Palm Oil in soap - Good magazine article

I never shared this article on my blog - as I had shared it on an ill-fated Facebook group instead. However, I digitized every word of it and saved it. So here it is - the words of this article have been reproduced exactly for education and benevolent purposes - published by Good magazine in their June/July 2009 issue.
Not having a bar of it 
Horrified to learn where the main ingredient in her soap comes from, Jean Hedges goes in search of a bar with a clean conscience“I've just been watching a programme about palm oil,” my partner Ed blurts as he bursts into the bathroom. “They're cutting down rainforests to grow palm oil, so you can have it in your soap. And your brand is one of the worst!”

I dive into the cupboard for a pack of my Dove Sensitive Skin soap. “There's no palm oil in here,” I say, spitting out toothpaste. But I suspect I'm wrong. Sodium palmate, the label says; I later learn it's made by reacting palm oil with lye. Unilever, which owns the Dove brand, is the biggest single buyer of palm oil in the world.

“Okay,” I sigh. “I'll add palm oil to the list of things I won't buy,” along with caged eggs and chickens, unnecessary food preservatives, colours and flavours ...the list keeps growing.

The documentary was right. Global demand for palm oil is increasing by six to ten percent a year. Producers of palm oil are cutting down huge tracts of rainforest to make room for plantations of oil palms, primarily in Malaysia and Indonesia. At the current rate of logging, the UN estimates that 98 percent of Indonesian forests will be destroyed by 2020.

As well as contributing to climate change-- tropical deforestation accounts for one quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions -- accelerating palm oil production is destroying orangutan habitats. The Auckland Zoo says orangutans will be extinct in less than ten years if the current growth in oil palm plantations continues.

To be fair, only about seven percent of palm oil is used in the cosmetics industry. Much greater amounts are used in biofuel and food manufacture. Palm oil is the second-most widely used consumed oil, after soy. It's an ingredient in many food products -- cookies, cakes, crackers, processed foods, pet food -- but I can easily find food that doesn't contain palm oil. There are very few alternatives for commercial beauty products, as I soon discover.

At the supermarket, I look for soap without palm oil, also known as arecaceae elaeis (its botanical name), palm kernel oil, sodium palm kernelate, sodium palmate, sodium palmitate…pretty mucn anything with the word 'palm' somewhere on the label. Lauric acid and glycerine may also indicate palm oil has been used. It can also be labelled 'vegetable oil', since New Zealand has no law making it compulsory to label a specific vegetable oil.

I pick up soap after soap from the supermarket shelves. All contain palm oil in some form or other. Spying the Ecostore soap, I grab it happily. Palm oil-free soap, at last? Well, no. All Ecostore soaps contain palm oil—although the company is committed to buying it from the most ethical suppliers it can find.

Ecostore is an affiliate member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oll (RSPO). Founded in 2004, the Malaysia­based organisation oversees an audit programme to certify the sustainable production of palm oil. The first shipment of RSPO-certified palm oil was made in November 2008.

Greenpeace, however, believes the RSPO's sustainabillty criteria are inadequate, and says it's failing to enforce even those minimum standards. It investigated RSPO-certified palm oil supplier United Plantations, andfound it received its certification for plantations in Malaysia while continuing destructive practices in Indonesia.

Ecostore chief executive Malcolm Rands acknowledges the RSPO is far from perfect, “but it’s the best initiative out there”. Many suppliers have been around for centuries, he says, and the issue is far from black and white.

Still, I’m determined to find an alternative. I go to my local health food store—and leave empty-handed. The local farmer’s market leaves me similarly disappointed.

The soap sold at your local farmer’s market may not even be handmade. You can buy soap blocks at Trade Me, melt them, add fragrances and pour the result into moulds. Such soaps are ‘handmade’, even though the maker doesn’t know what ingredients went into the base of the soap. I consider making my own soap from scratch, but lye is caustic and highly corrosive, so I decide against it. Instead, I hit the internet to continue my search.

