Hello folks.

This is the time of year where seeds should be germinated to get seedlings to be planted sometime in May (in my neck of the woods many do it on the May 24 weekend.) and there are things to be done to the soil before planting. I have already applied organic fertilizer to the soil. Since I am expanding my garden to some 4x4's in the front yard, I am going to be setting them up. I have been saving my newspapers to be used as a weed barrier and mulch. I will be grabbing a few bags of soil to make it a lot easier to start the new plots. I have compost that will be good to use in another year; I could use it this year but I may get too many weeds to deal with.

If you have been paying attention to the news from around the world, you know this is affecting everywhere. After all the suicides in India from farmers who went in to debt that they could not pay off to companies that lied to them about the terminator seeds they sold them, Many farmers are going back to the old ways of doing things. Saving seed from one year to the next makes sense; creating a franken-food that does not allow you to save seed from year to year does not make sense. Only in a boardroom, divorced from the farmers who grow our food, could some idiot come up with the idea to force the farmer to buy new seed each year. Let me put a what if out to the world. What if something happened to mutate the seeds that have been tampered with? I know this is a wild long shot, but what happened if all seed got infected with the terminator "gene". We would die and become extinct. My question is Why even take the chance? For a few extra pennies for your seed and the power of control over everyone, that is the only reason to dream up this abomination. Playing god can come back to bite you in the backside. Speaking of control, the NAZI-like stance Monsanto takes against individual farmers is sickening. This same company and others like it are pouring money into the pockets of politicians so they can outlaw organic small farms. once the pesky small farmers are out of the way, it will only be large scale food factories that will be feeding everyone, you can't call the farms anymore. They don't care that the food they produce has little life or nutrients in them. They only care about how much more money they are going to make this year over the year before.

I would rather grow my own food and give it away than be forced to live off the crap monsanto is trying to sell me. I see growing my own food as a political act as much as an act of love for myself and the people I share my food with. It is a relaxing activity that many more people will be forced into this year and the years to come. In ten years we will have some great crops going. It is going to take 10 years to make many mistakes and learn from them. The next 10 years will be very hard on many. I hope you are not in that group. Good luck.

Michael J. Kaer, Author of "What Money Can't Buy"