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Selecting Seeds: How to Choose the Right Seed Crop

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by Chelsea Green Pubishing

Seed Crop Characteristics

There are a number of prominent characteristics of cultivated plants that are quite similar within the nine plant families in which most of our vegetable crops are found.

One of the first things someone researching our cultivated crop plants finds is that closely related crops within a particular family usually share a number of prominent features.

We know that different crops within the same family often share certain phenotypic traits, such as structural or reproductive characteristics.

Flower Structure

Flower structure has long been a principal way of categorizing plants into families.

The type and structure of the fruit, which is indeed a fertilized ovary of the flower, has also classically been used to assign different plants of the angiosperms (the true flowering plants) to various species and genera.

As to structural features, we all know that crop species in the same family usually share a common leaf type, arrangement of their leaves on the main stem, type of stem, and so forth.

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10 Easy-to-Grow Flowers for Pest Control

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By Chelsea Green Publishing

Planting flowers in or near your vegetable garden doesn’t just add a pretty pop of color among the green. This companion planting strategy can help manage pesky insect pests that damage plants and impact your harvest.

Here are 10 flowers to consider planting in your vegetable garden for a steady supply of flowers. From lively marigolds to beautiful sunflowers and fragrant sweet alyssum, these flowers can make pest control seem easy.

The following is an excerpt from The Healthy Vegetable Garden by Sally Morgan. It has been adapted for the web.

There are some flowers that I’m never without and, fortunately, they are easy to grow from seed. My top 10 here will provide you with a steady supply of flowers from early spring to autumn. Banks of these flowers around your growing area will make sure that predatory insects don’t have to travel far to find food.

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5 Easy-to-Grow Vegetables and Herbs for Beginner Gardeners

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by Kristen Link

Does it seem like everyone you know wants to start a garden lately? Whether that’s due to rising food costs, interest in exploring greater self-sufficiency, the desire to know more about where our food comes from or just wanting to spend more time outside, we support it: It’s never a bad time to get into gardening. And often one of the first questions we hear from beginner gardeners: What vegetables and herbs are easiest to grow?

How to decide which vegetables to grow

While there are some pretty universal easy-to-grow plants, so much of gardening success is dependent on your specific situation. To get started, here are some questions to ask yourself that will help inform your choices.

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Grasslands and Wetlands Are Being Gobbled Up By Agriculture, Mostly Livestock

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by Georgina Gustin

Agriculture is widely known to be the biggest driver of forest destruction globally, especially in sprawling, high-profile ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest.

But new research published this week finds that non-forest ecosystems—the world’s grasslands, savannas and wetlands—are being devoured for agriculture at nearly four times the rate as forests. As with forests, the primary driver is livestock.

“The goal of this research was really just to understand where in the world this is happening,” said Elise Mazur, a researcher with the Land and Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s authors. “We know where deforestation is occurring. But we were less sure about where non-forest ecosystems are being lost.”

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a unique attempt to analyze which types of agriculture are forcing the conversion of natural ecosystems on a global scale, and then to attribute that conversion to demand for specific commodities.

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The Battle Over Seeds in Latin America: The Legal Siege and People’s Response

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by GRAIN

Current discussions on intellectual property and free trade agreements are merely an update of a persistent strategy: attempts by agribusiness to appropriate seeds through regulations or laws governing their circulation, sale, and use. In the recent context, these mechanisms have regained strength through international agreements that are reshaping the agricultural system to the industry’s advantage.
For years, various governments have promoted regulations that, under the promise of “regulating” seed trade, have ultimately harmed the traditional practices of farmers. By introducing control criteria over plant varieties and management procedures, these regulations consolidate a system that favors corporations and reduce the scope for farmers to use, save, and exchange seeds.
In parallel, farmers and Indigenous organisations have promoted legislative and regulatory initiatives aimed at safeguarding their knowledge and guaranteeing the free use of seeds. However, several of these proposals are disconnected from the reality on the ground in rural areas, either due to inadequate technical design or a failure to fully incorporate the needs of those who sustain agricultural diversity.
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