Palm oil-free soaps from Lush (http://www.lushnz.com/) will be available in New Zealand by the end of the year. The company has switched all its UK soap production to a new base of rapeseed, coconut and sunflower oils, reducing its annual palm oil consumption by 250 tonnes. Lush’s Sydney kitchen, which supplies New Zealand stores, will begin manufacturing palm oil-free soaps in August 2009.

Another ethical retailer, The Body Shop, has taken a different approach. One of the first RSPO members, it felt the industry-run group wasn’t moving quickly enough, so in 2007 The Body Shop began sourcing organic palm oil from the Colombia-based Daaban Group. Daabon is certified by the Rainforest Alliance, SA 8000, EcoCert and the FLO (Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International), and has pioneered organics in South America.

Closer to home, a couple of small companies producing genuine handmade soap offer to make me palm oil-free bars, but warn me it’ll cost more. “I have to use more coconut oil so the soap isn't too soft,” explains Linda Wilkinson from Just Soap (http://www.justsoap.co.nz/). Coconut oil is more expensive, so her palm oil-free soaps cost 30 cents extra.

Liz Brook from LizzieBee Soaps (www.lizziebee.co.nz) also offers to make me some palm oil-free soap and, as she lives near me, I take her up on the offer. The resulting soap is soft, smooth, lathers well, and leaves my skin feeling moist and supple. I love it.

And my Dove soap? Following public pressure led by Greenpeace last year (www.greenpeace.org/dove), Unilever has committed to purchasing all its palm oil form certified sustainable sources by 2015. It’s good to be reminded that people like me can make companies change (see page 103 for more info on what you can do)—but now I’ve gone palm-oil free, I won’t go back.

How is soap made?Our ancestors made their soap with tallow (aka beef fat) but nowadays soap is usually made with vegetable oil and lye (better known as caustic soda). The oil and lye react to produce natural glycerine, water and soap. Good soap retains glycerine, a moisturizer.

Palm oil is a very cheap vegetable oil that sets hard at room temperaure, like animal fat and the more expensive coconut oil. This makes the soap solid.

Tallow soaps are still available, so if you want an animal-product-free soap, avoid sodium tallowate as an ingredient. Tallow can also block pores, so you may want to avoid it for that reason.


WANT MORE?
www.aucklandzoo.co.nz/palmoil
www.greenpeace.org.uk/tags/rspo
www.orangutan.org/forest.php
http://www.rspo.org/

ENDQUOTE

PHOTO: A palm oil plantation next to native forest.

Palm Oil is found in 90% of margarine (in NZ) - except Alfa One (Rice Bran Oil based)

Just wanted to pass on something I learned from the great NZ show, "What's
Really in Our Food?" Season 4, Episode 2 - Table Spreads and Oils.

Most importantly "Over 90% of table spreads contain palm oil, however it can simply be listed as ‘vegetable oil’."

Palm oil is a problem as it is very difficult to buy sustainably produced oil. It's cheap, but responsible for the deforestation of rainforest in places such as Borneo and Sumatra - removing the habitat of orangutan and causing their extinction.

I knew that they used it in soaps, but was clueless about table spreads (as in margarine). Apparently the only table spread that doesn't use palm oil here is one which is based entirely on rice bran oil, Alfa One. Guess which one we buy now? (I think also a few letters are in order.)

Something else just for health info - virgin olive oil is just less refined - the terms refer to how it is processed. And there is no such thing as "light" oil (meaning less fattening). All oil is 100% fat.

From the "What's Really in Our Food?" website:

Cold pressed oils undergo minimal processing – the fruit or seed they’re made from is simply pressed so that the oil comes out. These oils usually have strong flavours that get destroyed by heating so they’re better used on salads or breads. Not all olive oils are cold pressed. Extra virgin and virgin olive oils are the result of the first and second pressings of olives.

But, more refined oils can be cooked at higher temperatures (before they start smoking). And...

Unlike wine, extra virgin olive oil is best enjoyed fresh. Over time, the oil degrades – both heat and light also contribute to this. Italian olive oils have a great reputation but if you’re an extra virgin olive oil fan it’s probably better to buy locally produced olive oils because they’re likely to be fresher.

