The Box of Herbs

It being the beginning of November, we are now officially into the off-season. With a few thousand garlics planted out over the last two days, the fields are now in dormant mode. Fresh produce must come from the hoophouses only – until March when we start anew. Our new off-season offering – to be unveiled at the first indoor winter market at Evergreen Brick Works Farmers Market this coming Saturday, November 10 – is this painstakingly created selection of certified organic dried herbs. The Box of Herbs is chock full of potent herbs and spices, containing a range of goodies for your culinary kitchen counter, your natural medicine cabinet, and your gift basket for friends and family. Get creative making teas, spicing up your cuisine, aromatizing your house, and healing with herbs!

So Long (for the season) to Marcia

Friday marked the last day of work on our farm this season for Marcia.

She has been our enthusiastic, stalwart weeder in the fields this summer through all weathers. She is seen here on her final task, harvesting calendula flowers midst the flowering rapini and freshly-harvested romano beans.

On this last day, Marcia honoured us with a poem she wrote about her vivid experience here in the farm fields of the rolling hills. Thank you, Marcia. We are very touched.

Rolling Hills organic farm – earth to salad greens

Rolling hills flow as far as the eye can see,

Luscious green trees sing of abundance

Stories of growth toward the sun,

On the edge of the wild, coyotes, deer and moose,

Silence in this oasis of time with bird music in the background.

Life flows in all its fullness.

The farm carves out its own space for a dream,

Plants and art to enrich the world,

Working with nature and glass, the gardener and the artist

Values of peace and cooperation.

A place of beauty, hope and midwifery

Life flows in all its fullness.

Rich earth is home to seeds and baby plants

Manure smells rich and musky,

Roots dig deep for their food,

Salad greens reach for the sky.

Bugs and weeds frolic in this rich land,

Life flows in all its fullness.

Straight lines of plants, weeds dug with a hoe

Glass sculptures glisten in the sun

Butterflies, yellow and black, flirt with the flowers

Birds celebrate abundance and freedom

But this garden is a business, where are my greens?

Life flows in all its fullness.

The gardener is British, with a no-nonsense air

He believes in growing locally without shortcuts,

He loves his land with passion and is committed to nature

Struggles to get help, and cope with the weather,

But his greens are lovely, don’t you think?

Life flows in all its fullness.

The artist makes towers out of glass,

She has a gentleness and is German,

Loves curves, colour and beauty,

She just wants to create, but is in business

How do you sell glass towers?

Life flows in all its fullness.

A retired social worker, loves sweat and grime

Gardening flows through the family tree,

She speaks to the plants with love and respect

And they breathe relief when freed of weeds

My elders all gardeners and the youngsters buy the greens.

Life flows in all its fullness.

Marcia Perryman                                                 June 19, 2013 


We are very happy to hear from Marcia that this poem has been accepted for inclusion into a collection of poetry to be published shortly.

Dry, Dry, Dry

On this Tuesday afternoon, I should really be at Riverdale doing market, selling a range of salad greens, lavender, garlic and grass-fed beef to the brave faithful souls that are out in the sultry heat looking for fresh local organic produce. Instead, I'm home on the farm. The temperature out there right now is 34 C. Not so extreme, but for the dearth of rain around here for several weeks at peak planting and growing time. It is hard for customers in Toronto to believe; they who have gone through bucketing rain that came down so fast and furious that the worst floods for a long while ensued. Basements under water, extended power outages, cars stranded half-submerged on major highways…. And we out here in the hills didn’t get a drop. Black clouds raced towards us and passed by, to the north, to the south, just as I well remember from summers gone by.

