The National Heirloom Expo Revisited
Social Compost Input #15
This past week, the National Heirloom Exposition had its inaugural run in Ventura, CA. It was the first time that Southern California got a shot at the Expo as it moved from Santa Rosa down the coast for its ten year anniversary.
For those of you that don’t know, the Heirloom Seed Expo is a three day happening of seed sales, seed and veggie swapping, lectures, music and vendors in the natural world of clothing, gardening and knick-knacks. We posted up at our booth for our compost company to show people where they could buy our farm made, real organic and non-GMO compost around California and other points West. I was also signing copies of A Hundred Years of Deception - Why Gardening Must Change and talking with folks about why gardening needs to change and how that tied into our fifteen year old compost company.
It was great to see the energy and enthusiasm of gardeners, homesteaders and urban farmers from all over the West Coast come in search of seed and information. Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company puts on the festival and they are a fabulous source for some really rare and excellent varieties of heirloom seeds. This is important because the landscape of the seed world is quickly vanishing into a small variety of seed that is sold at all of the usual suspects of nurseries, hardware stores and feed & farm supplies. The diversity in the seed world is disappearing, so events like this are critical for us to fight back against Big AG and Big CHEM who want our seed selection to dwindle down to nothing, other than from fake organic companies and seed concerns that they are buying out and control from behind the curtain. Heirloom seeds allow us to save seed year after year (open pollinated), they will produce plants that are true to its type (unlike hybrid seeds) and are Non-GMO.
With all of that fabulous stuff said, what blew my mind and continues to every time I get asked to speak or man a booth at an event like this is the lack of knowledge and consciousness when it comes to things organic… real organic! I mean for Pete’s sake we were at an heirloom seed sale and exhibition. People were buying heirloom seeds to plant in their gardens and on their farms to grow food. So, I would ask the people that would come up to our booth, what type of soil do they plant in? Or, if they made compost at home, what the inputs were? I’d ask them if they were buying compost… what kind? Or, did they use compost tea? I asked the types of questions that one would expect an organic, real organic farmer/gardener/composter/landscaper to ask.
The answers that I got were all over the place. Some ranged from, “I’m not sure” to “Whatever is cheap and onsite at Home Depot” to “Horse manure from the stalls down the street.” Wow! To me those are all unconscious answers. I expected more from these alleged Heirloomers! Why would you spend time and money to go to an event to buy heirloom seeds and plant them in whatever? How could you not know in 2023 that horses eat GMO Alfalfa, which is a Round-Up Ready crop? Why would anyone at this show buy anything to plant in or grow their food in from the Depot?
Why? Because gardeners, farmers, homesteaders and landscapers, even organic ones, don’t know what they don’t know.
I even had a gardening teacher tell me that their favorite way to fertilize was with bone meal and blood meal… organic of course. Organic! What did they think those animals were eating? I know what they’re eating.
It’s time for the gardening, farming, homesteading and landscaping world to wake up. Cheapness is not a virtue when it comes to one’s health and well being. As a person who has heart issues from long Covid, who had to entirely build his body strength and psyche back, I can tell you, your food, your diet, your consciousness is everything. Health is wealth. You can’t cheap out on health in my book. You can buy a less expensive car. Stop going to Starbucks, which by the way you should do anyway, because they serve conventional AG garbage in their food products and drinks. You can skip the vacation to swim with the dolphins. But, you can’t put a number or cost on your life.
My takeaway from three days of this 10th annual seed expo is that we are so far from healthy living and healthy conscience. I hope that the visits people had to our booth and the ones who heard me speak got the message loud and clear that if you grow in toxic soil with toxic amendments and fertilizers, even “organic” ones, then you are growing toxic food. That gets in your gut, your bloodstream, your brain and keeps you sick, which is exactly what Big CHEM and Big AG are hoping for their cousins Big MED and Big PHARMA.
Please take care of yourselves. Happy and healthy gardening everyone…