‘Plant Breeders Rights’<\/a>) means that terminal crosses are the norm (i.e. you can’t grow your supermarket corn from seed, you need to buy seedstock, at whatever price they demand, from whoever owns the genetics), and with chemical companies churning out genetically modified plant varieties (thus narrowing the gene pool and potentially producing future problems of chemical resistance and\/or chemical dependence), it is vital that old plant varieties continue to be grown by home gardeners, to ensure the survival of a broad spectrum of genes and security of future food production.<\/p>\nClive Blazey created the The Diggers Club in 1978. Clive became concerned about the disappearance of old plant varieties, and started his mail-order seed business to preserve old varieties of vegetables, fruit plants and cottage-garden ornamental flowers. Clive is a big-picture environmentalist from way back who naturally ‘walks the talk’ – their cafe is even made with rammed earth walls, recycled poles and thatched with locally grown water reeds. Today The Diggers Club is a mailorder business based in Dromana (Victoria) selling books, garden tools, seeds and plants. They sell a range of more practical clogs and gardening gloves, plus nifty ‘garden spikes’ for keeping water steadily dripping onto newly planted plants and ‘country’ sprinklers that work on low pressure, and are not blocked by dirty water. But it is the variety of Diggers vegetables on offer that is truly impressive. From splendid multi-coloured, traditional carrots and zucchinis to asparagus with interesting names and a huge variety of beans and every other sort of vegetable imaginable. And, of course, a big variety of tomatoes that taste fabulous, rather than green tennis balls well suited for space travel but not eating.<\/p>\n
The Diggers Club website unfortunately reminds me of how backward we are now, environmentally, compared to 35 years ago. The outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne were buzzing with positive sustainable environment enthusiasts through the 1970s. People were cutting back on paper use, to save forests, recycling came into vogue; raw wool was carded, washed, spun and knitted or woven into garments – fabulous buildings were constructed entirely of mud brick or rammed earth walls and recycled timber and corrugated iron. The keenest even made their own soap and candles. Wholemeal flour appeared on supermarket shelves, many people learnt how to make bread and the keenest ground their own flour. The Permaculture movement took off. Campaigns to ban CFCs and end whaling commenced. Far more household items were made of wood rather than plastic, a far greater percentage of clothing was made from environmentally sustainable materials (wool, cotton, linen, hemp) rather than synthetics, etc. Since then we have gone backwards at a rate of knots – houses have grown far larger though the average number of occupants has dropped, whitegoods and other appliances break down far quicker and are now thrown out rather than repaired, because buying new is cheaper; and there are far more electricity consuming household items in the average home, than ever before – from electric garage doors to insinkerators and computers, DVD players and fancy television screens. Cheap-tat shops have proliferated, selling garbage truckloads of shoddy rubbish that mostly isn’t needed and only kept for a short while before being thrown out. Household consumption would have gone through the roof over the last 35 years.<\/p>\n
One of the few steps forward is the increasing use of solar hot water systems, use of inverter airconditioners rather than the far less efficient box airconditioners, and decreased water consumption due to the proliferation of water-saving shower heads and dual-flush toilets. It’s ironic that being ‘environmentally aware’ is far more fashionable these days than it was back when the average householder had far less impact on the earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
‘Pretend’ environmentalists are now as thick as fleas on a dog’s back – people who have just jumped on the bandwagon in the last 5 minutes because it’s fashionable. They now feel really good because they use those green synthetic shopping bags and buy their garbage bags, instead of using the free supermarket plastic shopping […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,7],"tags":[176],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5963,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions\/5963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}