I have been watering the truly hot houses and the fields, keeping the best patches alive out there while watching the early planted carrots and beets get gobbled up by a sea of weeds, mostly grasses. This same thing happened last year when we endured many weeks of no rain, under drought conditions that took in a large chunk of central North America. I suppose by now I should realize that this is the new normal instead of reverting to the fallback position of hoping that the lack of rain was a one-off. I still retain some optimism that some of the heavy air and thunder forecast for a couple of days hence will yield some much-needed moisture for the parched plants. At least the lower temperatures following the front moving through will bring back some energy sapped by the intense heat. Last Friday, while picking for Saturday market, then watering all afternoon for several hours, I do believe I went a bit gaga and felt some severe heat exhaustion. Oh well, keep on keeping on.

I spare a rueful thought for the millions of people (and animals, plants) around the world that are at this moment entirely without water. Some live in searing heat and rarely have a drop of clean water to slake their thirst, let alone sprinkle over crops growing in the fields.

Eighty percent of the packaged foods on our grocers shelves are banned in other countries

Aisle after aisle of standard supermarket processed "food" offerings

by Tony Isaacs 

Tony Isaacs, is a natural health author, advocate and researcher who hosts The Best Years in Life website for those who wish to avoid prescription drugs and mainstream managed illness and live longer, healthier and happier lives naturally. Mr. Isaacs is the author of books and articles about natural health, longevity and beating cancer including "Cancer's Natural Enemy" and is working on a major book project due to be published later this year.

(NaturalNews) According to the new book Rich Food, Poor Food, ingredients commonly found in up to 80 percent of all pre-packaged foods on grocers shelves in the U.S. have been banned in other countries. As alarming as such information is, our food safety outlook becomes even bleaker when we consider other banned and toxic food items.

The toxic banned ingredients in our food

In the book, authors Mira and Jason Calton provide a list of banned ingredients which they term "Banned Bad Boys" as well as the countries which have banned them. Among the items is Olestra - commonly used in low/no-fat snack foods and known to cause serious gastrointestinal issues - which has been banned in the United Kingdom and Canada.

Worse is brominated vegetable oil, a substance found in Mountain Dew and Fresca which has been banned in more than 100 countries. As the authors state, brominated vegetable oil "has been linked to basically every form of thyroid disease - from cancer to autoimmune diseases - known to man."

Other dangerous items listed include food colorings - such as yellow #5 and yellow #6, dyes used to make mac & cheese dinners visually appealing. Those dyes are made from coal tar, an active ingredient in lice shampoo which has been linked to allergies, ADHD, and cancer in animals.

Other banned and toxic items in our foods

The toxic banned ingredients listed in the book, horrible as they are, are but part of the bad news when it comes to food items most Americans regularly consume. Here is a partial list of some other toxic ingredients and unsafe food items:

Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a synthetic chemical used to make plastic drinking bottles, baby bottles and storage containers as well as the lining of food and drink cans which can leech into foods from high heat and prolonged storage. Currently, it is found in virtually all canned goods and most baby bottles. It mimics estrogen and can offset the delicate hormonal balance in the developing child, and is blamed to be largely responsible for the age of puberty in young girls being lowered to as young as seven years old. In 2010, Canada became the first country to ban BPA.

An increasing number of countries are banning the sale and/or cultivation of GM crops. Some of the GM crops are engineered to produce their own pesticides and research has shown that the genes are passed on to humans and even down to several generations after consumption. Other crops are engineered to withstand heavy applications of the toxic pesticide Roundup.

Thanks in part to GM engineering, US produce contains serious levels of pesticides as well as herbicides such as Roundup and other glyphosphates. Researchers in Europe have found that the weed killer Roundup has serious toxic effects due to inert ingredients that amplify the toxicity of Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate. As a result, Roundup is banned in nearly every European country.

Due to growth stimulators such as ractopine as well as antibiotics which are added to our meats, over 160 countries say "no" to U.S. meats.

Chemical fertilizers are yet another widespread problem. From 1990 to 1995, 600 different companies from 44 states sent a whopping 270,000,000 pounds of toxic waste to both fertilizer companies and farms. The waste was not treated to remove toxic substances including arsenic and dioxins.