The world conference on melting polar ice caps dream

Last night I dreamed of seeing a place broadcast from the internet – it was – the polar ice caps. The ice caps were melting. There was an area, an outdoor ampitheatre, open with walls, and many seats inside. This is what was on the broadcast – with a label above the entrance that it was the polar ice cap region.

It was an international zone, people from all over the world were coming to see. Then, in my dream, I had arrived there and was looking around. I actually carried a bike with me, but not at first. First I saw the place, and there was a beautiful cliff I was making my way down, holding on the the grass at the sides, to get there. When I was there, I remember when I walked through the seats, the conference area full of seats, the area was filling with water. The water had risen up to the seat level.

Then I walked along a path people were walking. There was a beautiful tree, it was a beautiful area. I left my bike behind (which had appeared at some point) so it wouldn’t wreck the grass. I wanted to take a photo then – and this is where it gets a little silly for a moment - people were going down a slight hill and taking pictures of themselves standing in the trees – with these gnome people. I was trying to get someone to use my camera as I was alone, to take a photo of myself and the people in these trees. Then I gave up as the lady I had asked couldn’t work the camera. What I really wanted to do was to take photos myself of everything. So I think I tried to do that – although I had already flowed past, I went back intentionally back where I had come to take photos. At some point I saw Jasmine around – I often dream of her in relation to environmental things – she was my first friend who was aware of the environment at a young age.

I think sometimes dreams can go back and forth and can lose and gain focus – but what was very real in this dream was the international room of chairs, the world’s attention on this melting polar ice cap situation. Like the world was taking notice, meeting – convening there and talking about it. Like this was an opportunity we shouldn’t miss out on for the world to join.

The Swamp Man - The bald cypress of southern Louisiana is resilient and rot-resistant—and so is Dean Wilson, its most ardent defender (by Sierra Club)

Originally published by The Sierra Club at http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201205/louisiana-bald-cypress-156.aspx

The Swamp ManThe bald cypress of southern Louisiana is resilient and rot-resistant—and so is Dean Wilson, its most ardent defender
By Bruce Selcraig


DEAN WILSON ONCE SURVIVED TARZAN-LIKE in Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin for four months eating "horrible-tasting" ratty nutria and "fat and juicy" armadillos that he killed with a straightened fishhook. But now it's Sunday night on State Highway 1 in darkened bayou-burbia, and we need pizza.

"I don't know that we'll find anything at this time of night in Plaquemine," Wilson says, surveying the familiar commercial clutter of Family Dollars and auto parts joints. "Maybe we should go back home and have deer burgers." The nationally acclaimed swamp crusader clearly would prefer to be cruising the languid Atchafalaya Basin behind the wheel of his 18-foot aluminum bateau or whipping his kayak through the watery cypress forests he has spent years trying to protect from loggers.

Born to an American father and a Spanish mother on a military base outside Madrid, Wilson came with little English to the sweltering Atchafalaya Basin in 1984 to prepare himself for environmental work in the Amazon. "I just looked at a map and thought this place would be very hot and have lots of mosquitoes," he recalls. "I was right."

Wilson decided that Louisiana life suited him just fine, so he skipped the Amazon and stayed to become a commercial fisherman. For the next 16 years, the Spaniard learned the customs of his neighbors and picked up an intriguing but not always decipherable Cajun-Castilian accent. When he was just "the new foreigner," he received threats from locals, especially after he worked with a sheriff to stop the theft of crawfish traps. A "friendly" local told Wilson not to worry, that he probably wouldn't be killed because, the local said, "your skin is white and your eyes are right"—meaning not Mexican, not Vietnamese. The threats intensified after he became known primarily as an environmentalist: He was fired at, and his dog was poisoned.

"I still sleep with a gun," says Wilson, who likes to hunt, but only for food. "Guns have saved my life down here. I told one guy who threatened to burn me out of my house that he wasn't the only person who knew how to make a fire."

As a fisherman, Wilson witnessed industrial pollution, illegal logging, and the dredging of oil company canals throughout the basin. He thought that complaining to the proper authorities might help. "I was really naive," he says. "Coming from Spain, I had no idea how corrupt Louisiana politics was." His environmental epiphany came around 2000, when he realized that Louisiana loggers were harvesting thousands of acres of cypress trees—not for home building or flooring, as in years past, but to supply the flourishing $750 million annual market for garden mulch.

