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Dear Friend of After a short, mean little winter
our seeds are sprouting and we’re preparing for spring’s many tasks.
Unlike the previous year, last autumn brought mild frosts mid-October that
brought an end to the growing season, although warm weather persisted well
into January. Now the new shoots just emerging seem to include a
mysterious expansion in mass awareness. A revaluation of health and
medicine is underway, and the work of **** PRACTITIONER ALERT! Ginseng Direct ’07 Deadline Extended to April 13th ****This is a
bit late to remind you of the March 31st deadline, so for our email list
we’ll extend our Ginseng Direct 2007 deadline to Friday, April 13. If
you want ginseng in October, send us your order right away! See the
website for details and order form: http://highfallsgardens.net/newyorkgrown/Ginseng Direct.pdf. We had an
unpleasant surprise last autumn when we tried to submit our order to the
usual sources. The price had gone up hundreds of dollars per pound, and
no one would sell to us. Then The lessons
learned are (1) “early” means “before the season begins,” and (2) regular
customers get preferential treatment. **** New Seed List Posted, Order
Deadline April 30th ****
This year’s
list of medicinal plant seeds distributed free of charge to student gardeners
and growers includes several species of starts. Priority is given to
our student programs this year and several have already placed their
orders. See the list at http://highfallsgardens.net/botanicalstudies/SeedList.pdf. Deadline for orders is April 30, 2007. **** MHC Sample Pack Shipped End of
January ****
Once again,
that special box of goodies is getting rave reviews from around the
country. (And some disappointment expressed by those who ordered too
late.) More than once we heard the phrase “like opening Christmas
presents.” The product array, certainly colorful enough to qualify for
special gift status, glows with vitality. Highlights
this year were Katy Blanchard’s bǎn lán gēn (Isatis indigotica
root) from New Mexico; the hŭ
zhàng (Polygonum
cuspidatum rhizome), which took three strong
women an hour to dig one plant out of the creekbed
-- and even then we didn’t get it all; deep green jiao
gu lan (Gynostemma pentaphyllum
leaf) from Joe Hollis’s garden in North Carolina….sorry, I have to stop now,
it’s impossible to pick favorites from among all these jewels. Order next
year’s Sample Pack at http://highfallsgardens.net/consortium/index.html. **** Presentation at Purdue’s New
Crops Symposium ****
The New Crops website is a useful
reference tool for plants in their role as crops. The Proceedings of
the Fifth Symposium, held five years ago, are there at http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/ncnu02/v5-toc.html. **** Excitement Builds for Student Internship August 16-23 ****As of the
first day of spring, a dozen Oriental Medicine students have registered for
the first week-long field intensive to be held during the August break here
in Dr. Cheng
Chi, who wowed the crowd with his Pao Zhi (traditional processing) demonstration at
Northwestern last September, will be with us for the weekend of Aug.
18-19. He will describe in detail ten species from germination through
processing, and if any time is left over will cook us some tasty dishes using
fresh local produce. Hungry yet? To ice the cake, our
favorite Daoist hermit Joe Hollis (http://www.mountaingardensherbs.com/) will be on hand to answer students’ questions.
We plan to meet the plants where they live, find out what they want from us,
and learn to keep up our share of the bargain. Application form: http://highfallsgardens.net/botanicalstudies/internships/student
internship flyer.pdf **** Botanical Studies Projects Underway ****How do you
stimulate creativity? Give folks a problem, a piece of the means to
solve it and all the credit for doing so. Then stand back and expect magic.
Not everyone responds, but those who do accomplish amazing things.
Among our fifteen garden sites in the three-year Botanical Studies for
Oriental Medicine program, several have made real progress and others are on
the way. The New England School of Acupuncture and
Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum got together to create a map (in process) of
accessible specimens of the Arboretum’s significant collection of Asian
medicinal trees and shrubs. This includes an 80-year-old Eucommia ulmoides,
a superb grove of Pinus, and a group of mature Acanthopanax near a pond. Vivien Zhang and Jean Giblette will lead a tour on Tuesday, May 29 at 6:00 pm. **** Honeybees in the News ****We talk
about our interconnectedness but only recently have begun to learn what it
means in real terms, for example how dependent we are on the smallest of
creatures. The latest reminder of the fragile state of our fouled nest
came early in the year with reports from several states of mass deaths of
honeybees. Much more than the usual decline, 60 and 70 percent losses
in the What the
mass media tend to ignore in their reports of CCD is that commercial
beekeeping and honey production is essentially another industrial animal
confinement system. Conventional practices do not respect the bees and their
needs, the level of stress is beyond belief, and then we wonder why their
immune systems fail. On March 22
Der Spiegel reported a German study
suggesting that genetically engineered crops may be what’s
pushing the sick bees over the edge. Okay, class, here’s a quick
quiz. Why is engineering an insecticide into a crop (as in Monsanto’s
Bt corn) not a good idea? (a) An open-pollinated crop will spread its
GE pollen all over the world; (b) Long-term effects are completely unknown;
(c) It will kill “good bugs” as well as “bad bugs;” (d) All of the
above, and more. Readers may take some comfort in the fact
that High Falls Gardens’ three colonies, two ruled by feisty Russian queens
purchased from Kirk Webster in Vermont, came through the winter. You
treat them well, they treat you well – nyet? Jean Giblette / © 2007
High Falls Gardens. All rights reserved. |