Sadly, greed and cash are kings in the US and our government is too often for sale to the highest bidder. This explains why we have a Monsanto insider over our food safety, much like we have a Merck insider over our medicines.

Sources for this article include:

http://shine.yahoo.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/035504_BPA_puberty_chemicals.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/030343_BPA_toxic_chemicals.html

http://vegnews.com/articles/page.do?pageId=5537&catId=1

http://www.examiner.com/article/what-countries-have-banned-gmo-crops

http://www.offthegridnews.com

Riverdale Farmers Market status

A busier Tuesday summer afternoon at Riverdale Farmers Market

Rolling Hills Organics has so far put in only one appearance at the Riverdale Farmers Market in 2013. It has been a slow spring for most farmers and at our farm we are just getting up and running with field greens production with the recent spike in heat and passing thunderstorms. We also received a little help from the weekend supermoon which is supercharging anything green with extra magnetized moisture, including weeds of course.

In recent years, since the passing of Elizabeth Harris, the number of vendors has dropped along with the attendance. It’s a vicious cycle - customers stop coming because there are not enough vendors; vendors stop coming because there are not enough customers. The market needs to re-double efforts to attract customers and vendors back to the market to re-invigorate an event that is so appealing when busy in its park-like ambience and lovely clientele.

Thanks to the regular troopers who continue to come and buy through thick and thin, heat and rain. We plan to be there from  July on, continuing as long as it remains worth our while.  

Remembering Elizabeth Harris on Riverdale Farmers Market opening day

Elizabeth Harris

Today is the opening day of the 2013 season for Riverdale Farmers Market in Toronto. I find myself at home on the farm. A gentle rain is falling on the lush spring greenery all around. Feeling slightly guilty not to be at market as the rain falls in Toronto, I find myself remembering fondly Elizabeth Harris, the founding market manager, on this her breakout day of the year. It is not possible to imagine not being at market were she still with us, marshalling her farmers and cajoling.

Honouring Elizabeth, here is an excerpt from my newly-published book, High Up in the Rolling Hills:   

It was the irrepressible Elizabeth Harris who had given me my big break as a certified organic grower all those years ago. Then as vice-president of Quinte Organic Farmers Co-operative, I approached Elizabeth to apply for the co-op to be a vendor at her flagship organic farmers market at Riverdale Farm in Cabbagetown, Toronto. She sized up what we offered, 12 small certified-organic family farms pooling their produce to market direct to the customer, and she voiced her doubts. She was used to allowing only single farms to join her family of vendors. But she sized me up too and found something she liked or trusted, so she said, “Okay, but only as long as you bring all the farmers in to sell at your stand through the season.” “Sure,” I promised having gotten a foot in the door. It wasn’t to be, of course; only one or two farmers bothered to come in at all, but the first season was a roaring success for the co-op as a fledgling sales organization. I made sure we stayed on Elizabeth’s good side—as one had to—and, over several years, Elizabeth and I developed a wonderful mutual respect. I was awed by her tight control of the market, her fairness, her discipline with slack vendors, her amazing vision in holding it all together and bringing people together.

“Peter, I’d like you to meet Jamie Kennedy.”

“Peter, can any of your farmers supply three bushels of romano beans for a dinner for seventy-five this Friday?”

She would often call up and tell me about the latest new vendors that she was excited to have visited. She had such respect for farmers and for food produced honestly and in a fresh way. And she would ask my opinion and advice. Early on at market, I incurred her wrath. She had strong rules and enforced them. Vendors were not allowed to sell before the bell rang, right at 3:00 p.m. As I tried to sneak in a sale for a customer who was running off to work, a booming voice bellowed out from the other side of the park: “Mr. Finch, the market opens at three o’clock, and not before!” Last year, held up in traffic and running late in setting up, I upheld her rule when an impending storm told her to ring the bell early. “No, Elizabeth, that’s not fair; I’m not ready,” I pleaded. She agreed to wait, and for weeks after, she deferred to me to see if I was ready before ringing the bell. A softening, maybe? I feel deep down that she truly respected her senior farmers, and I was lucky enough to have been in that number.

