Bye bye Farmville...

I admit it, I was a Farmville Junkie! The amount of time I spent over this winter growing virtual crops was not reasonable, not even close! Slowly I built my farm up, bought bigger farms, earned most of the ribbons, gained Mastery in a dozen or more items and am now a Level 59 farmer. But slowly the game has lost me. The endless clicking to plow, clicking to plant, clicking to harvest (3 clicks for each crop in each field square.) I have the big farm, and most of it is field, so it is three hundred plus squares. Recently my interest has begun to wane... I am using up my stockpiled fuel from when you could buy it for farm coins (I stockpiled almost 100 tanks) but right now, for instance, my field is not even plowed.

The past week I have been playing Frounteirville instead. How sad am I!

This game has its own problems, the main one is it wants to drag you in multiple times a day! You only get a little energy at a time, and then one more every 5 minutes. So if I go in and click 15 times I have used all my energy. In another hour and a half I will have all my energy back. So instead of hours of clicking it is 10 minutes at a time 3 or 4 times a day! Wake up - Do frountierville, Lunch - Do frounteriville, Supper - Do frontierville, before bed - Do frountierville. There are also goals, which is very much my personality rather then just earning money towards no real goal except higher level...

Plus there are some things that you HAVE to get from our friends! Right now I need two ribbons so I can get married. (PLEASE BE MY NEIGHBOR AND SEND ME RIBBONS!!!)

Can you tell, I have spent to much time on this! I should have started in October, not June!

GMO Hamster...

As I write this post I will do so carefully, choosing my words with caution as I will be talking about one of the biggest names in industrial agriculture; Monsanto.

Today the supreme court sided with Monsanto, lifting an injunction that had prevented the company from selling it's genetically modified alfalfa seeds. Monsanto has developed a Roundup Ready alfalfa which (as the name suggests) has been genetically modified not to be killed by the company's popular herbicide, Roundup.

The injunction had been placed on the company because of concerns of cross pollination with organic and conventional (non-GMO) varieties of alfalfa. Monsanto says this is unlikely.

From this article. Dr. Nelson of Purdue University when speaking of GMO corn states that "GMO "contamination" of non-GMO grain can occur in corn by virtue of either cross-pollination between adjacent fields of GMO and non-GMO hybrids or by commingling (a fancy term for "mixing") of seed."

According to this article (Reuters) "There were 39 cases of crop contamination in 23 countries in 2007, and more than 200 in 57 countries over the last 10 years, according to biotech critic Greenpeace International."

Obviously, these are not all caused by pollen drift, but contamination by pollen drift is part of the concern. The other part is that Monsanto actively targets farmers who grow crops with there "intellectual property" (genes) even if the farmer did not grow the crop on purpose (and in the case of organic production where growing it is not allowed.)

I would hope that if the Supreme Court is siding with Monsanto that contamination is unlikely and will not hold farmers in the future liable if their crops do become contaminated. But I really doubt that. Like it or not, the future is here. Hope your hamster likes GMO alfalfa...

The AP article on the case.

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Potatoes

Hilling with our new tractor went really well... Lots of poatoes no their way.

Oh, and for those of you who followed our blog the past couple years, great news. To date the potatoe beetle count is... 0! (knock on wood!)

Look, mom, a toy!

We got an incredible deal on this 65 HP (@ PTO) Challenger Tractor. This is a pretty high quality toy and with only 12 hours on it and 18 months left on the warrenty we are pretty happy. Check out our Facebook fan page for more photos.

Has it only been 12 days?

When I looked back at my last post I realized it was 12 days ago. Wow, am I a bad blogger.

So much has happened in that week and a half.

Our first farm work day went amazingly well. In the course of 5 hours we had over 20 people come to the farm. They stayed between an hour and 4 hours and with their help we planted thousands of pepper, eggplant, cucumber, and squash plants.

The next day with one of our work share members we planted 400 lettuce plants and almost as many Boc Choi plants. A few days later two more work share members helped put in almost 1000 tomato plants.

Then it started to rain, and our field work has been a little limited for the past few days, as is evidenced by the amount of weeds in some of the rows! But on this past Saturday we did manage to see to our garlic plants and ended up pulling 2 bushels of scapes. (Garlic scapes are the attempt of the garlic plant to flower, and must be cut down in order to promote good bulb development!)

The unseasonable warm weather is causing our broccoli to quickly head. We were fearful it would flower before our first CSA week so we moved our season up one week. First time that has happened!

So our first CSA pickup is this coming Sunday, the 13th (maybe we should have waited on those scapes!) We are very excited and a little scared, but our first week should be OK, and this season is going to be great!

There are a couple big additions coming to the farm, if all goes as plans. Hubby is going to test drive one this morning and the second one is coming to the farm for a visit this evening.

I think that probably brings us up to date, except for all the computer work that has happened the last couple weeks. Getting start weeks straight for half members and then the mass confusion that moving our season start date caused!

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