the bees all summer, and now feed the birds, long after nearly everything else out there has finished. If you look closely at the photo below you’ll see there are 6 goldfinches, quite a sight!

Nor is it just goldfinches, we’ve had great-tits too. As you can see, they’re not timid about getting their share, this one was quite happy to push in while the goldfinches were feeding. He’s more agile than the goldfinches, so manages to get his way.

Other birds have benefited from both the goldfinches and the great tits dropping seeds on the ground. Black Redstarts and sparrows often forage around the pots while the other birds are doing their stuff. Sparrows may be plain compared to other birds, but they’re still fun to watch. Here’s 3 of them looking on while a fourth is dipping into the bowl of water we put out for them. You can’t easily tell, but he was taking a bath at the time.

Finally, although the garden outdoors is finished for the year, we’re still growing something! Dweezeljazz has got the bug now, and is growing fresh shoots of all sorts for our salads. They’re very easy to grow, using a neat little gadget from Satoriz, and make a welcome addition to our meals. Thank you, Dweezeljazz.

My little organic terrace-garden has been rather successful this year, and the produce has been very welcome at our table. We’re not the only ones to appreciate it, naturally, there are plenty of critters who have helped themselves throughout the summer. That’s OK with me, I’m happy to share to some extent, providing they don’t eat everything.

One common form of damage has been beetroot leaves eaten out from the inside by leaf-miners. There was a lot of this in early summer in particular, and I had little choice but to remove the affected parts of the leaves and throw them away. Otherwise I would have had very few leaves left on some of my plants! Apparently, some plants have evolved patterns of markings that look similar to the damage caused by leaf-miners, which protects them because the leaf-miners prefer unoccupied leaves in which to lay their eggs. Maybe I’ll ask Dweezeljazz to go out and paint the leaves for me next year, that sounds like a job for an artist!

There have been any number of butterflies hovering around the garden, even well before there were any flowers in evidence. They must have had something else in mind and yes, sure enough, I have found lots of eggs hidden on the leaves. Some were quite hard to spot, among the beetroot in particular. Some were easier, like the yellow eggs on the nasturtium leaves.

Butterfly eggs, of course, hatch into caterpillars, and I have found quite a number through the summer. On the left is a ‘Small White’ (Pieris rapae), this one was just running around the rim of the pot like he was desperate to find the end of it. I don’t know what the one on the right is called. Below them is, I think, the caterpillar of a Garden Tiger moth (Arctia caja). Apparently, Tiger Moth numbers have been decimated in the last 30 years, due largely to excessive use of pesticides. Like many other small creatures, they are now in need of protection in the UK. This one was running across our living room floor at high speed, heading for the stairs, looking for a place to pupate. He was safely redirected to the great outdoors!

There have been a number of other insects, such as this bright green beetle (probably a Chrysolina species), and the two crickets below.

The one on the right is Roesel’s bush cricket, (Metrioptera roeselii), and this poor specimen has lost one of his hind legs. Despite this, he was quite agile, climbing easily, and was able to manage a decent hop when I picked him up and released him in the nearby bushes.

It’s not just insects that visit our garden. After being absent this summer, the goldfinches are back, this one investigating the sunflower heads for seeds. Well, that’s why I planted them! I know it’s not a good photograph, but it’s the only one of a goldfinch that I have at the moment, so it will have to do. Hopefully I’ll get better photos later.

Although not closely related to the American goldfinch, it does share its taste for sunflower seeds!

Finally, late one night a few weeks ago, we found this hedgehog doing the rounds on our terrace. I don’t think he found anything edible, but he’s welcome to come back anytime. Again, not a perfect photo, but we don’t like to use flash on animals, especially nocturnal ones. He wasn’t hanging around for us to get many shots, this is the only one we got of him too!

I haven’t any photos of all the bees, butterflies and wasps that have visited my garden too. Maybe next year. It’s amazing how much variety you can get visiting just a few pots of plants.

