Links   World Organic News in the Australian Podcast Awards Click here   organic food shouldn’t be considered special. instead, cheap food made with harmful chemicals should be considered shitty. – crimson highway http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-etp   Hugelkultur: a first time for everything | Life, Death, & Radishes http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-eta   Here’s the link to: The World Organic News No Dig Gardening Book   ****   This is the World Organic News for the week ending 20th of March 2017. Jon Moore reporting!   This week we begin with spirited post from crimson highway entitled: organic food shouldn’t be considered special. instead, cheap food made with harmful chemicals should be considered shitty.   As I said this is a spirited piece and if you click through be aware of strong, even offensive language. The point though, is well made. As we have discussed in earlier episodes, the health costs of chemically forced, pesticide laden food are not included in their sale price. That zillions of carrots can be grown across a landscape and put up on your supermarket shelves for under a dollar per kilo is suggestive of something screwy.   Indeed on the matter of price, I have long wondered why oranges shipped across the Pacific from California should be cheaper to purchase than oranges grown a few hundred kilometres away. This questioning received a bit of kick along during this Irish sojourn. Not oranges but bananas being the focus. How could bananas from Coff Harbour, a mere six hours from home be more expensive than bananas in Ireland? Even when comparing bananas to bananas through currency exchange, they were still cheaper in Ireland. I was informed by the locals these Irish bananas were flown in from the Caribbean! A 13 hour flight away! So as I said there is something screwy in the price signals and market mechanisms when it comes to food. Then when we toss in the concerns raised in crimson highway’s post, someone somewhere is rent seeking and passing the costs on to someone else.   A quote form crimson highway: Quote: it should be the duty of the companies using harmful farming techniques to inform their customers of the destructive processes that go into making cheap products, and their products should be openly advertised as sub-standard. it’s backwards that shit that is grown normally is considered special and marketed as healthy. End Quote.   There is a pic that regularly pops up on my facebook feed with a basket of fresh fruit and vegetables and the words: Eat organic food or as your grandparents called it: Food!   Speaking of food, our next post comes from the blog: Life, Death & Radishes and is entitled: Hugelkultur: a first time for everything. Hugelkultur we have touched on before.   From the post: Quote: There are an endless number of ways to coax nature into working with you in the organic garden. So clearly my first choice was to pick the most labor intensive. Yes, I chose the one that begged for digging. End Quote   To start the system off does require some labour but so does every system in the setup phase.   Another quote: Quote: The German technique of hugelkultur is defined by the burying of wood, preferably wood that is already overcome by fungi and starting to get crumbly, but any wood will do as long as you give the bed or mound time to age before you plant it. And a little further on. You can dig a trench or hole to bury large pieces of wood followed by smaller sticks and twigs, then leaves, and finally top it off with soil. Alternatively, a hugelkultur mound begins by laying the stuff on top of the existing ground and working your way up to a giant about 6-8 feet high but I thought that would weird out the neighbors too much. End Quote.   So we either dig or pile. Your choice in the end. This is the case with Hugelkultur, it is the case with garden beds. You should know my preference by now! See in the show notes for a link to: The World Organic News No Dig Gardening Book   So Hugelkultur can be either ig or no-dig. Th