"That was the last straw for me," Wilson says, "knowing that people were clearcutting trees that were often centuries old in order to grow flowers in their garden."

WE SLIP KAYAKS INTO PEACEFUL Grassy Lake behind Wilson's simple home on Bayou Sorrel to survey the bald cypresses that have brought so much purpose to his life. You can almost feel his stress dissolving with each paddle stroke. "It gets a bit shallow up through here," Wilson hollers as he leads me into a watery forest draped in Spanish moss. He splashes into the muck with his knee-high rubber boots, and we tug the kayaks through soft grasses until we reach a deeper pool that's surrounded by smooth bald cypresses.

Wilson's environmental epiphany came when he realized that cypress trees were being logged not for lumber but for garden mulch. Photo by Christian Heeb/Prisma/SuperStock"

Almost the entire Gulf Coast, and certainly all of Louisiana's coast, was once covered with these wonderful trees," he says. "Only they were much taller, four or five times wider, and many were over a thousand years old. They say it better than I can. This is why I'm here."

It's a shame that movies and books often portray the cypress as a foreboding, mossy ghoul of the swamp, because it's among the most trouble-free, wildlife-friendly trees on the planet, and a close relative to California's Disney-darling sequoia. Since its branches grow out perpendicularto its trunk, the cypress is a great tree for nestingwaders like herons, egrets, and ibis. The hollowed-out trunks of older cypress become perfect homes for raccoon, otters, mink, bears, bats, and owls.

The massive root system of the cypress also makes it among the most hurricane-resistant of all trees.

The cypress decimation started long ago. In 1850, Congress passed the Swampland Act, deeding millions of acres of wetlands to the states along the Mississippi River. Louisiana officials, like others, viewed swamps as an impediment to progress and sold thousands of acres containing virgin cypresses to large corporations, often for 75 cents an acre or less.

"Instead of controlling floods in the Atchafalaya," write basin scholars Greg Guirard and C. Ray Brassieur in their 2007 book Inherit the Atchafalaya, "the Swampland Act enabled the complete devastation of one of the world's great forests." In the early 1900s, timber companies logged millions of board feet from the basin annually, usually by cutting canals (some still in use today) and floating the logs off to the mill. By the 1930s, most of the virgin trees were logged. Nearly a century later, about the only large cypresses left in the basin have been struck by lightning or a fungus.

Realizing he was witness to the last of the swamp's cypresses, Wilson formed a nonprofit called Atchafalaya Basinkeeper—one of about 200 programs affiliated with Waterkeeper Alliance, a global organization founded by activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and began using litigation and public education campaigns to protect the basin.

Wilson won support from such groups as the Sierra Club, the Garden Club of America, the National Audubon Society, and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network. Some days he prodded understaffed, poorly funded investigators in the New Orleans EPA office to better police the Gulf. On others he talked to schoolkids.

"If cypress had lined the coast whe Katrina and Rita struck, they could have saved lives."

Often Wilson's only legal toehold against the logging is to use the federal Clean Water Act to pursue companies that build unpermitted roads in the forest. Wilson says he's also gotten "crucial" help in doing aerial surveillance of the logging from SouthWings, a group of volunteer pilots based in Asheville, North Carolina, who monitor activities like pollution from animal feedlots and illegal coal-ash disposal. "SouthWings made the difference," he says, "between losing trees and saving trees."

Wilson's greatest success in the anti-mulch campaign came when Home Depot, Walmart, and Lowe's agreed in 2008 to stop selling mulch harvested from Louisiana cypresses. The news is comforting as we drift silently among the stately trees, but Wilson quickly puts it in perspective. "That's just one state," he says. "Loggers will move to Mississippi, Georgia, Florida."

If treehugging doesn't work, Wilson can also argue pure profit. "If you cut every cypress in Louisiana," he says, citing a Louisiana study commissioned in 2004 by then-governor Kathleen Blanco, "its one-time value as wood alone would be about $3.3 billion, but the total annual value of swamp tours, birding, fisheries, hunting, hurricane protection is more like $6.6 billion."