Elizabeth slipped away from us, succumbing to cancer, but her amazing energy, drive and spirit would remain with us as we tried to honour her legacy and continued to provide for the table she set for us so passionately. It had been an honour and a privilege to know her; hard to believe that she wouldn’t be shuffling along on a glorious spring afternoon on opening day of market in May and that her voice wouldn’t be greeting me across the park: “Peter, who do you have helping you today? I’d like to introduce you to …”

BREAKING: European Commission to criminalize nearly all seeds and plants not registered with government

As I wrote in my newly-published book High Up in the Rolling Hills:

“Imagine a world in which nature were privately owned. Well, that world is increasingly upon us now—with the overzealous regulation and restriction of natural products, the patenting of crops, the corporate ownership of seeds and food, the escalating genetic modification of foods, the killing of the bees. It really is the end of nature as we have known it.”

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor 

View online at http://www.naturalnews.com/z040214_seeds_European_Commission_registration.html

(NaturalNews) A new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to "grow, reproduce or trade" any vegetable seeds that have not been "tested, approved and accepted" by a new EU bureaucracy named the "EU Plant Variety Agency."

It's called the Plant Reproductive Material Law, and it attempts to put the government in charge of virtually all plants and seeds. Home gardeners who grow their own plants from non-regulated seeds would be considered criminals under this law.

The draft text of the law, which has already been amended several times due to a huge backlash from gardeners, is viewable here.

"This law will immediately stop the professional development of vegetable varieties for home gardeners, organic growers, and small-scale market farmers," said Ben Gabel, vegetable breeder and director of The Real Seed Catalogue. "Home gardeners have really different needs - for example they grow by hand, not machine, and can't or don't want to use such powerful chemical sprays. There's no way to register the varieties suitable for home use as they don't meet the strict criteria of the Plant Variety Agency, which is only concerned about approving the sort of seed used by industrial farmers."

Virtually all plants, vegetable seeds and gardeners to eventually be registered by government

All governments are, of course, infatuated with the idea of registering everybody and everything. Under Title IV of the proposed EU law:

Title IV Registration of varieties in national and Union registers
The varieties, in order to be made available on the market throughout the Union, shall be included in a national register or in the Union register via direct application procedure to the CVPO.

Gardeners must also pay fees to the EU bureaucracy for the registration of their seeds. From the proposed law text:

The competent authorities and the CPVO should charge fees for the processing of
applications, the formal and technical examinations including audits, variety denomination, and the maintenance of the varieties for each year for the duration of
the registration.

While this law may initially only be targeted at commercial gardeners, it sets a precedent to sooner or later go after home gardeners and require them to abide by the same insane regulations.

Government bureaucracy gone insane

"This is an instance of bureaucracy out of control," says Ben Gabel. "All this new law does is create a whole new raft of EU civil servants being paid to move mountains of papers round all day, while killing off the seed supply to home gardeners and interfering with the right of farmers to grow what they want. It also very worrying that they have given themselves the power to regulate and licence any plant species of any sort at all in the future - not just agricultural plants, but grasses, mosses, flowers, anything at all - without having to bring it back to the Council for a vote."

As a hint of the level of insane bureaucracy that gardeners and vegetable growers will be subject to under this EU law, check out this language from the proposed EU law:

Specific provisions are set out on the registration in the Union variety register and with regard to the possibility for the applicant to launch an appeal against a CPVO decision. Such provisions are not laid down for the registration in the national variety
registers, because they are subject to national administrative procedures. A new obligation for each national variety examination centre to be audited by the CPVO will be introduced with the aim to ensure the quality and harmonization of the variety registration process in the Union. The examination centre of the professional operators will be audited and approved by the national competent authorities. In case of direct application to the CPVO it will audit and approve the examination centres it uses for variety examination.

