We here at Scholars and Rogues would like to know what plans you have, and we are offering a new service. Send us gardening questions and we’ll answer them.

I don’t know what i’ll do with the beds around the house yet. Some larger questions need to be answered before finalizing those plans. Last year i was given access to a plot of bottom land next to Badger Creek. This year it will be bigger and better…mostly because Wright St. won’t be undergoing massive reconstruction all summer so the plot will be easier to access. I also did significant clearing on the steep, west bank of the creek this winter so it will have even more sun. With a little weather-related luck, i’ll get lots of production from the 20′ x 20′ plot i plan to cultivate.

Since i have easy access to lots of used greenhouse plastic and 3/4″ electrical conduit isn’t very expensive, i’ll be constructing some low tunnels to get an early start on tomatoes and plan to devise a way to protect a few cantaloupe vines into the fall.

This year we’ll only take a half-share in Farmer Bunce’s CSA. I realize that buying a CSA share isn’t “gardening”, but it is…vicariously. It’s also the cheapest, easiest and best solution for those of you with limited space to enjoy garden fresh produce and extricate yourselves somewhat from the industrial agriculture grid.

I’ll try to avoid taking side jobs, but i’ve agreed to become a “paid volunteer” with US Forest Service on the native plant and conservation program. Add that to my 40+ hours per week and personal gardening and my life will be definable in three words: eat, sleep, garden.

But i’ll make some time for your questions. Food gardening, lawn care, ornamentals (annual or perennial), trees, pests and disease, whatever. I tend towards organic solutions, but i’m a realist and a pragmatist. I’m also particularly interested in solutions for people with limited space.

I do this for a living because i love doing it, so fire away. Send an email to scholarsandroguesasks@gmail.com (we won’t share or publish your address under any circumstances) or hit the contact button.

A controversial Scottish brewery has launched what it described as the world’s strongest beer — with a 32% alcohol content. Tactical Nuclear Penguin has been unveiled by BrewDog of Fraserburgh.

At its website, BrewDog boasts that its “‘Tactical Nuclear Penguin’ beats the previous record of 31% held by German beer brand Schorschbraer.”

Intended for battlefield use, tactical nuclear weapons pack a significantly lower yield than the heavyweight nukes, which, of course, are known as strategic. (How the phrase “strategic” was appropriated for nuclear weapons is a subject for future post.) Despite a size intended to facilitate their utilization, tactical nukes are still judged too hot to handle by those nuclear powers that have developed them (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France).

If BrewDog’s new beer was called “Strategic Nuclear,” the wary drinker might fear the high alcohol content would lay waste to him, her, or the whole bar. “Tactical” suggests that, if the beer is used judiciously, its effects are manageable. (The word “penguin” in its brand name signifies the amount of time the beer has spent exposed to extreme cold, which apparently boosts the alcohol content.)

The BBC report also mentions that “BrewDog was previously branded irresponsible for an 18.2% beer called Tokyo” — after the World War II bombing? — “which it then followed with a low alcohol beer called” — drum roll, please — “Nanny State.”

Clearly this is a company with a sense of humor. But, too, it’s a company with a plan. BrewDog is soliciting 10,000 investors online through a program called Equity for Punks.

The BBC also reports quotes a representative of a group Called Alcohol Focus Scotland named Jack Law, who said: “We want to know why a brewer would produce a beer almost as strong as whisky.”

Yeah, and we disarmament advocates want to know why the national defense establishment would produce weapons as strong as nuclear.

One can’t help but wonder: Will Schorschbraer seek to redress the brewery balance of power by breaking BrewDog’s record for alcohol content with the aforementioned Strategic Nuclear beer. Instead of using cold brewing, it will exponentially increase the alcoholic content with extreme heat — thermonuclear, in fact.

Eventually, the breweries will realize that their high-yield beers are only good for deterrence. Nobody will be able to drink them without killing themselves.

First posted at the Faster Times.

