Links No Dirt Gardening! http://wp.me/s5Cqpo-55805 A "Natural" Experiment: GMO farming. http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-ewG **** This is the World Organic News Podcast for the week ending 27th of March 2017. Jon Moore reporting! We begin this week with post from farmer406: No Dirt? No problem: Strawbale Gardening. Quote: The concept of growing food from a bale of straw was odd at first until I thought it through. Commercial growers have been using alternative growing mediums for years, so why not scale it down for the backyard Do-It-Yourselfer? It is, of course, different than growing in dirt. End quote. The idea is to line up a row of straw bales into garden beds. Turn the bales so as to have the stems facing vertically and the bale twine on the sides. This allows for better water retention and the twine doesn’t rot as quickly, usually lasting the entire first season. The bales are then wetted and some sort of fertiliser added to the top. This done to start the decomposition process. A fish and or kelp based fertiliser is applied and the bales begin to decompose. Into the spaces between the lines of straw, seedlings or seeds are placed. Continue as per any other garden bed. The advantages of this system are numerous. Good organic matter, great drainage, heated beds at the start of Spring (from the decomposition process), no digging (always a plus for me), almost non existent weed issues, especially if the bales are clean of weeds to start with and a ready made pile of organic matter for next seasons garden beds. This also a great way to start gardening on compacted soils, thin soils, soils likely to be a bit wet at the start of Spring and excessively sandy soils. All these conditions, except for the excess water require the incorporation of organic matter to render them suitable for gardening. With straw bale gardens you start the process above the soil and let the soil biota, earthworms and microbia do the incorporating for you. I used a variation of this method by using the straw a bedding for dairy goats over winter and piling the bedding, complete with manures and urine, into garden beds. In all cases the organic matter boost and a food harvest is the outcome. I have also seen these done with spoiled bales of lucerne hay, that’s alfalfa for those listening in the Americas. To my mind this is overkill but it does bump up the nitrogen levels especially in the second season so it might be an option depending upon your rotation plans. However you do it, it is a viable option as far as I can see. Compared to our next post: Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops as reported in the blog: SEPTISPHERE. To sum up the thrust of the post before we dig a little deeper, Quote: Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise. End quote. The big sales pitch with GMOs back in the late 1908s and 1990s was the promised reduction in pesticides. This has occurred but not in isolation. Whilst the pesticide use has fallen, it is still being used and alongside this use is a huge jump in herbicide use. Let me explain the process of GMO farming. GMO seeds are designed to be resistant to pests and to withstand the application of herbicides. That being the case, each cell of the GMO plant contains a pesticide which is deadly to insects and, apparently, safe for humans and other non insect animals to consume. Therefore there is no need to spray insecticides. Now the resistance to herbicides means a farmer doesn’t need to till between the rows of plants to remove weeds. They just need to spray a herbicide, a herbicide who’s patent coincidently is owned by the GMO seed producers. So the claimed benefits of GMO farming are less pesticides, less tillage and better weed destruction. The reality is a litt