Why she joined SLOLA!!!

What a delightful blog post "Front Yardening" (click here to read) wrote about why she decided to join SLOLA! Here's a taste--read the whole thing at the link!

Gardening as Resistance: Why I Joined SLOLA

Posted on August 23, 2011

Part of why I decided to plant a kitchen garden was to empower myself. It has become all too clear that the corporations and government entities responsible for our food supply do not have our best interests at heart (not to mention the best interests of future generations). In addition to supporting local, sustainable farmers, I thought it made sense to educate myself about growing some of my own food. I started slowly – first just with lettuce seedlings, then a few other crops. For the past ten months, I’ve purchased almost all of my seedlings from a grower at the Culver City Farmers Market (my tomato seedlings came from Tomatomania). Lettuce, chard, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, summer squash, tomatoes, eggplant, basil, mint, sage, parsley, cilantro, and dill: I’ve grown it all, some with great success, and some with little. I’ve learned enough to know that I have a lot more to learn, and the experience has been wonderful, though largely solitary.
Recently I’ve found myself thinking about seeds and community. As enjoyable as it is to grow a small kitchen garden in my front yard, I never intended or expected to stop there. I know that to become a better gardener, I have to learn about seeds: how to grow food from them, and how to save them. I also know that I will learn more and faster if I connect with other growers, both beginners like myself and longtime masters. (continued; go to link at top of page)

Sweet Corn Pollination

Corn, Not Quite As High As An Elephant's Eye Tassels Out

Organic Seed Alliance's recent blog post, Sweet Corn Pollination Season in California, is a marvelous picture-loaded tutorial in hand pollination of corn.

Corn is a wind pollinated plant that will easily suffers from 'inbreeding.'  This means, to get seeds that will grow vigorously, individual plants must be pollinated by a plant other than itself.  Furthermore, especially in a small planting, the very light pollen will easily waft away, pollinating very little of the silks at hand.  To insure each silk gets pollinated, and by an adjacent plant and not itself, hand pollination is the preferred method.  Each kernel of corn has its own silk and that silk must be hit with at least one grain of pollen or the kernel does not develop, making it essential for good seed set to hand pollinate.  



I also found this video on breeding corn - while it does extoll the praises of hybrid corn, it is a good video on corn pollination and provides some interesting details on corn breeding.

If you want to save corn seed, this is the best way to get it done.  The tutorial's photos give a reader a good start on the methods and techniques.  I will being doing this procedure later this year as the purple dent corn, Purple Maize, begins to tassel out.  I've got my bags, a friend is sewing a pollination apron for me and I'm studying everything I can find on the hand pollination of corn.

If you like what you read from OSA, please consider sending them a couple of bucks.  They are doing excellent work and, like all non-profits, could use the dough to continue the good work.  Remember that Monsanto and the other mega-corporations that are trying to control our seed supply have billions of dollars.  It's a David vs. Goliath scenario and OSA is one the best 'David's' in the business today.

david