With the help of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, Basinkeeper currently has seven lawsuits going—most involving permitting issues—against foes like Tennessee loggers, school districts, and energy companies whose environmental practices have somehow impacted the basin. For now, he simply implores consumers not to buy cypress mulch from any source.

Back at Wilson's bayou-side house, he sits on a porch swing and whips out his laptop. He shows me surveillance photos tracking cypresses being logged from the Atchafalaya Basin, cut at local mills, "chipped" into mulch, and then stuffed into yellow plastic bags with labels that falsely claim the mulch has come from Florida or "forest-friendly" sources. Wilson has shown the photos to countless people, but he's careful not to demand outrage from the uninitiated. Still, he's dismayed that his smoking gun hasn't inspired more official action.

"It is immoral to lie to people about what you're selling," he says calmly. "Virtually everything we do comes down to corporations bullying people. I hate bullying. I hate injustice."

That's the Dean Wilson everyone knows. While a forestry association official once dismissed him as "all passion and no facts," colleagues respect his abundant idealism and his hard work. Thick EPA studies, brightly colored satellite maps, and hydrology reports dot his living room. A network of activists keeps his cellphone humming. "Dean does this every day, from the time he wakes up until the time he goes to sleep," says friend and Lafayette environmental educator Stacey Scarce. It's all necessary in a place where logging ancient trees is just one environmental threat, a place where the oil, gas, and chemical industries not only affect the Atchafalaya but also run right through it.


The Atchafalaya's iconic alligator shares space with 60 species of reptiles and amphibians and some 250 bird species in America's largest river swamp. Photo by Adam Jones/Visuals Unlimited

IN EARLY RISING PLAQUEMINE, my Best Western breakfast nook features more petroleum mechanics and burly welders than blueberry muffins.

State Highway 1, a flat and sweaty industrial corridor that runs south from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico, is choked with pipe fitters and laborers headed to this area's largest employer, Dow Chemical, on the west bank of the Mississippi. There, more than 3,000 workers churn out polyethylene and methyl cellulose, key ingredients in milk jugs and even milkshakes.

In the shadow of Dow, a shimmering steel monument to the dirty industries that shape so many lives down here, it is easy to forget that just a few miles away is a world-class wetland. Wilson, who also runs the Last Wilderness, a swamp-tour business that attracts visitors from as far away as France and Germany, has told me to meet him at the Bayou Bait Shop in Bayou Sorrel. The village of 1,000 looks like a fishing camp; wobbly wooden homes beside the brown bayou are raised up on concrete piers. The straight two-lane road into town passes the U-turn-inducing Verret Shipyard, where they've been making Mississippi River towboats since 1966. Homemade signs tout "fresh coon meat" and Ron Paul rallies.

"Hey, Dean," a lady behind the bait shop counter says, "you know Junior's back in town, and he's got some new T-shirts."

That would be the town's unassuming but unfathomably famous celebrity, Junior Edwards, the gator-gutting star of the History Channel's hit reality show Swamp People, which has brought international exposure to the basin and its slowly disappearing Cajun culture.

Wilson and I walk to a little dock on the eastern edge of the Atchafalaya. From that vantage point, it's hard to imagine the extent of the basin, which is 1.4 million acres, runs about 100 miles north to south, and is more than a dozen times larger than New Orleans. It's the flood basin for the Atchafalaya River, a "pirate stream," or distributary, that broke through the natural levees of the Mississippi in the 15th century—and has threatened to divert the latter river's flow ever since.

Zippered against the wind in Wilson's boat, we rocket down the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway as Shanka, his German shepherd, patrols the squared-off bow. It's warm for January but winter nonetheless, so many of the swamp's most elegant creatures, like the Florida panther, the black bear, and the mink, are snoozing. But birds are everywhere. The basin is virtually at the mouth of the Mississippi, on North America's most important flyway, and is an indispensable, O'Hare-like terminal for migratory tropical birds. Two minutes into the boat ride we see a stunning bald eagle—removed from the federal endangered species list just five years ago—unfurl from a willow perch as if it has fallen from Mt. Rushmore. Ten more minutes and we've seen great egrets, yellow-rumped warblers, Carolina chickadees, and stocky barred owls with NBA wingspans. Missing are the swamp's divas, Alligator mississipiensis. They're brumating, which usually involves burrowing beneath the nutrient-rich sediment into muddy holes and lowering their body temperature to a torpid, football-watching state.