Although we’ve had a heatwave recently here in France, the dominant theme for this summer has been rain. Lots of rain. And yet more rain. With all this rain, I’ve not had to water my terrace-garden very often. I was initially concerned that my plants, being on a west-facing terrace, would get too hot. That has not been a problem! Despite this, I’ve had a fair bit of success in the garden so far. We’ve had lettuce and chard in good quantities since the middle of June, and will still have plenty for some time to come. I planted a second crop of both a while ago, and that is giving me a good succession. We’ve also had our first beetroot, as you can see from the pictures here. They weren’t quite the cricket-balls you can get in the supermarkets, but they were certainly big enough for us. As with everything that comes straight from the garden into the kitchen, they tasted great! There are still plenty more out there, so they’re not done yet!

The beetroot leaves have been supplementing the chard whenever we want fresh greens. I deliberately planted many of my plants closer together than they say you should on the packet, with the intention of taking a leaf off here and there to keep them from getting overcrowded. This has worked well, more or less, and has allowed me to make good use of the few tubs I have available. Lettuce, chard, and beetroot have rubbed shoulders – or roots – and kept us well supplied. That said, I have to admit that some of the plants were just too close, and I should have left them more room. I’ll know better next year!

Not everything has been entirely successful. The herbs I planted have not grown as fast or well as I had hoped. The thyme has not flowered, which has disappointed me because I was hoping it would attract bees. I think it may have been too cold and wet for it, and it has also been crowded by some of the leafier plants. The rosemary never came up, which is also disappointing because it can provide useful food for bees in winter.

I lost a number of seedlings, plucked by birds looking for something to eat. I’m guessing that they may have been younger birds, perhaps recent fledglings learning how to forage, because the damage all happened in a short period of time around the end of June. I’ve not lost any later seedlings this way. If they were adults that pull up seedlings regularly, I would expect to have lost some of my later sowings too.

I also had an attack of powdery mildew on the beetroot leaves. Looking around, it seems that one way to deal with that is to spray the plants with milk! Incidentally, if you go looking for the article referenced on that page, the link they give is incorrect. The original paper was in the journal of Crop Protection, not Crop Science. If your Portugese is any good, you can also take a look at a technical note by the same author, which you can get without paying for it!

I’ve mentioned the ants on my sunflowers, they were farming aphids. I read in several places that mint deters ants. Not having any mint to hand at the time, I put down the contents of a few mint tea-bags, and that seemed to do the trick! That same link actually advocates planting sunflowers so the ants will herd aphids onto them, taking them away from other plants. I didn’t read that bit first time round, it seems there’s more to companion-planting than meets the eye!

The peas I planted actually produced some decent pods. I think I will try a few more next year, cascading out of the pots where they will not compete with other plants. The spring-onions are doing well too, as is the basil, of course. We have been having some very good salads lately!

We have 6 large tubs for our terrace garden, plus a number of smaller pots, which provide a good deal of growing space. We shall add more tubs next year. We paid more for the pots and soil than we have saved on the food we have grown so far, but I think that it will only take 3 or 4 years to pay back the initial investment. Meanwhile, we’ve been able to go shopping less often, saving us time, and money on petrol, and we have been able to supplement our table regularly, with good-tasting, pesticide-free produce. All things considered, our first summer of organic terrace gardening has gone very well so far, and it’s not over yet!

Back in April, I described my gardening plans for this year. Time for an update! It’s been seven weeks since then, so I ought really to be well advanced with my plants. Unfortunately, we have not had access to our terrace all that time because of work that needed doing on it, so I’m rather behind with the schedule. Still, there is progress to show, and here it is.

I bought the seeds, here they are, most of them. I was interested to see that some of the seeds on offer were ‘certified organic’, like the beetroot here on the left. I’d never heard of organic seeds before, but if that means they don’t use pesticide or fertilisers to raise the stock, that gets my vote.

I also got some big pots. I have had the white one you see here for some time, and I recall it was expensive when I got it. It seems pots still are expensive, which is why I’m not getting more until I am convinced I can produce something in them. The brown pots are huge, they hold 120 litres of compost each, that’s over four cubic feet. I would have preferred white pots that would absorb less heat, but despite the number of garden centres in our area it’s not easy to find something suitable. Large pots will hold a lot of water, so plants will survive better in the summer heat. Our balcony takes the full force of the summer sun, so that’s an important consideration!

