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Organic Food and Health Articles
Look After the Wildlife in your Garden
Don't forget the animals and insects that live in your garden this autumn. Try not to be over zealous with tidying up your garden. A windfall apple left lying can provide nutrition for a wide variety, from lacewings to badgers. Birds greatly enjoy windfall apples. If I have a lot I save some in the garage until the weather turns really bad in January then I return them to the ground around the apple trees, here they are quickly eaten by the blackbirds and mistle thrushes. A whole array of insects will take their fill from windfalls many like butterflies are filling up with sugar for the long period of hibernation ahead. Slugs will take their share at night before being eaten by a hedgehog on their way home. Small mammals like mice and voles will also take their share and in turn become a meal for owls, kestrels and foxes. Leave a rotting log in a quiet corner of the garden as this will provide excellent habitat for insects again attracting the attention of larger garden animals. If you want big animals in your garden you must provide the small ones that feed them, woodlice, worms, grubs, snails, slugs all live off decaying matter and they are an important food source for the carnivores.
Seeds and berries are an essential food source. There is no need to harvest every last vegetable. Leave some broccoli to flower and a pumpkin or marrow to rot. The occasional sweetcorn left on the plant will feed many a hungry tit.
Flower seeds are really important. The seeds from wild flowers are more beneficial than cultivated flowers. Hogweed, angelica, lovage, teasels and sunflowers all provide valuable seeds. We grow sunflowers every year not only for their magnificent beauty but for the nutrition they provide wildlife and us. Rowan, holly, pyracantha, dog rose and snowberry will feed birds, insects and some mammals. Never trim hedges and shrubs laden with edible berries.
The colours around our pond at Penrhos have mellowed as Autumn approaches.
Long gone are the startling yellow kingcups and the blue irises, gone too are the albatros lilies and golden yellow monkey flowers. Sedges, reeds and rushes are all a dull green and brown. The sweet galingale with its terminal umbels of stiff spiky leaves has bent over double. It looks magnificent in August growing over a metre high.
The activity has changed the swallows no longer swoop low over the pond by day or the bats by night but there are many birds feeding off the seed heads in and around the pond. The teasels especially are providing a good meal for the gold finches.
Warning:
Take great care before you light a bonfire that it has not become home to a hibernating animal.
GM Contamination in our Gardens
Your organic garden is not safe from the contamination by the pollen of GM crops. As I travel around the country I am amazed where I see the bright yellow flowers of the rapeseed plant. It is at its most conspicuous growing in the central reservation of motorways, often a long way from where it was first cultivated. Obviously the separation distance of 50 metres set by the industry body in charge of policing the release of GMO's into the open environment needs an urgent review. It is absurd to think that wind blown pollen can be confined in anyway. We only have to remember Chernobyl and the distance the radioactive debris travelled. Scotland for example suffered considerably from windblown radioactive debris.
GM crops are widely grown in USA and Canada and some parts of Europe but have met with overwhelming resistance in the UK. It is important not to become complacent but to keep the pressure on the government by writing to your MP voicing your concerns. Genetically modified foods will jeopardize the safety and quality of our food. The technology carries potentially devastating side effects for human and animal health. It will endanger wildlife, threaten our environment and deny us food choice.
If you want to find out more contact:
Friends of the Earth
26-28 Underwood Street,
London, N1 7JQ.
Tel: 0207 490 1555
www.foe.co.uk
Soil Association
Bristol House,
40-56 Victoria Street,
Bristol,
BS1 6BY.
Tel:0117 929 0661
www.soilassociation.org
Greenpeace
Canonbury Villas,
London, N1 2PN.
Tel: 0207 865 8100
www.greenpeace.org.uk
Read:
Genetic Engineering, Food, And Our Environment - Luke Anderson
Publishers - Green Books
Other articles include:
The British Season
In Celebration of Cabbage
Pumpkins
Autumn Harvest
Microwaves
Barley
Sprouting
Aloe Vera
Garlic
Moonlight Gardening
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