Nature - Agriculture (Upcoming blog)

Very entertaining and informative.  Learn about the role that corn plays in our daily lives and why you should be concerned that 3/4 of the corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified.

Our friend Shelly Roche at Bytestyle.tv has created a new application for use on the Apple iPhone.  Based on her research and the article I posted back in July on reading food labels to find out if your food is GMO, Shelly has build a new iPhone app to do this for you, on the go.

So if you're in the store looking at some peaches and aren't sure if what you're seeing is organic, GMO, or synthetically sprayed, this can help.  Just put the short little PLU number into your phone and viola!  It tells you everything you can know about that fruit from that number: GMO or not, organic or not, etc.

It's a cool little app and it's available now from iTunes.  To find out more, visit the Fruit Decoder website at this link.

This may seem a macabre choice for my first blog post on the Travelujah site - why choose a subject closely associated with death? - but in fact, ossuaries are also intimately associated with life, particularly life in Jerusalem of the first century CE.

 For those who don't know or need to be refreshed: during a very brief period in Jerusalem's history, Jews engaged in an expensive, laborious, prolonged and utterly inconceivable (to us) process of burying their dead, called "secondary burial". First a family would buy, commission or excavate by themselves a cave in the soft rock around Jerusalem. (I say Jerusalem

This was the idea of put together by a German company called Stuewer and a farm called Peter-und-Paul-Hof.  All I can say is that it's frikkin' brilliant.

These specially-designed machines (called Regiomats for "regional materials" or goods) hold stuff like fresh eggs, sausages, butter, cheese, potatoes, carrots, you name it.  Of course, the fresh farm products are wrapped in cellophane and packaging, but the idea itself is pretty awesome.

The idea began originally as a milk delivery service in which the PPH farm would deliver milk to consumers directly.  This was costly and time-consuming, however, so the farm switched to a "come and get it" model in which customers would come collect their milk from refrigerators in a distribution center near the farm.

Through that, the farm began selling related goods such as cheese and butter and it began to grow.  Operating the distribution center (which was fast becoming a grocery store) was expensive, however, so the farmers looked for a cheaper alternative.  They found one with the Regiomat.

Now, these handy machines are throughout the area and someone from the farm visits them every day or two to refill the stocks, rotate out old stuff, and so forth.

So far, the machines are catching on and locals love the easy 24/7 access to their favorite foods.  The farmers, meanwhile, are making more money from their produce than they would have selling direct to markets.

Very cool idea!

Two ladies in Virginia, Deborah Williamson and Deanna Child, have formed Farmer Girls, LLC.  Their new enterprise created FarmersOnlineMarket.net where people in the area can go to see what is available from the two growers.  Both Deborah and Deanna have farms in Virginia and the two of them realized that there is a disconnect between people who buy produce and goods and the farmers who're producing it.

The project started in June of this year and is growing rapidly.  Other local farmers have been signing on, selling their wares through the Farmers Online Market and the idea is really gaining steam.

The process of direct selling from farms to consumers means higher profits for the farmers, better prices (and groceries) for the consumers, and less transportation and other markups in the mix.

Deanna, for instance, raises pastured pork, poultry, etc. at her Orlean, Virginia Flatrock Farm.  While these meats are worth more to the consumer (and are much healthier as well as make for happier animals), stores like Whole Foods and other outlets don't usually pay as much of a premium for them as the farmer might hope.

Deborah is co-owner of Seven Oaks Lavender Farm in Cartlett, Virginia which grows lavender (who'd have guessed?) and produces several products based around that popular plant.

If you garden, as I do, sooner or later you'll start thinking about how to save seeds from your harvest for use next year.  Then the year after.  Then after that.  It's possible to keep a near-perpetual store of seeds for crops year after year.  In fact, many farmers, until only recently, would save 2-3 years of seeds and always have them on hand.  This was before the advent of modern, large-scale seed farms that supply thousands of buyers with next year's crop seeds.

Savings seeds is not rocket science and requires only a few basic pieces of knowledge and just a bit of skill.  Most of seed saving happens with the coming of fall harvests and the early onset of cold weather.  This is when seed crops–those left to grow and finish out their process, rather than getting harvested early, ripen and begin to rot.

The three things you'll need to know to save seeds are:

1. Is the plant in question a self-pollinating variety?
2. Do the fruits (seed-bearing containers) require full maturity before harvest for seeds?
3. The best process for acquiring, processing, and storing the seeds from that particular plant type.

Quite often, these are basically the same for most of the plants you'll be growing and want to save seeds from.  Each question's answer will vary from plant-to-plant, but overall you'll see trends in how this process works. Then it's just a matter of knowing which ones to use with which type of plant.