Such language is, of course, Orwellian bureaucraticspeak that means only one thing: All gardeners should prepare to be subjected to total government insanity over seeds, vegetables and home gardens.

RealSeeds.co.uk warns about any attempt to actually try to understand the law by reading it:

You cannot just read the first 5 pages or so that are an 'executive summary', and think you know what this law is about. The executive summary is NOT what will become the law. It is the actual Articles themselves that become law, the Summary has no legal standing and is just tacked on as an aid to the public and legislators, it is supposed to give background information and set the proposed legislation in context so people know what is going on and why.

The problem with this law has always been that the Summary says lots of nice fluffy things about preserving biodiversity, simplifying legislation, making things easier etc - things we all would love - but the Articles of the law actually do completely the opposite. And the Summary is not what becomes the law.

For example, the Summary of drafts 1, 2 & 3 talked about making things easier for 'Amateur' varieties. But the entire class of Amateur vegetables - which we have spent 5 years working with DEFRA to register - was actually abolished entirely in the Articles right from the start. Yet the Summary , and press releases based on it, still talked about how it will help preserve Amateur varieties! The Summary is completely bogus. Do not base your views of the law on it!

So, be warned. By all means, read it yourself. But you have the ignore the Summary as that is not the Law, and does not reflect what is in the Law. 

As you might suspect, this move is the "final solution" of Monsanto, DuPont and other seed-domination corporations who have long admitted their goal is the complete domination of all seeds and crops grown on the planet. By criminalizing the private growing of vegetables - thereby turning gardeners into criminals - EU bureaucrats can finally hand over full control of the food supply to powerful corporations like Monsanto.

Most heirloom seeds to be criminalized

Nearly all varieties of heirloom vegetable seeds will be criminalized under this proposed EU law. This means the act of saving seeds from one generation to the next - a cornerstone of sustainable living - will become a criminal act.

In addition, as Gabel explains, this law "...effectively kills off development of home-garden seeds in the EU."

This is the ultimate wish of all governments, of course: To criminalize any act of self-reliance and make the population completely dependent on monopolistic corporations for their very survival. This is true both in the USA and the EU. This is what governments do: They seize control, one sector at a time, year after year, until you are living as nothing more than a total slave under a globalist dictatorial regime.

An online petition has already been started on this issue and has garnered nearly 25,000 signatures so far.

NOAH'S ARK and 240 other organizations from 40 European countries have also initiated an "open letter" appealing to Brussels bureaucrats to stop the insanity. Click here for a translated version of their petition.

I saw this coming

By the way, I am on the record predicting this exact scenario. Read Chapter Three of my fiction book, "Freedom Chronicles 2026." (Read it FREE, online.) It depicts a seed smuggler living in a time when seeds are criminalized and people earn a living as professional seed smugglers.

In my book, a woman uses a specially-crafted breast prosthesis to smuggle seeds to "underground gardeners" in full defiance of laws crafted by Monsanto. A vast underground network of grassroots gardeners and scientists manage to put together a "seed weapon" to destroy GMOs and take back the food supply from evil corporations.

Mark my words: Seeds are about to become contraband. Anyone who grows their own food is about to be targeted as a criminal. The governments of the world, conspiring with corporations like Monsanto, do not want any individual to be able to grow their own food.

This is about total domination of the food supply and the criminalizing of gardeners. And this is what big government always does after centralizing sufficient power. All governments inherently seek total control over the lives of everyone, and if you don't set boundaries and limits for government (i.e. the Bill of Rights), it eventually runs roughshod over all freedoms and liberties, including the freedom to grow your own food.

Additional sources:
http://open-seeds.org/bad-seed-law/
http://www.realseeds.co.uk/seedlaw.html