Our local organic store, Satoriz, now sells organic compost, which is a great idea. It’s good stuff, but it can’t be used on its own because it needs something mixed with it to help it drain well. On its own, it tends to pack solid when its wet, forming a solid layer like a dried-up river bed. That’s not good because the soil doesn’t breath or absorb water properly when it’s like that, it needs to be open and porous. Still, it’s good to know that ‘organic’ is really entering every part of the home-food-growers’ domain, and I will definitely be using this compost as a regular part of my gardening.

When you fill a pot as big as these with new soil, it’s a good idea to make sure the soil is thoroughly wet before you plant anything. The compost sold by garden centres is normally very dry so it weighs less, people are more likely to buy it if they can carry it. When it’s that dry it can take a lot of water to soak it thoroughly, these big pots actually took 30 litres of water before anything drained out the bottom, that’s one quarter of their volume in soil! I watered them 3 or 4 times over a day or so before I was happy enough to plant in them.

The lettuce is growing strongly, as are the chard and beetroot. I’ve already thinned them out, but I may still have to thin the lettuce some more, they’re growing very vigorously. The spring onions have sprung, as you can see at the top of the post. You can see a sunflower growing well in the white pot above, but I can’t take the credit for that one, it’s a seed that found its way into the pot somehow and sprouted without asking permission. The sunflowers I planted are a dwarf variety, they shouldn’t grow to more than about 18 inches/45 cm high, and you can’t see them over the edge of the pot yet.

I also have some peas coming through. I had not intended to plant peas, but we bought some for eating and there were a few that were sprouting, so we thought we’d give them a try. They’re doing very well, in fact they’re currently the biggest plants I have out there.

The french marigolds are doing well, and I did plant nasturtiums, which have also come up. The thyme, sage, rosemary, and basil have sprouted too, but they have been a bit disappointing with their germination, slow to come through and slow to get on with the job. The mint hasn’t come up at all, but that’s my only no-show this year, so I can’t really complain.

Since the herbs were supposed to be our organic pest-deterrent, that leaves the other plants a bit vulnerable at the moment. The sunflower that that seeded itself is harbouring aphids, which are being looked after by ants. That’s not good, so I need to do something about them, and would welcome any suggestions for dealing with them. I’m pretty certain the ants aren’t nesting in the pot, there are only a few of them, so I don’t have a nest to eradicate, just a few visitors.

Fortunately, other characters, such as this enormous slug, have not found their way into my little garden. That’s one advantage of an exposed, hot terrace, it forms a natural barrier to some pests. I don’t think my lettuce would last long if this guy found them!

So I’m not competing with the local farmers yet, but even since I took these photos a couple of days ago the plants have grown quite a bit. It won’t be long before I’m getting a few lettuce leaves at least. I know other people out there who are blogging about their organic gardens, The Natural Patriot has already started harvesting goodies from his. The Earth Home Dwellers are having a go too, but I don’t know how they’re getting on. C’mon guys, tell us, I’m curious!

If anyone else is growing their own organic vegetables out there I’d love to know how you’re doing?

Next Monday, June 8th, is World Oceans Day. At the risk of turning this blog into a diary of global eco-events, I’d like to draw your attention to it.

The idea to have a world-day for the oceans came in 1992 from Canada, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It’s been celebrated every year since then, but this year marks the first time it has official U.N. recognition. Henceforth, World Oceans Day will be celebrated on June 8th, every year.

You might think that since I live near Geneva, about as far away from the sea as it is possible to get in Western Europe, I would not have much to say about the sea. If you think that, you must be new to this blog (welcome!), the sea is one thing I can talk about for hours. I grew up in England, closer to the coast than most people there. Nobody in England is more than 70 miles from the sea, I grew up much closer than that, about one mile away from the shore, on an island, no less. I spent many a childhood summer day freezing in the cold water, picking my way over the stony beaches, trying to see what I could through the opaque grey-green waters of the north Kent coast (not much, as it happens). I collected foraminifera (tiny shells, less than 1 mm across) and looked at them under a microscope. I remember the first time I saw sea-anemones, on the beaches of Jersey on a family holiday. I’ve seen octopus and nudibranchs on crowded Greek beaches, and sharks and dolphins in the Maldives. Oh yes, I can safely say I love the sea.

