Category Archives: Out and About

Montana moments: corn growing in your what?

April 5, 2011 by The Manic Gardener

I dedicate this one to all my gardening fellows who know they've planted something in the wrong place, or to all those who have lost track of a seed or two: it could be worse. If you don't believe me, try this 1938 headline

“Lad grows corn in nostril; Doc plows it under.”

Yes, it's true. You can read all about it here.

My local paper, the Bozeman Chronicle, turns a respectable 100 this year. To celebrate this momentous occasion, every day it reprints several short articles drawn from its archives for that date. That was one of today's.

My husband suggested I call this "A Nose for Gardening." Or perhaps, "S'not what it used to be."

Me, I keep thinking that the story gives a whole new meaning to “In your face!”

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Posted in Montana Moments, News flash!

Stopping the Mega Load Mega-Madness

April 1, 2011 by The Manic Gardener

missoulian.com Tue. Mar. 8, 2011

That thing in the picture above is a piece of oil refinery machinery. It's one of two mega-loads that made their slow and sorry way over the continental Divide on a two-lane road this winter. That is, when they weren't stuck on one pullout or another waiting for the weather to clear.

Those loads were headed for a ConocoPhillips refinery in Billings, Montana, but Exxon Mobile is eager to follow their lead—part of the way. It plans to haul 207 such loads along scenic two-lane roads through Idaho and Montana on their way north to the oil sands atrocity—er, operations— in Alberta.

(See map at right–from a NYTimes article by Tom Zeller Jr., "Oil Sands Effort Turns on a Fight Over a Road," from Oct. 21, 2010.)

I really was planning to write about gardening today (this being a gardening blog and all). But during the local news section of this morning's NPR broadcast, I heard that several groups have sued to stop the mega loads. So once again I'm celebrating the little guys who won't let the big guys roll right over them. (One of the sites devoted to the cause is called “The Rural People of Route 12 Fighting Goliath.”) The post about carrots will just have to wait.

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Posted in Environment, News flash!

News flash! Organic farmers take on Monsanto

March 31, 2011 by The Manic Gardener

This gets filed under the Way to Go! banner.

Sixty organic seed dealers and farmers have banded together to file suit against global seed giant Monsanto, a world leader in producing genetically engineered (“transgenic”) seeds. The farmers are taking pre-emptive action to protect themselves from the litigious company's propensity for suing farmers whom it claims illegally grow crops from “its” seeds.

The problem is that farmers sometimes find themselves growing such crops unknowingly, or at least unintentionally. This can happen if seeds or pollen blow from a field that does use a Monsanto crop onto neighboring fields that don't, or if seeds fall from trucks as they're being shipped, or as happened in at least one case, if farmers trade seeds—an old tradition—but one of them gives away seed collected from a crop grown from Monsanto transgenic seeds. The unfortunate recipient in that case, Edward Zilinski of Micado, Saskatchewan, was informed that he owed Monsanto $28,000.

In other words, it doesn't matter how you come by the stuff: if you didn't buy it, you have no right to it, at least according to Monsanto.

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Posted in Environment, News flash!, Organic Gardening

Large-scale Bokashi??!?

March 29, 2011 by The Manic Gardener

Bokashi bins outside Great Falls food bank. Photo by Mary Jane Arendes.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'd never heard of largescale Bokashi composting until Sunday afternoon at the Best of Bioneers festival here in Bozeman.

Several years back, Michael Dalton and Mary Jane Ahrendes hadn't heard of it either, but that didn't stop them. Inspired by another Bioneers conference several years ago, they founded an organization, Gardens from Garbage, and started setting up composting systems around their city of Great Falls. Bokashi composting systems.

Bokashi is an anaerobic (oxygen-free) composting method (as to opposed to the back-yard aerobic heap methods most of us are familiar with) which uses special microbes to essentially pickle waste into compost. Most often used for household garbage, the method requires nothing more than an airtight container and some starter microbes, usually in the form of treated wheat bran, which gets sprinkled over each layer of garbage until the vessel is full.

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Posted in Composting, Out and About

Bozeman welcomes Rick Bass and the Bioneers

March 28, 2011 by The Manic Gardener

I went to Bozeman's Best of Bioneers festival yesterday, and my head is reeling. It's amazing to spend an afternoon with such extraordinary thinkers, speakers, and activists, people who get stuff done in the realms of environmentalism and global awareness.

Bioneers has to be one of the most active and hopeful environmental groups out there. They bring together creative and active people who are working to save the environment and the people who live in it. You can follow some of their work through their fine weekly radio broadcast .

This event started with a bang, courtesy of Montana's one and only taiko group, which made me think of the traditional Japanese drumming groups we saw when we were in Japan. It also brought to mind Sendai, where we lived, decimated three weeks ago by earthquake and tsunami and now threatened by nuclear contamination. It was an oblique but fitting reminder, on this day dedicated to the environment, of how vulnerable the environment is, and we with it.

The afternoon included videocasts of speeches by Michael Pollan, author and food activist; Winona LaDuke, Ojibwe activist and politician; Jessica Rimington youthful founder of One World Youth Project; and John Francis, founder of Planetwalk, and author of Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking; 17 Years of Silence.

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Posted in Environment, Out and About