New Plants are on their way!

Well... today is going to be a semi-long day. All the kids are off school for today as it's the end of the marking period. So grades are out too, which my kids are not terribly worried over.

We have peas sprouts, cabbage sprouts, onions popping up. Not to mention we picked up some red cabbage plants and some brussel sprout plants. Also... I received my plant investment from my mother and aside for the money I had set aside for Baker Creek (which went to something for a pick me up after some bad news) I have placed some seed, plant orders. We have a irs check coming..in the mail... after we discovered the bank wouldn't accept the check. We are going to use that money for a car when it gets here. Problem is we found 3 that we really wanted that we looked for when we thought it would be directly deposited. Then find out the bank wouldn't accept the check, it wound up be a big let down. One that required a “pick me up” meal. It entailed beef fajitas, followed up by chocolate cake for the adults macaroni for the kids. So the money I put aside for the bulk of my seeds will be coming out of the remainder of our irs check. I am planning to take Queen sized Tink with me when I go shopping (I hope we don't run them out of inventory grins).

As for the plants/seeds I ordered with the companies, now note I did buy plants from Burgess... aside from 1 due to it being the only place that carried it, the other plants are ornamental from them.

Burgess:

Screen trees/shrubs:

Russian olive (5 plants)

Hybrid Willow (20 plants)

Butterfly/insect attractant shrubs:

Old Fashioned Lilac (2 plants)

Pink Honeysuckle (3 plants)

Edibles:

Daylilies (20 plants?)

Dwarf Flowering cherry (8 plants)

Cold Hardy Banana (4 trees)

Luffa sponge squash ( 1 pkt)

Other:

Weeping Willow (2 trees)

Bushel Gourd (1 pkt)

Stokes Seed Company:

Ornamental:

Purple Millet (1 pkt)

Edibles:

Corn salad (1 pkt)

Blue Lake bush beans (1 lb)

Celery Root (1 pkt)

Raintree:

Wintergreen (4 plants)

Goji berries (1 plant)

Russian Tea (2 trees)

Rhubarb (4 crowns?)

I think this is a very nice start plant wise, the cold hardy banana is suppose to be edible, and with how we go through bananas. I do hope they taste good... we eat bananas like most people drink water. Burgess is the only company that offers it, so that was a necessity. We are getting a goji berry as I want to try them, I figure if they have an odd flavor I can always mix them into something and we'd get the health benefits from them. Anybody know if you can harvest from a tea plant in the first year you plant it?

I replaced the potatoes the former roosters ate today, then watered all the garden. Mind you, we were suppose to get rain for the last few days... it has all avoided us. I'm figuring that because I watered it will rain today. Had a funny moment while watering the potato pile, one of the kittens was trying to catch the water and not understanding why he was getting wet.

Well that's it for now, everyone have a good weekend!

Be Well, Be safe, and Blessed be...

A Word On Seeds....

Well I was talking to Silver and the kids about watermelons, and an interesting question came up. How do you get seeds for “seedless” watermelons? Now I know that those white “seeds” are seeds, but anyone who has grown watermelons and has seen the seeds you plant for them. Know they are not those little white “seeds”. So if the watermelons don't produce a standard seed, how DO you get the seed?

That brought on another question, as my reply to Silver asking about seeds for seedless watermelon was. “The same way you get seeds for a GMO that has the terminator gene in it.” Which as anyone knows, isn't an answer.

So, how do they get the seed stock for the terminator plants? I imagine you can make a new batch every year, but here is another few questions. What happens if they make a mistake? Where would they get the original seed to genetically modify? I imagine that eventually if they have their way with it that, there would be no seed without some “markers” from the GM corn. Look at Mexico for example, where they did not allow GM corn to go into their country as seed corn. Now though, due to the fact that they did allow “food stuffs” to come in with GM corn. So what did the “poor” farmers there do? They take some of any of the corn they eat and save it to grow. Now they are finding in different places around Mexico that some of the GM corn “genes” are mutating their corn plants. Sometimes so that the plant is producing multiple ears per leaf. Now on any standard corn plants they only have one per leaf. The officials are telling the people to NOT EAT OR SAVE THE SEEDS. They even want the farmers to destroy them. What does that tell you about the GM genes?

What happens when the terminator gene crosses over there? Mexico has many varieties of corn that are only seen there. They plant their corn near the “wild” types that corn came from way back when. So the wild corn is a grass, so if that “gene” jumps to the “wild” type would it then cross over to standard grass?

So, back tot he original question that led to this, seedless watermelon seeds. Well we have been told that the seedless types are a hybrid, now my mother says seedless ones have no flavor. She is right the seedless ones to me seem to not have the “flavor” I associate with WATERMELON, so is that a good side affect of the hybrid? Also why would you hybridize a plant to not produce a viable seed? What is the point of that?

One could almost question, are seedless watermelons a GMO in disguise? It would make more sense than “forcing” nature to do something unnatural. Producing something without any seed is not that far from producing one with a sterile seed. The big difference here is corn the “vegetable” part is the seed. Whereas the watermelon it has nothing to do with the seed. So we go back to where the “greed” of the BIG M and the idea of their terminator gene come into play. If the farmer that is buying watermelon seeds from you cannot use the seeds from the watermelon he grows because there are none then he has to keep buying from the seed company. Which is what happens with the terminator gene that is out there. Makes good money sense doesn't it? To the seed company any way....

Makes you think doesn't it?