Marion Nestle recently pointed out that in Europe food must be labeled as containing GMO’s. The system isn’t new, and it springs from a general distrust of GM agriculture in much of the world. Nothing, however, stops a company from using GM ingredients or consumers from purchasing GM products. Their presence is labeled with the allergens. Looks like a free market where the informed consumer can make choices, promote competition and generally play a part in the all important invisible hand mechanism. But, no, you can’t have it.

I have no idea whether ingesting GM crops will damage humans, but we’ll find out for sure in a few decades. Like in the pharmaceutical industry, long-term testing mostly consists of selling it to us and seeing what happens. And we will see what happens, because planting percentages of GM crops is large and growing. Corn is at least 50%; soya is close to 90%; and canola/rape is 75%. The US plants 63% of all GM crops, with Argentina trailing by a wide margin at 21%.

Contrary to what you might read on the internet, not all of the applications are scary. Golden rice is probably one of the noblest developments in agriculture’s history, but it still amounts to fiddling the latch on Pandora’s Box. No, genetic modification is not “just like hybridization”. Hybridization is strictly controlled and promoted evolution. Genetic modification is winding evolution up and letting it go. The 50% number that Ms. Nestle quotes for GM corn is almost certainly much, much higher, and i’ve read reputable reports stating that more than 90% of corn at sorting tests positive for GM markers. The modifications don’t stay where they’re put because plants cross pollinate; in fact, genetic modification of crops travels like the wind…literally. And since some of the modifications give plants a distinct advantage, they are unlikely to go away.

You can just go ahead and figure that most of the food you eat contains GM ingredients. Even the farmers who don’t plant it end up reaping it, and when they do the Monsanto snoops will surely find out. That leads to a lawsuit that the farmer will inevitably lose, which leads to a settlement that always includes a strict gag order. The snoops and the lawyers will be from Monsanto because Monsanto is the GM agriculture industry. And the law will be on Monsanto’s side because it has infiltrated government to a degree that makes the MIC weep with envy. Without hyperbole, Monsanto makes Halliburton look like the Salvation Army.

This is the company that brought us Agent Orange, PCBs and an illustrious list of other banned substances. It is the same company that managed to get and defend a law in Pennsylvania that forbade dairy farmers/producers from labeling dairy “growth hormone free”. (Monsanto developed rBGH if you hadn’t guessed.) This is the company that applies for patents on interesting finds from the national seed bank. And when you read the stories of farmer suicide in India, think Monsanto. They have vertically integrated to such a degree that the farmers generally kill themselves by drinking a Monsanto product. After being sold/coerced into purchasing Monsanto seeds that they cannot save under threat of patent infringement, the farmer will find out that the increases in yield will also cost a great deal because the yield increase is dependent on inputs besides the seed…inputs that, coincidentally, Monsanto sells. When the loans taken to pay for the great leap into a glossy, full-page ad in The Economist come due and the harvest isn’t the shining utopia promised by the green revolution, nor are there any seeds for next season, the farmer kills himself.

It’s been said that a revolution tends to devolve into a tyranny worse than the one which it overthrew. If the green revolution were the one in Russia, Monsanto would be Stalin.

And here is the most significant problem. Monsanto and the promoters of GM agriculture claim that it feeds a hungry world by increasing yield. Except that it doesn’t. The majority Monsanto’s GM crops are designed to resist Round Up. Theoretically, being able to cover everything in Round Up to keep weed growth down will increase yield. But higher yields don’t have anything to do with Monsanto’s modifications: it’s about selling Round Up. A fair number of tests show that GM crops yield less than a traditional hybrids. (In one case, a supplement boosted the GM crop to equal the hybrid, but needing to supplement suggests that more changes have occurred than just being “Round Up Ready”…of course, i’m not a research agronomist.) When confronted with these results, Monsanto countered that it hadn’t designed the crops to increase yields. Precisely, except all of the advertisements and editorials claim yield improvements.

It’s not just the poor, Indian cotton farmers who are in a bind. American farmers are on Monsanto’s treadmill, and so are you. One company controls an astoundingly large percentage of the food you eat at its source: the seed. We won’t see GM labeling laws because they might hurt Monsanto’s business, and there isn’t a politician in America who will poke Monsanto…not for love, nor money, nor the sanctity of free markets.