Amid all this tranquility, we pass a docked barge carrying black tanks of chemicals, a quick reminder that the basin, while elegant in places, is just another aging production field for Big Oil, woven with miles of exposed, often-leaking, 50-year-old pipelines and more than 500 oil and gas wells. "We've got leaks all over the basin," Mike Bienvenu, president of the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association, recently told the Louisiana Weekly. "We've been fighting the oil and gas companies to get something done about their violations for 20 years."

Wilson checks some of his crawfish traps—mesh metal cages that he pulls from the cool freshwater—then idles into a shallow, moss-covered pool. Pretty but depressing, the water's surface is so completely carpeted by the leafy, invasive Salvinia molesta that dogs less hip than Shanka will often leap in, thinking it's dry land—unwisely waking torpid gators.

"In the spring, if I were to drop just a handful of Salvinia into clear water," Wilson says, "it would be covered solid in a month." Experts believe the menace arrived here in 2006 from local water gardens.

At times Wilson, a father of four on his third marriage, may seem wearied by the day-to-day demands of fundraising, lawsuits, and not missing his son's soccer games. But surrounded by this bright morning theater of cypress, he can't help being drawn back to what brought him here. "Imagine if millions of cypress, four or five times as wide as these, had been lining the Gulf Coast in 2005 when Katrina and Rita struck," he says. "They would have defeated the wind. They would have defeated storm surges. They would have saved lives."

Bruce Selcraig, a frequent Sierra contributor, wrote "Last Man Standing" (September/October 2011), a profile of Texas activist Hilton Kelley.
This article was funded by the Sierra Club's Water Sentinels program.

Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron - sustainability message and parable of humankind

I love James Cameron's "final word". Just stumbled onto this - the others of the family were watching the final fate of the Titanic, and then James Cameron closed with this - watch from about 4 minutes on.


But I've typed up every word, anyways.

James Cameron:

"I've been working on Titanic for nearly 20 years. I planned this investigation to be my final word. It's time for me to pass the baton, and move on to some new challenges.

"But I'll never stop thinking about Titanic. For me it's so much more than simply an exercise in forensic archaeology. Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of this sense that we're too big to fail. Well, where have we heard that one before?

"There was this big machine, this human system that was pushing forward with so much momentum that it couldn't turn, it couldn't stop in time to avert a disaster. And that's what we have right now.

"Within that human system on board that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm for the world, you have different classes - you know you've got first class, second class, third class. Well, in our world right now you've got developed nations and undeveloped nations. You've got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most effected by the next iceberg that we hit - which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can't turn. We can't turn because of the momentum of the system: political momentum, business momentum. There are too many people making money out the system the way the system works right now. And those people, you know, frankly have their hands on the levers of power and aren't ready to let'em go. Until they do, we're not going to be able to turn to miss that iceberg and we're going to hit it. When we hit it, the rich are still going to be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water and so on, it's going to be the poor, it's going to be the steerage that are going to be impacted and it was the same with Titanic.

"And I think that's why this story will always fascinate people, because it's a perfect little encapsulation of the world and all social spectrum; but until our lives are really put at risk, the moment of truth, we don't know what we would do.

"And that's my final word."


By the way, I just realized who James Cameron is. I knew that Avatar contained an amazing message - but I didn't know that James Cameron had written it until recently. I really appreciate his wisdom, and clarity. Thank-you, James.

Blights - powdery mildew on pumpkin plants

This summer a few pumpkin plants seeded themselves in my garden, from seeds in the compost I had added. I happily let a few grow to see what happened. They grew so well that I felt like I was watching a B movie, Revenge of the Monster Plants, as they took over the garden - their curling tendrils grasping onto everything.