The oceans are huge. They cover almost three-quarters of the surface of the earth, and something like three fifths of the earth is over a mile below the surface of the sea. There is an awful lot of seawater out there. So why do we need a world-day event to draw attention to the oceans? Well, as it turns out, the seas and oceans of the world are not in good shape, and it’s our fault, again. You can find out more about the threats to the oceans on the Marine Conservation Society website, here are a few of the highlights.

Everyone knows about global warming, and the melting of the polar ice-caps. That’s bad news for penguins and polar bears, but also for people. A large fraction of humanity lives near the coast, making a substantial part of their living from what they can haul out of the sea. Rising seas and warming waters will change that. Not only will islands and low-lying regions be lost under the waves, the ecosystems at the coastal fringes will suffer too. Coral reefs, for example, provide living space and nurseries for a great many species, and are essential to the marine environment. Even creatures that don’t live on or in them directly often depend on the animals that do. Excessively warm water leads to ‘coral bleaching’, which can kill it if the water stays warm for long enough. Bleaching events are more common than they used to be, and are predicted to become much worse over time. Despite some research showing that some corals may adapt to warmer waters, there is strong reason to believe that most corals will be killed by warm seas by the end of this century unless we make big cuts in our emissions of greenhouse gasses. Scientists are working to find ways to help coral survive, but they’re racing against the clock.

Globally, there’s an even bigger threat, ocean-acidification. The oceans absorb a great deal of the excess carbon dioxide that we are pumping into the atmosphere, and this is slowly turning the seas more acidic. This slows coral growth because it is harder for the coral to form its chalky skeleton. Other creatures, many of which are right at the bottom of the marine food chain, will suffer the same fate. Acidification of the oceans is a global problem by its very nature. It will affect reefs and other ecosystems worldwide, not just those near to cities and industries.

Overfishing is another major problem for the oceans. By depleting stocks of even a few species, we change the way entire ecosystems behave, often seriously. Tuna have been fished almost to extinction in the Mediterranean sea, and there is little sign that common sense will prevail to reduce the pressure on them. Tuna are predators, high up in the food chain. When you remove top predators, often the result is that a few species lower down the food-chain start to dominate, out-competing other creatures. The ecosystem becomes unbalanced, and may change its nature completely. It may not be enough to simply stop hunting the predators, the ecosystem may no longer be able to recover on its own.

Floating garbage is another serious problem. On the tiny atoll of Midway in the Pacific ocean, albatross often mistake floating plastic garbage for food, which they then feed to their chicks. That kills many of them, not surprisingly. Albatross aren’t meant to digest golf-tees, toothbrushes, and lego blocks.

Even the efforts we go to to protect the oceans and their inhabitants can often be misguided. I’m sure we’ve all heard of dolphin-safe tuna, it even got a mention in Lethal Weapon 2, released some 20 years ago. I’m fond of dolphins, like many people, but I was shocked to learn about just how much damage dolphin-safe tuna-fishing can do. The methods used to catch tuna without harming dolphins have a much higher rate of bycatch than other methods. ‘Bycatch’ is another word for ‘collateral damage’, animals accidentally killed while hunting a specific species at sea. Much of the bycatch in dolphin-safe tuna is in itself seriously endangered, far more so than dolphins themselves. No, dolphin-safe tuna is not a good thing for the marine environment.

More and more people are becoming aware of and involved in environmental issues. They are paying attention to the environmental cost of the goods they purchase, insisting on packaging that can be recycled, lower power consumption from electrical goods, or higher mileage from their cars, for example. But what can you change in your daily activities to help the oceans, especially if you live far from the sea? The Marine Conservation Society have some advice, and there’s also a page of hints at The Ocean Project. One obvious thing is to be more informed and cautious in your seafood purchases, both sites have suggestions there. If you prefer to avoid seafood altogether, simply buying organic food is a good idea. That encourages farmers to produce more of it, which means less pesticide in use. Reduced pesticide use means less of it getting into our rivers and from there into the sea, finally ending up in marine mammals like that dolphin we were trying to save a moment ago.