Worse, if in two decades we discover that one of these modifications is quite dangerous to humans or the environment, we will likely find ourselves in a situation where there isn’t any alternative. Evolution will have adopted the modifications. Monsanto will have made its profit. And we’ll all be left holding the bag…which in this case could well be an empty one of the grocery sort.

An ear of corn is quintessentially summer. My favorite is the Silver Queen corn grown in Maryland. I just did a search on Silver Queen only to discover a Washington Post article announcing my royal favorite has been dethroned by two new variants Argent and White Magic. Says who?

A beautiful ripe tomato and an ear of corn are the crown jewels of summer. Our growing season is so short where I live that I seldom get really good versions of either one. Forget the grocery store – these can only be obtained from a Farmer’s Market.

The perfect lunch for August – tomato sandwich and an ear of corn off the grill. Pass the lime and salt please.

Guessing the acquisition of Anheuser Busch was good for InBev?… I walked past a bottle shop in Fremantle proudly displaying this poster. The price was so stunning to me I stopped to take this picture. I thought the price was a function of the distance, but they sell plenty of Heineken for no where near this price. For comparison purposes this sign was outside a road house a few hundred klicks north or Fremantle.

A block is 30 cans.

The odd thing – I’ve never seen an Australian drinking a Budweiser… Of course at $100 a case you might guess why.

Yup. Ami Cusack of Survivor fame.

Things were going pretty well, I thought, and then out of nowhere I got voted out of the restaurant.

The good reverend has had a long and storied career, with a recent highlight being his poetic excoriation of the Bush administration with President George W. Bush himself sitting behind Lowery as he spoke at Coretta Scott King’s memorial service in 2006.

What will the loquacious Lowery say at his Freedom Medal acceptance speech?

I can imagine it’ll go something like this:

Thank you all for coming today / to hear what this old bird’s got to say…

What a thrill it is to receive this honor / along with Bishop Tutu, Ted Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor…

Harvey Milk, Sidney Poitier and many other notables / but first let me talk a little bit about potables…

It’s two thousand and nine but you coulda fooled me / ‘Cause discrimination remains, like in Cambridge, you see…

Where a black man, a professor, an honorable soul / gets profiled, another brother in a never-ending toll…

Cuffed in his house by a white cop he was / for raising his voice, no real probable cause…

Obama was mad but made nice, so I hear / and invited them both to the White House for beer…

The distinguished professor preferred a Red Stripe / while the chief exec wanted Bud Light (that’s allright!)…

When it came to the cop, whose power he flaunted / I took a step back when I heard what he wanted…

Bad enough Gates was nabbed by this goon / but making it worse, his choice was BLUE MOON!

For Coors, millions more / thanks to this boor PR whore…

With so many choices, tasty and fine / he coulda drank oatmeal stout, ale, barleywine…

He coulda had a Rogue or a Stone IPA / Dogfish Head, Red Hook or a Guinness, I say…

Colorado gems from Left Hand or Dry Dock / maybe something from Europe like a top Doppelbock…

Man, he coulda picked Pabst or, more aptly, Pig’s Eye / and how come he ain’t given Sam Adams a try?

Made right in his neighborhood, in Boston no less / but it sounds like he don’t get around, I guess…

Instead he drank something like lemony pee / that my aunties wouldn’t touch, it might just be me…

But it’s all good in the end, I don’t want to insult / especially in times that are so difficult…

Economy’s weak, jobs flushed down the can / still got our soldiers out in Afghanistan…

Education a shambles, environment’s trash / bankers keep taking what’s left of the cash…

Corruption gets deeper, health care a mess / and the poor have to live with somehow even less…

The birthers, the racists, the haters, Fox News / all giving Obama the Oval Office blues…

But one thing’s for sho’, they can’t take away / no matter how they lie, how they rant every day…

How much they deny, how hard they attack / the plain truth is the ole White House is Black.

Crossposted from JAZZ from HELL