I thought all was well, but I am the type to learn by doing (and so I soon learned). In February, a few dusty spots appeared on them, which spread rapidly. Soon, many of the formerly healthy leaves were blighted by the dusty stuff.

I looked it up in my trusty gardening book (Xanthe White's Organic Vegetable Gardening). "Powdery mildew" which is best prevented rather than treating. If I had kept the plants consistently well watered, and sprayed the leaves all along with water with a bit of dish soap the mold would have had a harder time staying. (And knowing how much it spreads, I would have reacted far more quickly at the first spots.)

As it was, the mildew on the leaves got so bad I had to spray them all over with copper spray, both sides (Bordeux mixture would have been better, see recipe below). It was a lot of work, and the leaves still didn't look great, so I ended up destroying much of the plants trying to remove it. We did get a few large pumpkins out of it, but I had alot of sadness destroying the infected plants, along with the many flowers that all would have become pumpkins.

Boo hooo. Next year I will know to keep the leaves clear by watering the plants very well so they stay strong, and spraying with water and a bit of dish soap all along (or even Bordeaux mixture fortnightly) - but mostly by staying observant.

(I am also going to plant them in a devoted pumpkin monster plant area. Those things spread like crazy, tangling up all the other plants, they get damaged as you try to free them.)


Excerpt from Xanthe White's Organic Vegetable Gardening book:

"Powdery Mildew

"Cucumbers, courgettes, pumpkins and beans are particularly susceptible to this common garden affliction. Powdery mildew thrives in the hot dry of late summer so water regularly and consistently. If you are hit, strike back with a spray of old dishwashing water or detergent mixed with water. If this fails, try baking soda dissolved in water at a ratio of half a teaspoon to one litre. Treat more serious cases with Bordeaux mixture or flowers of sulphur. Act swiftly and remove as much infected material as possible before the fungus spreads." -Xanthe White


Recipe (from her book as well):

"Bordeaux mixture

"Bordeaux mixture can be bought pre-mixed or made at home quite easily. It is the organic gardener's best defence against fungal disease, effective against everything from potato blight to powdery mildew, but should, as with all chemicals, natural or otherwise, be used with caution. It can damage soft or new growth so using the appropriate dilution is important.

"100 g copper sulphate dissolved in 1 litre of hot water

"150 g hydrated lime dissolved in 1 litre of cold water

"Add the copper sulphate solution slowly to the lime solution, stirring continuously. Dilute this mixture with a further 10 litres of cold water and use while fresh. Dilute to 10 parts further if you are using on tender young growth. If used as a preventative spray fortnightly; otherwise us as infection requires. Do not store in a metal container."

-Xanthe White

Space to Grow - my chilli plants' life lesson

One great thing about gardening - which is essentially nurturing the land - is that you get some great lessons on how nature works. Of course, this applies to human lives as well. You just feel these lessons about life so closely when you are out there gardening (or interacting in nature in any way, e.g. camping, hiking, working with wood).

This year Shane bought some chilli plant seedlings at what turned out to be the perfect time of year. However, he insisted on planting them right next to each other on one of our thin balcony planters which run along the edge of our raised gardens. Despite his protests, I moved two of the plants to the large raised bed above, with generous space all around them. The other three I spaced out further from each other and left them where he had wanted them.

The two with the spacious environment and heaps of fertile soil above became huge bushes, generously producing buckets upon buckets of large, shiny green delicious chillies. The other three in the cramped space fought against each other and eventually produced a few mid-sized chillies at the end of the season.

What did I learn from this? It's not just the genetics of the plant, it's the environment that allows the plant to really develop. This is something that gardening teaches all the time - as it's the soil and conditions around a plant that really allow it to thrive. That's just like children, I think. The genes are important, but one they've got them, what really makes the difference is the environment they are provided in which they can thrive.

I also know this as I was provided with an environment when I was growing up where I did really well - not due to being stronger by nature - I could feel, but by being nurtured and allowed space to grow, play, discover, make things, a place with some wildness to explore...we were able to develop fully.

I am so relieved that now the my kids are in the neighbourhood we live in now (we used to live in a cramped city suburb) that they will have space they need to grow.