You can find out more about World Ocean Day at the World Ocean Network site. Maybe one of the events that they list is taking place somewhere near you. If not, there are plenty of web-based resources available, like the 24 hours in the Ocean online event from the Musée Nausicaä. I’ll certainly be following that for some of the day.

Easter has come and gone, and those of you lucky enough to have a garden may well have been out in it planting things. I don’t have a garden, and my mum is probably raising her eyebrows right now because I didn’t get that much done in hers over Easter, but I do have a terrace, and I am looking forward to trying my hand at growing a few plants this year.

I’ve grown vegetables in pots before, but not without pesticides and fertilisers. This year will be different, I intend to follow the growing trend and see how well I manage without chemical assistance. If it’s good enough for Michelle Obama, it’s good enough for me!

Michelle Obama wants to plant an organic garden in the white house lawn, and apparently this is upsetting the agricultural chemicals industry in the US. They are concerned that it sends the wrong message because it is organic. This despite the fact that more and more people out there are moving away from pesticide use. The fourth Semaine sans Pesticides (‘week without pesticides’), just last month, was twice the size of the one last year.

14 countries participated, from Canada, South America, Europe, and Africa (a summary is available online). Pesticides are nasty chemicals, and it seems a lot of people, the world over, think we can do without using so much or so many of them. But how?

Fortunately for the small gardener, there’s a lot of good information out there about natural pest control, such as using coffee to repel slugs and snails, using neem oil as an environmentally-friendly pesticide, companion planting, for mutual pest-resistance, selecting plants to attract useful insects, and growing vegetables in pots. I’ve even read some of it, and have decided what I want to grow this year.

I want to grow lettuce, beetroot, chard, and spring onions. Beetroot leaves are good in salads, so they’re not just for the roots. I also want to plant a few herbs (basil, thyme, rosemary, mint), as much for the smell as anything. I’ve chosen these plants for a variety of reasons:

• they’re easy and fast to grow, so I can hope to get something quickly
• for the most part, they’re cut-and-come-again, so I can hope for a long season
• lettuce and chard, in particular, don’t keep too well in the fridge. By growing my own, I hope to have them fresh whenever I want them.
• they don’t need staking, so occasional high winds and storms won’t damage them (I hope)
• in the event of a disaster (hailstorm, heatwave, locusts, whatever) I should be able to replace them rapidly

Incidentally, if your parrot likes beetroot, do bear in mind that it retains its colour as it passes through the digestive system of your feathered friend. Jasmine liked beetroot, but the first few times we gave it to her we were a little concerned about the red droppings at the bottom of the cage a few hours later!

I also want to grow some flowers, partly for the colour but also for the local birds and insects – some of them anyway. The local bees will probably like the thyme, and I’m sure they’ll go for sunflowers too. The sunflower heads will be kept for feeding the birds later in the autumn and winter.

The minimal research I’ve done so far suggests that french marigolds are good at deterring aphids, so they’ll be very much in evidence, in and around the other plants. Nasturtiums are easy and, if I am to believe what I hear, edible too, but I’m not convinced. Maybe I’ll try them, maybe not.

I don’t intend to be too ambitous with my gardening this year. I won’t have a great deal of time for it and I’m not expecting to save a lot of money. I do expect to grow some tasty food, and to have a lot of fun in the process. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Some dates for your diary:

• 28th March, 8:30-9:30 local time, Earth Hour
• 22nd April, Earth Day
• 20th-30th March, Semaine sans Pesticides (“Week without pesticides”)

Earth Hour is something that started only two years ago, but is catching on fast. In 2007, 2.2 million homes and businesses in Sydney, turned out their lights for one hour, as a gesture to raise awareness about global warming. Last year, 50 million people took part, in 400 cities in 35 countries around the world.

This year, over 80 countries will take part, representing over 1400 cities (and growing fast). The Eiffel Tower in Paris is one of many major landmarks worldwide that will have its lights turned off for that hour. Apparently Switzerland hasn’t heard about it yet, but there’s still time.

They’re hoping to have a billion people participate this year, so please visit the Earth Hour site, watch their rather impressive video, and join in. Maybe invite a friend or two over for the evening of the 28th and see how much fun you can have with the lights out!

