Clive's blog

Labelling

We - the consumers of GM - are being treated like guinea pigs. We demand to know what we are eating, for the food that comes from chemical industrial agriculture is neither equivalent to what we grow at home or that we used to buy in green grocers. Labelling of more...

Having spent some time travelling in Europe and America recently I think it is useful to break the CO2 polluters into 3 categories.

Worst polluters - 20 tonnes+

Australia and US. Over 20 tonnes of CO2 per person annually. These so-called new countries have always put monetary gain ahead of conservation whether more...

Hardly any food that is offered within all our capital cities is grown locally. We now have three generations of city dwellers that are totally unable to grow their own food. Twenty-five years ago the poor or the unemployed would simply buy some seeds and support themselves. Today the poor more...

You may not have heard that our highly esteemed research institution—the CSIRO—is teaming up with one of the world’s most hated multinationals. The CSIRO brand was instrumental in making its diet book a number-one best seller. Bio-tech GM companies including Monsanto are using that positive association as a Trojan horse more...

In the last thirty years nearly all the tall romantic flowers we associate with cottage gardening have been replaced in our nurseries by dwarf, early flowering bedding plants with enlarged flowers.

F1 hybrid petunias, pansies, marigolds and impatiens with enlarged flowers on dwarf plants replace tall hollyhocks, lupins, delphiniums more...

At the end of our Botanica boat trip up the Rhine, we were eager to explore the French answer to the Chelsea Flower Show - the Garden Festival at Chaumont.
Chaumont Chateau is just one hour south of Paris on the Loire river - the setting for so many splendid more...

It was striking how green the German countryside was both visually and ecologically: compared with “Brown Australia” (visually and ecologically), reinforcing the truism “There is no Economy without Ecology.”

One hopes that Australia’s new directions in climate change policies begin the process of healing our soils, protecting our bio-diversity, and restoring more...

The tomatoes we eat today are the most altered fresh food we serve at the table. The original tomato that arrived in Europe 400 years ago, pomodoro (golden apple), has now become large and red and has the highest dissatisfaction rating of any vegetable.

The heyday of breeding vegetables for gardeners more...

The Diggers Club pioneered the rescue of heirloom seeds 19 years ago. Since then commercial seed companies have concentrated on creating hybrid and genetically modified forms of vegetable seeds because they are vastly more profitable. The identity of these sources of supermarket driven food are kept secret and unlabelled so more...

Every seed merchant prospers by selling highly priced hybrid seed that they now own which replaces open-pollinated heirloom seed, that we all own, with a low profit margin.
So the movement back to growing heirlooms represents a threat to their bottom line.

George Ball, the latest owner of America’s oldest more...