Earth Day, just over three weeks later, is a bit less dramatic, but they claim to already have a billion people participate in their activities, so it’s no small thing. Earth Day has been around since the 1960’s, and is aimed at raising awareness about environmental issues. There are a variety of different events, organised all over the place, so there may be something near you. Switzerland are on board this one, at least in Zurich, as far as I can tell. It’s unfortunate that the earthday.net web-site is so poorly structured, it’s really hard to find anything useful there. You might have more luck with Google., or you can find some ideas on how to participate at the earth911.com site.

Making the bridge between Earth Hour and Earth Day, you can take the Earth Hour 2 Earth Day Challenge if you want to do more.

Another noteworthy event is “Semaine sans pesticides” (“Week without pesticides”). This started in France, and is young, like Earth Hour, this year being only its fourth year. France uses more pesticide than any other country in Europe (76,000 tonnes per year), and this movement is all about letting people know there are better ways of doing things. It has also become an international event, and this year it has gone as far as Brazil. Check out their website to find out what’s going on near you.

An American study published last year showed that pesticides can be measured in young children on a conventional diet, and that switching to organic foods eliminated the pesticides from the childrens’ bodies in less than 36 hours. Switch back to a conventional diet and the pesticides are detectable again almost immediately, which means the children are eating pesticides every day. I don’t know about you, but that rather worries me.

So, there’s a lot going on in the near future, and it’s easy to get involved. Attend one or more of the events for Earth Day or Semaine sans Pesticides, or switch off your lights for an hour on the 28th and have some fun.

Oh, that reminds me, I haven’t mentioned this to DweezelJazz yet. DweezelJazz, fancy spending an hour with me in the dark on a Saturday evening?

The BBC published an article on Tuesday with the title Farmers fear EU pesticide rules. Interestingly, a few hours later they changed the title to “Euro MPs back pesticide controls”. This concerns the very law that I mentioned in a previous post, “Optimism“.

It’s a shame the BBC changed the title, but the story still made it out into the world with that title, so i feel I am allowed to refer to it as such. So why should British farmers fear these rules? The majority of the EU states welcomes them, as do I, though the MEPs don’t ask me for my opinion.

Apparently, they fear the rise in price that would follow the drop in productivity, even to the point that the ‘British carrot’ could become extinct. Why, then, does the Soil Association believe otherwise? The Soil Association is an organisation that supports and promotes organic farming. They published a report in October 2008 entitled “England And Wales Under Organic Agriculture”, in which they discuss the consequences (email them if you want a copy, it’s not available for download). They point out that going completely organic could, for the UK, reduce the use of fertilizers by 95%, spraying by 98%, and increase jobs by 73%. There are many other benefits, not least of which is a huge reduction in the carbon footprint of their food.

The common objection to going organic is that yields would decline. This report shows that they would not suffer as much as is often claimed, Britain would not starve. It might even be better off with the right balance of farming techniques, there’s plenty of scope. If the Argentinians can manage to raise organic beef on large farms and export it around the world, surely Britain can do likewise?

Unfortunately, the soil-association report doesn’t mention the fate of the British carrot, so I don’t know what would happen there.

France is not so scared of going organic, it seems. The French are putting 12 million euros annually into turning their farms organic. They want organic production to grow considerably in the near future. France is the biggest consumer of pesticides in europe, but they don’t seem to be scared of running out of carrots as they change their ways.

Personally, I buy most of my food from a French organic chain, Satoriz (Jasmine often came with us). Their prices are reasonable, the quality is good, and they have a full range of organic products, from soap and baby food to beer and wine. Oh yes, and carrots, like the one at the top of this post. I’ve also noticed that the food I buy from there tastes better than food I get from elsewhere. Satoriz have a lot of shops in my area, and have recently opened a large new outlet. I hope they continue to do well.

America, too, has an agricultural system strongly based in the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. As Obama prepares to be sworn in as president, there are people calling on him to reform the way the USA produces food, citing largely the same reasons.

So if all the French, the Argentinians, and the USA think they can produce food without so many chemicals, I have to wonder what the British farmers have to fear? Surely they aren’t really scared for their carrots?